SOE Station Exchange Launches

MMORPG.com reports that the experiment in Massive retail that is the Station Exchange has launched. From the article: "SOE recently concluded a two week pre-launch trial phase for Station Exchange. We only allowed a very small number of EQII players into the pre-launch in order to help us fine-tune the system and get feedback on the user experience. The service was live for pre-launch, which meant that all of the users were exchanging US dollars for the rights to use virtual goods, characters and coin within the game."

Comments

Their motto:

[88NoSoup4U88]

If you can't beat them, join them.

Lawsuits, here we come

[Naerbnic]

SOE is setting themselves up for some major lawsuits. When all of this auctioning was under the table via eBay et. al, Sony had plausible deniability about the practice. If anyone complained that an item they bought was lost due to a server problem or was nerfed by the developers and thus negated their purchase, they could casually gesture towards their ELUA while simply saying "Not our problem."

Now that it's been given the blessing of the powers that be, in game items are no longer in game items, but actual currency; they are commodities which people have put value into. Any actions by Sony which even whisper about a nerf to an item (or god forbid a rollback) will quite possibly be countered with lawsuits by individuals who have real money invested in the game. And since I'm sure the ELUA has been changed to allow the actions of Station Exchange, Sony has no way of completely looking the other way.

Re:Lawsuits, here we come

[Naerbnic]

Of course it's just a licence, but that wouldn't stop someone from making the argument of damages. They spent real money in an officially sanctioned way to get an item which can be traded back for real money via the same channel. If Sony does something which would hurt the tradeback value of the item, a damages suit could occur (not necessarily win, but at least be filed against them). This is not entirely unlike people suing because others did something to "nerf" their real-estate values. Of course, this is a horrible analogy.

Furthermore, since I think Sony is planning on this being a new cash cow, they're going to be very, very careful about what they change in-game. Even if their ELUA states that they can do something, the fear of bad publicity will probably cause them to think twice before they do it. If people start complaining on message boards and blogs about how Sony screwed them over, Station Exchange will feel the pain. While this may or may not be a big problem, it is going to make them a lot slower to actually rebalance unbalanced things which in the end hurts the gameplay. Seems like one heck of a sticky situation.

Bad idea...

[Psmylie]

They're moving one giant step closer to assigning real-world value to virtual items/currency. Now, if someone makes their living buying/selling virtual goods, how does that make it all that different then the stock market? Except that SoE has complete control over this market. I just wonder how long it will be before the first lawsuit is filed, should Sony nerf someone's best-selling item. And I wonder if the SEC is going to get involved at some point :)

Also, if real value is assigned to a character, what happens if SoE attempts to ban them? They may say that they still own all "virtual" property, but if someone bought the character "officially", then that person may have a good basis for a lawsuit.

Overall problems

[Nytewynd]

I really worry about the overall problems this causes for a game. Now that we have an economic gain to the company for the sale of items, does that company increase the drop rate of rare items to increase their own portion of the revenue?

Imagine how bad that could get. You could have dupes not being fixed because they would lose money. There would be incentive for people to camp the best spawns for profit, thereby preventing people from fighting those mobs for fun. This might turn out just like FFXI, where the only way to get a good item was literally to buy it online.

This has to be the worst executive decision for a game that I've seen.

hmm

[Joe the Lesser]

As an EQ2 player, this seems like a great way to find which users should be banned for being idiots.