Goblin Squad Member
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If prices change with any regularity I wonder if websites will be able to keep up. Certainly not with what is being placed on or bought off the market at any random time, thus maybe flooding/draining and driving prices down or up. If you have to meta price-check markets then having an alt stashed in your favorite settlements would work way better.
@bringslite
Because Eve limits market knowledge to regions which are actually fairly small in the universe you get third party websites for eve that do exactly this
They keep up just fine to the point that its not worth bother putting market alts in to much
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Goblin Squad Member
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Reading through it, it sounds like knowledge of prices will be available to those with the skills, but to actually place buy/sell orders you'll have to be physically present. Which makese sense. Is there something I'm missing?That's the way I read it, too.
There is the potential for wasted time traveling to a market to place your Buy Order only to discover that the goods have already been sold to someone else.
Hmm, that is a risk I had not considered. I suppose you could attempt to contact the buyer/seller and attempt to arrange the trade informally, to hold it until you can arrive. I suspect it will help keep local markets distinguishable, though. It'd have to be a pretty good deal to risk the travel with the chance the deal won't be there when you arrive. Not to mention giving competition the chance to swoop you. I think I'll have to see how this plays out before I can form an opinion on it.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@bringslite
Because Eve limits market knowledge to regions which are actually fairly small in the universe you get third party websites for eve that do exactly this
They keep up just fine to the point that its not worth bother putting market alts in to much
I was under the impression that they did this in EVE through public API calls. Is that correct? If so, is that something we have reason to expect in PFO?
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Goblin Squad Member
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... having an alt stashed in your favorite settlements would work way better.
From the same post I quoted above.
Realistically there will be players who set up alts in every Settlement and generate near-real time information on every market, then centralize that information in tools they either keep proprietary or make available to the whole community. There's virtually no way to stop that from happening, so we'll just accept it and move on.
Just for reference.
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Goblin Squad Member
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If I am a merchant sitting in Settlement M and want 1000 hides I have to either
a) visit each settlement separately and place a buy order for 40 hides (assumed each will get more or less the same.Or
b) just put a single buy order in settlement M
Going back to this, I think it's important to point out that you can still place the Buy Order for 1,000 Hides at Settlement M even if there aren't any Hides currently available for Sale there. This will create an incentive for dedicated traders to go to the outlying markets and buy up the existing stock and bring it to M to satisfy your Buy Order.
It seems like there ought to be some mechanism to "lock" a Buy (or Sell) Order for a short period of time while you gather the resources to fulfill it. I would expect there to be a significant Reputation hit for failing to fulfill it after locking it. And I would expect the player who placed the Order to be able to set a minimum Reputation required to lock the Order. That should keep low Rep characters from abusing the system to cause grief.
@Dario No idea as yet. Eve is currently done by API calls but it certainly doesn't have to be done that way they just make it more efficient.
I believe (possibly misinformed though) it was originally done by screenscraping and to access the website you had to run the screenscraping software and provide updates which just gave the users of the website a much larger advantage so CCP provided the API's on the basis that they couldn't be used for commercial gain and now the site is free to all supported by advertising
@Nihimon buy orders are not filled immediately though, I often put up buy orders in eve which take 20 or more days to fully satisfy. The merchants won't just be able to go further out buy hides and return necessarily they may have to go out place their own buy order then return. When they return my buy order may have been filled already.
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Goblin Squad Member
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It seems like there ought to be some mechanism to "lock" a Buy (or Sell) Order for a short period of time while you gather the resources to fulfill it. I would expect there to be a significant Reputation hit for failing to fulfill it after locking it. And I would expect the player who placed the Order to be able to set a minimum Reputation required to lock the Order. That should keep low Rep characters from abusing the system to cause grief.
Out of curiosity, why? What is the advantage of a mechanic to say "I don't have that, but I will get it for you so don't get it from anyone else in the meanwhile." that can't be replicated by contacting the buyer and saying exactly that to them? Isn't getting swooped by someone else who actually has it on hand part of the risk of reactive trading?
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Goblin Squad Member
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Out of curiosity, why?
Hrm. It's a fairly unexamined bias on my part. Looking at it now, I'd say it's mostly because I'd hate to get swooped by someone if I saw a really great price on a Buy Order and started running around - investing a lot of my money - trying to satisfy it.
