[MUD-Dev] Blacksnow revisted

[Damion Schubert]

>From Daniel Harman

> 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.

The problem here is not the reselling of accounts, but the fact that
advancement in most of these games is so dull that it can be
described as a 'production line' =).

Anytime you have players who have to compete for each other for a
spot in line in order to get a drop/spawn/resource/whatever, you
will get resentment between the people who don't have time to play
these games, and the people that do.  If you take away the ability
to resell a character, people will resent those who take a spawn
solely to help out a guildmate who can't play as often, or sell it
to an NPC just for plat, or even just throw it in the bank since you
already have something better (i.e.  you're just a collector).

More succinctly put, if Player A wastes Player B's time on something
that does not help Player A's character, Player B will grow
resentful.  Ebay is just one possible output for Player A.  The
right solution, IMHO, is to prevent Player A from wasting Player B's
time.

> 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.

If this is true (and I do believe that this happened in EQ), then I
would argue that banning account resale is addressing a symptom
without solving the problem.  The real solution: make a better
treadmill.

--d
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