[MUD-Dev] Sony to ban sale of online characters from its popular gaming sites

[Matthew Mihaly]

On Tue, 11 Apr 2000, Ryan Palacio wrote:

> 
> Maddog at best.com wrote:
> 
> > item farming is not a profitable business.
> 
> Commodity farming is most definitely a profitable business.  If this were
> not true, why would EQ platinum and UO gold have higher US dollar exchange
> rates than currency from many countries?!

This fact is _utterly_ irrelevant. Does the fact that the English pound
trades at a premium to the dollar mean that English goods are inherently
more valuable? Of course not. Likewise, does the fact that the Japanese 
yen trades at a deep discount to the dollar indicate that Japanese
goods are less valuable? No. Comparing arbitrary currency amounts doesn't
mean anything, except in terms of changes in the relationship between the
two (as I understand it at least).

I'm not disputing that commodity farming is profitable, incidentally, just
that your example has no relevance to it being profitable.


> Higher risk.  Little to no means of recourse should the deal go awry.  Less
> overall user-base per site. No one-stop shopping marts.  More inconvenience.
> All of these things combined diminish the number of potential trades.  The
> less potential trades, the less potentially lucrative, and increasingly more
> difficult it becomes to establish a "business" doing such things.  This in
> turn leads to less people taking part in "money-making" ventures that _DO_
> cause problems for other users.
> 
> When you pay $10 a month, you are paying for a service.  Just as when you
> pay at the movie theatre, if your personal enjoyment spills over and
> negatively affects other customers, you _WILL_ be asked to leave.

That is a poor analogy. In a movie theatre, _any_ interaction with fellow
patrons (for the most part...I'm not talking about the Rocky Horror
Picture Show crowd), aside perhaps from holding hands with your
girlfriend, etc, is generally negative, because a movie is not meant to be
an interactive experience either with the movie or with the other patrons.

A much better would be, say, a club. Let's use a flashy NYC-style club as
the example. Because the games we are talking about insist on playing
follow-the-leader with their business model, and want to charge everyone
the same amount, we'll say that you pay a flat-rate cover charge to get
in, and that drinks and coat check and such once inside the club are free. 

Given that clubs of this sort benefit from attracting well-dressed,
good-looking men and women, let's say that Beautiful Betsy is in the club,
dancing about, and some loser comes up to her to ask her out. She tells
him to sod off quite rudely, providing poor ole Mr. Loser with a negative
experience. You going to chuck Betsy out? Of course not. All customers are
not equal, even in a flat-rate environment. Betsy attracts and keeps other
customers for you. Saying that just because someone suffers a negative
experience due to another player will result in the offending player being
kicked out is simply not a workable policy, and EQ doesn't work that way,
or you'd have no players. You can't have large-scale social interaction
without every player being negatively affected at some time or another by
other players. 

The trick is deciding how valuable a player is by weighing his cost to the
game and his benefit to the game against each other. How you do that is up
to you, but I'm sure you do it rather than just blindly kick out anyone
causing any negative feelings.

--matt





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