[MUD-Dev] Another Reality Check [was Re: Black Snow Revisited]

[Matt Mihaly]

On Fri, 5 Apr 2002, Dr. Cat wrote:

> Right away I thought of Matt's experience with Achaea.  Where it
> apparently works just fine.  I'd probably sell our currency for
> even less than he charges for his.  One obvious consequence of
> this is that it puts a cap on the price any player can get selling
> the stuff on Ebay.  Black Snow isn't going to come along and sell
> a hoard of coins for $150 if Dragon's Eye Productions will let you
> buy the same number of game coins for $10.  The kind of
> profiteering you see in situations of high scarcity simply
> wouldn't arise, nor would all the attending negative consequences.

We have almost 0 problem with people trying to sell stuff we don't
want them to sell. First of all, there's already an easy, in-game
way to purchase gold, as people can buy the for-real-money virtual
currency (credits) from our web page, and then use that to purchase
gold from other players (we ourselves do not sell gold to players as
we don't wish to set an exchange rate. It's more interesting if it
is allowed to float.) Second, the items people buy from us are not
able to be given away. They reset into your inventory every hour or
so, and we will not change where they reset. So, you can't sell
those items to other people. Further, the only way to get those
items is buy them from us. You can't go out and kill a thousand orcs
and get them except insofar as you might be able to take the gold
from the monster-bashing and buy credits from other people with it,
and then buy special items from us with the credits. (Which is
totally fine with us, as someone had to buy the credits from us to
begin with.)

We've had a couple people sell their characters, but Achaea is a
small enough game where it's virtually impossible to do that with
any medium strength or higher character and not run a significant
chance of someone noticing that your personality is different. A few
well-placed shrubbings has taught most people not to try and waste
their money that way.

--matt

_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev