Rinion

Now I am convinced.

You are an idiot and really not worth my time.

None of those things are avalible for purchase and never will be.

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"Before one can identify anything as "gray", one has to know what is black and what is white. In the field of morality, this means that one must first identify what is good and what is evil. And when a man has ascertained that one alternative is good and the other evil, he has no justification for choosing a mixture. " Ayn Rand

Edwin Ahe

And when eq2 became pvp-game?

aduros

I'm just just curious since I've never played on an RMT server before, and I'm interested in learning more about it (not playing with it tho). What draws you to The Bazaar? Is it the convenience of buying gear/plat? Selling it for RL cash? Or something else?

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Caswydian

EQ2 has PvP servers, and I was responding to a post about the effect of RMT on PvP.

Flaming Homo

I don't know how far along they've gone with this, or which committees or subcommittees are involved, but Congress has had some discussions about how (not if) to tax virtual economies. I think it was Second Life that brought the matter to their attention, since that game (not really a game but not truly a virtual reality either) has always involved the exchange of real money for virtual items and virtual services.

As long as the game publishers maintained the position that virtual items held no real world value and were strictly the publisher's intellectual property, the tax codes would not have a foundation for assessing a tax base on transactions which only involved code to manage the virtual value. Now that game economies are openly pursuing an exchange rate with real currency, taxation is inevitable.

sarafan

Personally I didn't come to exchange for any of those reasons. I started out on Faydark and transfered to Shadowhaven when the exchange opened. My reasons at the time were from the public outcry over the exchange when it was first anounced I knew it was going to be a low population server. With a low pop comes less competition for spawns. Of course this was back in T5 in the orginal game. As for the exchange services I don't care for them one way or another as they have absolutly no effect on my gameplay. Alot of people on here talk like they know what it's like to play on exchange and it's why alot of us from the Bazaar are laughing at them. They have no clue. Our server doesn't have jacked up broker prices (actually things sell cheaper here than I have seen on other servers) We don't have rampent farm squads running around (compared to other servers) And for everyone thinking you can buy your way to the top, every guild on the server is not a fully fabled/mastered top end raid guild. Our top Raid guild on the server, Ethereal Legacy, didn't get what they have off the exchange they went out and earned it like any other top raid guild, with skill. Listening to some of the people here, every guild on this server should be able to buy what we need to gear out just like EL and then magicly aquire the skill to use all of that gear, masters, toons and compete with them. Shit just doesn't work like that.

If you were a new player and had no idea what exchange was and rolled a toon on Bazaar and one on any other server you'd see no real difference in gameplay. The things you'd see is the bazaar has a lower population and lower broker prices.

The best the exchange can do for you is buy you whatever you want off the broker. Go look at your broker and pretend you had the plat to buy whatever you wanted off of it. However that gears you out is the best the exchange will ever do for you. So are you uber now? Are you the envy of every NPU member? BTW in the process of doing this you probally spent over $1000. Was it worth it?

As it is now money will not get you to the top, only skill gets you there.

Rinion

Ethereal legacy is definatly not on top in this xpac. not yet anyway. Really wont be any clear definitions of whose on top untill Avatar kills start up again.

But in the past, Yes Sarafan.

__________________
"Before one can identify anything as "gray", one has to know what is black and what is white. In the field of morality, this means that one must first identify what is good and what is evil. And when a man has ascertained that one alternative is good and the other evil, he has no justification for choosing a mixture. " Ayn Rand

Jalathan

wow, you really are an idiot aren't you? Yes, I pay 15$ a month to access all the content of the game, just like EVERY OTHER PERSON on a REAL server (SE is some fantasy land of idiocy to me). Nowhere in there do I spend anythign other than the exact amount required for the access to the servers. I do not pay for LoN packs, I do not buy plat with cash. I earn what I get, I raid for what I get. I will NOT participate in RMT (which for the slow here is real money spent to aquire SPECIFIC AND MEASURABLE in game items). Nowhere in the RMT models is there a pay for access, in fact typically RMT models have no pay for access at all (ie, they are F2P games).

There are specific and very active initiatives going on that will have legal and tax conquences in F2P models. How long before the first PvP fight where a player loses a huge amount of plat (which under a RMT system has a specific REAL LIFE value) and sues for robbery? (stupid, I agree, but we are talking litigation happy USA here). And there are very real tax issues becoming involved in this as well.

P2P models (ie, subscription models), avoid this blurring of the lines due to the fact that everyone pays the same amount of money regardless and any additional spent is done against the EULA, so therefore not officially sponsored by the company and therefore not an aspect of the virtual world. Once that line is blurred (ie, F2P RMT type games), the company is putting a specific value upon that virtual item and therefore it CAN and eventually WILL be a taxable event. How it will be taxed is still up in the air (when it is converted to real dollars or based upon value).

This is a huge can of worms and anyone too damn dumb to see it coming gets what they deserve.

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Paladin of Antonia Bayle

Caswydian

You are overblowing the tax issues.

First, players would not actually own any of their in-game items, but would essentially be licensing access to them. That license could then be transferred between players for various reasons - gifted, sold for real money, sold for in-game currency or items, etc. Perhaps the best analogy would be subletting an apartment, but that's still not perfect.

Second, there are really no other instances of hobby items being taxed. Baseball cards, comic books, Magic cards, and countless other collectibles are regularly bought and sold for substantial sums of money, but only the income made from those sales would be taxed. The same rules would likely apply to in-game items. If you make money off the sale, that would be taxed like any other income.

Third, the video game industry has it's lobbyists and can influence politics. Microsoft, Sony, Vivendi and others are not small companies, and do carry some political clout.

Rinion

I was just being technical and Technically paying for a subscription is a real money transaction.

But hey, get this, a good deal of people on bazaar don't participate in RMT either. I know I never used to.

RMT for in game items or money is optional and will always be optional. Thank you for agreeing with that in your ...long winded?.. post.

The can of worms in already open, whether you participate in it or not.

__________________
"Before one can identify anything as "gray", one has to know what is black and what is white. In the field of morality, this means that one must first identify what is good and what is evil. And when a man has ascertained that one alternative is good and the other evil, he has no justification for choosing a mixture. " Ayn Rand