Curse

moriz · Apr 09, 2009, 12:05 AM // 00:05

botters are not operated by ncsoft. accounts, however, are. whether you've used those services is irrelevant. sorry, proof disproved.

for anet to get into RMT, they'll need to charge ADDITIONAL money for the gold. that is, you'll need to pay an additional $$$, just to have the privilege of playing the XTH. fortunately, all you need is a valid account. you are not forced to purchase another account, or anything else, to enjoy the benefits of XTH.

there are those who abuse this by buying a large number of accounts just to cash in the XTH award. is this unintentional? yep. is this abusive? yep. can it be fixed without folding XTH completely? yep. anet has the ability to find a bot based on key input patterns, so it's a simple matter of applying the same to ban every "XTH farm" account. i have faith in anet to do so if it ever even remotely become popular. after all, they are adamant about ensuring nobody having an ingame advantage, and i've seen them go to great lengths to ensure that.

Martin Alvito · Apr 09, 2009, 12:26 AM // 00:26

It's RMT either way. Real money is exchanged for an account. The account is used solely to generate in-game gold. It's no different than if you put a bunch of gold on an account and sell me the account, except that the party collecting the money (ANet) varies and in-game cash is actually CREATED by the transaction. It's the latter half that's the problem here.

The legality has nothing to do with it. The net effect on the game is the same.

As you stated, there are a large number of ways to fix the problem. I've outlined some of them earlier. The bot trick won't work because people aren't farming it with bots. The time costs associated with collecting the rewards are negligible, so real humans do it and the movement pattern to and from NPCs varies because humans are navigating from Tolkano to the box and back (and possibly using storage as well).

If we imposed a rule where you either had to complete an easy hour-long quest or put 50k Balth on an account during the course of a month, you'd solve the problem of players purchasing additional accounts for both PvP and PvE. You'd have to either expend time used for farming (making it a net wash on profit) or play a bunch of PvP on the account to get your goodies. If you try to bot the quest and save the hour, you get banned.

ANet hasn't done that. They've been conspicuously silent on the matter. No Regina posts here about how the problem will be reviewed, is under review, or will be solved. There's reason to expect that; they're incentivized, on the face of it, to ignore the problem. It isn't a problem for them - it's a source of immediate profit.

We'll leverage the revealed preference axiom. They haven't fixed the problem because they prefer not to. They're making money, right?

Trouble is, they're alienating savvy players that can see through to the real effects of XTH. This hurts them in two ways. First, those players are profitable players that play games seriously and buy maximum margin products. Second, these players are serious gamers and are therefore opinion leaders that influence others' decisions about what games to purchase. The problem is that ANet is undermining their credibility here. They've crusaded against RMT extensively...except when it happens to benefit them.

There are three clear reasons that ANet could be playing this strategy. Either they can't reason through to the consequences, they're broke and desperate to survive until GW2's release, or they're in a position where they're stuck on their contracts with retailers and need to move existing inventory.

If it's #1, something might eventually be done. If it's #2, we're stuck. If it's #3, something will eventually be done once the boxes ship. But #3 is relatively unlikely.

moriz · Apr 09, 2009, 12:35 AM // 00:35

anet can also keep track of accounts logged in and out from any ip address. banning such accounts is a simple matter of looking in the log to see if a bunch of unique accounts all logs in around the same time on a single IP, all of them collecting their zkeys, and then all of them trading to one account. it's certainly possible to dodge such a ban procedure, but the sheer inconvienence is going to deter almost anyone who does this.

i had already made it clear that anet is not lacking money; they've doubled their staff over the last year or so, AND they are making the de facto flagship franchise of ncsoft west. they've secured as much money as they'll reasonably need.

with greed explained away, i suppose the only reason why anet hasn't done anything about it, is because its not very widespread.

wu is me · Apr 09, 2009, 12:39 AM // 00:39

Quote:

Originally Posted by moriz

your real-world analogy still does not work, simply because real-world economies also factor in such things as debt and credit. GW does not have those things in place, so only a tiny subset of real-life economic law applies. unfortunately for you, all the examples you've drawn are outside of that subset.

