SOE EQ2 Auction Site Opens

I received a phone call from SOE tonight to give me some pretty amazing -- and unsettling -- news. SOE's Station Exchange is now live. Station Exchange you ask? Oh no, is that what I think it is? Yes, Sony is now going to start allowing players to officially auction items and cash for real live money. Initially, it will be limited to two new servers they are creating for Everquest 2, with existing players being given the right to transfer to those servers where they can buy and sell with officially sanctioned impunity. However, this is just the experimental stage. It is clear from the FAQ that if this proves to be financially successful, there is no reason not to think that this experiment will eventually be expanded to all of EQ2 as well as SOE's other games, which include Everquest, Star Wars Galaxies and even possibly, given their large ownership share of Square-Enix, Final Fantasy XI. IGE, meet SOE. Is this the end of online gaming as we know it? Or is it just a natural and inevitable development? I know I personally feel a need for a strong adult beverage right about now. Feel free to post your feedback and opinions. Update. After I posted this, SOE posted a letter from John Smedley about it on their site. Here's the letter.

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As long as it's not my server...
# Apr 20 2005 at 12:29 AM Rating: Decent
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1,049 posts
As long as they make new servers for this, I would be completely fine for it coming to FFXI. The new servers would have trash economies where 95% of the people buy their armor/gil, but it would be cheap because there is so much gil in the economy ($10-15 Haubergeon?). The rest of us can sit in our old servers with 1/20th of the gilsellers left and bask in the glory. Now we can claim Amemet and maybe more then once. ^^
Guess they got greedy.
# Apr 20 2005 at 12:24 AM Rating: Decent
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277 posts
On the one hand the letter says:

Quote:
Dealing with fraudulent transactions of one type or another takes up roughly 40% of our customer service people's time. We have players calling us up or requesting in-game service for activities related to these sorts of transactions constantly, even though they are specifically disallowed by our EULA.

We believe that by taking this course, we will free up a great number of resources to deal with other things for our players.


And on the other it says:

Quote:
We're going to continue to heavily enforce the rules of EQ II, and those rules don't permit players to monopolize spawns or in any way harm the play experience of another player.


So in short:

"We can't cope with the amount of complaints regarding people breaking the EULA, so were going to take a cut, which will of course free up lots of time to deal with complaints regarding people breaking the EULA."

I smell a rat. A greedy one. Particularly as they're doing this to an existing game and not one they're developing specificially for this purpose.

I just hope for the sake of existing EQII players that they don't force them into this option if they get too many people doing it on the new servers.
Yay!
# Apr 20 2005 at 12:19 AM Rating: Decent
Everybody's over reacting.

1. It would be bad business to do this on all EQ2 servers - more people would leave than would join. So, they would need to come up with a policy to allow cross-shard transferal. aka - You can move your (old) characters, once. From a RMT to a non-RMT, or a non-RMT to a RMT. This does 2 things - aggregates the chars with the most gil towards the RMT, lowering prices on the REAL servers, and moves all the goldsellers towards the rmt servers. Result - Good Servers, and bad servers; and the ability to choose.

2. This is on EQ2 right now. One of the worst failed "Big MMORPG" launches to date. They are trying to appeal to the casual gamer. Odds are this will never make it to FFXI (SquareEnix wouldn't allow it, and a lack of future content is a good reason not to **** off SE.)

3. SWG is the next logical progression. The horrid drop-off numbers and rediculous currency exchange there are prime factors, limited only by their atrocious hacking. If RMT hits Galaxies, it will stop very shortly after the first dupe-hacked credits sell.
"You counterfeited Digital Credits in a persistant, buggy online game." Thatll hold up REAL well in court...

Edited, Wed Apr 20 01:22:04 2005
mixed
# Apr 20 2005 at 12:07 AM Rating: Decent
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2,684 posts
This is a mixed thing. Think of it as a comparrison to garage sales, and best buy.

At a garage sale Im selling you my crap for low cost becuse my profit margin is high no matter what I sell it to you.

At best bey they buy it and have a set price they have to sell it for, to pay for staff, and general upkeep and profit.

Why would people go to Ige when I can get stuff 100X cheaper legaly.

