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MMORPG.COM News: Secondary Market Panel Editorial
Dana
Member Posts: 2,415
Staff Writer Laura Genender could not resist the Austin Game Conference Secondary Market panel discussion. Featuring Daniel James, Puzzle Pirates; Ed Castronova, professor and MMO-economics expert; Jeff Anderson, President of Turbine; and Steve Salyer, President of IGE, this panel is sure to set off some debate. Laura filed this mixed report/commentary on the event.
;) Im not a fan of the secondary market. In fact, thats putting it lightly; Id feel comfortable saying that, could I change any single aspect of the MMO world, Id flush IGE down the toilet in a matter of seconds. Thus I could not resist attending the panel on secondary markets: Im Bid Four Quatloos for the One Ring; Do I Hear Five?
The panel consisted of four members: Edward Castronova, Associated Professor of Telecommunications at Indiana University; Daniel James, Designer & CEO, Three Rings; Steve Salyer, President, IGE; and Jeff Anderson, President & CEO, Turbine. Castronova was vehemently against the secondary market and Salyer, as one might expect, was entirely pro-secondary market. James and Anderson were somewhere in the middle. |
You can read her full commentary and report on this panel here.
Dana Massey
Formerly of MMORPG.com
Currently Lead Designer for Bit Trap Studios
Comments
I am not going to respond to pro or anti secondary markets.
However, let me says that it puts MMORPG.com in a dubious light to feature such a slanted article.
MMORPG.com should have editorials or reports, not this smirking snide combo presented here.
Either report on the even in an unbiased and objective way, OR write an editorial about how you FEEL.
And while you are at it, if you are going to let people present their slanted views, you should take the next step of journalistic integrity of contacting someone in the opposing camp and offering them a chence to present their side as well, such as Steve Salyer.
The "article" (and I use that word loosely) was an agendized piece of propoganda serving a bias and unfairly slamming the opposing side both out of context and without due possibility for response.
I hope that you at MMORPG.com take the fact that you are for all intents and purposes the online Journal of MMOs seriously and try to maintain more journalistic integrity.
-Sindyr
I agree completely. The article was poorly written and has no amount of journalistic integrety. In the future, write an unbiased article of the event and follow up with a forum post after it's released about your opinion. But I have no faith in what truly went on during the panel because you attacked one side right from the start of the article.
It's good work, if you work for Fox News.
Imo, can't we just play the game for fun instead of having to make a career out of it?
I agree with the above 2 posters.
While I abhore the secondary market, either report or comment about it, and if you report, get boths sides imput. But I HATE $tation Exchange so screw em!
It's always something...
HERE'S WHAT YOU FORGOT- A Sociologist to explain the effects of slave labor in the gaming industry. I find it fascinating that the issue of human rights didn't crop up in this discussion. There have been various stories about how there are people in China and other places that are paid a very low wage and made to play various mmorpgs all day farming in game money and then selling it. Is anyone looking out for the rights of these people? Do they have a Union yet? How about a minimum wage and benefits? It's too bad that the marginalized and downtrodden are invisible to the CEOs, not to mention most other people.
The other issue of the day is cheating. Cheating can fuel the secondary market quite easily. If someone discovers an exploit and begins to utilize it excessively, like the duplication of in-game cash, it would be very easy for them to make a profit by selling it for real money. I'm sure this has already happened. 100% sure. How does this affect the secondary market? Are companies like IGE utilizing such methods to fuel their business?
/rant off
And yes, please write more objectively. If you want to include your opinions do so at the end of the article. Perhaps someone with just extreme biases on a subject should refrain from writing articles on it, aside from editorials.
It is pathos we lack, and this lack of pathos makes the worlds we explore quite stale.
http://www.mmorpg.com/blogs/Antioche
That's basically the same thing Nike does and companies like that hiring sweat shops to manufacture their clothes Antioche. What's your stance on that? Would you like them to shut them down? Oh wait, if they shut them down, you're clothes/items/whatever are going to be more expensive? Don't want your items to be more expensive? Wait a minute, something doesn't work here....
