Juponen wrote: »

Game balance today rewards giving it time and effort. Bringing out-of-game reasons as to why someone gives it time and effort is, well, bringing real life issues into a thread that IS about gamebalance..

"time and effort" is just playing. It's not work, it's not really even effort, it's playing. Those with the most time to play, a form of entertainment, wins.

That isn't balance.

how does someone elses gold affect ur game? What you get jealous of their inventory bag and horse? Come on for all I know everyone has a million gold. Who cares? wow they can buy all the best stuff and blah blah blah. People will play their way regardless of how much in game currency they have. How is it even pay to win anyway? You telling me I cant make level 50 and finish end game because I dont add real life money to it.

Bromiscuous wrote: »

A better solution is a chat filter program. Normal people never use the terms "gold" "selling" "USD/EUR" and website names in the same sentence, so when the program detects things like that being said it filters and kicks the player. Seriously whens the last time you said anything remotely close to what the spammers say, there is no way innocent people will get caught in this.

Problem is, even gold sellers don't use gold selling any more. Now it's G.o.L.D or G,O<L[D or G^O-%L>D

They just keep changing it

anfmofo wrote: »

how does someone elses gold affect ur game? What you get jealous of their inventory bag and horse? Come on for all I know everyone has a million gold. Who cares? wow they can buy all the best stuff and blah blah blah. People will play their way regardless of how much in game currency they have. How is it even pay to win anyway? You telling me I cant make level 50 and finish end game because I dont add real life money to it.

It becomes an issue in the secondary market. If gold has an actual monetary value associated with it, and there is a means of introducing it into the economy that's independent of items, and limited only by a whale's bank account... Actually, let's take a step back.

With the duping bug, items were introduced into the in game economy. This caused a crash in values for some high demand items. I'm already seeing the legendary upgrade tokens at 8k, but while the duping was going on, I saw them as low as a couple hundred.

The issue was, even though you could use the duping bug to generate currency, it was also tied to the generation of new items. So, the items themselves became devalued. There were simply more desirable items in circulation.

But, if you simply introduce gold into the economy, you'll see an increase in secondary market prices. The easiest one to point to is the motif books. These are things where, you could simply want the style for yourself, and it's not jealousy. But, unless you are lucky or persistent, you probably won't find the ones you want.

Now, if someone can simply buy gold, from Bethesda, the value of motif books (and everything else on the secondary market will go up). There's now a real $ value associated with them, and if someone is willing to throw the cash at it, then someone else will cough one up eventually.

But, if 1k gold only represents 2 dollars, then you can bet players will cough up a couple bucks, depleting the market. The result is, people will charge more for style books, $5, $10... whatever they feel is reasonable. But, now, that style book costs 5k gold. Which, for low and mid level characters, is a much bigger chunk of change.

This in turn, encourages them to cough up some cash, buy the gold, and then get the book, rather than just grinding up the gold the old fashioned way.

Now, over time, it creates an inflation, where the secondary market works on a scale of gold that cannot be obtained through normal gameplay. Then, if you need something and can't get it as a drop, you find yourself presented with a "pay or get out" wall.

It's supply and demand, at it's worst.

EDIT: I skimmed over another part.

With a system like this, gold sinks now work to Bethesda's advantage. Right now, if you're upgrading your bank, that's a gold transaction. It's in game currency, and there's no incentive for Zenimax to fudge the numbers in order to disrupt game balance.

But, if they're also selling gold, suddenly it is in their best interest to inflate these numbers.

You can actually look at Dead Space 3, and all of the controversy around it's launch, if you want an idea of what this looks like.

Arthur_Spoonfondle wrote: »

No point trying to ban the spammers, They will always find ways around the bans as long as people are buying gold.

The bots can be, at least, reduced by instancing all dungeons and adding a lock-out timer.

Squeeze out the gold sellers by banning inter-account gold transactions, including between a player's own accounts and restricting the amount of gold a player can move, between his or her own characters, within one account, on a per day basis. Not sure whether this will work but, I think it might be worth a try.