Its not a good thing... but its not a bad thing ina way
who's the genious?!
# Apr 19 2005 at 11:53 PM Rating: Decent
47 posts
omg wtf?!!
This may not be as bad as it seems....
# Apr 19 2005 at 11:31 PM Rating: Decent
This actually would give Square a pretty viable option. Now if they have evidence that someone's a gilseller, they probably have to go thru pretty elaborate steps to cover their butt legally before they ban someone. With RMT enabled servers, they could change the ToS to say that they will move a person to one of these servers with heavy suspicion of gilselling. SO if a gilseller tries to move to one of the non-enabled servers, they would log on one day and find themselves on a new server where they have to compete with a slew of other gilsellers.

And in case you missed it, this would be a one time transfer. I'm sure the majority of the gilsellers would leap to the RMT enabled servers, and then we'd see very few of them ever again. And the economy on that server would be as wild as everyone thinks, since Sony could easily sell a slew of gil and items under temp accounts to stabilize the economy.

Like someone said earlier, a lot of money would disappear very fast on all of the servers. Basically every server would go through their own version of the great depression, but as prices stabilized, the gameplay overall would be much better, and probably cheaper gil-wise.

And for all of those going "OMFG....I QUIT!!! NOO!!", if you and your LS wind up on an enabled server, you all pick another one, and leave together. It's not a big deal...in fact, depending on how much time they give you to decide whether you want to leave your server or not, you could make a nice profit and take a significant amout of gil with you on your transfer.
oi veigh!
# Apr 19 2005 at 11:25 PM Rating: Decent
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1,574 posts
SE- "Let's not get rid of gilsellers, lets out sell them >:)"

/end-lame-joke!

As long as they keep this one separate servers then with players who want to play the proper way and earn everything, then I see nothing wrong with this. IT's sorta a good thing, all the gil buyer's just might leave the normal server's, thus cracking down on gil bought, resulting in the gilsellers not being profitable for themselves anymore.

One can only dream...
If it hits...
# Apr 19 2005 at 11:20 PM Rating: Decent
A sharp, cold breeze from the east hits my face, though it may seem distant and undeserving of notice, it carries with it the destruction of our way of life...

Translation, if this comes to Vana'diel, WoW will get a lot more packed, assuming Blizzard doesn't adopt this first. I'm not afraid to say it now, I WILL leave FFXI for another game if SE adopts this, and I'm sure everyone who isn't extremely rich irl or in game for that matter will too, but as we all know, these companies care for nothing but profit and will do what they deam in the best interests of their stockholders. I know people who don't see this as a big deal yet, "It's only on two EQ2 servers"... for now. Just the fact that an idea like this came on to that the board room table makes me nervous, and that it was green lighted is horrifying. Sound off on any and all forums you can, make SE know that we are wholy and vehemently against this idea and will leave if it ever gets implemented.
so what?
# Apr 19 2005 at 10:57 PM Rating: Decent
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97 posts
It seems like the RMT industry is already doing this on pretty much every online game. So whats the difference? Sony makes the profit instead of some chinese guy with good bots. Maybe it'd cut down on all the NM campers since sony doesn't have to camp a nm to make gil to sell online. I think this is a great idea. Instead of a bunch of greedy, immature, and often times immoral group of people in game ruining the fun for everyone else with their pursuit of things worth selling... We get the game makers doing it all via the web. And I doubt they're going to do anything that'll take the fun out of the game and make us not want to play. They'd destroy their own market. Less gil farmers = more fun for the rest of us I say. People will always want to take the easy way out and buy their gil/items/accounts online. At least this way someone with a greater interest in us continuing to enjoy the game will be controlling it. I say BRING IT ON!!!
drama queens
# Apr 19 2005 at 10:53 PM Rating: Decent
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294 posts
If you want RMT then move to an RMT server.

If you dont want RMT then dont move to an RMT server.

If your server is marked for RMT and you dont want it then you transfer. The only people you will leave behind are those that want RMT which most people say they dont like anyways. Seriously what's the difference on whether RMT people move out of your server or if non-RMT people move out of your server.

The beauty of this whole thing is two-fold.

1. Those that do partake in RMT will NO LONGER BE AROUND TO ANNOY YOU. If one of them ever posts something in here or anywhere else about how 1337 they are then you can just remind them that they are playing a totally different game called FFXI LITE and to kindly STFU.

2. When those that want to partake in RMT move to another RMT server they will be taking a boatload of gil with them.

Seems like everybody complains about how screwed the economy is and always blames 2 things: gil buyers/sellers and inflation due to excess gil. If they make these RMT servers then those servers can have the 2 things nobody wants: gil buyers/sellers and mad excess of gil. Meanwhile the rest of the servers can gain back some pride.