I don't mean to flame you, I just don't feel the issue is represented well enough.
Anyway to the article, I agree with the other posters, if you're going to post an opinionated article, say it. Either give us an unbiased article or give us a totally opiniated article. That article made me want to punch the writer, and I take full seriousness to that.
i'll choose a side real quick....fuck these secondary markets that were described above... people buying any in-game currency, property, or characters are fuckin worthless space-crack smokin junkies....there is no justification buying shit outside of the game; its fuckin cheating and slimey...and dont anyone give me that time-played defense....
please dont support ige or anyother "secondary market" shit....stay away from games that openly allow it...only the gamers can stop it..
MMORPG.COM has been slammed for sometime on their symbiotic relationship with IGE. Time and Time over Admin has stated that they share no view, neither negative or positive on IGE. It's viewed as a helpful way to get a word out for those who wish to use it and mmorpg.com's web portal is the conduit.
Now the slanted article of a staff writer for mmorpg.com comes out and shows the entire community a different view. The article as stated is entirely slanted and has the agenda to be so from the very beginning. This article informs us all of one thing. That the writer views those at Sony Online Entertainment as angels for Station Exchange. Well, personally, I think it's a great idea if we're discussing the undeniable end for IGE but Station Exchange carries the large problem of ruining in game Economy and game play.
So yes and no. My stance, developers, companies and the like should make an agreement statement stating that the equipment/weapons/magic and pets within the game are property solely for the "Blank" company and are shared for use to subscribers if paid for through a monthly agreement and paid for by In-game currency, any outsourced equipment will be punishable by loss of account, payment for the month and in turn the loss of time growing that character.
There's a very simple way to have an MMORPG that avoids the second market: design one which doesn't have a player economy at all.
We all seem to have fallen into believing that MMORPGs must have a working internal economy and consequently vast amounts of development hours are spent on trying to make sure it runs smoothly (which rarely happens) and in trying to police abuses (so ineffective that the current atitude seems to be "if you can't beat 'em...").
I'm not enough of a games historian to be able to put my finger on exactly when or how this obsession with economies was first introduced, but it seems to have become one of the unconsidered truisms of the industry.
Personally, I quite enjoy the trading side of MMOS (in-game, not with real-world money); however, if some imaginative company were to offer a well-designed, fully-realised MMORPG in which there simply were NO tradeable items, and indeed no mechanism in the UI to allow trading between player-characters, I'd be there like a shot.
When I used to play tabletop RPGs, which I did for quite a few years, though not recently, there was absolutely no concept of a "player economy" in any game I played. I cannot remember a single instance of members of the gaming group trading items between each other's characters for in-game money (let alone real-world money!). The only economies in those games were in the NPC milieu. We sold to NPCs, bought from NPCs and then got on with adventuring. In fact, we very rarely even traded to and from NPCs, except at the bar of an inn.
While I realise that a no-trading game would be a minority taste, I would guess that it would be a commercially viable minority. When the MMO market is mature enough to fracture into a lot more niche markets than we see at the present stage of development, perhaps we'll see one or two games popping up that leave all the trading to NPCs and let the players concentrate on adventure instead of commerce.
Secondary markets basicly capitalise on the competition that exists between players which by itself is ok but when you include immaturity in the equation, it deviates to "i'll have a superior character the easy and quickest way so i get to show off and satisfy my ego", secondary markets wouldn't exist if these kina people didn't express a need for them.
"Life is too short to play nerfed characters."
Ok, I just wanted to bring something to everyone's attention and see what you think. In reference to games themselves being the problem I tend to agree. I am going to give 2 examples and lets go from there.
Game #1: Final Fantasy XI
I currently play this one(waiting for WoW expansion to go back to that wonderful game that ended at 60)and I personally HATE how bad the economy constantly inflates and is a NECESSITY to get anywhere in the game. I have never bought in game currency but a game like this almost BEGS to have gil be bought. I blame this on game mechanics and the small fact that you have to FARM for items to sell to get gil which for me is utterly boring.