Just clarifying one more time.
ALL real world models are constructing from abstract simple models. That is, they start off in a simplistic economy where debt and credit do not exist, then then once an accurate model has been proven for the simplistic case, further complications are introduced. Thus theoretical Economics will usually be sound analogy for modeling in game economy.

Martin Alvito · Apr 09, 2009, 12:50 AM // 00:50

The signs you (moriz) indicate about ANet's spending prove nothing. Suppose that you're cash strapped and facing insolvency in a year. Your only hope of survival is to release the next game and get the cash windfall before your creditors liquidate you.

You are presently two years away from being able to release a product that will sell. Do you:

a) incur additional expenses by doubling staff and gamble for resurrection? You fail harder if you fail but salvage some small probability of succeeding and surviving. It's unlikely that the people you hire can cut development time by over half, but you never know.

b) do nothing? You fail for certain.

Bankruptcy laws in the US always incentivize companies to do a), since the banks are the ones that eat the losses. Back when I was a lender, I never had a customer with a credit card that failed to max it out before filing for bankruptcy.

Further, you have not disproven hypothesis #1. More revenue = bigger bonuses in the short run. If I were ANet's sales manager, I'd block any efforts to shut off this revenue flow. I'd make more bonus money, and if long-run sales dropped I could always transfer my skills elsewhere to someone who could pay me my market value.

moriz · Apr 09, 2009, 01:38 AM // 01:38

didn't i just prove that since anet is making the flagship franchise for ncsoft west, that there is NO WAY that anet is short on money?

lastly, you have no idea whether anet operates in that manner.

Martin Alvito · Apr 09, 2009, 03:04 AM // 03:04

No, you didn't. NCSoft has made some poor acquisitions. The result is that they're hemmorhaging cash. If you look at their most recent balance sheet, the amount of cash on hand (in the form of cash and short term investments) dropped by 20% in 2008. The amount of assets dropped by 15%. Those signs make me a bit edgy. Profit is also falling rapidly, implying that the situation is likely to start getting worse for creditors rather than better in the near term.

We don't know the precise terms of their financing arrangements; that's privileged information. The usual US terms are lines of credit that have to be refinanced each year. I don't know what the usual South Korean terms are; I would assume they are similar until shown otherwise. If I'm a creditor, I'm very edgy about refinancing a 12 month revolving line of credit for this company. I would rather spend my capital on better risks.

However, they don't carry a lot of debt, and the value of short-term assets greatly exceeds the amount of total liabilities. Barring an extreme shift in their revenue structure in 2009, they should be OK. In an extreme scenario, they have to pay off all of their debt (quite unlikely), sell their treasury stock and still cough up a bunch of cash this year, yet are still solvent and likely to be able to eat a year or two of losses.

That's proof that ANet is likely to be OK. "Because they're the flagship" is not. GM's truck lines are their flagship products, but they still go down with the ship if GM files.

moriz · Apr 09, 2009, 04:15 AM // 04:15

if ncsoft goes down, all the major studios will line up and open their bankaccounts to acquire anet and the guild wars franchise.

we're talking about the second largest MMO in the world here, with a fairly large following. the GW franchise is quite valuable.

btw, if XTH disappears and zkeys suddenly x10 in price, it wouldn't help gvgers at all. this is because items worth 4-5k is very easy to move, where as items in the 40k-50k are not. this will simply lead to a ton of keys gathering dust, since there are only a handful of people with the money to buy them in significant quantities.

factor in that XTH merely gives a second stream of zkeys. this can potentially give gvgers double the income, as well as making keys easy enough to move in bulk. basically, there's no reasonable argument why removing XTH benefits anyone.

wu is me · Apr 09, 2009, 04:26 AM // 04:26

Quote:

Originally Posted by moriz

if ncsoft goes down, all the major studios will line up and open their bankaccounts to acquire anet and the guild wars franchise.

we're talking about the second largest MMO in the world here, with a fairly large following. the GW franchise is quite valuable.

btw, if XTH disappears and zkeys suddenly x10 in price, it wouldn't help gvgers at all. this is because items worth 4-5k is very easy to move, where as items in the 40k-50k are not. this will simply lead to a ton of keys gathering dust, since there are only a handful of people with the money to buy them in significant quantities.

factor in that XTH merely gives a second stream of zkeys. this can potentially give gvgers double the income, as well as making keys easy enough to move in bulk. basically, there's no reasonable argument why removing XTH benefits anyone.