Of course if the economy doesn't improve after this were to occur then alot of people would end up choking on the BS they talk every day.

Sorry, I meant to give 2 cents and it turned into 4.
RE: drama queens
# Apr 20 2005 at 12:11 AM Rating: Decent
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590 posts
Well that's inflation for ya ^^
-j
^ ^
# Apr 19 2005 at 10:50 PM Rating: Decent
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189 posts
OH *&%$
Wow...
# Apr 19 2005 at 10:49 PM Rating: Good
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1,326 posts
I wonder if SOE knows what kind of a can of worms they're opening up with this... by having "legitimate" sales of in-game items for cash, they're essentially turning those items (or characters, or whatever) into things that have an official real-world value... Thus, the standard MMORPG mentality of "the company owns everything on the server" more or less flies out the window. I can see the lawsuits happening if SOE ever tries to ban a character, or if EQ2 ever shuts down, or if they nerf a certain weapon or class... the players could try to sue for compensation.
On the other hand, this will give everyone a chance to see how this effects a major MMORPG's economy. It will be interesting to watch.
(disclaimer - I am not a lawyer, though I play one in D&D)
SoE Will Burn In Hell For Their Blasphemy
# Apr 19 2005 at 10:32 PM Rating: Default
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362 posts
IGE will still have their gilsellers on every server on every game. It won't change a damn thing. All it'll do is make the non-gilsellers raise the prices due to greed and the gilsellers will watch and follow so both will make money while prices continue to inflate. Nice going SoE. I wonder how well you balance your checkbook and how much you lie about your stocks to get people to buy stock in Sony.

SE will NOT agree to this regardless of SoE's investment into SE. I think SE could actually tell Sony to go @#%^ themselves on this whole deal they're trying to do and still come out without them as an investor. Though lately I HAVE been wondering if there's any official information on how much of SE stock SoE actually owns.

I also forgot to mention if SoE does do this and SE is against it, maybe, JUST MAYBE... the gilsellers that we DO have will fock over to EQ2 and leave us the hell alone that or they'll recruit more people to work for their company. Who knows. This is really bad news and could be the end of a well respected company in my viewpoint.

When did Squaresoft start caring about money more then putting out a wonderfully detailed and beautiful game for gamers such as myself to buy and invest in them to continue doing so with my money. I really love you Squaresoft but please don't fail me now... please don't be a sellout. All my bands I use to like, all my actors I used to like... all sold themselves like whores. *sigh*

Edited, Tue Apr 19 23:39:30 2005
Well, I'd be done if it came here.
# Apr 19 2005 at 10:32 PM Rating: Good
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141 posts
I really hope this is a late April Fool's Joke...

If this spreads to FFXI, I'm done.
And I'll never play EQ or any other SOE game.
Oh well. Good business move for the people that want to turn your alleged 'game' and make it pay their rent.
Auction Site Opens
# Apr 19 2005 at 10:18 PM Rating: Decent
In Final Fantasy XI we have had problems with gil sellers. If this happens in this game then the gil sellers win and it is no longer a game, but instead a business! If this happens many players may consider quitting and finding an online game that is still just a game. I, personally, think it is wrong and would be one of those that quits.
-_-
# Apr 19 2005 at 10:16 PM Rating: Decent
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687 posts
sounds like a way to stealing IGE's money...

*Note* IGE Is Bad

Edited, Tue Apr 19 23:17:23 2005
Just Business
# Apr 19 2005 at 10:10 PM Rating: Decent
Sounds like a purely business move to me. Instead of banning all these players doing illegal currency/item/account transfers why not make it legal? Think about it. Instead of losing what was it, hundreds of accounts banned for illegal activities, you broaden your customer base by inviting people to pay monthly fees to you, and still make profit for themselves by playing day and night to pay their own rent.

So now you not only have the purely legit players on your servers, but the 'easy way out' players who buy all their money/items online, and now a whole new set of people paying monthly fees on multiple accounts to corner their own items/currency that they can sell for real cash.

*GMs now no longer have to answer to petitions saying "I think Imanobviouscurrencyseller is selling currency." They can now focus on bugs/botters/hackers/whatever.

*The respective game no longer has to ban accounts. Pure and simple. More accounts = more money in their pockets.

*Here's the best one...THEY CONTROL THE EXCHANGES SO THEY GET A CUT!!! Beautiful!