Game #2: World of Warcraft
Like I said I played this one, got one character to 60 another to 54, loved it, but it got very boring post 60(I don't like the idea of raiding for 8 hours on end for a 1 in a million chance that the item I want will drop.) Now, all that time, I never once had any problem with money. It dropped alot in the leveling process, the items I sold on the market did well, not once did I really see a need to have to go FARM. I remember seeing an ad to buy gold for WoW and thinking "What the hell for!? It's so stinking easy to get money in the game." Which I personally think is one of the many reasons it IS so succesful.
So with that said, why don't the developers of other games that have a large problem with this look at what Blizzard has done, or am I barking up the wrong tree?
On a side note, I think that buying fake money with real money is borderline insanity. Its like saying, I'll buy your Park Place for $100 real U.S. dollars while playing a friendly game of Monopoly. Yikes!
I personally am against it. I'll pay $50 for a game for sure, on top of the monthly subscription. Many games are worth that. After that, if the game isn't fun, buying items/cash on the secondary market wouldn't make it any more fun. Aside from posessing all the best gear, there is still a game to be played. If it's too difficult to get what you need in a game, that's a flaw with the game it's self.
Quote from article:
Castronova then proposed an interesting alternative for the future of the secondary market. Players could pay 500$ for noble status or something similar that would provide benefits such as land, access to special areas/items, etc. This better fits the back-story of most MMOs, and leaves the secondary market in the hands of game developers, as James touched on earlier.
Lol, that sounds like a $500 dollar expansion to me.
First, we seem to be more concerned with the presentation of the article than the subject of RL money used in games.
nice analogy .."On a side note, I think that buying fake money with real money is borderline insanity. Its like saying, I'll buy your Park Place for $100 real U.S. dollars while playing a friendly game of Monopoly. Yikes! " What would then be the point of playing?
I also like the view presented which wonders what an MMORG would be like without currency, it would be interesting to see what a barter only system would result in. It would probably result in a lot of stuff just being given away to someone who needed it. I remember in very early EQ that merchant-type players were frowned upon, there were far more items given away than bought and sold. I remember getting your first plat was a big accomplishment, and I remember that people were very generous with other players...one guy I grouped with just once gave me my first set of leather which he had just replaced....and I gave it to another player when a player offered to make me a set of banded at cost. This sort of thing was not rare, that was a great community to play in.
Then players invented their own places like North Freeport where players congregated to hawk their wares....and STILL there was a stigma to being called a NFP player much as there is a stigma today to being called an EBAY.
"Innocence Lost"....we won't see such a thing again.
Almost all of this comes from games becoming hardcore centric.....get in beta so you have a knowledge advantage, buy the game first, level to max first, all the max chars gather and form the hardcore guilds who get the best gear first.....and 90% of the player base comes on-line after work and progression looks futile...they could never hope to have a charactor that they could be proud of in that world...how can normal people expect to progress in a game where all progression is based on how much time you can devote? with the time needed to "keep up" enormous and impossible for most players to devote to a game? So this opens the doors for companies such as IGE.
The hardcore raid system is in place...man-hours=rewards...the more people needed to repeatedly do an encounter to get 2-3 rewards, the more necessary to advancement those encounters become. As those encounters are used up by the hardcore players, the devs release new encounters that you need equiement from the first ones to succeed in. Thus you end up with a large portion of the player base butting their heads against a roadblock, since having a ready-made group or being in a hardcore guild demands a huge chunk of time, not just social skills...you have to see the same players daily to form relationships.....thus they turn to other means.
The problem is that the devs are former hardcore players, the former big guild leaders and raid leaders and beta testers. Dispite big raids being essentially 1-5 players actually playing the game with the other 30-50 members just mindlessly following orders more concerned with not messing up than anything else, thee current devs were those leaders, they had a lot of fun in the system, it took them a lot of effort to outfit everyone and don't want that effort marginalized.
