Selling Items for RL $$

[Theo_GL]

I think one of the things that really hurt UO in general was eBay banning game related sales (due to many issues around fraud and inability to prove you actually delivered the items).

Before your items translated to hard currency value and it make it less attractive to leave the game and these assets behind. Without a good way to sell or transfer this value - people found less barrier to quiting.

Now, somehow, Blizzard has managed to solve the legal/ownership issue with their real money auction house on Diablo III. They also take a cut of the sales from this auction house as a way to generate additional profits.

Why can't UO implement a similar model? Allow sales of items for $$ and take a percentage of the sales, link accounts to paypal accounts like D3. Of course, we'd need some actual game security but use the RMAH money to pay for the security updates.

Discuss.

 

[NBG]

I think one of the things that really hurt UO in general was eBay banning game related sales (due to many issues around fraud and inability to prove you actually delivered the items).

Before your items translated to hard currency value and it make it less attractive to leave the game and these assets behind. Without a good way to sell or transfer this value - people found less barrier to quiting.

Now, somehow, Blizzard has managed to solve the legal/ownership issue with their real money auction house on Diablo III. They also take a cut of the sales from this auction house as a way to generate additional profits.

Why can't UO implement a similar model? Allow sales of items for $$ and take a percentage of the sales, link accounts to paypal accounts like D3. Of course, we'd need some actual game security but use the RMAH money to pay for the security updates.

Discuss.

Hmmm only if the game remains pay to play....

 

[MrNiceMNC]

why is that? if it only remains pay to play? Diablo 3 you payed once and its free forever.

 

[Dermott of LS]

...

For UO it would need to be an external site with shard-based marketplaces and have moderators involved to be able to flag accounts posting possible or probable duped or exploited items.

I'm in no way against the concept of the RMT Marketplace, however, given the current situation, I don't see the "suits" expanding the UO team in order to make such a thing happen.

I am glad to see it at least as Proof of Concept in D3. RMT by itself is not an evil thing, though it does have involve issues with exploiting... but the problem remains exploiting, not RMT... it's just an easy scapegoat because it plays on people's envy of what other people are doing in and around the game.

 

[Nails Warstein]

I am curious if UO can borrow a concept from Dark Ages of Camelot also owned by EA Mythic. They have NPC vendors that sell every item a player puts on vendor at their house from every server (shard), meaning you can buy an item on Atlantic that was put on a vendor on Pacific. You can even search for items by name, and organize them by price. If EA Mythic could legally implement this same feature, they could in theory add a cash value the way Diablo 3 does.

 

[Arien]

A Game is a game and if you could sell Pixel for $$ ... UO would be not longer a game. We would get tons of Bots, Dupers, Cheaters more as we already have now. Peoples would play only for the Money and not for fun.
And think of all Players that have already Billions of UO Gold (cheated, exploited ect.), how rich they would become. It would be kinda a smack in the face for all Players that earned their Gold on the normal legal way.

 

[Ron Silverbeard]

Havening hundrets of millions gold in game nowadays needs no exploiting - just time for Events, beeing a vet with rares OR real $$ - you can 24/7 go to the origin store and sell the items you purchased with real $$ on your vendor on any shard for gold points...well at least as long as EA lets you do this which is under investigation too lol

 

[claudia-fjp]

A Game is a game and if you could sell Pixel for $$ ... UO would be not longer a game.

So UO wasn't ever a game? Last I checked people sold pixels for cash from the very beginning and RG thought it was pretty cool. In fact things sold for much more back when we had a lot of players. Gold was over $30 a mil now barely 30 cents. After Trammel opened a large tower on Napa was $300, now you can go place keeps yourself.

 

[Eärendil]

I am curious if UO can borrow a concept from Dark Ages of Camelot also owned by EA Mythic. They have NPC vendors that sell every item a player puts on vendor at their house from every server (shard), meaning you can buy an item on Atlantic that was put on a vendor on Pacific. You can even search for items by name, and organize them by price. If EA Mythic could legally implement this same feature, they could in theory add a cash value the way Diablo 3 does.

Awesome idea. However, two different effects could change UO-economy:

Optimistic: Low prices on some shards (e.g. Drach) lead to pressure on high prices on other shards (e.g. Atlantic) - with the effect of generally lower prices for all UO-customers.