Who knows if this is good or bad for MMO's. Nothing personal. It's just busniess.
Utter horse****
# Apr 19 2005 at 10:00 PM Rating: Good
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202 posts
To hell with this bullcrap. If this ever comes to FFXI the first thing I'm doing is cancelling my account, and then the next thing I'll do is advise the rest of my linkshell to do the same. It's enough that we have IGE and MOGS running around practically unchecked, if Squeenix actually endorses this it will be the anvil that broke the camel's back.
boycott.
# Apr 19 2005 at 9:57 PM Rating: Excellent
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721 posts
o m f g .

IF THIS DISEASE EVER SPREADS TO F F X I. . .

[ B - O - Y - C - O - T - T ]

Shades>> I mean... wtf... sony? can you hear me? SONY?!

Sony>> *cough* I'm.. dieing... they replaced me... with another... *cough*

Shades>> Who is it?! WHY?!

Sony>> It's... this guy...

Shades>> O M G, NO!! this.. is it.. realy happening? The end of the world?!

-Shade
legal RMT...
# Apr 19 2005 at 9:45 PM Rating: Excellent
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1,392 posts
(-.-;) I'm speechless...

::calms down for a second::
Alright, now that I've thought about it for a second and reread the post, this might not be such a bad thing. If it's limited to a certain number of servers, those that RMT or are interested in RMT can go to those servers, (hopefully) leaving a much "cleaner" server for those of us that do not participate in RMT. We'll see...

Edited, Tue Apr 19 22:48:42 2005
RE: legal RMT...
# Apr 19 2005 at 10:29 PM Rating: Decent
I wholeheartedly agree with the first half of your statement - if it's only limited to NEW servers. The issue arises with the people who care not to participate and the srever they are on is converted... they would have to move servers and perhaps lose alot of long time friends.

Bring up 3-4 new servers (I'm sure the added income in SE/SOEs coffers will more than cover this) and allow people to move.

As far as a "cleaner" server is concerned? Don't think so... We had that chance last October, and of course we blew it.
Effects on Gilselling and Prices?
# Apr 19 2005 at 9:45 PM Rating: Decent
This is Jesikah's hubby actually, just posting on her account since she's on my comp.

This means gil (or gold, credits, whatever) will not artificially inflate anymore since it will not be the currency required to buy items, and cold cash will, which means the prices of items as far as they relate to gil will not change much. There is little to no reason to buy 1 million gil if you can just buy your peacock charm for $50 or $100, probably cheaper than buying the gil and purchasing the item in-game.

On the other hand, this means certain items that are rare will skip the auction houses and go straight to the internet for sales, meaning there will be a even higher demand from honest players for the items that are not hitting the auction houses at all. This will drive prices up again, since these people will have less items to choose from.

Its a scary kind of balance, since there is no official way to make sure that 1 million gil equals a certain amount of real money, since real money is finite and gil is essentially infinite. So either the gil needs to deflate a bit, and SE can fix a standard price for gil to dollars of some sort by emptying the world's amount of gil, like the Fed buys back money in the forms of bonds, handling the cash allowances on banks, etc.

I wonder if SE has dedicated economists in their employ to handle matters like this, just like they have quality assurance testers, artists, programmers, and the like.

Anyone else have any predictions?
RE: Effects on Gilselling and Prices?
# Apr 19 2005 at 10:58 PM Rating: Decent
Hey Jesi's hubby...I think you nailed one of the biggest potential issues. That is we would see rare-items go right to the internet and skip the AH's.

You can take this one step further and say that this will result in even MORE people trying to camp rare drops; as if it weren't busy enough most of the time!

Has anyone seen these articles?




Well here we are a few years later...and all hell is about to break loose on our beloved FFXI.

Let's all hang-in there until we see what happens.
wth!
# Apr 19 2005 at 9:43 PM Rating: Decent
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111 posts
legal gil farmer! >.<
{Thank you for the offer, but I have to pass.}
-_-
# Apr 19 2005 at 9:41 PM Rating: Decent
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302 posts
Although I doubt they ever would, if SE ever made it legal to buy and sell items for real money I guess it wouldn't be so bad if they made 2 or 3 servers devoted just to people that want to play that way, and let the rest of us that just play for fun and whatnot stay on the servers where we can earn the gil and items we have/want... Maybe that'll even help fix the economy on some of the servers with big gil buying/selling problems.
f00k dat.
# Apr 19 2005 at 9:41 PM Rating: Decent
Booooo.
!!!!!
# Apr 19 2005 at 9:38 PM Rating: Decent
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253 posts
...NNNOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!
WHY? (cries)
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