To be honest ...have you ever buy PP for your character ?Follow

I also did the imaginary shopping in bazaar before where I figured how many pp I needed to get everything I wanted. I never actually purchased any because I can never justify spending cash on pp. Every time I considered it, I calculated how many lap dances I could get for that money at DejaVu and then decided against buying the pp!

I have many many times been farming zones for stuff that I saw in bazaar was selling for money that I knew I could get easily. I have a trader on all night every night. My wifes account has a trader up every night and we have a shared third account that has a trader up all night every night that we use to sell only words/runes for researchers. (my wife claims all pp from sales of words/runes since she is the one that looks em all up to set the prices correctly!)

I am now in a family/raiding guild that raids three days a week and nothing sold in bazaar is useful to me Except tradeskill items. I recently bought 300k worth of stuff in bazaar to get my Artisan Charm increases from 300 fletching, 300 jewelry, 300 brewing, and some(274) smithing.

so for ppl who dont have cash to buy PP or who choose not to buy pp, The things that sell the most often as a steady supply of pp to the trader are all tradeskill items. Check out your local price for Swirling Shadows on your server. Those are used for smithing Shadowscream armor and are the one component that needs to be farmed but is also tradeable. This means that ppl who are doing smithing will already be peeved at having to farm all the no-drop stones in Hollowshade Moor and will want to purchase their Swirling Shadows from the bazaar because they are tired of farming and want to get to smithing. If you spend an hour or so in Twilight sea and kill all the spectre type mobs there you will get about a hundred swirling shadows in an hour or so. Those sell for 100-150p ea in bazaar netting you 10000-15000p for an hour of your time.
I personally paid for hundreds of those swirling shadows before I figured it wasnt worth it to me. Since then I just pop over there and pick up how ever many I need.

Somebody posted about how someone had 45000 radiant crystals for sale. These ppl do not do missions to get their crystals. They set up a buyer and fill him with a pile of coins and ppl come to him with radiant crystals to sell for cash. He then at the end of the day puts all those radiants on his trader at a markup and hopes the economy keeps him in cash. Problem with this is you run the risk of a declining cost to the crystals. You end up with 45000 you paid more for and now they wont sell for that much.

I am reading the book "Synthetic Worlds" right now, and it is well worth reading. The author is an economist, and played several MMORPGs first hand.



You do have a very important point here. Before anyone had significant amounts of plat, it was a barter system for everyone. I stood in the EC tunnel and spent my time hawking, trading, and being generally miserable. I made a lot of money, mind you, and traded crap for stuff I needed... but what a sigh of relief when they introduced the bazaar: AFK trading at night without the constant haggling and 'trade you this for that'. My effort went to zero and my profit skyrocketed. Manually trading is tedious and time consuming, and like all economies eventually progresses to a higher level with a useful medium of exchange (money, plat).

Exchange within guilds I am sure is very similar to the EC tunnel barter system, and even the DKP system exchanges your time for rewards without any money changing hands. I still believe, however, that outside these environments (guilds and barter economies) that supply and demand ultimately set prices.

As for the economy of a game being "distorted" by the outside influence of a second market economy - yes I agree. I certainly would prefer that the game remain pristine. But now, so many years later, I have resigned myself to the belief that it is impossible to stop people that have no better prospects (to make a living) from generating cash flow from the virtual world, thus changing the economic balance of the game world we are playing in.

The impact is as Kirbyramz and Groogle mentioned - rare valuable items become more common and cheaper. Every one of the 'farmers' is competing with each other for your purchase driving his own prices down as well as his profit; cutthroat economics at their best. That could almost be considered a third tier of the game world economy, one that the normal player has no conception of. Making rare items common may be bad for the game, but there will always be some rare drop that people will collect and exchange for profit - if not radiant crystals then something else, with or without farmers who are making a business of it.

I hate to go on, on an already long post, but just one more thing...



I have to disagree here, but I guess I am in the minority. To me, the ones that farm, sell, and accumulate plat to exchange for real money are not the villains. They are profiting from the weakness of others. They are feeding their families by making a market that clearly a lot of people are demanding. Maybe they fail to see the moral repercussions of their actions, how they corrupt the 'game world' but does a ticket scalper go home and cry about his profit? When there is demand someone will always step in with supply, be it drugs or plat. If there wasn't *huge* demand for virtual goods / money there would be no one selling.

