Business And Economy Archive

Well lets take a look at ebay for a moment..

I see a few $10= 10mill cr most of the other 10mill cr are $30.

What effect does it have on the economy ?

Caters to Instant players. Buy some credits get the best armor and weapons and buffs and Master in a day.
(I won't go into in general the effect this has on the overall game thinking of grinding and lack of content.)

But instant players don't buy lower quality goods. So if your not a master with 12 Experimentation points. Your not going to make any money off them working their way up in the game. Which in turn pushs crafters into the grind thinking as they won't make any money until they are a 12 point Master. And since masters have so much money high Quality resources prices get set at high amounts.(which greater weighs things toward masters)

The Instant player also doesn't tend to run into as many money sinks. Which means more Money floating around which raises prices.

Since the ingame money means nothing to them. They also are willing to pay insanely high prices for loot and items. Which helps keep prices high.(which again hurts the game for new and casual players.)



There are all other sorts of things I can think of that this affects. And most of them in the end tell players that they need to grind to master. Grind loot and credits. And seriously hurts the new and casual players from being involved in new content like the multi piece loot drops. As the prices for finished products sky rocket to the point that those players can not afford them. Which gets people into the grind thinking so they can have that stuff. Which burns people out on the game faster which means people leave more often.

Now is the game like this currently because of ebay credits ? No. it's like this Currently because holo-grind very strongly pushed the "grind" mindset on players. And in grinding for xp it generates for those players a lot of extra credits in the form of loot and credits from missions. And as all their time is spent grinding xp they simple buy what every status symbols or loot they want at what ever price is set. Also there was a decent number of different credit duping bugs that went on for quite a while. Of which the last one was the most public due to the massive amount of credits it so quickly produced. While with the last dupe they got 75% of the duped credits out of the system it still left at least 180,000,000,000cr in. Which takes a very long time to get worked out of the overall economy.

Message Edited by DarkY0da on 01-21-2005 01:51 PM

I certainly agree many people ebay stuff. Many typical players tend to be attracted to it at certain point, especially when they are quitting.

As mentioned before, also players really playing the game can have an excess of cash that they sell because its possible and profitable. This case is relatively harmless, as the player is the player and this is just a funds transfer.

However, there are people who started as players and ended up being "miners" (for lack of better terms) or people that came to the game with sole purpose of mining it - because they already mine different games and this is the next one worth doing it. They are more likely to abuse the system and at the same time they dont add anything to the game environement/community.

Generally, I think that the ability to ebay can corrupt almost everyone and I also believe games would be better without it. Unfortunatelly however, I dont see an effective method of stopping that

Message Edited by DirthNader on 01-22-2005 06:47 AM

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jmg416 wrote:

I've found the vistors of this forum to have a good understanding of how one economic influence might effect another. So I am very interested in what others think of the affects the outside markets have on the SWG economy. By outside markets, I am refering to eBay, IGE and other such outlets for in game items and credits.

Do you feel these hurt the economy or help stimulate it? Does it truly hurt the gameplay for any players directly, or is it just the thought that it's there that detracts from a pure RPing experience? Does it need to be stopped? And can anything actually be done to stop it?

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I personally believe it can severly damage the player economy.
What people really dont understand is that SWG is in fact a true "free-market" in where the players set the rules (almost all of them) of the economy. When you purchase credits off ebay for instance, its exactly as if a real life currency would be constantly be traded for a value on the market for another currency. Therefore, the credit within SWG keeps losing value as it becomes easier and easier to get money fast. Its like a government that keeps pumping money and instead of putting the money on the market through legit means (work for instance) it can be bought through another currency. I think it was mainly fueled when people could group and go do solo missions for 37k. I mean in a buff session, one could easily do close to 200k (if not more). Not only did this bring down the value of the credit but prices also skyrocketed. The crafter, knowing that money can be obtained very easily in large amounts, will boost his prices thinking if such and such can do 200k in a buff session, then my clients can pay the big price and anyways get back their money in another buff session. Therefore prices jump, money is being pumped in by loads and we have a phenomenon called INFLATION. Not only this, but you also get new folks signing in the game with only what - 200 credits in their pockets and they find out VERY quickly that its almost impossible for them to get anything at a reasonable price because they simply cannot afford it. This results in new people ending their subscription and SWG ends up with the same old people and no recycling of its community - hence the demise of the game. I think the DEVs did the right thing in stopping the solo missions, but the problem remains that a lot of crafters (on gorath anyways) still charge the big bucks cuz they know there are still some folks out there with a lot of money and hence they will keep their prices up as long as they can suck the blood out of us non-crafters or non-doctors.

Therefore, to remedy this, there needs to be an IMMEDIATE end on credit transfers out of SWG and an attempt of price control to curb the inflation rate (usually thats done through interest rates, but, as we all know theres no interest rates in the game - or should there be?). Lets face it, to have an in-game economy runned ENTIRELY by players is simply not healthy because there lacks a lot of regulatory measures that exists in real life. The devs need to step in and stop that for the sake of the long-term future of the game.

Message Edited by Noboe_Kuri on 01-22-2005 11:57 AM

Message Edited by Noboe_Kuri on 01-22-2005 11:58 AM

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jmg416 wrote:

Why do you believe that the game makers are so opposed?

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Tremk_Stryder wrote:

sony doesnt have any problerm with it because they get the cash in the end

if u were to leave..u stop paying..if u leave and sell your account...then that account is still active and someone is still paying Sony

hence its a win-win situation.

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are you serious? They have a sticky post that explicitly says you cannot sell/buy credits or in game items/accounts

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Makkir wrote:

are you serious? They have a sticky post that explicitly says you cannot sell/buy credits or in game items/accounts

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I've known probably a dozen people that sold their accounts, and even more who've sold items. No one has been banned.

Sticky posts aside, I doubt SOE cares about what gets bought and sold on eBay. Given the choice between an account closing and an account switching owners, I'd gamble that they'd prefer to keep getting their $15 a month.

SOE's policies on eBay are really a legacy from Everquest. There, people/businesses like Yantis actually had a very real negative effect on the game, farming items that only dropped at certain locations so that if you wanted said item the only way to get it was to pay Yantis for it. There are very few chances for things like that to happen in SWG, but (for example) I imagine they'd step in if someone killed every single acklay and the only way to obtain acklay loot was to buy itfrom their online store.

Message Edited by DirthNader on 01-24-2005 11:15 AM

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Makkir wrote:

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Tremk_Stryder wrote:

sony doesnt have any problerm with it because they get the cash in the end

if u were to leave..u stop paying..if u leave and sell your account...then that account is still active and someone is still paying Sony

hence its a win-win situation.

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are you serious? They have a sticky post that explicitly says you cannot sell/buy credits or in game items/accounts

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I agree it tends to hurt the servers a bit, but not the way you might expect. The secret to a healthy server IMHO is to have a constant "dying off" of top tier characters. Unless this happens, new players will never be able to climb up and assume the top tier roles, which means they will burn out faster. E-Bay and other things like this keep the old characters in play long after the original player has lost interest, which means there is less opportunities for new players to rise. Intrepid is very much "top heavy." Too many players at the top, and not enough players at the bottom. When things like that happen man, you find the normal operations we all depend on seem to disappear, like medics in the med center or DH-17s for sale alongside some chitin armor. Inflation becomes worse too, making it even harder for new players to get established while having fun doin' it.