Pessimistic: High prices on some shards lead to adaptive behaviour - prices on other shards rise, too. UO-stuff becomes even more expensive.

I am not sure, which scenario is more realistic - but given the experiences with UO-economy and prices for stuff that reach billions nowadays, I would say: Leave the low price-shards alone. I am happy that I have to pay 20 million for a Scroll of Valiant Commendation and not 50, 80, 100 million...

 

[Penderrin]

When you have an EM system where they can hand out unique items I can see a lot of corruption going on if this was easily translated into cash.

 

[swroberts]

You are essentially speaking of gold farming and do some research into the subject. There are actually laws in Countries banning such actions. Unfortunately the people who would benefit from this would not be the gamers or the game, but the exploiters of children.

 

[sativa green]

certain sites have been getting away with selling items for cash for years and nobody has stopped them even though they are using illegal means to do so

 

[Nails Warstein]

Awesome idea. However, two different effects could change UO-economy:

Optimistic: Low prices on some shards (e.g. Drach) lead to pressure on high prices on other shards (e.g. Atlantic) - with the effect of generally lower prices for all UO-customers.

Pessimistic: High prices on some shards lead to adaptive behaviour - prices on other shards rise, too. UO-stuff becomes even more expensive.

I am not sure, which scenario is more realistic - but given the experiences with UO-economy and prices for stuff that reach billions nowadays, I would say: Leave the low price-shards alone. I am happy that I have to pay 20 million for a Scroll of Valiant Commendation and not 50, 80, 100 million...

I would think the result would be somewhere in the middle, you'll definitely see an increase in supply and demand. However when presented with a problem, I offer this solution, which I think presents a great gold sink idea:

Players can choose to sell their items on their home shard's vendor to be sold just to players on their home shard for a lower vendor daily cost than what it currently is or for FREE .
Players can also choose to sell their items from their home shard's vendor to be sold on any shard, perhaps exception of Siege and Mugen for a much higher base FLAT FEE daily vendor cost than what it currently is.

There are two problems I forsee happening with this concept:

1. The demand for transfer tokens might go down, because players can place an item on one shard vendor, to buy off the NEW NPC Vendor on a different shard. Yet the higher FLAT FEE daily vendor cost per item would limit the number and types of items players might choose to sell for the purpose of transferring.

2. Luna and Zento houses might lose their value, because no one would have to run around these cities looking for shopping anymore. Its possible that any player with their own house could sell from anywhere in UO, this would put players all on equal footing with each other. Now a possible solution for cities and/or player run towns is to give them a discount on their daily vendor cost.

 

[Ludes]

certain sites have been getting away with selling items for cash for years and nobody has stopped them even though they are using illegal means to do so

^ this...
Everyone I know uses one of these for pricechecks.

 

[Silverbird]

I am curious if UO can borrow a concept from Dark Ages of Camelot also owned by EA Mythic. They have NPC vendors that sell every item a player puts on vendor at their house from every server (shard), meaning you can buy an item on Atlantic that was put on a vendor on Pacific. You can even search for items by name, and organize them by price. If EA Mythic could legally implement this same feature, they could in theory add a cash value the way Diablo 3 does.

Afaik all DAOC servers got merged into one with mirrors of different zones. That includes the housing zones from former different servers. But it would be nice to have those market place npcs, where all items are listed, if the vendor owner wishes. That would replace the illegal search machines and would make having (succesfull selling) vendors possible for everyone (without spending much time on advertising). That markeplace npc demands a fee, if you buy directly from him. If you want to avoid that fee, you have to travel to the vendor, whos lls the desired item.
[Dont nail me too much of the DAOC servers. There are still different ones. The former european ones are not merged with the american ones and there are different types of servers with differences in their rulesets, that are also not merged together.]

 

[Woodsman]

certain sites have been getting away with selling items for cash for years and nobody has stopped them even though they are using illegal means to do so

I know they were reported to the UO team multiple times, and the scripters do their thing in the open when making the rounds of Luna, Tokuno, New Magincia, etc. It's not like they can hide from GMs either. They were mentioned by name in March of 2011 here on Stratics and even before that, and nothing was done.

