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Ok, I think that some of the newer folks may be giving too much credit to the botters for the overblown economy of this past year.
First off let's remember what actually blew the economy out of wack.....that was the 'glitch'. It was sometime around January 2007, when suddenly particular sims seemed to have 'endless' amounts of money and were able to pay and did pay 'any amount' of money you wanted for your items.
And since suddenly everyone had tons of money...prices went out the roof. Payouts on jams went from 2 or 5K to 100k to 1 mill per case. Trees sales went from 15 mill to 250 mil. Rare pets went from 7 mil to 250 mil.
And the thing is, I seriously doubt if the people that 'flooded' the game with gazillions of simoleans probably were botters at all. Botters wouldn't have just 'given' money away and for a long time many of the botters just quit because there really wasn't a market for simoleans.
So now everything is back to normal but with much less money in the economy and so simolean sellers are coming back.
Now is EA supposed to just let all that extra money go into private individuals' pockets again. Selling simoleans has been a very lucrative business for private people. So now EA has decided to counter the private dealers and offer a secure transaction for buying simoleans and thus bring more of a profit into EA on behalf of TSO.
The little bit of money people are buying is just a drop in the bucket and is probably gone within days...but you can bet the bank that EA is probably closely monitoring the economy to ensure that 'too many' simoleans aren't rushed into the system.
So the next time folks start worrying about the economy going to hades in a handbasket....remember that the broken economy of recent has absolutely nothing to do with botters.
Many of the old timers that were around over the past years need to get real and tell the true story so that younger players that haven't been here understand what actually DID happen.
My one and only problem with botters or private TSO virtual good sales is that none of that money goes into TSO's bottom line. I read an article that talked about how one seller made up to $170k in one year selling TSO virtual items. Just think what $170K in TSO's bank account would do for our game? It would give our Dev's a lot more leverage and a lot more budget money to take our game to places we could only dream of.
So next time you gripe about EA taking money for selling Simoleans...think of it as a little deposit towards a financially stable future for TSO.
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Right on, Dutch! Hades in a handbasket - good one ROFL!!!!
And CB, what exactly is a 'fair economy'? So poor sims can afford the same life as rich sims? If store owners price items ridiculously high, then they'll be very lonely store owners because no one will visit and buy from them lol... Items are priced relative to the economic state of that time. 15 mil for a mystic was expensive even before the glitch from Hell sure, but relative to the economic state of a developed 5 year old game...
And are you sure that it was bots that
caused the glitch? I assumed that players simply had found a bug that was overlooked, and went wild.