In some ways, it would be analogous to "locking" a Bounty Contract, wouldn't it?
@Nihimon why should a buyer wait for you to run around if there is someone on hand saying look I have the goods just give me the money?
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Goblin Squad Member
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It seems like there ought to be some mechanism to "lock" a Buy (or Sell) Order for a short period of time while you gather the resources to fulfill it. I would expect there to be a significant Reputation hit for failing to fulfill it after locking it. And I would expect the player who placed the Order to be able to set a minimum Reputation required to lock the Order. That should keep low Rep characters from abusing the system to cause grief.Out of curiosity, why? What is the advantage of a mechanic to say "I don't have that, but I will get it for you so don't get it from anyone else in the meanwhile." that can't be replicated by contacting the buyer and saying exactly that to them? Isn't getting swooped by someone else who actually has it on hand part of the risk of reactive trading?
Nihimon, this is what the contract system is for. Replace 'buy order' with 'supply agreement', and define terms for delivery, contract breach (in very fine print), etc.
@Nihimon
To clarify as well as I am not sure if you have played EVE. If I put up a buy order for a 1000 hides that does not indicate that you have to have a 1000 hides to sell me. You can set a minimum purchase number (usually left at 1) So my 1000 hide order may be filled by player a sells me 120 hides, player b sells me 30 hides and player c sells me 850 hides. Each sale is reflected in the buy order on the market as the number ordered is decremented.
Also buy and sell orders are not set in stone in Eve and I expect the same will be in Pfo. I put up an order for 1000 hides at 1000 groats each I can modify the price of individual items up or down after that so for instance someone comes along and also places a buy order for 1000 hides offering 1010 groats a piece I can modify my original order to offer 1020 groats each. I can also of course modify the price downwards.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Nihimon why should a buyer wait for you to run around if there is someone on hand saying look I have the goods just give me the money?
When I said it was an "unexamined bias", I meant that I didn't really have a well-considered reason for it, it's just where my intuition took me. Examining that bias now, I don't have really strong arguments for why it should be that way. However, it does seem analogous to the Bounty Contract.
Nihimon, this is what the contract system is for. Replace 'buy order' with 'supply agreement', and define terms for delivery, contract breach (in very fine print), etc.
There's a subtle but important difference, and thinking about what you said reinforces my perception that "locking" Buy Orders is analogous to "locking" Bounty Contracts.
The thing that Buy Orders and Bounty Contracts have in common, and what makes them significantly different from "supply agreements" is that they are publicly posted. It's true that you can define parameters for Bounty Contracts, but it's still publicly posted to everyone within those parameters.
The fact that they're publicly posted means that there can be two entities who both want to satisfy them. In that case, it seems unfair to allow one of those entities to incur all the costs of fulfillment without giving them a guarantee that they'll be paid in the event of fulfillment.
It seems very unrealistic to think that anyone would willingly load a truck full of furniture and drive it to a furniture retail warehouse on the hopes that they'll actually arrive first and get paid, but knowing that someone else could show up first, leaving them "holding the bag".
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Goblin Squad Member
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Out of curiosity, why?Hrm. It's a fairly unexamined bias on my part. Looking at it now, I'd say it's mostly because I'd hate to get swooped by someone if I saw a really great price on a Buy Order and started running around - investing a lot of my money - trying to satisfy it.
In some ways, it would be analogous to "locking" a Bounty Contract, wouldn't it?
Would locking the contract also prevent the buyer from cancelling it? Should the buyer be penalized if he puts up a buy order, you lock it, then his buddy is like "Oh, I've got a surplus of that, here, have some." and he no longer needs the locked buy? Or maybe something else comes up (such as bandits hitting his caravan and taking a chunk out of his profits) and he can no longer afford that buy order, and needs to cancel it to reclaim the money in escrow.
I think getting swooped is just a risk of reactive trading, balanced by having less of your worth locked up in items that may not sell. If you look to see what the market wants, then go out and get it, you risk being behind the times. Or you can try predictive trading. Figure out what the market will want, keep it in stock, and have a quicker turnaround, at the expense of less liquid assets.
