Sony's Station Exchange

I've never actually bought an in-game item or cash in an MMORPG...but I see no problem with folks who do. Ive yet to hear a compelling arguement that made me change my opinion.

1. I hear people all day saying its "stupid". Well, whatever you like, I think its stupid...does saying really accomplish anything? Who cares if you think this or that is stupid? Maybe a 10 year old...Oh, btw, you're stupid just because I think so.

2. Some people say "but these things aren't real". So? Just about every person on the internet is guilty of this. If you've bought a subscription to a website, paid to download a digital music file, or paid to download a game (halflife 2 steam)...guess what? You just bought something that does not exist in the phyiscal world.

3. Or "it messes up the game's economy" you say. This shouldnt be an issue for you...especially if you are part of example number 2 mentioned above. Why should you care? I thought it wasnt real anyway? Whats the harm in messing up a fake economy? Oh thats right...looks like it does matter to you after all. Why do you care about fake stuff? Didn't we already label this as "stupid"?

Models were quickly and poorly done,
Everything in the world was 'instanced',
The World had a complete lack of detail,
Zones were very small and TONS of loading,

These are the reasons why I cancelled within the first month,

Now they're gonna massacre the in-game economy?
EQ2 imo is going no where...

You lead a sad, sorry existence if you actually go and spend real money on a ficticious item for a video game.

I hope this isn't a sign of the future, but rather a passing fad.

Imagine this scenario in BF:1942. "For sale! HOT! HOT! HOT! Brand new, freshly spawned in Tiger tank! Mint condition! Location: Arnhem. Starting bid: $100"

Pretty absurd huh?

You know what Sony should do? Allow people to transfer their WoW characters over to a similar level-ed EQ2 character.

You're all missing the point. The reason for an official service like this is all about cutting down on customer service problems. Currently, any real-cash transaction for a game like this happens through eBay, PlayerAuction, or some similar service. The buyer and seller come to an agreement then cash is exchanged, this happens entirely outside the game in question. At that point the players log in their characters, the seller gives his item to the buyer, and the deal is complete.

The problem here is, there's a huge break right in the middle there. Either the item is exchanged first, or the cash is exchanged first -- but both are independant and nonsecure, so it's totally good faith that the second half of the transaction will happen at all. Plenty of times, somebody's out the rip the other off, and when that happens there's a good chance they're going to call your CS department to handle it, despite the fact you had nothing to do with this deal at all.

So now you've got some CS guy that you're paying good money to keep your customers happy, and he's just been saddled with either a he said/she said problem or an entirely fictitious story about how player B stole my item. This burns a bunch of his time working out what the hell actually happened -- or maybe he's successfully been lied to and is inadvertantly ripping off one side or the other.

This is the real reason most of these games disallow this sort of item selling. It gives the hapless CS guy an out, once he figures out what's going on, he can say "Sorry, we don't handle that" and hang up on you. Still an unhappy customer, and the fact you don't allow it means he'll have to work through the cover stories first.

If you hosted your own service -- and keep in mind players are selling items for cash anyway, whether you approve or not -- then you can keep the transaction entirely secure by handling both sides. You take the cash from player A, give it to player B, then take player B's item in the database and move it to player A, and the deal's done. No questions and no risk about who's ripping off who, and as a bonus fewer customer service problems. I'm surprised this is the first of the major players to take the step, because they can make some extra income with the service, and solve some outstanding problems at the same time. It's basically a win-win from that perspective.

The downside is that it's not really in the spirit of these games, but the fact players are already making these deals by the tens of thousands suggests they don't feel too strongly on that.

Out of curiousity how would WoW players feel about Blizzard doing something like this?

This is going to be the suck because I doubt very many people will sell anything on the ingame AH.

I wish players didn't want it, but as they do I can see why SOE is doing this.

It's kinda nuts though and going to be interesting to see how much people are willing to spend when it can all be tracked legitimately.

I wonder how many people SOE have working on the various elements of EQ2, they seem determined to catch up with WoW by sheer man power, extra content, adventure packs, expansions, extra UI's or things like this they seem to be pushing pretty hard.