I've given up on it. Remember, our esteemed franchise producer had this to say

Now, speaking of hackers, though, there’s definitely…there’s some stuff that the team and I are in discussion about. We understand that some players just want to play that way, and [we're] trying to figure out a way where we can give them a place to play like that. So, we’ll see. Maybe we’ll talk more about that towards the summer.

When the franchise producer says he wants to accomodate the scripters, it's over, LOL.

 

[Pawain]

Great Idea. I have been playing D3 since it came out. I dont use the real money auction house, but I love the game gold auction house.

1. The devs would have to make a completly new game for this to be implemented.
2. thousands play D3 at a time.

I dont se this happening

 

[Driven Insane]

When the franchise producer says he wants to accomodate the scripters, it's over, LOL.

Whether they've said it or not, we all know they don't give a rat's ass about cheaters. There are so many simple things they could do to stop 95% of the cheaters, but they haven't in 15 years.

Sadly those of us still around have just accepted it and unfortunately (or fortunately) UO is such a great unique game that despite all of it's numerous problems it still has us playing.

 

[claudia-fjp]

Selling items for cash hasn't been illegal, many of us did it on E-Bay or right here on Stratics before they both did a 180 for different reasons.

The scripting of resources, looting, finding IDOCs, PVP now that's bad.

On the other hand many non-cheaters applaud the search sites for doing a service in the game EA should have done in the first place. I don't care that they use scripts to do it, it's just too damn handy having a vendor search. Every other game under the sun has an auction house. What did we get? The extremely limited New Magincia Bazaar...

 

[MalagAste]

EA has never cared about cheaters, never really done much about scammers and as far as hacking goes they do little to nothing about that... what they do do is blame the victims as if they had some hand in getting screwed. They do nothing at all about all the free shards, they do nothing at all about all the sale sites selling stuff for RL money and they do not do anything about the scripting...

But say one wrong word and they come down right now.

UO is in need of a search engine.... as well as some sort of trading house or something to help folk. I think if they put in a search engine and trading house type thing it would take a bunch of the profit away from many of those sale sites and put money back into UO where it belongs as well as take away a bunch of the edge for scripters and make it less profitable for them... But that's my opinion.

 

[NBG]

Selling UO stuff for $ has been around since the start.... It was one of the topic of discussion for some News reports in the beginning about how much stuff can sell for.

It was a bold step in the beginning to make that decision and EBay helped that along. If this is to be a policy again, then Mythic would need to provide some way to add this functionality for RMT feature into Origin store that ties into sales of items right there in the store for each shard.

RMT really needs to be supported by "proper" software and legal issues before we can even begin to start discussion on issues concerning botter and cheater.

 

[Woodsman]

RMT really needs to be supported by "proper" software and legal issues before we can even begin to start discussion on issues concerning botter and cheater.

Legitimate RMT is a completely separate issue from botters/cheaters.

There doesn't need to be any discussion about botters and cheaters, just start banning their asses.

 

[puni666]

A Game is a game and if you could sell Pixel for $$ ... UO would be not longer a game. We would get tons of Bots, Dupers, Cheaters more as we already have now. Peoples would play only for the Money and not for fun.
And think of all Players that have already Billions of UO Gold (cheated, exploited ect.), how rich they would become. It would be kinda a smack in the face for all Players that earned their Gold on the normal legal way.

Have you been under a rock the past oh... 14 years? This already happened. Now it's hardly profitable unless you're one of the top few mass traders.

 

[CryptisRavenous]

Can I sell RL items for in game gold? ... lol

 

[Dermott of LS]

...

Can I sell RL items for in game gold? ... lol

If you find someone wanting to make that trade, sure. People trade ingame gold for gametime codes to gold sellers, so it's not like it hasn't been done.

 

[Eärendil]

Luna and Zento houses might lose their value, because no one would have to run around these cities looking for shopping anymore.

...this would be a REALLY nice side-effect

 

[CovenantX]

The RMAH most definitely would have been more effective in D3 if it were a true MMORPG instead of instanced 1-4 player games, and it had alot more content currently it's possible to beat all difficultys in less than 4 hours per difficulty (not counting the time it takes to get the items you'd need to survive).

A RMAH could definitely be a useful addition to UO since UO has no "end game" <- probably why UO is still my favorite =].

all of Blizzard's Games are pretty damn close to the same since WoW "end game = boring" not to mention all their games seem to be endless grind from the start.