@Dario precisely, the merchant filling the order takes a risk that the order will be there and making him a profit. Risk and reward
If he can lock the contract then the risk is transferred to the buyer who may be in turn looking to fill a bigger order in time and would have done so. I would say though I do not mind the mechanic as long as the one putting up the order can select it to be non lockable if they wish
@Nihimon
I am all for options on things like this personally
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Goblin Squad Member
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I hope there is no high tech auction house in PFO. PFO is a fantasy MMO and the buying and selling techniques should be relatively quiant compared to the New York Stock Exchange or the EVE market. A local AH, preferrably run by players, or individual vendors hired by craftsmen should suffice. We are not playing EVE with a super high tech trading and communications system. We are not playing WoW with a goblin run Alliance, Horde and Neutral Action House system. We are playing Pathfinder Online.
(If you played Ultima Online in the late 90s there were hired vendors you could place on the stoop of your house, and for larger house, they could be placed inside if you were willing to leave your house unlocked. It worked quite well, and fit the theme of the fantasy MMO. Keep it themed. That's my hope.)
@Hardin
Because what you can do is similar does not mean the in character method is similar. Don't forget such things as stock markets and brokers date well back to the 16th century, banking even further.
Prices can be available by a system of fast post riders between the settlements in a region paid for partly by the market fees as an example.
Letters of credit lodged in one settlement and the funds drawn on in another account for remote buying etc.
I think you are getting too caught up in the Eve explains it this way therefore if they do the same thing in PfO its high tech
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RPG Superstar 2012 Top 16
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I hope there is no high tech auction house in PFO. PFO is a fantasy MMO and the buying and selling techniques should be relatively quiant compared to the New York Stock Exchange or the EVE market. A local AH, preferrably run by players, or individual vendors hired by craftsmen should suffice. We are not playing EVE with a super high tech trading and communications system. We are not playing WoW with a goblin run Alliance, Horde and Neutral Action House system. We are playing Pathfinder Online.
[...]
I see where you're coming from, Hardin, but this description doesn't really fit Golarion. Much of Golarion is closer to an Enlightenment or 18th century setting than a dark-ages setting. The Aspis Consortium is a global trading corporation modeled after the British East India Company from the 17th and 18th cenury.
Temples dedicated to Abadar, the Master of the First Vault, often provide the surrounding community with banking and other services. Such sites are often built near courthouses, and led by a Banker or Archbanker.
Then there's commonplace magic easily used for communication, particularly between nearby settlements.
To sum up, this isn't feudal europe. And even they had much more sophisticated economic systems than you see in most post-Tolkien western fantasy.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I wouldn't go as far as the 18th Century, but Pathfinder is definitely a High Renaissance setting, at least in many countries. The Inner Sea World Guide discusses printing presses. There are pretty advanced firearms in limited use. At least one major power began colonizing the local equivalent of Africa, before a revolution back home weakened the effort.
Backing up a bit in the thread, I hope that the AH hosts genuine auctions. (Place a bid, wait for the bidding period to end, then pick up the item if you won.) A clearing house might be okay too. (Dump 30 items here, put up a sell order, wait for matching buy orders.) I hope, though, that there will be a place for player-run shops. (I need a fishing pole now. I go to a bait and tackle shop and buy it outright if I'm willing to pay the price the merchant has set.)
Auction houses are great for high value, low volume transactions, like a magic sword for personal use.
Clearing houses are great for high volume purchases, whether high or low value.
I hope there will be player-owned shops for low volume, low to medium value transactions.
Buying a long sword +2, Holy Avenger? Auction House.
Buying 5,000 board-feet of lumber, or 50 short swords +1? Clearing House.
Buying a new fishing pole (my specialty in SWG) or 10 days' worth of trail rations? Player-owned Store
No reason there shouldn't be both, however I suspect if you have a market that after the initial novelty wears off the lure of everything in one place will likely win out and personal shops are unlikely to see much traffic.
The exception being the shops of those who know how to make something highend and only a handful know how to do it. If you follow the maxim "most people are lazy and follow the path of least difficulty" you sadly will not go far wrong.
I would estimate the most likely market after the initial novelty period are likely to be roleplayers. According to some one here a market that is going to be small.
I am less convinced of the point of auctions frankly, I have never as yet sold anything on an auction house in any mmo which has not been sold for the buyout price.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I am less convinced of the point of auctions frankly, I have never as yet sold anything on an auction house in any mmo which has not been sold for the buyout price.
I find that odd since I've had a lot of the opposite experience. Perhaps your buyout is too low.