I don't think those would work, but, I do think large transactions, or excessive farming triggering a "flagged for review" status might be a good idea. Obviously, this could already be happening, and the erroneous bans are just human error.

I don't understand why people care about gold sellers. I play MMO´s since more than 15 years and never bought a piece of copper and still managed to survive. You can get gold by playing the game, its not mandatory to buy anything.

However, if you add a shop system like with GW2 then the optional shopping will become mandatory, as the whole game will then be balanced around the shop.

That's why SWTOR or GW2 are such horrible games and unless you pay unplayable.

The real problem with gold selling/buying is that it skews the economy. It skews the in-game market as all that gold is injected into the economy. Anyone who's NOT also buying gold is punished by prices skyrocketing to account for the influx of gold.

The only way you can afford items is if you are buying gold out of game because you simply cannot farm fast enough in-game.

Whether you can afford to buy it out of game or not isn't the question. Some of us, like myself, don't WANT to buy gold. We want to earn everything in-game. In fact, the point of playing the game at all is to achieve things within the game world itself, not outside of it.

You gold buyers are simply making it even harder for us to earn it legitimately.

Want to save up to buy that legendary mat? It now costs 1M gold each instead of something more reasonable like 10-20K gold. (they are way cheaper right now because of duped mats)

No.

Better solution is bans for Sellers and Buyers. This "suggestion" is either a misguided suggestion (that'll kill economy), or just another Buyer looking to avoid a ban.

Tweek wrote: »

Everyones a gold buyer that is okay with this stuff right?

You tell me.

Tweek wrote: »

I don't buy gold(although I have in MMO's before)

Gold is mostly useless in this game, I don't understand why all the debate, just ban botters and gold sellers as they appear and call it good. Everything else is over reactionary at this point.

phOnyUK wrote: »

erm, its what? mostly useless? send me yours then cos the repair bills are killing me

You repair your stuff? there's no point repairing anything till you near level cap when you get stuff you actually gonna keep, I didn't repair once while I was leveling, just crafted stuff and used quest gear, when something wore out I just deconed it or used it for research. I had nearly 100k or so by my first vet rank.

phOnyUK wrote: »

Not any more but before I understood the waste of time it was I did, either way I wouldnt call gold mostly useless.

I'm curious, what do you spend your gold on, in my case I really don't see what gold is useful for, mats are easy to come by, I got 2 bag and 2 bank upgrades any more seemed superfluous, already had the imperial mount so I didn't need a horse, I honestly can't see why anyone would need much gold outside of wanting a horse.

SuicideDonkey wrote: »

Gold is mostly useless in this game, I don't understand why all the debate, just ban botters and gold sellers as they appear and call it good. Everything else is over reactionary at this point.

Yup

Tweek wrote: »

starkerealm wrote: »

Tweek wrote: »

Everyones a gold buyer that is okay with this stuff right?

You tell me.

Tweek wrote: »

I don't buy gold(although I have in MMO's before)

There are others on here with the same thought process as me that have not bought gold.

Also please read - I don't buy gold

I did read.

I'm not going to drag you out as a strawman and pound on you.

The short version, if you didn't see, read, or understand the longer post above is this. If Zenimax introduces a mechanic for selling gold, it is in their interest to push that as much as possible, meaning that gold available through normal play would be at risk of being reduced, or gold costs for items would raise.

We already see the risk of this in the horse pricing. 40k gold is a ridiculous figure for a new player, but for just $15 you can have a horse for 1g...

A more insidious possibility would be drastically reducing the availability of lockpicks, while pushing their prices through the roof. If a pick cost you 1000g... suddenly every treasure chest on the map becomes a real money sink for Zeni.

So you can spend your in game currency on a chance for items that you can't really vendor for nearly what a pick cost. Or, you can buy gold from Zeni and use real money to open those chests.

Again, don't think this would happen? Go look at Dead Space 3. Do the math on how many ration seals you need to get one $2 grab bag through normal gameplay. (~6 hours, IIRC)

Is that really the game you want to be playing?

I guess I'm a bit of a trendsetter now.. I'm proud of you guys!