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Star Wars Galaxies Auctions Afoot
Fusty writes "Game Girl Advance is running a story about the first wave of Star Wars Galaxies auctions on Ebay. Items, credits and characters are already selling for over $250, not even a month after launch. Will Sony/Verant shut down SWG auctions, like they did the EverQuest Auctions?"
Sony only succeded with e-bay, and only partially. playerauctions.com provides all the same features outside of sony's grasp.
Sure, buying property in UO makes sense, because property is scarce. But in SWG or SB, you can still earn things. So go earn things, and feel good about them; not like you merely bought them.
Yes.
(Lucas Arts is even more of a control freak than Sony.)
I browse Slashdot at +3, Funny
Offer a piece of paper as well for auction. Now you have a tangible item.
I wonder if at some point ebay decided to crack down on this and started shutting down the auctions maybe sellers would start auctioning things like pennies or buttons that also came with a complimentary in-game item. Kind of like those people selling software that has to be bundled with hardware who send you an old floppy drive mounting kit with it to comply with the rules.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
...wins. So when are there going to be e-bay only items for auction rather then in the game. For example, you have to pay for that uber rare item as it would never be found in the game. If Lucas Arts held such auctions, that would act as a second form of revenue rather thne just though monthly payments from players.
Life is not for the lazy.
I've seen people do that when selling bootleg CDs. They'll list it like "Pencil... sharpened and chewed. Win my auction and I might throw in some goodies, like a Phish CD from 01/01/01!" I don't know whether they got away with it, but it's a great idea. However, I remember that one guy who was selling CD-Rs of his own band, and E-Bay was giving him a bunch of shit about counterfeit merchandise, even though he had never pressed his CD, and he owned full rights to it. So you never know what E-Bay will do to your auction.
is gambling! Go to the local cantina, and try to win a starship. What's more Star Wars than that? The answer to that question seems to be killing womp rats, from everything I've heard about the game (I haven't played it).
1) People who started playing SW:G are getting bored/annoyed by the bugs already, and are selling their accounts.
2) People started playing the game with the intention of investing a large amount of time to farm cash/items, and sell them.
In either case, this is interesting, it means either SW:G sucks, or there are some people who really need to go out and get jobs (I find it hard to believe that the cash that can be made from playing online games is a reasonable substitute for a paying job).
I've never really understood the people who buy items for use in an online game, surely if they don't have the time to invest to actually earn cash and items themselves, with the accompanying sense of achievement, it's not worth playing the game at all? As an ex-player of Ultima Online though, I can sympathise with some of the sellers. For example, I sold my account when I quit, which was easily enough to recoup the subscription fees I'd payed for playing. There seem to be no reasons why people would be selling accounts this early in the game though, except for those I described above, both of which are a little worrying.
1. Your casual player, just having fun. They extract their enjoyment from playing and figuring out quests, discovery, and exploration, and achievment within the confines of the game.
2. Your Ebay player. They have fun playing, but additionaly, the have fun from actually transfering the time they spend in game into real life money. Auctioning can be quite addicting, and the money can be quite good ... enough to offset the monthly price, cost of game, and typicaly all the upgrades to your computer to play the advanced ones.
3. Your automated player. These types I'm sure that the peeps (mmorpg slang for people) from /. understand, not only get their enjoyment from playing, ebay'ing, but also derive a certain snug satisfaction by "beating" the game somewhat. I mean creating elaborate unattended play scripts or macros for their toons (slang for their characters).
Now of course there are others, mostly variations of the above with different levels of dedication and interest.
Like, the "Corporations". Power gamers intent on making huge $$$ by selling items, money and toons from the game to those casual players who really have little hope or little time to get them through ordinary games means. These are peeps, few in number mostly, but share the common trait of having multiple computers and multiple accounts. They bludgeon their way to riches, then as the prices come down, they auction of thier toons on ebay and move on to the latest games.
Then of course there are the "outside devs", they are the ones that break the program, hack the packets and develope automated play tools, then sell access or subscriptions to the tools, occasionaly even offering and fufulling support.
Then, on to the 'Sploiters. The ones that don't really develope, but find and abuse and exploit bugs to their advantage. The mmorpg addage goes, exploit early and exploit often, because once discovered, they are quickly fixed. Typicaly with no punishment to those that abused.
All in all, each category is deriving fun and satisfaction from some aspect of the game. Even if it is an unattended aspect.
On to next topic ... It's a delicate balance that the mmorpg game developers and server and fees maintainers tread when they enforce their COC and license rules. Just like in real life, these are the Enforcers. They understand that a little bit of hanky panky is going to happen, they just don't want it rampant to the point were it hurts the name brand and the game itself. They also dont' want to come down too hard and chase off revenue. And they will chase off revenue if they do come down hard. The reason is, they are limiting the types of players to those of basicaly the worst sort ... the casual gamer who loses attention to the repetativeness of the game.