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RPG Superstar 2012 Top 16
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[...]
Auction houses are great for high value, low volume transactions, like a magic sword for personal use.
Clearing houses are great for high volume purchases, whether high or low value.
I hope there will be player-owned shops for low volume, low to medium value transactions.
[...]
Yes, I'd love to see all those transactions well supported.
And the other main transaction type will be one-to-one commissions, based on either a verbal agreement or a formal contract. These a more complex to set up and require greater time investment, but allow more flexibility on delivery, barter, provision of required materials, and so on.
@Drakhan Valane
If you mostly sell by auction rather than buyout I would suggest it is probably not necessarily my buyout is too low but yours is too high. For instance I just had a sale of a stack of exceptional hides in lotro. I got 5g for that stack at the same time there is a stack on the auction house that has run down to 6 hours out of the maximum 48 that is priced at 9g. It has yet to attract a bid even though the minimum is set at 1g.
I suspect that what will happen is there may be a few bids in the last half hour or so but it won't get anywhere near the 4g mark. This player would probably say the same to me as you just have
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Goblin Squad Member
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If GW wishes to do so, one way to support player-owned store sales in the face of clearing house convenience is to place a (relatively small) surcharge on clearing house purchases. They could also set the development system up in such a way that small, relatively new settlements can host shops before they can build a clearing house.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Timing has a lot to do with how successful your auction is. I don't know the LotRO market, but generally speaking I'd set up auctions in WoW with the initial bid close to, but a little lower than, other buyouts and set the buyout higher. That way I'll still get good money without worrying about being too undercut, or if someone with lots of money buys everything out, I get more than I was expecting.
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Goblin Squad Member
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To support auctions in the face of the "buy it now" button, GW could put a minimum number of products on clearing house sell orders, or put a mildly punitive surcharge on very small sell orders. Only have one of something? Sell it in your shop or in the auction house. Selling 10 of the same thing? Now the rules or the surcharge economics make the clearing house viable.
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RPG Superstar 2012 Top 16
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If GW wishes to do so, one way to support player-owned store sales in the face of clearing house convenience is to place a (relatively small) surcharge on clearing house purchases. They could also set the development system up in such a way that small, relatively new settlements can host shops before they can build a clearing house.
Remains to be seen if GW will set charges on auction / clearing houses at all. That might be something they leave to the individual settlements that establish the houses.
The big thing I think against individual player shops, and I would like to make it clear I would love them to be in game and would use them, is frankly as I said before players are lazy. The first two settlements players come to they will run around finding all the shops and looking through them and then laziness would set in and they would just head for the central shop. This is why shopping malls and supermarkets win out in real life as well even if the prices are slightly higher in some cases.
If you want player run shops to thrive there can be no central market. However if there is no central market it will be a black mark for many players that helps them to decide whether they wish to play the game.
SWTOR released with an Auction house that while functional wasn't as smooth to use as some and that caused huge amount of player complaining. The same with Age of Conan.
I am not saying it is good, it is just the way things are. Eve tbh has similar problems. I deal with a lot of new Eve players and one of the biggest complaints I hear is about travel time.
Ultima Online could get away with inconvenience as could Everquest and SWG because they were running in a market where all the competitors were equally inconvenient in some way or other and players had yet to get used to the idea of convenience in an mmo. WOW came along and did away with a lot of the inconvenience which is one reason it did so well. Since then many wow clones have come out and taught the players you can have your cake and eat it with convenience items like instant travel, lfr etc. This is the market PfO is in.
Do I like it? No I don't. Do I recognise that PfO at the end of the day has to attract and hold players? Yes I do. This is one reason why I have not argued for some things I think would actually from a pure practical point benefit the game such as full equipment loss on pvp kill. It would be better for gatherers,crafters,pvp'ers but it would also deter to many players.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I understand everyone's concern for having a high tech AH. I really do. But here is a good example of what happens when there is a cash shop and an AH (especially if the cash shop allows such things as PLEX, Skymetal bits, or Gems, as in GW2).
GW2 has the worst pre-end game economy measured in the last 14 years
I might be wrong, but the less centralized the better. Some settlements will be very efficient, some will not, but that is no reason to amalgamate all AHs into one big global trading system. That is a sure way to drive the economy into the tank.
