[MUD-Dev] The Price of Being Male

[Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com]

From: Richard A. Bartle [mailto:richard at mud.co.uk]

>   9) You don't include equipment as a factor (except by not
>   accepting characters that have been stripped of it), linking
>   this to level instead. Perhaps you should have included it?
>   Maybe the equipment that typically comes with female avatars is,
>   for some reason, not as attractive to potential buyers as that
>   which typically comes with male avatars?

For an evaluation of everquest, this is a huge oversight. Level is
only very loosely coupled to equipment quality. The most expensive
characters on Playerauctions have a large set of valuable, but
droppable equipment. Their price is dictated by the vultures who
pick them clean, sell off the items individually and finally sell
the asset stripped character at a large discount.

As alluded to above, it's very hard to appraise an EQ character
because there are two markets, the asset strippers who put a premium
on equipment that is tradeable (i.e. not flagged nodrop, which is
rare for top end equipment), and people who intend to play the
avatar and will be happy enough to pay for 'no drop' equipment. To
put it in perspective, it's not atypical for a high level
character's equipment to be more valuable than the avatar. Due to
this, the asset strippers should probably be considered the primary
market who then sell on to the 'players'.

Given the two markets, I'm not entirely sure how the analysis could
be balanced without monitoring the value of items and factoring them
in. This could be performed by measuring equipment prices across
each and every server, and then indexing it against the value of
platinum pieces on that server. The latter step being necessary
because it appears to fluctuate +- 25% depending on the server
(contrast Rodcet Nife vs Kane Bayle (a newer Euro server which you
might expect to have less coinage...)). That takes care of the
primary market. One then needs to have sufficient EQ knowledge to
rank the 'no drop' stripped character's equipment in terms of
desireability so that it too may be factored into the price.

Perhaps female characters really are just less well equipped? Given
the obsessive level of play required to remedy that, I guess that's
something to be proud of, not ashamed of.

Anyway, it is a lot of work, but if you could get sales data from
the last two months from playervault, certainly not
impossible. Would be easier if Ryan S. Dancey was willing to help
I'm sure, but I imagine some form of screen scraper could get the
info out his site anyway. Alternatively, one could visit the bazarr
on each server and note the platinum value there of the items. This
could then be directly indexed against the platinum value on that
server. Of course for it to be accurate it would need to assume an
efficient market, in economi terms, and I suspect that that may not
be the case given the recent complaints of a free fall economy in
EQ[1].

Dan

[1] Until recently, there was a set of items that were extremely
resistent to mud-inflation for the last 3 years (dragon haste,
fungal tunics etc). I no longer play but apparently these have
halved in price over the last 6 months or so.
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