Unbefoockinglievable. I thought Progress Quest was pretty funny as a parody of treadmill games. Likewise, I know that people have, in fact, paid good money to buy level gazillion characters so they can do… whatever… it is that high-level characters do.
But this? If I’m reading this right, you can actually pay people to play a character up to the level you want? I can see the social aspect of these games (though I haven’t played any) but if you’ve got a 100th level character and no hands-on skill aren’t you going to suffer compared to the very people you’re running with?
Y’know, if the companies that run these online games had any sense, they’d get in on this action. I know I’d go for it.
Eh. It’s prettty dumb, IMHO, and no way in bloody hell am I paying someone else to play my game, but it’s their money. It’s definitely a disadvantage to have a high level without the proper experience and mental seasoning to go with it, but I guess some people don’t mind being fast-tracked.
Well, a lot of the low-end content can be really boring if you’ve played through it several times already and just want to try a different character or whatever.
Or maybe you want to play with some higher-level friends but can’t catch up to them quickly enough.
Yeah, you might know less than a real player, but who cares? If you’re having fun and other groups are dumb enough to accept you…
I know Sony is setting up some of the Everquest 2 servers to allow players to auction off items securely for real money. And of course, Sony gets a cut of the auction money.
Sheesh, before EQ 2 came out, and I was still actively playing EQ1 you know how many offers I got for my 65 pally, 65 enchanter and 65 cleric? They wanted to buy the chanter and cleric to be buff-bots…and we are talking about $500 each for the cleric and chanter, and 250 for the pally…
Yeah, there has been auctioning off of characters (illegally) for years. I don’t really want to play on a server with high level purchased characters, but I think on EQ2 they are letting us vote on each server as to whether we want to allow it on our server or not (I didn’t read the details, just when I got a pop up box asking if I was for or against it, I voted against). I hope that they give us the option to move to a non-player bought server if we want to, though…
Other than that, I say it’s a good business move. People are going to do it no matter how hard you crack down on them - may as well get a cut of the profits and cater to those who think it’s okay. Just give me my “work from the ground up only” server and I won’t complain.
Actually, when they first made the announcement, the plan was to start with a few new servers that would utitlize the SONY sanctioned auction service and then poll the players about the idea of converting old servers. They’ve since come to their senses (a bit at least) and stated that no previously existing servers will be changed to allow for the auctioning service.
The issue I have with this mindset, specifically regarding EQ2 and SOE as a whole, is that for years SOE publicly condemned the practice in EQ1 and banned accounts that were caught, now they’ve suddenly changed their stance on a pretty big issue.
The justification that I’ve been given for this is that people are going to do this auctioning anyway, and that SOE may as well make it as secure as possible for their customers. However, since they’re only doing this on a select few servers, I fail to see this making a difference. It doesn’t seem likely to me that everyone with the urge to purchase characters, items, or whatever will move to a server that sanctions auctions (especially if their friends don’t want to move). So there will still be auctioning going on across all servers, not just the ones that are specifically allowing it.
Also, the extreme skeptic in me has a hard time believing that this SOE auction service has anything to do with the safety of the customer. They’re in it for the pure profit. Yes, I realize that they’re a business, and they’re trying to make as much money as possible, but they’ve really been going over the line on some of their money-grubbing schemes. The flood of unfinished expansions that were rushed to the stores before fixing the previous broken expansion releases in EQ1 and the silly extra services they keep offering for additional subscription fees have left a bad taste in my mouth.
I am just skeeved out at the thought of selling off my characters, they are a part of me…i would be horrified to have someone trash MY hard earned reputation for fairness, and honor. I was always skeeved off when I ran into someone I hadn’t seen playing for a long time and discovered that they had sold their characters and weren’t ‘themselves’ any longer=(
SOE sees that the market for pixel property is not going away, but growing larger. Years ago, it was found that game currency was selling on E-bay at higher rates than some real world currencies. Over the past couple years, there are a couple companies who have almost cornered the market in online sales of pixel property and the situation is only getting worse. The companies are, keeping in mind that the transactions are against the EULAs of most games, honest. However, some of the people who “sell” things through these companies (and E-bay) are not. After receiving money they proceed to claim their accounts or items were stolen (I was hacked!!) and the buyer usually ends up being the loser.
Will SOE’s idea of sanctioning such sales on special servers put those companies out of business or stop the dishonest players from doing what they do? Probably not. There will still be people on regular servers that will occassionally want to purchase some kind of pixel property and they will still be accommodated (or ripped off).
It’s interesting to see how the online gaming world is maturing.
Another reason Sony’s doing this is, they say, 40% of their customer service time was spent on clearing up the fraud from these pixel-property-sales-gone wrong. So yes although they want to make money off the auction sales, there is also a strong business case for just killing the fraud and lightening the burden on customer service.