Dispite their innate interest in the hardcore, devs know they can't make a profit wo the larger numbers of normal and casual players, so they make a lot of equipement buyable so they at least have a chance to progress. To buy those items would, under normal gameplay, take almost as many man-hours to gather the money as devoted to raids, so players buy money.
The only answer is to reduce the hardcore players progession so normal players can stay a bit closer to them and maybe reduce size of raids to a number normal players can hope to form. The blizzard system of "rested" experience bonus is probably the answer, just need to make the difference between normal and rested far more drastic. Maybe go ahead and have big raids, just don't make them ESSENTIAL to progression, or make the biggest raids smaller so medium guilds can evenmtually do them.
Make progression through the normal playing of the game more accessible for normal people and remove in game wealth as the only means for many to progress. Remove the market.
Different strokes for different folks. Some like to grind just to get some loot to sell - some like to buy loot because they don't like to grind. To me buying things is no different than being given things by a guild.
As a casual gamer, I will always try to avoid grinding as much as possible. If the grinding is already done, and someone wants to give/sell what they've worked for to someone else, then there is no effect on the game, no effect on anyone else, just a convenient way to get things that otherwise would still be the sellers.
I'm all for free enterprise
"Life is too short to play nerfed characters."
First off I do agree that the report was very slanted one way. Should of been reported objectively without a doubt.
Of course I am 100% against buying ingame items for real world cash. It is cheating pure and simple. People who try to rationalize it can spin it any way they want but it is still cheating plain and simple. It used to be we just had to put up with people who bought a level ## warrior and didn't know how to play him. Now I am fighting not only pve mobs for items, and other legit players, but now farmers who sole goal in life is to get as many items/gold as they can so they can get a paycheck friday. This of course drives up the cost of items so that either (1) can't buy what I want or (2) have to inflate my crafting costs to compete.
The moment SOE announced the Station Exchange I cancelled my account, as it showed they were now part of the problem and were encouraging it.
People, regardless if they are players or developers, need to realize that this secondary market is bad for the game, ANY game. Take legal action vs IGN and other such entities that sell your property for their own profit. If no legal recourse is available to you, then take ingame actions where your company has 100% influence in what goes on.
Regarding the slant... The author states in the first paragraph her bias. We also listed it as an editorial.
If this had been labeled an objective report, I would see the point. The reason the decision was made to make this an editorial/report was that the author in question had such strong opinions. Rather than try to supress them (and probably have them seep in anyway) we chose to flat out state the bias.
Dana Massey
Formerly of MMORPG.com
Currently Lead Designer for Bit Trap Studios
i was an avid adena farmer fighter in L2 so i am against them however i believe the solution doesnt involve whole guilds pking hundreds of adena farmers with no long term success.
i believe it belongs in games like WoW(not a fanboy in fact i stopped playing cus i got bored) where the economy isnt harsh.
i also think DAOC didnt have a harsh economy at all if you actually crafted.
so as far as im concerned im against it but its the developers fault at the same time.
98% of the teenage population does or has tried smoking pot. If you''re one of the 2% who hasn''t, copy & paste this in your signature.
Assistant Community Manager
Age of Conan Ten Ton Hammer
I agree with the above poster. People have also forgot that this world we live in is dishonest, greedy and cold. Money is power, etc etc. I highly doubt these big companys care about the rights of X nationality in these third world countrys. Im quite sure that you can grasp that the only way they would care is if it hurt or helped there pocketbook. Thats the only time they care. Even if they got bad press they technically dont care. They will only change when bad press hurts them enough in the publics eye to slow sales. And Im sure by then there Public Relations department will make there change of policy look like a act of good will. By the end of the day everyone will be patting them on the back for being such humanitarians.
As far as the coments from the writer of the article, I could care less. He didnt entirely bash IGE as many of you 1 post wonder first timers said. He expressed his view. Maybe its the fact that Im of the same beleif and thats the reason why I wasnt offended.
