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Another article explaining the new user experience less than G-rated: http://www.gameguidesonline.com/guides/articles/se cond_life_article.asp

That's part of the problem, you see. By driving the price on materials low and then redistributing gold to other players based on out-of-game cash, farmers make material farming unprofitable for regular players while simultaneously driving the price up for high end items. So if you want to buy an epic item off the auction hall, farmers drive the price of the epic up and the price of all the stuff you can sell down. Thus forcing the average player to spend a lot more time farming their own gold to compete with the presence of bought gold.

I can honestly say that I always made a profit from my personal farming. The trick was to actually sit and pay attention to the Auction house and other factors of the economy (former AH junky). I used to make a good amount of money buying "underpriced" items from farmers and reselling at a normal price on the AH a few days later(or saved money by keeping them for myself or the guild). Rather than trying to sell items when the AH was flooded with them, I'd send them to a mule for storage until prices came up to something decent. Hell, if you're motivated enough, try to get into the beta for the burning crusades and start finding out what new recipies or quests need what items and have your mains collect those on your regular server (or at least keep an ear open in the forums)

Getting back to epics. Again, farmers don't drive prices up. They'll try to get as much as they can for an item, true, but so will all sellers. Most players are willing to repost such items several times to make the sale, eating up the deposit losses the whole time. Farmers want quick sales and will undersell on the AH (at the time posted), or even spam the trade channel. You may miss the 1/2 priced Krol Blade because you've put that person on your ignore list (I clean mine out every few weeks, just to see what I'm missing).

Anyhow, the biggest reason epics or other high demand items cost huge amount can be boiled down to players with too much money. They have huge cash reserves and rarely are willing to do anything but buy-out auctions. They want their items now! Gold buyers and people with high level mains twinking alts (this got considerably worse after battlegrounds and the bracket system was introduced) are mostly the cause of this type of price inflation. Sub-20 blue items go for a ton of money, not because of farmers, but because of twinkers. It's just like when people complain about AH items accidentally buyout an overpriced item, say 1sbid/20g buyout on a stack of linen. I've found that I've made good purchases by just looking for and bidding on those items. Many people don't bother bidding on high ticket items specifically because of thier super high buyout and miss a good opportunity.

People that "must" have an item now are the ones that alter the future buyout prices and percieved market value. There's no reason to think that farmers don't have auctioneer like a lot of regular players do. If enough idiots pay 1000g for a piece of junk, I guarantee you that the piece of junk will be sold at prices around 1000g, regardless of the seller's actual occupation. Farmers, especially around the end of thier shift, can be very willing to undersell by 1/2. There were a few times I wish I had borrowed money to buy such good deals. /. had linked an article about this a while back.

So, to sum it all up:
High prices caused and maintained by overly funded players that have no sense of shopping around or patience. Work with or around the farmers and you'll make out like a bandit.

This stems from the way the game farms work. Typically the gold farmers work in 12 hour shifts, and share the character/account with a shift partner and some other fill-in workers also, so the account can be used 24/7. They have a quota of gold that has to be turned in by the end of their shift, and items are useless to them because unless the item sells for gold by the end of their shift, the shift partner who plays the account the next work shift will get the leftover items and auctions. This is why farmers will dump items for cheap near the end of their shift.

A way to help the 'worker' and screw the 'boss' a bit in these Chinese gold farms is to help the worker by re-selling their items for them (where you can get some profit because you don't have a time limit in the auctions) and being a 'bank' for any extra gold over their shift quota they might have acquired. This way the player (the actual worker, not just the character name or account) can get their minimum of quota of gold sent back from you at the beginning of their next shift (you need a password or something to make sure you aren't chatting to their shift partner or boss). They can then actually play the game for fun and goof off for a while, instead of using company bots to repeatedly scrape the most profitable areas for gold.

More interesting notes about how the farms and farmers work, and how you might interact with the farmers can be found can be found here.

The obvious solution to the whole problem is to not pay real world money for virtual items (this is not as futile as 'don't buy drugs'->'no more gang violence'). That shuts down the whole sordid business and the game can be fun again. Besides, the whole point of most games (from MMO.. games like Diablo on, along with others like Need for Speed Underground 2, etc) is to build a better character/car/army/civilization through pressing the feeder bar repeatedly and being rewarded with pellets. Just like a game cheat code that gives you $1000000 and unlimited power ups, etc, if you can plunk down your credit card and buy the level 60 character with all the items you want, there is no more fun to be had by playing the game. The fun is getting there, once you have the '10 star car', or the 'level 60 character', the game is pretty much over and you will end up putting the game back on the shelf.

SOE is notorious for launching games with content that is not finished or buggy (SWG Launch, EverQuest Expansion end game content, etc.). Blizzard on the other hand is known for at times delaying a game, and then delaying a game again just to work out all the minor bugs.

The question I would like to ask Slashdot readers is if it worth launching a game early, yet buggy to grab a certain market from competition? I know Themis group thinks a poor launch can cost a company millions of dollars http://www.themis-group.com/uploads/Cost%20of%20La unch.xls, but will the benefit of launching early exceed the costs?

Brian Whitener

http://www.gameguidesonline.com/

I have about 400 hours (16 some days) in my World of Warcraft character and must say it is the first game I have been excited about since the original EverQuest. I have played just about every MMORPG that has come out in the last few years and really have to say that the lower level (particularly alliance side) portion of the game is brilliant. The higher levels of the game don't have the same polish and "magic" as the lower levels (most likely due to the push for a Christmas release) but WoW is leaps and bounds above any MMORPG on the market. Although I love World of Warcraft the more I played the game the more I noticed that it is nothing really new or revolutionary. World of Warcraft is "evolutionary not revolutionary". It took what worked with MMORPG's and put it together well, but appears a bit rushed (compared to the lower level content) at the higher levels (yet still huge strides over other MMORPGs). Recently I have not been enjoying WoW as much as I once did possibly due the slightly rushed current higher level content (no raid content in the game yet) and the fact that I am in the process of writing a few player guides for the game (which quickly causes burn out). It could also be the fact that my main character (a mage) went from being overpowered to a bit underpowered. Blizzard tends to nerf and fix things with large sweeping changes until they find a proper medium. I have yet to really look at EQ2 yet just because I was tired of the EverQuest world and its unfortunate decline over the years. EverQuest 2's main audience is the 2 million people who have played EverQuest over its lifespan (and quit for numerous reasons). EQ2 and WoW are the most anticipated MMORPG's ever. It will be interesting to see how they play out, but either way new players will want new guides and GameGuidesOnline http://www.gameguidesonline.com/ staff will cover both games.