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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.
Actually if you think about it, this is even better than software fees. Need money for the yearly employee bonus? Just make some pretend stuff out of thin air and sell as needed! Who said magic isn't real?
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
The things that go through SOE's collective heads... You know, murder is illegal, and people are still doing it all over. It's clogging up our court systems. How about we just make a state where you can murder whomever you want? We will just charge a special tax so we can make a profit off of it. If it just so happens to be your state that we decide to make murder legal in, it's ok, you can always move. You don't need your friends and family anyways.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
- Preventing people from hacking/gaming the system.
- Making sure it's all skill and not chance.
I'll wager that this is a fiasco. Oops, I mean I suspect it will be. No gambling allowed on Slashdot...Actually, I was trying to be Insightful, not Funny.
Not unexpected. They're already charging for every little possible extra feature they can think of.. may as well try to get a cut from all those ebay sales as well.
Sony's gone cash-nuts. Like a Cookie Monster and a bag of Oreos.
Hokey statistics and ancient misconceptions are no match for a good thought in your head, kid!
I didn't RTFA but I'm guessing Sony gets a percentage cut of all items traded on the Station. And even if they don't, it's generating traffic and thus ad revenue.
I mean, WHOA! RIAA! Look at this! Somebody had customers doing illegal things with their property in violation of their license agreement and found a way to make a profit off it instead of sueing their own customers! What a novel friggen concept.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
If people want to give real money to buy imaginary items, they should be able to do so. I wouldn't do it, because I don't see what value I would be getting, but if others feel differently, more power to them.
I am surprised that Sony is doing this, though, because they have a tendency to shoot themselves in the foot with propriatery standards and a sometimes control-freakish mentality which makes some of their hardware less desireable than it would otherwise be.
It's almost like someone with a different (non-Sony) mindset approved this decision.
There are two issues with Sony actually doing something like this:
1) They are accepting responsibility for the value of in-game items. This might not seem like a big deal, but god forbid a server rollback takes a big-ticket item out of your inventory. Or worse, balance adjustments devalue rare/valuable items. How many lawsuits can you imagine will come from people who want to be reimbursed for their "virtual" property's market value? To be sure, the items in question are really just bits on a computer. But really, how different is that from most banking done today? 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?
2) Officially putting a value to in-game items gives new incentive to all those gold and item harvesting shops to work extra hard, not only to eat up as much of those resources as possible, but to hoard and control market fluxuations. If you think spawn camping is bad now, imagine when you're competing with people who are doing it for a living! Yes, it's already happening now, but this will just take it to levels untold of before.
Will there be an SEC to make sure collusion doesn't take place between harvesters and GMs who spawn an extra rare or two for a few bucks?
There's no difference between trading virtual items and trading any tangible non-essential item. It's a basic economic process: you trade your hours (in the form of money) for someone else's hours (in the form of game goods).
There's a very good reason why realistic online games evolve this kind of trading. Never heard of people selling low-number Slashdot IDs? It's the same thing... people place a value on the virtual goods because they represent an investment in time that they cannot afford.
The obvious rules for virtual goods apply if these are to be traded usefully: a realistic supply (i.e. you can't resell the same item more than once), recourse against fraud, and a semi-official currency that allows abstract exchange.
No difference selling game goods than trading Dollars on forex.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
You'd think they'd run into inflationary pressures if they essentially printed money.
In SL, though, equipment and items don't play the same role they do in level-based fantasy and science fiction MMORPGs. In most MMORPGs, advancement in level and power is important to enjoy the game, and this advancement requires acquiring items, which are often from rare monsters that are highly contested.
Part of the charm of these games is that in the game world, what I can achieve is determined by my character's behavior in that world, rather than by my real-life situation. This is the very essence of a role-playing game. Bringing real-life money into the game can easily destroy this.
While this has been modded 'Funny', I'm not sure it shouldn't be labled 'Insightful' or better yet:
Why don't we have a 'Prophetic' mod?
There is not nearly enough love in the world, but there is far too much trust.
Smed says that 40% of their customer service calls are related to fraudulent in-game transactions. Sony could make this disappear instantly by creating an escrow system in-game. You have a sword to sell, you take it to the EQ Escrow storefront and drop it off. The buyer picks up the sword and the credits are automatically deducted from his account. No chance for fraud.