Personally I dont know if its possible to introduce any type of secondary IGE market or ingame REAL money market and not cause inflation.
As far as cheating and selling items gained from that cheating--this has already happened in Japan and the guy was arrested for fraud. He was using a botted player in Lineage 2 and to 1 hit killing people and taking there loot. He then turned around and sold there stuff for rl money.
Laters-dont forget your blood pressure medicine before you come read mmorpg.com
Games are for fun. You people are way too serious. Do what ypu like. I like IGE and (eBay) and will continue to enjoy games the way I like to play them. Sorry if you don't like it, but we'll probably never meet in game anyway.
Luckily, you don't control it.
"Life is too short to play nerfed characters."
i have serveal things to say first in regard to the qestions of the jurnalistc integraty of the author please read the bolded part.
They said it was a commentary.
i do agree with what some of the other posters have said the only way to efectivly kill the secondary market is with no economy i.e. Planetside, WW2online, or a serveraly inhibited one. like Guild wars and World of warcraft. Even then Ebaying suff still happens just not farm fest like Linage 2.
This is where i think the Problemes lies, i could be wrong but ... in my mind i see 3 factions not counting the ones who don't care eather way and the farmers/ebayers. 1) the Ebay Buyers. they buy items off of ebay to keep up or to get to a point. 2) the Eleetist, they dont like Ebaying or ebayers becouse they spent alot of time to be the best. and getting suff off of ebay makes what they did less valuable. 3) people who could not care less about ebay, they just hate the farmming. <-- this is where i stand and i think a lot are with me. :-) poll time
Let me start by saying I'm an odd mix here. I don't mind the secondary market, but I've never participated in it. The prices I've seen are just too high for me to justify it. It would take a game that mixes a good deal of fun with frustation, and good prices on the secondary market, before I'd consider it. So far that hasn't happend, and it probably never will.
From what I've seen of this continueing argument, there's only one side that feels strongly: the people against it. The people for it don't seem to care. That's why these threads tend to be so one-sided, usually one or two people being lynched by the hanging mob. I usually have my doubts about the "dissenting voices" too, as often it seems they're trolling for reaction.
So what I would ask of the lynch mob is to put down your torches and consider why it is you consider this such a bad thing so strongly. The most common name I've seen thrown around is "cheater". I've yet to understand why. Yes, in the "EULA" and "Rules of Conduct" sense, there's probably a violation. But how is it cheating?
The reasons I've seen is it's acquiring something you couldn't normally get. This is, of course, a completely invalid arguement. If someone walks up to you in-game and hands you some crazy powerful item, no strings, you'll take it. Does that make you a cheater? I don't think it does. Yet using that arguement, you are.
Uber guilders who've raided every dungeon time and time again and have the best crap out there get mad when someone buys it stuff off ebay. However, as someone who can't do those kinds of raids, I get mad that people expect me to play like that just to keep up.
Others say it's real life interfering in the game. In that sense guilds make everyone a cheater. I've handed tons of DAOC plat to crafters and guildies, many of whom where in single digit levels. That's something they wouldn't be able to get on their own for a very long time. My guild is the same "core" with 20 or so people who bounce into every game we go to. Many of us knew others from real life before ever playing in an MMO together. As an organized guild, we do things much faster and efficiently that any solo player could. In that sense, it's real life interfering.
Not being angry about it myself and having not found a good logical reason as yet, I can only speculate that the anger comes from someone acquiring something in a way you didn't like. Well from what I've seen there's dozens and dozens of ways to do that. A game like DAOC does not have a level playing field. There's things you can do with 3 characters that can't be done with 15, things you can do with 5 characters that can't be done with 40. Am I supposed to hate every Animist or Mentalist I see because he can get a bot and do artifacts? Or should I be glad that, not being able to get 40 people together to do it myself, at least someone can do the encounter and make the items availible to all.
