RadarX

Sony Online Entertainment recently released a report outlining the demographics from a year of transactions on the EQ2 Station Exchange servers. How much was made, how old were the buyers/sellers, and what other odd details are in this report? I actually read the entire 20 page report and hit the high spots. (There is a link to the original report/interview in my article)

SOE Station Exchange

Snark

while there is a significant amount of money exchanging hands for one server, I don't think station exchange has resolved any bit what it was promised to achieve. I remember when it was announced, I had a lot of really good friends quit the game because of how lame it is. And frankly, it's still lame.

Whenever someone quits they just say "whatever, I'll just throw my char on x-change for a quick few hundred bucks". With 2 years of experience, I can say confidently that SE can be a pretty large motivator for people to quit, and I think that's a shame.

I get more plat tells than before SE came out, more ingame spam mail, I see more characters on playerauctions and Ebay...

It is pretty obvious that instead of reducing the value of 3rd party sellers, they just overall stimulated the market. The naturality of selling your character to exchange makes one automatically look for the buying/selling of virtual property through third party means.

I'm just going to assume that when they came up with the idea, which is what I remember from it being announced, that they had plans to put it on every server.

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LFG

Radar thanks for posting this, this is fascinating.

For those interested, a link directly to SoE's white paper:

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20...per%201.19.doc

Ok, a little trivia from SoE's white paper:

1. Which of these top 10 sellers post on eq2flames?

2. Even more interesting, WHO IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT'S HOLY SPENT $19K RL on The Bazaar last year lol - methinks this person needs an intervention and 12 step program:

3. Finally, and most importantly, what were the names of the top characters sold on The Bazaar between June 05 and June 06, and what servers and guilds did they come from?

Ok, I have no clue what most of the answers are either, but it's fun to speculate.

The user who provides the most answers gets a cookie, a title, anything they want.

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Snark

1) I have a name but I cannot share it!
2) I'm gonna go with SHOE on this one
3) Wasn't heisenberg the first character to hit the $2k cap on bids?

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http://acceptable.tv/videos/769-Cirque-Du-Soleil
http://www.break.com/index/sheep-wea...ares-herd.html

Niber

Good article, keeps me from having to read the report.

LFG

No, the Disso shaman and SK were I believe, each sold high based on early DT keys.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Unfortunately, Heisenberg sold twice for $2k, but each of those transactions didn't go through because of the buyer's card being declined by the cc company. He then actually sold for under $900, which many people thought of as him getting ripped off by someone playing games with the SE system at the time.

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LFG

I was thinking also, you know what that white paper totally misses the boat on?

Graphing sale prices in connection with significant game dates and events.

What I mean is, the $2k sales were mostly early DT key'd players I believe, so the buyers on The Bazaar could beat EL to DT, and strategically timed sales when the toon was at it's peak gear wise, after getting decked early and before most other people had that gear.

The paper also doesn't consider the value of a toon based on pre or post expansion release. Just after an expansion is released, a toon is going to sell for much less, because new gear that it doesn't have deflates the price.

There are many ways you could go with all this. The paper is interesting, but was definitely written by an academic rather than a gamer. What it fails to go into, but that we all know, is that the maximum possible value of a toon will occur when it is sold with a rare item such as a Chel'Drak tooth, is sold after being among the first fully decked tank in a new expansion serverwide, or is sold after being one of the first to get keyed access to a high end raid zone.

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Pinski

Majority of characters in T5 were sold for $2k, even without raid gear.

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Xelus

I do believe Dissolution contributed greatly to the economy!

All those accounts sold ... I don't even know how many =p.




Well... SoE is apart of Sony and Sony is a Corporation in Japan... despite this, SoE still does employ US workers and that's good for the economy right?

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LFG

I believe that for toons transferred to The Bazaar, the total value of all Disso toons sold in 2006 was highest of all guilds gamewide.

All they would need to check is high selling toons transferred from Nek.

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