Wow. It's already begun. LOOK!

And that's one reason why I quit SWG and am eagerly awaiting my copy of GW to arrive....

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...sPageName=WDVW
this is even worse. Honestly if anyone is willing to pay that much money just for a game they really need to re-evaluate their life, or Donate all their millions to better causes.

Huh, odd, the er, person with

can't even spell.

What is it, exactly that you are buying there?

Wow, the value of a bow like that is only 66? I expected 5 times that!

Might want to clarify that I got it during the last BWE...values are different now, and the item isn't even 11010010 anymore...just a memory (til i find a new one!)

We can discuss this, but do not put up any more links to sellers (including eBay).

I really can't believe that anyone would pay money to get weapons for a game or any one to expecting some one to buy it. I mean it's riddiculous. Stupid people selling virtual weapons.

There really is no market for online AHing in guild wars. The game is built around the casual player and with the level 20 limit and the fact weapons are not game breakers like they can be in other games there will be very few people looking to spend money on items and characters.

Question: can't Arenanet easily catch people who do this? Specific website are different, but wouldn't Ebay be easyer?

Whats so illegal about this? Nothing.

If an item like that is worth 8 hours to get to you, and $20 for another person, what does it matter? It's just time.

I personally am going to try to sell some items (And then GW will be like a free game for me.)

It doesn't ruin your experience.

It doesn't wreck the econ.

Get over it.

The problem is they cant do anything about it. Many companies have tried to shut down such auctions legally but it is at best very difficult. The companies can claim to own the virtual property but the sellers are simply selling their time - the time it took to find/collect the item. They cannot be sued for selling their time.

Edit:You are wrong about selling items not damaging the in-game economy. Lets say a person buys 1 million gold. They can now beat any price anyone can offer. They then purchase an item for a rediculous amount of gold. The seller then, thinking he can keep his prices at that range, continues to advertise the prices at such a level. More sellers see this, and they too raise their prices. Soon people cannot buy anything unless they have a rediculous sum of money.

- Kcha

The only reason companies try to shut this down is because they wish they could sell items but they can't, so they dislike people selling something they can't sell and getting money for it. Let me give you an analogy:

A guy has a farm, for $50 you can go in and pick your own berries for as long as you want. Now, you can't then just start going outside of your farm and start selling your berries, because that wouldn't make sense. Yet some people will pick their berries, go outside, and sell them to others. Would you be mad if someone did that?

But in the end, there's nothing wrong with doing this. The whole world is pretty much capitalistic, so anything goes in business. People need to calm down and stop saying that this is wrong because it ruins the game, it doesn't. You are just jealous that one person can get an item that you would have to spend 20 hours for in a few minutes by spending cash. Sure, you could do that, but I find it more rewarding to find it the item myself.

The very thing that you didnt read, the thing that you had to say ok to in order to play the game.

Thats whats illegal about it.

Garric, I am not saying it is totaly unethical. I have sort of/kind of had thoughts of doing it myself. Thing is, I thought that the company that owns the video game could track somebody down (on ebay) and when they find who is selling and buying, kick them off the game.

The amount of money earned through these auctions is spare change to them in comparison to the amount of money they could potentially be losing. If the economy is artificially inflated by people buying gold, the prices of everything reaches a level that is impossible to achieve as a casual/hardcore gamer who doesnt farm 24/7. This could potentially turn people off to the game and stop them from buying any future expansions (most like) or force them to purchase gold online (unlikely as you can see from the negative responses). How much gold would have to be sold for a company to earn the amount of money losed by 100 thousand people not renewing (conservative estimate if the economy is seriously screwed up)? It is in the companies best interest to maintain a good natural in-game economy.

EDIT: individuals who sell ingame items are not the main problem IMO. It is the massive companies who shall remain unnamed that cause the game economies to faulter. To them, having a single cd key banned is really no big deal because they have hundreds of people employed to grind money or items. They are stores that most people will buy from - because 1. it is cheaper and 2. they are more reliable. They cause the most damage to the economy.

- Kcha

Good Point Kaycha. I think that is what happened to FFXI and for all I know is still going on. I stopped playing it when they nerfed the desert town fishing hole, I was a legit/nonbot fisher by the way. Right before I left, stuff was almost double for what I had payed for them. For all I know it is still going on and getting worse. This was about 5-6 months ago, anybody leave that game recently?

Sigh.

The problem has nothing to do with the buying and selling (outside the game) of gold. It has to do with inherent inflationary problems within a game's economy. Buying and selling gold is simply the most visible (and, hence, the most demonized) consequence of those problems.

To address the specific example above - it matters very little if one person (or even ten) purchase a million gp on E-bay. Sure, they might be able to beat any price in an auction, and they might temporarily inflate prices on those items they bid on. But no-one else will have that kind of cash on hand, so if the sellers keep their prices at a level only Mr. Million GP can afford, they'll quickly find that they aren't selling anything. And then prices drop. Simple supply and demand - price something outside of the range of what your demand demographic can afford, and you won't sell it.