It's made worse for me and my guild and we only usually play PvP based games. We have a legitimate reason for "needing" gear, and while none of us are uber, we like to be competitive. In a PvE game, the timesinks ARE the game, so if they're enjoyable then that's good enough. The few times I've played PvE games I've never felt "forced" into do anything. It's different in a PvP game though, and virtually every game has PvP in some form.
If people want to be angry, they really should blame developers. They are directly responsible for the creation of a secondary market. People HATE repitition. Yet many put up with it, usually complaining all the time. That's the thing that blows my mind. I play MMOs because there's so much to do. If I wanted repitition I'd fire up the single player game I just beat. The amount of content is FAR more than you'll get from any single player game. But developers paint themselves into a corner with high-priced NPC gear(WoW's level 60 mounts for example), or ridiculous repetitive times sinks. Spending hours on a raid with 40+ people for 10 items that drop is stupid and unfair. And then they jazz it up with insanely low drop rates for the best items and multiple items needed or even better, linked together in sets for added bonuses. By forcing people into doing the same things over and over you're garaunteing that there's going to be some dislike building, because you've created a chore. You're setting yourself up for people to explore "other options" to get out of chores because we aren't paying a monthly fee for chores. Those "other options" could be buying it off the games market, finding ways to do it easier, quitting/playing a different game, or getting it off the secondary market. Often the games market is far more cutthroat than the secondary. Nothing like searching on an item, seeing it's priced insanely high, and seeing every single one of them is being sold by the same guy. I've even seen "that guy" in a thread like this saying that buying it off IGE is cheating, as opposed to cornering the market in the game(something you can go to jail for in RL). Personally I'd rather buy it off the secondary market guy. He's got no illusions about what he's doing and the role he's filling, as opposed to someone who's sticking it to their side or faction for profit. Regardless, it's the dev's fault for putting in such content to create the environment.
It doesn't have to be that way. Mythic's Cassic servers are a near-perfect example. No "needed" item is in particularly high demand, and most things can be acquired by only a few people. Prices are therefore pretty reasonable on the market, and while some stuff is expensive, it's usually not unreasonable. There is a bit of repitition still required(multiple runs to Darkspire), but it can be done with 8 people in an hour, not unreasonable.
Yep, didn't get the issue with 'journalistic integrety', just heard 'I buy gold' in all of those posts.
Buying gold from secondary markets using real life money is cheating. No two ways about it. Just like a botting program, purchasing in game items / money is a way of circumventing in game mechanics...it's cheating.
Buying in game money through a secondary market also causes inflation. You'll hear that farming doesn't cause inflation and this is correct. Inflation is caused by the 'players' that purchase the money, by the cheaters. The false comparisons about gifts from other players or 'guild help' purposely miss the point, the gold generated by farmers isn't equivilent to gold generated by players. Players will generate gold in normal game play (which may or may not include some grinding / farming) and use it to outfit their character or to help friends. I.e the in game money isn't the end, it's the means to the end. For farmers, the gold is the end. They play for the gold and they play 24/7.
The gold removed from the economy by farmers really hurts no one. They play in much the same way as others and win loot in the same way, sometimes by 'ninja' tactics but not necessarily. It's when this gold is accumulated and brought back into the game that inflation occurs. Players that have purchased gold then go onto buy items, paying full pop on auction houses or outbidding legitimate players. This has a cumulative effect of increasing prices creating more demand for secondary market gold.
So, there's my 2 coppers. 1. Buying gold = cheating and 2. Buying gold = Bad for in-game economy.
ps - this is my opinion, not a jounalistic piece, flame away.
You better get your ears checked, pal. I said nothing of the sort. In fact I truly despise the second market.
What I don't get is MMORPG.com making a big deal of this 'commentary' days in advance by sending me an email stating they had a 'big announcement' on Saturday only to log on and find that drivel. I didn't learn anything I didn't already know, other than the fact that this writer doesn't like gold buyers.
Part of relaying information to people is communicating the pertinent information in an unbiased fashion. Comments and opinions made are to be reserved for the latter part of an article.
