Slashdot Mirror
Sony Online To Sell Virtual Property
OMG! writes "In an open letter to the community John Smedley, the president of Sony Online Entertainment, announced their new service 'the Station Exchange' which will allow players of Everquest II to trade their items for real live money.
Sony Online is the first major player in the MMORPG genre to embrace commercial trading of in-game items." Commentary available from all the usual suspects, including Wired, the Players, Terra Nova, F13, and Grimwell. This would seem to be a total reversal of the policies of certain other MMOGs.
What's next? Well, I don't know if you know this or not but you can order Pizza Hut pizza in-game through EQ2 by typing /pizza. The menu comes up, your order and 30 minutes later you've got pizza at your door. And you never leave your chair. I guess with this then it seems you could sell some power sword and convert it right into Pizza.
~64b
No, they aren't liable per their TOS. All of us in SL have lost something at one time or another and nothing has ever been returned. However, this doesn't happen often. Most of us keep copies of anything really important.
I dislike it when big companies take credit for something that smaller companies have been doing for years. SL allows you to sell the items you build, then trade that game money for real currency. SL and PE allow you to own property that you can resell.
As far as I can tell, all SOE is doing is legitimizing the unofficial trading that has been going on for years in MMO's.
Basically what they are saying is half their time is spent resolving issues from failed transactions so there are support cost savings in putting in an effective forsale/trade system. They won't be selling items themselves, only help facilitate the trade.
They have explicitly stated that (for now) new servers will be brought on line where this service will be available. That they will be leaving all of their existing servers - where players have a good deal of items and wealth and are where the 'illegal' transactions are currently happening - with no change at all.
So how exactly will this cut down on support costs related to out of game transactions on these servers? Are they hoping that everyone who wants to buy & sell for RL cash are going to just uproot themselves and start fresh on the new servers? That no one will every try and cash out from the old servers when they quit or continue to see value it items not on these new Exchange servers?
[place
You have got your signals crossed. Sony is not making any new games of chance. This article is about the new servers which Sony will put into place to regulate a practice which has been going on behind the scenes for many years. That is the sale if virtual items i.e. swords, rings, gold coins, within the game of Everquest II.
And I live in Canada for the record.
Race: TOTAL CARP
Class: Ethereal Ninja
S: 12
I: 4
W: 2
D: 11
C: 17
CHR: 2
AC: 10 -1 (wants to be caught)
HP: 340
HD: 18+15
#ATT: 0 (defenseless)
Special: Spreads Influence into Corporate Culture
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
They aren't creating or removing itemry or gold or characters: They're facilitating the migration of said gold, items, or characters from one character/account to another, then handling the money transaction and taking a nice little cut while they do it... That's all it is. You get a guarantee from the people that maintain the databases that you WILL get your phat lewt that you just paid 50 bucks for.
The difference being is that in Second Life you're givin' the tools to do this. In EQII and most of the large MMOG's, that lvl Uber mithryl sword is already been made BY THE DEVELOPERS and is waiting for someone to complete some boring ass mission to claim it.
No sig for you!!
In gunbound you can buy "gold" for $$$.
And yeah, whats so bad about it? You can invest either lots of time or money for the same result.
And yeah, some people would rather spend 20$ than 5hours of grinding...
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
1) People can already buy their end-game setup at the beginning. (I got tired of always being broke in Anarchy Online, so I went on eBay and bought $100 mil credits for $20.) There are still limiting factors, though... you have to level up before you can use all of your stuff. I'm having a hard time spending my $100 mil because there's just not that much worthwhile stuff I can use without levelling up.
2) People who are serious about the game are already spending the money. People who are casual players probably do so for the cheap entertainment, so I doubt they'll be that upset. And if they are, well, Sony is going to cater to the crowd that has their wallets open.
3) Not everything can be traded. I've never played EQ, but in AO, there are a lot of NODROP items that can't be transfered. Only way to get those it to earn them. If EQ doesn't already have NODROP's, it's something that can be added to restrict commerce of the better stuff.
Actually, the first example comparing "The Old Way" and "The New Way" on the Station Exchange website specifically deals with character exchange and preventing people from being ripped off by people who take the money then change the password on the sold account before the buyer can log in.