RoflWTF!
Problem: Keys become less liquid at 40k a pop.
Solution:...

Step 1: Go to kamaden
Step 2:"WTS zkey 20k!"
Step 3:????
Step 4: profit?

Sold...

Noobs these days.

lewl

Martin Alvito · Apr 09, 2009, 04:33 AM // 04:33

Do you think that ANet wants to surrender the control that it has right now? If they could create a revenue stream that would avoid a bankruptcy and the resultant loss of control, they'd absolutely do it.

Again, this is likely academic because the financials suggest an NCSoft bankruptcy is a highly unlikely outcome in the near term.

If you don't fail at GvG, you make a lot more than 10-20 zkeys per month. Simply doubling the price of keys would make you better off if XTH were removed.

I can't see zkeys going to 40-50k. 10k or so is a more realistic ceiling for the value after an XTH elimination. Even if they were to go to 40-50k, they'd still be easy enough to liquidate. You'd be stunned at how fast you can move into and out of a stack of ecto in 100k increments, if you ever tried it. You don't have to price very far off the "market" price to make those transactions instantaneous. If you sell at 24 or buy at 22, you can pretty much sell or buy a stack instantly. All you'd have to do is accept 36k instead of 40k for your zkey if you were impatient. There are plenty of people out there that make their in-game money off these sorts of arbitrage opportunities, and will be happy to provide cash for discounted shinies.

**cosyfiep** · Apr 09, 2009, 12:32 PM // 12:32

my opinion of the xth....its helping me get my HoM filled faster since I get to merch all the golds I get from the keys, I am getting closer to my titles too---wisdom, drunkard and sweet tooth while the cash helps for the armor and stupid ugly weapons.

Martin Alvito · Apr 09, 2009, 12:42 PM // 12:42

Yes, cosyfiep, it LOOKS like the XTH is helping you. My central point of contention is that unless you are in the small subset of players buying tons of accounts, own super-rare minis, or hardly play but still remember to do XTH, you're actually a loser here.

XTH is distorting markets such that to benefit you would either have to get a ton of keys from it, already own things worth a ton of keys, or only make a tiny amount of in-game stuff from play every month. It helps the few at the expense of the many and serves as a form of RMT, with all the associated nefarious effects.

moriz · Apr 09, 2009, 02:23 PM // 14:23

Quote:

Originally Posted by wu is me

RoflWTF!
Problem: Keys become less liquid at 40k a pop.
Solution:...

Step 1: Go to kamaden
Step 2:"WTS zkey 20k!"
Step 3:????
Step 4: profit?

Sold...

Noobs these days.

lewl

then someone else tries to undersell that and go for 10k, and then someone else tries to undersell that and goes for 5k.... gee, we're right back where we started, except with a lot less keys.

noobs these days.

lulwut.

and to martin: you and i have a different notion of "winning" and "losing" then. to me, and to the majority of the players, paying actual money for a rather questionable ingame advantage is losing. i'd rather use that money and buy myself a nice dinner, or a better keyboard, or save it up for a computer upgrade, or even buy a new game.

btw, your market analogy fails to take into account how gold is created, and where it will eventually go. gold in GW is generated by monster drop, or by trading in something to one of the traders. zkeys do not generate gold. minis do not generate gold. that voltaic spear/obsidian edge that everyone's hunting after, those also do not generate gold. gold is destroyed if someone use it to buy something from the traders, such as runes, dyes, materials, and armor/weapon crafting. it is also effectively gone if someone let it sit in storage. for the former, that gold is gone forever and you'll never get it back, even if you sell the items you've bought. for the former, it is effectively gone until that person decides to buy something, in which case the gold will eventually get stored again, or used to buy something from the merchants and is gone.

