[MUD-Dev] Blacksnow revisted

[Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com]

From: Damion Schubert
> From shren

>> If I have a million dollar house next to two other million dollar
>> houses, and I sell my house to some guy on the street for 10
>> bucks and a cup of coffee, then the odds are that my old
>> neighbors are not going to be happy with thier new neighbor.  It
>> might be possible that the new resident will respect the house in
>> proportion to the value inherant in it.  It's just as likely that
>> the new resident will have wild parties at all hours and push
>> walls over just to hear the crashing sound they make.

> But the new resident did have to give something of value for it -
> he had to do some incredibly time-costly thing for you.  He has
> time but no money.

> People who buy characters for $300 do place a value on their
> characters.  Pretty explicitly, I might add.  Maybe they aren't
> the guys that organize the in-game bake sale, but they might be,
> and most people who spend $300 bucks for a character aren't likely
> to do something that will get them banned.

Leaving all this aside, if you allow account sales there is another
possible issue. People may try and turn certain areas of your game
into a production line to power level characters purely for sale. If
you have tonnes of content this may not be an issue, but given that
those making the production line are almost certain to pick the
optimal place to level, I'm fairly certain they will lock heads with
players doing the same. Its a similar problem to people farming
equipment from static rare spawns for ebay, which again damages the
majorities fun.

I don't follow DAoC that much I'm afraid, and Dave will have to
correct me if I'm wrong (and he's permitted), but I think this
happened in DAoC so they had to suspend their policy of allowing
account resale. Possibly there was more to it than that, and perhaps
an exploit was involved so I may have missed a key aspect.

Dan
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