daray

As Pinski mentioned, the activities of the RMT plat farmers and bots are detrimental to the ingame economy. While you may see lower prices on some items that select RMT farmers may be competing over selling, the general trend would be for higher inflation across the whole game market.

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Mesmer.Coercer.Kithicor

Hesster

Is it possible? Sure it is. Is it probable? I'd say not. For one thing, if something like that ever came to light, it would cause a player shitstorm of a magnatude that would make the whole Test to Unrest server transfer bruhaha look miniscule in comparison. It would be a PR nightmare, and any employee caught doing anything like that would probably be booted out the door so fast they'd leave a vapor trail. Think about it this way... If SOE as a company was 'unofficially' doing it across all servers to increase profits, then why would they have the Exchange servers?

I'm sure that the servers can record every bit of cash generated in the game and what happens to it. The problem is that it would take too much in the way of manpower to sift through all that data. I send my alts money and items all the time, loan plat to guildmates and friends who also play, send spell orders with plat and rares to people I trust, ect. Hardly a day goes by when I'm not sending something to someone. Now magnify that by thousands of players... and that's just mail, not even taking player to player trades into account. Trying to keep track of it all would be like trying to sip from a fire hose, and so SOE only does something about it when it's obvious and causes a problem (like duping) or when players bring individual cases to their attention.

As for why I care about plat buyers, there are several reasons... First is that it's supposed to be a level playing field. Everyone starts out with a level 1 toon with a few silver to their name. If someone makes friends in the game or joins a guild that is willing to bankroll them, or meets a higher level character that is just feeling generous that day, more power to them. But once you go outside the game and use real world money to effect what goes on inside the game, that means the playing field is no longer level.

Secondly, the more asshat plat buyers there are, the more asshat plat spammers there are that interrupt my playtime and piss me off. Fuckers seem to get through the spam filter more and more often these days. Not nearly as bad as it used to be, but I still see them every now and then even with spam unchecked under chat options.

Chumann

The biggest effect they have is the way the skew economic values outside of their intended ranges. Everything that's sellable has to have some kind of an intended price associated with it. The part of the game economy that is somewhat controllable is controlled by these amounts. When farmers decide to swarm in, the intended value of items shift outside the range the game was designed for.

I'll give you an example...

-The cost for a crafter to create a full set of mastercrafted armor is exactly 1p in fuel.
-Some developer mastermind decides that 1p should be able to be accomplished reasonably within approximately 10 days.
-Farmers arrive, accumulate money faster than at the inteded rate and sell that gold to consumers for RL money.
-Now, Joe Avg. Player accumulates 1p faster than a 10 day time period because he begins to buy plat for RL money.
-SoE has to compensate by manipulating the few parts of the economy they can control. (usually resulting in faster earnings AND higher prices)
-Rinse, Repeat

Vendetta

they are reptilians
fo realz

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Psychomantis

It Doesn't affect the average player, it doesn't affect the hard core raiders, and i don't see a way that they can afect any player seriously.

Sometimes they can kill a mob that you camped 2 hrs for quest, but just see the time played on a lvl 80 for example it gonna be up to 30 days X24=720 hrs if someone take 2 stealing a mob is almost nothing and 30 days for a lvl 80 is low, some have 160 - 200days+ so if somebody is crying for 2 hrs cam and someone stealth their mob i'll tell that guy get a fucking life

is disgusting i know, but it wont happen so offen, and also if some farmer can stealth ypur mob, you need to learn to play a lil bit better :D

does they affect crafters? i don't fucking know... i find crafting so boreeeing

bye that was my opinion.

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Ti'iesinyo'face

Word! Thats what i think lol

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ItsChickie

If people wanna spend Real Life money to buy plat, then it's their right. You can make the arguement that it provides an un-fair or un-balanced playing field, but the same arguement can be made about "class balancing". Like it or not, Plat Sellers will NEVER be completely gone...my 2 cents.

And if it's against the EULA or whatever it is, then why doesn't SOE ban these people. *shrugs*

Tiggin

Actually did they not ban a buncha ppl a while back for doing just that. EULA is kinda like the law irl applied to games. Some things are rarely enforced, some things are dealt with harshly and some things as much as they are wrong require a bit to much effort to deal with effectively (for example drug trafficing). Just cos you can steal or commit fraud IRL doesnt mean you actually have the right to. Things you have the right to do do not have any possiblity of having you punished. I have the right to buy plat as much as i have the right to buy crack - its a free will choice but they may have consequences.

Jamesray

Contrary to what you might think...farmers do not inflate the prices of goods.

Competition drives prices down...which is why you see extremely cheap prices for masters when there are 20 of them for sale.

This is also why you can buy a stack of status items for a fraction of a plat, when it could take you quite some time to farm that same stack.

The same is true with tradeskilled items...if there were only a few people selling them, prices are higher. When you've got tons of crafters, the price tends to gravitate closer to the actual cost.

Very rare items are usually overpriced anyways because the demand for them is so high, not to mention the fact that there aren't other people able to farm those items and compete. Add to that the fact you can make money so easily now via quests and you've got some natural inflationary pressure.

Hoss

There are 2 ways the RMTers can drive the prices up.

First, a lot of them engage in price fixing. They decide something is worth X, and they buy up any that others put on the market for less. This is risky but does happen and keeps prices high for items where there is a lot of demand and a lot of supply.

Second, it basically causes inflation. Joe plat buyer didn't have to work as hard for his 100 plat, so he's going to spend it on a couple of masters that are really only worth 5p each to people of his same class who actually play and earn their money. That raises the price for everyone because the next time someone gets one of those masters, they're gunna remember that it went for 50 plat last time.

Basically, it works both ways. Saying plat sellers raise prices is almost as wrong as saying they lower them. The net result is that some things are higher and some are lower.


-h

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Lord, please pray for the soul of this bitch and guide my pimp hand and make it strong Lord, so that she might learn a hoe's place.

Amen