Now, the problem comes from this : suppose there are other people who can afford those high prices - say, secondary characters for high level people, or farmers, or bots, or whatever - enough of them that sellers can still move their goods reasonably well at that price range. Then the prices stay high. And it has nothing to do with the guy that bought the million gp. What it has to do with are two separate (but linked) problems that occur in virtually every online economy.

The first is simple inflation. Game economies, by their nature, are not zero sum (nor, for that matter, are real-life economies, but to a far lesser extent). Money is created (every time you kill a mob who drops something, or complete a quest for a rewards) and it is destroyed (via certain expenses, such as consumables, or item repair, or whatnot). In every game yet written, more money is created than is destroyed. In fact, it has to be - if it were not, then resources would get continually more scarce as new players and new characters entered the game. However, it is not even true that the money supply is help constant on a per character basis (and I'm not even sure it would help if it were). So, we have inflation, which means that the longer a game runs, the more everything costs - and there is nothing anyone can do about it either way.

The second problem has to do with level-based games (and, consequently, level-based economies). In virtually every online game (GW may actually be an exception to this, but only time will tell), prices for equipment are tiered based on the level of character for which they are designed. Level 1 equipment costs less than level 20 equipment or level 60 equipment. The cost progression, much like the experience progression, is usually exponential. Likewise, the resource gathering capabilities increase exponentially (but usually on a slightly less steep curve) as level progresses.

This is an acceptable situation so long as there is relatively little economic interaction between levels. Treat each region of levels as its own mini-economy, and things work as they are supposed to. However, in practice that never happens, and there is always leakage of resources from high level characters down to low level characters, which means that there are always a significant number of low level characters who have substantially more resources at their disposal than they could be expected to acquire on their own. And it is this that causes the most problems for an economy (because it means new players are competing with high level characters for their share of low level resources).

Here, of course, is where farming, botting, and buying/selling gold cause their problems, because the end effect is to always (by one mechanism or another) provide characters with more resources than they could be expected to acquire at their level on their own. However, equally guilty (and, in my experience, far more common) are people who simply transfer gold from a high-level account to a second one when they re-roll, or guilds which provide resources to their members, or any other similar activity.

And, again, there is no way to stop this problem without totally isolating those mini-economies (which would be difficult, and probably game-breaking) or (equally game-breaking) somehow allowing new characters to compete on even ground economically with maxed-out characters. Even deleting/banning/shooting every botter/farmer/gold-seller who set foot into the game wouldn't solve the issue (and I doubt it would even make a dent).

Even after that issue is dealt with, there's still good old inflation gumming up the works. And, to be honest, this second issue isn't really an issue - it's just the mechanism by which inflation (represented primarily in the resource-gathering ability of high-level characters) causes problems; fix it, and inflation will find another route.

DEFINITLY Final Fantasy XI. There were lvl 10-25 items that were used end game. Anybody remember Emp. Hairpin or Leaping Boots? those were special items, but even lvl 25 (?) Chain Armor was a ton and was mostly expected from Warriors and Palidins.

He cannot do anything the person he bought the virtual gold from couldn't do. Player to player transactions do not add or remove anything from the game.

Sure any system that promote trade will affect the economy. But the addition of personal storage space will have a far larger effect (from low level character starting with gold collected by high level characters) than e-bay will ever have.

And an auction house as many have suggested would *really* change the economy.

I have zero problems with people trading on e-bay. I wouldn't do it myself, but I trade very little in-game anyway. The game tend to provide what you need, and I don't find trading on the spam market fun. For me, the game is about having fun.

[QUOTE=TwinRaven][CENTER][IMG]
I typically feel kinda bad salvaging high end swords and hammers and other odds and ends I can't use as a ranger...so...I, well...don't hate me...GIVE them away! I look for a lower level player and whisper to them..."here's what I got____need it? It's free. If they get a-scart (scared) I promise no curses, no strings...you'd be surprised at how many people will tell you to go away (about one in four)...but the trusting ones get rewarded with some pretty cool stuff...Sometimes they say, "No thanks, got a hammer." I say, "stats?" they say, "9-18" I say, "mine's 14-28" they say, "OMG what do you want for it?"...I say, "didn't I just tell you it's free?" I get a lot of joy from it...

I did the same thing the other night. I had tons of cloth, hides, glitter, not high level bows, but some 9-13dmg I didn't need. So I just said in trade what I had was free. Response was amazing and everyone was grateful and very nice. I didn't give them everything they needed, if they asked for 6 cloth I'd give them 3 so they wouldn't feel the questing/salavaging for 3 more was so hard. I see people selling for ridiculous prices, so I figured why not give it away?
Unrelated, I also saw a few people offering to take other to different locations for 500gp. Like, "Will take you through the breach for 500gp" That I didn't like, not when there are plenty of people willing to go and try for free.