If players are so lazy they can't run to numerous vendors to check inventory and prices, then maybe they should play something else? And if PFO goes the way of the big centralized AH, some of the backers will go play something else. I'll try it either way, and hope it lives up to my expectations, but this is a specialized audience. I think most PFO fans would expect shopping to be a little more archaic than surfing the internet.
Adding on to what Will Cooper said above about bartering...having an AH type barter system would be a great idea (it has been discussed a bit before now, but still a valid option), and contracts seem like a logical additiona (using a bulletin board in the AH itself, perhaps, or at City Hall). Lots of options.
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Goblin Squad Member
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| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
If GW wishes to do so, one way to support player-owned store sales in the face of clearing house convenience is to place a (relatively small) surcharge on clearing house purchases. They could also set the development system up in such a way that small, relatively new settlements can host shops before they can build a clearing house.Remains to be seen if GW will set charges on auction / clearing houses at all. That might be something they leave to the individual settlements that establish the houses.
That's true, too.
ZenPagan, it helps that PFO is deliberately not setting out to be a WOW-killer. They can get away with not offering some conveniences, since they aren't trying to appeal to the largest possible target audience. They still have to think about the customer experience, but if a certain segment of the MMO population can't live without instant order fulfillment in their in-game shopping, PFO can afford to let them go.
I cant comment on GW2 as I managed to escape playing that, however I have yet to play any themepark game that has anything like a player driven decent economy and that wasnt driven by rampant inflation.
*shrug* Eve's market model does seem to mostly work, should it be adapted before implementation? Of course it should you cannot just lift it out of one game and dump it in another.
Can you list the reasons you think the Eve market is a fail in Eve? I am assuming you do as you list Plex as one of the things that breaks markets. I have been playing Eve for 3 odd years on and off and one of the few things I have never thought of complaining about because it seems to work pretty well is the market. In fact the only thing I can think of that may need looking at is the margin trading skill.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I understand everyone's concern for having a high tech AH. I really do. But here is a good example of what happens when there is a cash shop and an AH (especially if the cash shop allows such things as PLEX, Skymetal bits, or Gems, as in GW2).
GW2 has the worst pre-end game economy measured in the last 14 years
I might be wrong, but the less centralized the better. Some settlements will be very efficient, some will not, but that is no reason to amalgamate all AHs into one big global trading system. That is a sure way to drive the economy into the tank.
If players are so lazy they can't run to numerous vendors to check inventory and prices, then maybe they should play something else? And if PFO goes the way of the big centralized AH, some of the backers will go play something else. I'll try it either way, and hope it lives up to my expectations, but this is a specialized audience. I think most PFO fans would expect shopping to be a little more archaic than surfing the internet.
Adding on to what Will Cooper said above about bartering...having an AH type barter system would be a great idea (it has been discussed a bit before now, but still a valid option), and contracts seem like a logical additiona (using a bulletin board in the AH itself, perhaps, or at City Hall). Lots of options.
Some of the reasons why GW2's pre-endgame economy is broken just won't apply to PFO.
GW2 has a pretty fast leveling system. Most people who want to reach the endgame can do so pretty quickly. Buying something for a level 30 character doesn't make much sense, because the character won't stay level 30 for long.
I'll read the article to see what else the economist thinks hurt GW2's economy, but with real-time xp gain intended to max out characters in about 2 years, that particular problem seems unlikely in PFO.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Anything that can be purchased for real cash and converted into game money whether it be PLEX or any other type, really causes huge inflation. One year ago one PLEX ran about 400 million ISK. Now they are over 600 million ISK. 50% in one year, so a year from now the will be (around) 900 million each, and two years 1.35 billion. That's nuts. It makes all the fixed values of NPCs totally irrelevant (NPC sops and quest rewards).
At level 5 a character in WoW could learn their first skill. Those cost 9 coppers. That's cheap. But quest rewards in Vanilla endgame were close to 3 gold (there weren't really very many back then), Burning Crusade at around 9 gold, Lich King about 15 gold, and Cataclysm were 20 gold each. And this is without a cash shop where players could buy items tradable ingame. I just see bad things coming if the skymetal bits mentioned can be sold to other players in game. Fine to use them to buy other stuff in the cash shop, but I see it breaking the economy.
(A little off topic for the AH thread, but these are always one of the highest priced AH items.)
