They don’t care. They have no repercussions. They get their money and that is all they care about. Every restriction only hurts the players because the sellers DO. NOT. CARE. If demand is there; they go through the “hardships” to do it. Because they get paid doing so.
Yes…they do have repercussions. The time spent to workaround the rules, if adverse enough, would be time better spent on some dumb Aeria Games product.
Opportunity Cost is important to consider for a gold-selling business.
Repercussions is not the same as a slight inconvenience.
Doesn’t work if your own arguments are devoid of logical thought.
It doesn’t take a genius to have already noticed that IMC was wrong with implementing this system, even before the game went online.
If they can tweak the system to make gold-selling unprofitable, they you’re right they made the right decision.
But at what costs? Limiting players’ interaction is like putting square tires on a car.
It’s a bad thing because:
- You have to spend hours/days grinding for silver to buy an item that will allow you trading. But, first you will have to reach a considerably high level to be able to farm silver semi-efficiently. This means you have to endure the leveling process without the ability to trade with other players, friends, guildmates. This will make a lot of people quit before reaching a high level.
- People are accustomed to the fact that trading is enabled in any other MMORPG in the planet, as standard function. If it’s not unlocked, this simply means you have to play for 5-10 hours to unlock it. But in ToS? Soon enough Token prices will be in millions (like in KR right now). I doubt an average player, playing ToS for the first time, will be able to collect enough silver in 5-10 hours of playtime. He will get discouraged sooner than he reaches appropriate level for silver farming.
- There’s a reason why no other MMORPG has locked trading behind a paywall. The reason is that - it kills the game.
Oh, haha. You serious dude?
Let’s see. Hmm, my friend needs a gem for socketing? No problem, here you go. He also needs materials to complete his collection? No problem, here you go. Oh, a good weapon for his class dropped and I got it. No problem, I’ll just trade him.
Oh, new leveling area. This means better drops. Oh, more rare materials for his collection, here you go. Oh, a really good ring that boosts his Magic Attack, here you go.
3 days later? You already traded 30 times with me! It’s time to stop playing and install a different game.
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I don’t want to be condescending, but these are businesses and they operate with opportunity cost in mind.
Every hour spent needs to be productive, they need to make money or they won’t stay in business. Here is a hypothetical.
Ruuj’s gold selling emporium wants to make the most money possible. DO YOU
A: Spend 3 hours in trades on Tree of Savior, working through all the rules and restrictions to make $100 in money
OR
B: Spend 1 hour in trades on World of Warcraft, and make that $100 easier.
Stopped reading here, not going to debate with someone who resorts to insults.
Every MMO ever has had gil sellers and they always come back. I’ve been on MMOs where they ban 10s of thousands of accounts after a 6 month investigation and economies collapse. Within 24 hours the shouts are back. Even at a loss, there still gaining brand awareness - same as advertising - if you don’t buy the service here, you may remember it for later.
And if your entire theory of this rests on capping the auction house sale price, what is your solution when the gil sellers just buy a token to trade? On games like FFXI, and WoW, they still have to pay the monthly account fee and that “hassle” doesn’t stop them because they make more than they lose. And tokens aren’t really that expensive. Or are you saying that all the players who buy tokens won’t buy gil? Because the demand will still be there. Always.
No matter how many stops you put in, 17 years of MMOs have shown that there will always be lazy players, and there will always be RMTs that find a way to get their money.
That’s not how markets work. They find more manpower and they spread it out accordingly. If a market is fully saturated, you can’t make more profit in it no matter how many hours you spend.
If that were the case, why wouldn’t every Gil seller only be in the most profitable game? Why are they in every single MMO out there - even though a game like Ragnarok Online or Lineage II are no where near as profitable per hour as games like WoW or Tera currently are.
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Nice way to avoid saying “I have no constructive counter-arguments to defend myself”.
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Whatever helps you sleep at night. Carry on.