Anyway, before you go off knocking those who enjoy these games in the myriad of ways that they provide, look closely at what you do for your own personal entertainment. I havn't watched TV for over 5 years now. Have two top of the line computers, programming tools, and books all provided for by my hobby. I've met good people, bad people, learned certain aspects about myself (that I am inherently good and incapable of true evil), and I get to communicate with my children in a playfull and rich medium that these games provide, even though they live 1500 miles away.
MMORPGS are a sort of entertainment and therapy that perhaps most of you don't understand. I see nothing but positives with MMORPGS for the future. I see military training possibilities, I see Prisoner rehabilitation, advanced learning, and a whole new economy that is just in it's infant stage. 30 to 40 years from now who knows what value mmorpg will have been passed off to the next generation of young people. It may be that we'll all be living like thx1178 and our only real freedoms will be virtual freedoms, or it could be that we all spread out a bit and report into work every morning by logging into our work based mmorpg.
Some individuals can't invest 3-4 hours a day to create a high level character. So by purchasing an item/char they are making the game more fun for themselves. Maybe if buying an item/char was not possible these individuals would not even be playing the game.
The question is whether or not Sony/Verant wants these kinds of people to play their game. Even if they are just out for making bucks they should facilitate the sale of virtual goods/chars.
Then let's say they took a 3% commission off each sale they could make some extra cash while at the same time give people the assurance that their sale is authorized by Sony. This could cut down on people cheating others on virtual sales.
Seriously, though, to make it even worse about -- One second I'm sqeezing out a statistic [grunt] -- 99% of "newsworthy" auctions are outright frauds, whether it's for a town or for Eminem's childhood home: There are virtually no identification checks on Ebay for bidders, so I can go and auction off my Slashdot UID, auction myself up to a million dollars, and run around talking about the intrinsic value of Slashdot UIDs. Of course then The Turd Report (god bless his soul) will come along and set new records for UID value.
but why aren't slashdot accounts for sale? you know... good accounts for ... good purposes?!
Actually, this is a bit of a dilemma for Lucas Arts.
I was at this year's Game Developer's Conference in San Jose listening to Raph Koster (the Creative Director of SWG) during a full ballroom packed presentation he gave on designing and running MMPORGs.
He was wearing two hats during the presentation: With his corporate business hat on he said (something to the effect) "eBay is very bad and it is against the terms of service and all violators will be prosecuted" then with the developers hat he said (stte) "eBay is vey good and will tell you how well your game's economy is doing and you should watch it religously."
Basically, all the MMORPG devs use eBay to see the going rate for different virtual property thereby having one extremelly good metric for the health of their game's economy.
One example Raph gave was when one particular monthly update for Everquest(?) caused the exchange rate of in game currency to US dollars on eBay to plummet. This was a very good indication they had really screwed the pooch with the update.
-)----- B
My memory is fuzzy so facts could be wrong. Raph has a web site where he discusses such things if you are really interested.
In Asheron's Call they didnt have any rules against this at first. In time there was a lot of high level characters for sale on Ebay. Well a meanharted group of players bought up a bunch of accounts and begain to take over the worlds, most notably Darktide which is 24/7 Pvp and caused trouble on other worlds such as quest jumping among other things.
Now while any group of people can still level up the normal way on Darktide you ended up with a guild of players that could go out and kill any group of players in the game. It ruined things for many who played there and before they came there was a thriving sense of certian guilds owning certain areas of the game. These guys ruined it. SO many left the game never to return.
This can happen to any game and I'm sure SOE/Lucas Arts do not want it to happen. And I applaud any gaming company efforts to stop this.
Also unlike the real world where money = class in the virtual world a poor kid can become very rich. What becomes unfair is Rich kids becoming very rich in the game becuase his pocketbook is supporting his character while the poor kid now has to struggle to maintain his level of fun/play against the more well to do kids.
This is a perfectly natural turn of events.
This has happend with every MMORGP ever released. Items and characters themselves are a comodity and represent the time spent by players achieving them. The fact that they're sold does not,with-in itself, mean that players are bored, or that the game itself is boring or that G. Lucast is out to make money. This is simply players choosing what parts of the game they want to expirience and how.
No doubt the reason Sony is against these auctions is to reduce their liability. If they admit that the items have real cash value, they are open to a damage law suit the moment they ban somebody or the server crashes and players loose some items.
However, from the player prespective, this kind of thing is vital. I would not even touch a game that does not have a healthy economic system both in game and in reality. Not because I'd want to use it, but because a stable economy shows that the game is well balanced and alive.
As a side note, 250$ does not really sound like a lot. Especially considering that prices right at the game release are several orders of magnitude greater than they will be in couple of months, per item. Probably per time invested it works out.
No kidding. A few years ago (2?) some kids made like $30,000 one summer by doing item runs in Diablo II, and then auctioning off the items on eBay. Back then the expansion pack was brand new, and dupes were few and far between. An unidentified Windforce, Harlequin Crest, Grandfather, etc, would go for $300+. Accounts full of good items would go for thousands, IIRC.