@Hardin you seem to fundamentally misunderstand the plex thing many do.The Plex does not create new money in the economy. The plex is traded from one player to another for money that already exists.
Before
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Player A has a plex
player b has 1 billion isk
Total isk in system 1 billion
After
=====
player A sells the plex to b for 500 million isk
Player A now has 500 million isk
player b now has 1 plex and 500 million isk
Total isk in system
Inflation in system = (total isk after / total isk before) * 100) - 100
---> (((1 billion / 1 billion = 1) *100) = 100) - 100 ) = 0
So total inflation of economy is 0%
The reason Plex went up in price is that for various reasons there were not so many for sale at that time. The price has now come back down again you will find the last time I looked about 4 weeks ago the price was back to 480 million per plex in the region I am in.
New isk comes into Eve by only 3 routes
1) Npc bounties
2) Mission rewards
3) Insurance payouts
All the other transactions are merely isk moving from one players wallet to anothers. If you want to point a finger at what is causing inflation in eve it is probably the pve side more than anything bounties from running missions and incursions is probably the biggest isk faucet in the game. Eve has an inflation problem to a certain extent but that is because the sink's are not matching the faucets
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Goblin Squad Member
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Anything that can be purchased for real cash and converted into game money whether it be PLEX or any other type, really causes huge inflation. One year ago one PLEX ran about 400 million ISK. Now they are over 600 million ISK. 50% in one year, so a year from now the will be (around) 900 million each, and two years 1.35 billion. That's nuts. It makes all the fixed values of NPCs totally irrelevant (NPC sops and quest rewards).
At level 5 a character in WoW could learn their first skill. Those cost 9 coppers. That's cheap. But quest rewards in Vanilla endgame were close to 3 gold (there weren't really very many back then), Burning Crusade at around 9 gold, Lich King about 15 gold, and Cataclysm were 20 gold each. And this is without a cash shop where players could buy items tradable ingame. I just see bad things coming if the skymetal bits mentioned can be sold to other players in game. Fine to use them to buy other stuff in the cash shop, but I see it breaking the economy.
(A little off topic for the AH thread, but these are always one of the highest priced AH items.)
Something to remember regarding the cash shop -> game coin transactions. That coin is still coming from other players. No new coin is entering the system through that. If prices are going up like what you reference in EVE, it's because more coin is entering the system than leaving it. Which it should. Players should be able to accumulate wealth over the life of their character. That game's been running for ten years. That's a lot of time for long-term players to amass wealth.
Not really sure where you were going with WoW, other than to point out that it has had a silly scale creep each time an expansion has come out. (MOAR DOTS! BIGGER NUMBERS!)
Nor am I really sure where you were going with the GW2 article. I read the paper, and it remarks that coin is well done, and kept scarce, pointing out that the issues with that game have to do with leveling speed (gear is deprecated quickly) and the flood of gear in the market. The only coin-related issue I saw him cite was with crafting materials, which he attributed (rightly so, in my experience) to higher level players buying everything up so they didn't have to trudge through lowbie areas gathering.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Now I've read the article, too. I really don't think gem sales did in the GW2 economy, and the author of the article doesn't seem to think so, either.
PFO monsters won't be dropping directly useful gear very often, from what we've heard so far. More often, they'll drop crafting materials.
Players aren't likely to "out-level" gear immediately after they acquire it, since character progression will be slower.
Without rampant monster equipment drops, player-crafted items should be in much higher demand.
Put those together, and I don't think PFO's economy will have the same kinds of problems as GW2's economy. Add in the fact that the economist didn't blame gem sales for GW2 economic problems, and I think this article isn't very useful as an argument against a cash shop and an AH coexisting in PFO.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Zen, I understand the economy. I was in finance for years (banker and stockbroker, I do understand RL economics and ingame economics). And I get the whole faucet/drain thing. But the crossover between real cash and the game money is a real problem for me. Blizzard has tried to mitigate that in Diablo III by having a way to sell ingame items for real cash. Besides the IRS wanting their cut (they are investigating ingame/real cash profits as taxable income...no, they really are) is infuses the game with a huge outside influence. I also understand that these influences occur regardless by gold farmers and folks selling things on illicit websites (you can but battleships and the like from EVE web vendors for $1).