This isn't going to legitimize IGE, this is going to put them out of business, once Sony gets rolling with this.
Hmm... let me rephrase that a bit.
...now you need the time, too. People with free time will be better equipped than people with no time...those with no time will quit in disgust, and those with time will lose interest after they run up against enough other players with enough time to equip themselves well.
So you're prefectly fine with paying for in-game items with time but think paying for them with money is a mortal sin..? Is it by any chance because you have more time than money?
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Between 10 and 20 years ago I was into "pen and dice" role playing games big time. As the pre-cursor to MMORPGs, it was great fun escaping from the real life of mortgages & work to go have a few beers with some friends and pretending to be an elf for a while - I even miss RPGs occasionally today.
They were pleasant hours because of pure escapism and entertainment, nothing more. Yes, it was great going up a level as a character, killing a huge beast or solving a big mystery but part of the fun was also dying occasionally or making some huge mistake that made you and your character look like an idiot.
However, one thing that would have ruined it would have been to have a games master who was open to bribery - e.g. "Here's a ten pound note, make sure I get that +5 Vorpal Blade, okay?" It didn't happen and had it happened, the fun element would have dissipated quickly purely because the real world of money and bribery would have begun to influence that fantasy world in our heads.
One reason I never play MMORPGs is because while I believe most people play them for fun, just like our pen and dice games, a small rogue element in every game takes it far too seriously. These are people who need attention and power before escapism and fun, perhaps mirroring what they are like in real life. Thus real life (again!) creeps into a fantasy universe.
Now, Sony is proposing that yet more of "real life" creeps in because, all of a sudden, how much disposable income you have in real life influences how well you will do in EQ. Suddenly, escapism is not so much of an escape...
The real problem here is that it will ruin the escape for the people who do enjoy the fun of it (again, the majority). It's sad, but those people who have to seek attention and power now have a mechanism to buy that.
In my day, we called it "cheating" and all it does is start to destroy the fun of those players who genuinely play purely for to escape from the real world.
This will destroy Everquest, no question about it, because the people that make that universe fun will feel cheated and robbed and will no doubt find another MMORPG to go and play instead.
But quite frankly, if the cheats can make Sony richer in the short term, what do Sony really care?
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I see all these comments about how this is going to cause everyone to quit EQ II and how the rich will have the best equipment and blah, blah, blah... I used to buy and sell EQ gear for real money all the time and if you actually play the game you learn that the best gear in game can not be bought. They make the truly awesome gear that you get from raiding uber mobs NO DROP. This means that it cannot be traded, sold and etc... The key to getting great gear in a game like this is getting into a good guild and taking on the big mobs in the big zones. Of course spending time getting your character up in levels and experience is important too, but I don't think Sony will allow that on their sales site because you wouldn't be selling an item. They will probably disallow the powerleveling services that charge X amount to play your character for you and get levels. In any case unless EQ II has changed their item drops drastically I would have to say that this won't hurt the game at all. (It will hurt the kids who burn their paychecks on some goofy piece of virtual kit though. Sigh there goes that college fund.)
News Reporters Make Tasty Polar Bear Treats!
Not that I agree with the grandparent's prophecies of doom and destruction, but I think your analogy suffers from serious flaws.
Everquest isn't just a service like Internet access. If my neighbor is paying more for access, and getting better performance, it doesn't hurt me in any way. But say me and my neighbor enter into a competition against one another (say, three on three basketball). Say we've been competing in this tournament for years, and rather enjoy it.
Then one year, the people running the game make a new rule that says any team can drop $20 and start a game with a five point advantage, with each additional $20 providing an additional 5 point handicap. Given that my neighbor is a multimillionaire and places a high priority on winning, how much fun am I going to have in this year's competition? Why should I even show?
Now imagine that Slashdot started selling special mod points that I could use to mod myself up. In both cases, cash is used as a replacement for talent. But in the latter case, nobody can be sure how my posts keep getting undeservedly high ratings. Hence, it saps trust from the system.
Or imagine that money could buy you more protection under the law, or special legislation that protected your interests... Wait. Nevermind.
The point is, there are some places where you shouldn't be able to pay to tilt the playing field in your favor. I think an RPG like Everquest is probably among them. As a private service, they're entitled to run things that way, but I don't see that offering "various levels of service" would benefit the end users in any way.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!