These kids, aged 19 and 20, had state-of-the-art computers, notebooks, new cars, and a load of other stuff. Their dad thought they were robbing houses, before the kids showed him the receipts.
Here is the article.
Not entirly true. While the popularity of the game determines the demand for the items, it does not determine their intrinsic value.
For example people may think that water is the best thing ever since sex, but its pure abandance does not make it the most expensive resource.
The underlying value of the item depends more on the skill and time required to attain it. Those that require simple time investment will fall in price over time as more and more people spend time playing the game (That and MOST people would rather play for item than bey it). Those that require skill will be more stable since the gradient of skill stays reletivley constant through the game play.
As I've seen on more than one game (Diablo 2 comes to mind as the best/worst example), when items become worth big $$ IRL, there always comes a huge problem with cheating. People finding ways to make hacked items to sell, or ways to raise the odds that THEY will get all the best stuff (sometimes at the expense of other players).
:P ), none of this will matter to you. But...if you're one of the people who use the game as recreation, let alone one of the people who is giving up a large chunk of life for the game, this just plain sucks. Either way, the company takes a popularity hit, and loses players (and thus future customers).
There have been weeks when game servers are virtually unplayable when some new hack comes out, and the script kiddies are rushing in to get the latest uber item and sell a few hundred on Ebay before the bottom of the market drops out.
Now, if you're not a gamer (and if not, why are you even reading this?
Chaos, panic, disorder...my work here is done.
Giving away a bootleg is still illegal.
Not necessarily.
Giving away a bootleg absent persmission from the copyright holder is a technical violation of the U.S. Code. It's not a crime, but a minor infraction and a tort against the copyright holder. (You need to get to a rather large scale for criminal copyright behavior. I could make and give away two copies of everything I own and not be criminal.)
A good bootleg of a band that authorizes the trading and selling of bootlegs is exactly the sort of thing that belongs on ebay. Just got to remember to get permission first.
People can actually get on the servers to play?!?!?!
Only once I couldn't get on a server, and I've been playing since day 3.
Next youll tell me that hunting rats,hitting them twenty times with blasters, and running for twenty minutes at a time is Star Wars!
Last night the group I was in got jumped by some bandits on Corellia. Three of us stayed back and opened up with our blasters, while a fourth circled around and jumped them from behind. Then I went down and checked out their land speeder. Is that Star Wars enough for you?
Also, medium level creatures can be taken out with one blaster shot if you're an expert with your weapon. You just need to work on your skills.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
The fact is, they are already taking down auctions through the VeRO program. You can even see some of these mails that users has posted on the official SWG forums. One warning first, do it again and you're screwed, basically. For some reason, they let most of them remain, though, and I think this is because they are trying to track down the sellers and tie them to one/several game accounts. I wouldn't be suprised if they are bidding on the auctions themselves.
I play Galaxies, and my character is not really built up that much... but I can honestly say that in one hour, I could easily accumulate 20,000 credits, which is going for upwards of $20 on eBay?!?! That sounds like a sweet summer job to me (I'm still a lowly college student, so that's not a bad rate at all). Hooray for dumb rich kids!
I used to play Asheron's Call..... I would say that it was probably an addiction. Every new patch I scoured the land for new items and while they were valuable I would trade them in game. ;)
Then one day, I found out about ebay. I took a look and saw that a particular piece of armor I had was selling for 300$ US. Having this piece of armor didn't really make or break the game for me. I could do without it so I decided to give ebay a whirl.
I sold the piece of armor for 300$US and at that moment decided if people are foolish enough to spend real money on virtual items, then it might as well be me taking their money.
After I sold my first item I went to my wife and passed her a piece of paper. On it I had written a sequence of 1's and 0's. I asked her, "Would you pay 300$ US for that?" She looked at me kinda awkward and said, "No..." I told her someone just did. I laughed, she still looked at me awkwardly.
As far as i'm concerned, if someone has the disposible income and want to spend their money on this, go ahead. If I was paid a few bucks an hour to get some of the items I sold on ebay for 300$, then that person got a really good deal.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
I used to be a big MMORPG player a year ago approx. I quitted this way of life when i got tired of seeing people with better wallets and the will to spend favored by the companies maintaining these games. Since then, i vowed never to spend a single buck on a game that wouldn't restrict the players' investments with a strict rule set and/or an environment which favors strict investments from its community. I guess the less time you spend on the game, the more incline you will be to buy those bits on Ebay, then shame on you for not playing fairly. If you want to become a baseball player, will you go buy your freakin stats to be recruited in MLB? Do you think good quake players bought their fame out of some black box? Frankly, i wish Online RPG games wouldn't be the exception in the gaming world, but they are. Why? Cause they're freakin money cows, that's why..
.. i'm a stupid kid who doesn't understand shit.." ok? Thanks. ;-)
Kids, this isn't how life goes so don't reply the usual: ".. it's life bla bla bla
( Got tired of that answer already also )