I guess maybe I expect too much from someone who writes for THE source for MMORPG news.
And again, I ask you, give an actual reason as to how it's cheating other than what's in the Eula. It's not. Player to player transactions are allowed(everyone has made a trade at some point). Gold farming is allowed(every played has farmed at one time or another). The only difference here is something changed hands outside of the game. Other than EULA, no rules were violated, no content exploited, no "circumvention" took place.
And farming doesn't cause inflation, the design of the economy does. If you don't have enough money sinks, inflation is a problem. Farmers may increase the rate of inflation by bringing more money into the economy at a faster rate, but it's the design of the economy that creates the problem. Continual, repeating money sinks are needed to fight inflation, but many games go the wrong route with it. They put in high priced "one shots". By setting lofty goals, you've created an environment that fosters farming, either by professionals or by players. You're essentially encouraging players to increase inflation. Devs look at something like WoW's Epic mounts as a good way to "excess" money from the economy. Players view it as a goal to be obtained and grind away at it until they get there. This isn't syphoning excess money, it's generating new money at a faster rate than would be normal. Of course you could say it's a rub, the "excess" money generated is now gone. However, neither have you filtered off "normal money", which will be still be spent on other required things. What you have created though, is a reason to farm, and an "in" for companies like IGE to make money.
You're assumption that someone buys money off IGE and then goes and farts it away on the AH is completely baseless. The people spending money like water are the ones who've achieved the artificial money sinks, replenished thier stockpiles of money(probably from selling high demand items and unfairly high prices), and now don't have anything else to spend it on. People who pay hard earned real life cash are likely looking for something very specific and currently out of reach for them(the epic mount or the previously mentioned high priced high dollar item). The ones to blame there are Blizzard and seller for creating lofty goals that force people into a chore to achieve them. The only difference between your "cheater" and your "legitimate player" is in how much time was personally spent gathing up that money. Could even be luck. The "legitimate player" that's bidding against the "cheater" may very well be the a-hole seller some previous item you couldn't buy because it was priced too high. But he's "legitimate" because some item with a .007 chance of dropping landed in his backpack like a winning lottery ticket.
And again, it doesn't have to be this way. Citing DAOC as an example again, it once had the "perfect" economy. Prior to the release of Trials of Atlantis, but after spellcrafting, this was a game with virtually no inflation. Money generated by players through normal means was essentially funneled through another player into the merchants that sold the components for crafted items. A handful of items existed that were better than what could be made, but not much better, and not needed to "max out". These appeared on the player market but with low demand there were low prices. The costs for getting crafted gear were quit reasonable, enough to take a significant portion of a players wealth but not enough to force people into farming. On paper it looks unsustainable but reality was different. People continually tweaked their templates requiring all new gear, and new crafters and new characters came up all the time. The people with spare money didn't have anything they needed so they spent it on fun things like having the most expensive house.
Trials of Atlantis of coursed ruined this. By adding rare must have items, coupled with what can only be described as forced farming(artifact and master level XP), the stage was set. By the time people "farmed" most everything they needed they had an excess of cash and usually a batch of items they didn't need but someone else desperately wanted. These went onto the player market for excessive amounts of money. After the sale, the seller had a large abundance of cash with which they'd spend on some other high priced item. But the money never leaves the economy, it just shuffles from player to player, in bigger and bigger stockpiles, and driving prices ever higher. The old money sink of player made goods is virtually non-existant, replaced by the new dropped gear. New people coming in(if there are any) face litterally 150+ hours of pointless farming to aquire needed artifacts, items, and scrolls. This is not interesting PvE content, this is killing the exact same mobs or running the exact same encounters again and again and again until they drop what you need. New players will have to do this, because the player market has priced items so high that to fully outfit yourself from nothing via buying the gear would take more money than the game allows a single player to hold. You'd litterally need another player to hold some for you. In light of that, I can't blame anyone for buying plat, but I can blame Mythic for fostering the environment.