This takes a difficult decision on the part of the game owners. I know games like WoW and FFO have a habit of punishing the gold seller, but they usually look the other way when it comes to the gold buyer because they are a paying customer.
It would take some balls from IMC to ban both buyer and seller. If it is well known that gold buyers get banned, then players will think twice about doing it.
When push comes to shove it is about influencing the buyer to do the right thing. If the buyer in this game wants to make a RMT, maybe instead they will buy tokens and sell them, since that is effectively the IMC-approved method of gold buying.
Even now, RMTers are advertising to sell their coins in shouts, and in the long run, by the time the RMTers leave, its not going to be because of these stupid limitations, it’s going to be because the player base will be long sick of the limitations that there will no longer be anyone playing to sell silver to.
That is when this game dies and players instead have hopes that another company picks up the game without placing the stupid embargoes, or someone gets their hands on the files and creates their own private server.
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@Remiri , you can’t implement a price cap in items in the auction house. At least if you don’t want to destroy in-game economy.
Market economy is based in supply and demand. With a price cap you destroy the basis of any economy system.
Goldsellers, goldsellers, goldsellers, goldsellers, goldsellers, goldsellers, goldsellers, goldsellers, goldsellers, goldsellers, goldsellers etc
There is other thing more important to think… PLAYERS (customers).
You can destroy a game to make it 100% unviable for gold seller, and too for players.
A player can block a goldseller spamer in chat and be happy.
Yes, goldsellers can too destroy in-game economy but not at the same level with a price cap.
What is more important? a perfect in-game economy or satisfied customers?
Players are pissed off for the lack of trading, not for the goldsellers.
If IMC want to stay with good health in western market, they need to implement a basic functionality (trade), what every other game has for free and unlimited.
If not, they are showing a less attractive product, being a very important aspect in western market.
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Going to assume this was an edit since it wasn’t in your OP. Of course they don’t focus on 1 game, and of course they can get more people, but more people cost money. Spending time and money wisely is the cornerstone of any effective business. If IMC makes it too prohibitive to sell currency, any gold-selling business worth its salt will look elsewhere.
@riwerv1 In kTOS they already capped material prices to avoid this. I would not have mentioned it if it wasn’t already in practice.
Physically you can implement the system. But is even worse than a market populated by goldsellers. Time to time
Yeah that is pretty much perfect, I would say to eliminate the AH totally and then they’d have a much tougher time to sell gold! Actually then they would just sell leveled up characters/ powerleveling / kills from bosses.
Hmmm. Let’s make it so that you can only log on with a code from an authenticator that you can buy for just $25 and a $9.99 a month fee. Actually to stop any kind of mercenary work how about we just get rid of parties all together. To stop people from holding monsters so that you can get the kills we could always make it so you can’t see other players online too.
Pretty much the game should only be offline, solo and make sure you send in a monthly fee.
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Sounds great! Lets do it! :3
hurr durr sarcasm is funny
That won’t even stop them; they’ll make and sell client patches for max stats and all items. Better get rid of all the computers.
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this is such bullshit, but what pisses me off the most is the 30% market fee, and the 1 item listing only. This is stupid, you can’t sell anything because you need to price things higher than everyone else for you to profit.
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It was as I saw your next post after I posted and didn’t want to double post.
No game company, including IMC has ever succeeded in making it too prohibitive for gil sellers to hawk their product. Not even on the Korean server where auction house caps are in place. This took me 30 seconds to google search from korean servers, and the bottom picture was from our servers.
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I don’t want to discredit them for trying. Hopefully they can find the magic potion that works.
The caps in kRO are only with materials, so the easy workaround is to buy cheap equipment from an NPC and sell that for hi prices. The solution is just as easy, either don’t allow NPC equips to be sold on the AH since it could be viewed as scamming, or put a cap on them.
This will force the gold sellers to trade or convince the user to find something allowed or not capped on the AH and complicate the process for them.
The picture from our servers was on day 1 of the server opening, so I am willing to give them some time to figure things out.
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