I just see bad things happen to ingame economies cross into real life cash transactions. It's like Vegas.....what happens in game should stay in game. But it isn't working out well. Cash stores are a way for companies to try to make money while mitigating the damage done from the leakage of other things in or out of the game world.
Another note, Ryan said they can see all the coin being generated in the game world. No doubt. But if that is the case they have done a piss poor job of managing their coin faucets (or ISK in the case of EVE). All done on this thread.
The point remains you cannot point at plex and blame Eve economy inflation on it. Fine if you have reasons to oppose things then by all means post them. Do not post inaccurate things to support your argument though and this
"Anything that can be purchased for real cash and converted into game money whether it be PLEX or any other type, really causes huge inflation. One year ago one PLEX ran about 400 million ISK. Now they are over 600 million ISK. 50% in one year, so a year from now the will be (around) 900 million each, and two years 1.35 billion. That's nuts. It makes all the fixed values of NPCs totally irrelevant (NPC sops and quest rewards)."
was inaccurate.
If you had come out and said I do not like the mix of cash shops with auction houses and came out with good reasons for it you might find people will agree with you, even me. I do not particularly like cash shops in subscription games either for a lot of reasons.
Post reasons that are wrong though and people are going to go hang on thats not right.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The change of price of PLEX is a function of existing inflation and supply & demand of PLEX. It does not cause new money to be created.
@Hardin I may be mistaken, but for whatever reason, it seems to me like you keep arguing against a global AH... but I don't think anybody else is talking about global AHs.
I feel like there is some major miscommunication going on.
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Goblin Squad Member
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... the crossover between real cash and the game money is a real problem for me.
I understand this, and feel the same way to an extent. However, it seems like this isn't really a problem as long as it's only one-way. That is, as long as you can't convert in-game coin into real money, there shouldn't be a problem.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I am not an economist. Do not feel like studying the matter in depth either. If the "faucet" incoming or generated supply is balanced by the "drain" outgoing or removed amount, is not a balance achieved that will help curb inflation. You would just need a significant "drain" or redistribution applied to discourage hoarding and the problems it causes.
How does in-game gold -> real $$$ differ from real $$$ -> in-game gold? Seems neither would add or deplete the amount of gold coin in the game.
The difference is simple bringlite
Goblinworks make money from $$ for in game items that can be sold for game gold and no in game gold is generated it merely moves from the wallet of the buyer to the wallet of the seller
Gold for $$ on the other hand costs money that Goblinworks has to payout. What is the exchange rate? How is the exchange rate set? What are the legal ramifications? How do you deal with deflation as more and more gold leaves the system to be converted into $
Remember if you buy "plex" and then trade it to me for groats I cannot swap it back to a real world item all I can do is either resell it or use it to add time to my account.
If they do it like Plex in addition to this it is an object in Golarion and can be looted, destroyed or stolen. Imagine taking the settlement to find its warehouses stacked to the rafters with "PfO Plex"
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Goblin Squad Member
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Gold for $$ on the other hand costs money that Goblinworks has to payout. What is the exchange rate? How is the exchange rate set? What are the legal ramifications? How do you deal with deflation as more and more gold leaves the system to be converted into $
Isn't gold for $$$ how GW will make $$$ for selling training time? How does the gold "leave" the system when I buy it for real $$$?
I thought you were asking about trading in game gold for money and how it differed from trading real money for gold perhaps I misunderstood the question
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Goblin Squad Member
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The difference is, you cannot buy coin from the store. "Gold for $$$" does not exist. You can buy a consumable item (PLEX-like training time consumable), and then sell it for coin already in the system, collected by other players. No new currency is entering the system. Additional value enters when the PLEX-like item is created, and leaves when it is consumed for training time. It is not a transaction that alters equilibrium.
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Goblin Squad Member
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My point is that unless in-game gold is drained as fast as it is created, you will have inflation creep.
I thought you were asking about trading in game gold for money and how it differed from trading real money for gold perhaps I misunderstood the question
GW will sell training time for real $$$. Some players will buy that time with real $$$ and sell it for in-game gold. I like the idea because it will cut down the gold farmer/sellers a bit. It won't eliminate them though. It will generate competition for the gold value of training time and the real $$$ of in-game gold. Hopefully they will find it a losing proposition but there will always be the lazy players that want to buy gold if the training time can be found for lower cost of in-game gold than GW's price point. A vicious cycle that I hope gold sellers lose.