Y|
I'm not sure your issues are valid.
"How many lawsuits can you imagine will come from people who want to be reimbursed for their virtual' property's market value?"
Raise your hand if this has ever happened to you. Ever buy a car? A house? Can someone point me to the reimbursement department; I have some items I've bought in my life that have devalued.
"But really, how different is that from most banking done today?"
Have you ever taken an economics course? What kind of parallel are you trying to get at with comparing it to banking? The essential function of a bank is to provide services related to the storing of value and the extending of credit, and most of which are not for profit organizations.
"Would you like to be told by your bank that your last direct deposit doesn't exist anymore because they needed to rollback their database?"
From a legal standpoint, there are many many many laws protecting compensation from an employer to an employee.
"If you think spawn camping is bad now, imagine when you're competing with people who are doing it for a living!"
And that doesn't already happen? You haven't spent much time with mmorpgs have you?
By taking an active position, they're basically accepting inflation. They have no control over inflation. They can't raise or lower interest rates, these things don't exist. You could make an argument for supply and demand, but I think you'll find that this will eventually outrage the casual gamer who finds these games fun. Its no longer fun when you add cost to just be average.
That's got to be the most maddening, yet rewarding (I suppose) parts of AO. The NODROP items tend to be essential parts to quests, and they also appear frequently in dungeons that have regular enemies that drop quite decent items, so that players can't just farm easy kills for cash. And I would also like to hope that the players themselves would regulate the economy by not selling too many of those super-ultimate-fire-sword-of-the-eternal-dragon(s) that they just spent three hours apiece obtaining. We'll just have to wait and see.
I attribute that line to the greatest SNL movie ever, Blues Brothers
Belushi at the expensive restaurant
Everquest has had NODROP items since the beginnings (or just about). The only exception is the Firona Vie server (Role-Playing). Here the only Nodrop items are epic quest related and some augmentations. But, there is a trivial loot code implemented so if a mob is x number of levels below you, he drops no loot if you kill.
Governments control the supply of housing by using zoning to restrict the land available.
Governments control the supply of tobacco and alcohol by requiring licenses for the production and sale of these.
But all of this is beside the point. Governments above all control the supply of money, which is what we trade primarily. Any issuing authority that tries to extract more from a market than it will bear will damage and eventually kill the market.
Governments have tried all the tricks you can imagine to "control" how people earn and hold their wealth. Nothing Sony can do is new, and it's been shown many times that all such tricks are zero-sum games. The only way to profit (for all parties) is to have minimal interference, simply taxation, and to allow the game to play itself.
Quite possibly Sony won't realise this and will do things wrong.
To explain: if Sony tax the game more than is "fair", people will simply stop investing their time in it. It'll happen very rapidly and very obviously.
Think of people leaving a high-inflation country to live somewhere else.
Game goods are simply an intermediate stage on the inevitable route to game currencies, controlled by the game provider. And, inevitably, the floating of these currencies (exactly as a country may float its currency) to allow free exchange with other currencies.
There is no difference at all between what we're seeing here and a classic economic system.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
Every time a comment like the parent is posted, somehow it gets modded up as insightful and gathers a bunch of flames before smarter people mod it down properly.
/. has "smarter" (that is, people who agree with you) people to mod comments down that you don't like. Perhaps we should give you and your friends full-time mod status so you can enlighten us with you all-encompassing knowledge of everything.
Its a good thing
If you're pissed about moderation, there is something called meta-moderation. Perhaps you might do that sometime.
Once again, the old money will reign and trod on the up-and-coming, or the hobbyist player.
Wake up call: Players were already doing that, except through eBay and the like. This is just Sony going for the cut on the deal eBay gets.
Quite true. Obviously, no 3rd-party seller of in-game resources can survive being undercut by the system administrators, who can accomplish the equivalent of MONTHS of gil-farming with a single command-line.
If I understand it correctly, Sony isn't actually selling the items or gold directly. Nothing is created in the transaction. They are just giving people a way to safely do their business.
In other words, IGE should still be able to make money from farming. Now they just have to compete with (or just use) Sony's marketplace, which may effect their profits.