I blame the buyer and hold them primarily responsible for the creation of this industry. Do I want to be a ticket scalper? A drug dealer? A plat seller? No! I have better things to occupy my time. Do I want to buy my way through a virtual world? Corrupt my own play experience? Nope... it is a game and I want to experience it fully without having it all handed to me. They may be dealing plat, but you have the choice as an individual to buy or not. No one is forcing you to keep them in business.

It is very, very easy to cave in to pressure to level fast! Get the best gear fast! Get to the end so you can raid the end game content over and over again with 40 of your closest friends... I just want to be there for the ride, cause that's where the real game is. Instant gratification ruins the game just as it takes away your appreciation for things in real life. Don't do it, because you are the one that loses out ultimately.

Yes.

The last time I came back to EQ, I had nothing, having given all of my plat and items to guildies and having deleting several high-level puppets. I'd played the game as a noob, scrimped and saved for gear, farmed wisp stones for hours and even days on end, etc. Been there, done that, had lots of fun but not going to do it again. Buying 100k plat to get me geared up made the difference between making the game fun, and making the game loads of work in order to someday be fun.

I do lament the fact that plat selling has forever altered the server economies, but it's a reality that's not going away. My only concern is the new player that buys plat; not only are they robbing themselves of the experiences that will make them truly appreciate a good drop (you kids need to learn the value of money!), but they often tend not to know how to play their chosen classes well (although there are always exceptions).

I agree... I wasn't even thinking of these scammers. These people are nothing more than criminals and deserve real punishment for this for exactly the reason you stated... time = money, even if they are virtual goods. Probably the only thing stopping this from actually being a crime is the fact that the companies (most, I guess) running MMOs all make a disclaimer that the virtual goods are theirs and you are only paying to access the world. I think Second Life may be one of the exceptions to this where I think you actually own what you have in game because you essentially paid for it with real money in the first place.

I wish I Had hours and hours to play this game...but I don't. I am not 13. I am not unemployed and living in my parent's basement. I am married. I am not independently wealthy. (although, Barkingturtle, if anyone takes you up on your offer, pst).

That being said, I do have one thing: A bit of cash. Just waxing philisophique at 2 am, but; How is it that the player who plays 10-15 hours a day affects the economy in one way, but someone who plays 10-15 hours a week and buys plat affects it in a more negative way? I have considered buying but frankly I am afraid that I would delete it when I could not convince myself it was the right thing to do. But a personal decision it is, not some bane on MMORPG economies.

I guess I could quit my job, leave my wife, inject myself into Norrath for hours on end, join a hard-core raiding guild and bust my hump on tradeskills to make a million plat. But I don't want to.

I guess another point that comes to me at this late hour is that EQ has recreated their market to do at least 2 things: 1) Most really high quality items are no trade. I see that trend continuing. It makes the bazaar less attractive. 2) They have devised a number of ways to take some of the plat out of circulation forever. You never used to summon corpses to the GL or have to remove an aug for 1k or more. This was smart on their part but can be expensive for the casual player.

I have never bought plat and presume I never will.

I have, in moments of frustration, thought about buying plat or, rather, would condone the purhase of plat under certain circumstances. I am a tradeskiller and choose to farm all of the tradeskill components that can be farmed.

During one of my countless farming sessions I was interrupted by someone farming the same mobs, but for cash. I became very frustrated and logged off. I convinced myself that it would be accpetable to me for someone to buy plat if it meant that they didn't need to interfere with my ritualistic farming practices. That sounds funny, no?

I am a "casual" player have not used the bazaar for gear upgrades in about two years (not that I couldn't!) I have used the bazaar about two or three times for PC-vendor purchases about two or three times in that same timeframe. Once, to "lightly" twink my warrior and the rest for inexpensive but hard-to-find spell research components. I haven't logged my trader on in about six months.

I have very little use for plat, right now, other than to make potions, summon my corpse and switch around my gimp augs. Tradeskills will eventually eat my savings dry when I have no other reasonable farming routes.

I know I am in the minority by my play-style but it really makes what I accomplish feel like a great accomplishment. That sense of accomplishment, accomplishment I earned, is exactly why I play and I am glad I learned that before tainting myself with things I feel are "tainted."

Long-ish post, thanks for reading.