the problem with your comparison is that you are assuming zkeys actually represent gold in the game engine. that is, you think zkeys actually cause the game to CREATE 4k. instead, it does not. pumping a zillion zkeys into the game is the equivalent of writing off a zillion blank checks. money is shifted around, but none is actually created. this of course, cause no overall change to the game economy.

therefore, an item such as zkeys, which do not generate gold in game, but is used as currency, will only cause the market to shift. you said it yourself that common items are likely to drop in price or remain stable, and ultra rare items tends to rise in price. that is not something to be concerned of. prices change over time by themselves, even without zkeys. overall, zkeys cause no change to the market as a whole, though it does change the demographics of the market.

zkey prices have been overinflated, and it is slowly going back down. even without the keys generated by XTH every month, its price will go down, though maybe slower. i personally do not see this as a problem. zkeys are always profitable, and even if my monthly allowance falls off too much, i can easily use the gold i have and reinvest it in something else, and generate profit that way.

Martin Alvito · Apr 09, 2009, 05:45 PM // 17:45

moriz, you reveal the issues that prevent you from understanding what is going on in this most recent post. Once again, you simply misunderstand how to map economics onto the game. If I take the logic of your argument and apply it to other situations, one implication is that the dupe of ectos and armbraces should not have impacted in game prices. Since that is just patently false, it follows logically that your argument is false.

If the market value of a zkey is 4k, then you have created 4k out of thin air by creating a new zkey. Why? There's a ton of gold, zkeys, ecto and armbraces in circulation already. Printing one more has no discernible marginal impact upon the cash value of all the other zkeys. Change the rates at which they are created or destroyed relative to the rate of gold creation in the game, and you will alter the value of the currency in question in the long run. This takes time, though, because of the sheer volume of zkeys and gold in the system. Change players' perceptions of those currencies' value, and you alter the value of those currencies in the short run. (We call these instances booms and panics.) Add one more key? All you did was cause the money supply to grow by 4k.

Your answer to wu is me is just bad. If the market value of the key is 40k, and you sell it for 20k, the guy that bought it can still turn around and sell the key for 40k. You dumped the key at 20k because it wasn't worth your time (to you) to sit there spamming the item. However, someone willing to invest the time in getting top dollar can still get 40k for the item. All that happened in this story is you revealed that you have a higher time price for selling items than most players. The underlying market value for the item was not affected.

Players accept zkeys as currency because they have three desirable properties: they stack, they rarely change in value rapidly and they can enable players to get around the 100k maximum in the trade window. If I drop 20 zkeys into your inventory, you can now pay 80k more for a single item than you previously could. You're fundamentally richer by 80k, and you don't have to convert the zkeys into gold to realize the change. Stubborn seller that won't take zkeys? Trade the zkeys for ecto, pay in ecto. Both the zkey and ecto markets are highly liquid. Problem solved.

Here's how this affects prices. The value of in-game items is determined by supply and demand, right? Supply increases when more of the items in question are dropped. Demand increases when players have more money in their wallets, because it increases players' ability to pay for items. If you give everyone more money, prices rise relative to what they would be in the absence of that additional money. The fact that zkeys are converted to gold items by players ameliorates this effect somewhat on the prices of items that drop from the zchest, but does not on other items.

However, most players are bad at trading, right? As a result, if you give everyone more money, it makes the wealthiest players able to extract more from other players by providing liquidity services (buying low) and selling assets at the top of the market.

The upshot is that prices on expensive items rise very quickly, because players that can afford such items can make more money per transaction than they could before. So the capacity constraint loosens by a great deal, which drives up prices, and the cycle repeats.

This is why RMT is bad. By dumping large quantities of money into the economy, it disrupts markets. All that changing the TYPE of money printed does is alter what items are affected. If you print gold, different items' prices are affected than if you print zkeys.

I don't get your statement about winning and losing. I think it's a net loss to purchase accounts to play XTH. But not everyone else does. Once again, you're confused about preferences. The problem is that some subset of players greater than zero prefers to spend money on accounts that give them in-game goodies. These players receive LARGE numbers of zkeys monthly, and distort markets severely when they throw their weight around by buying things with all those keys.

You can draw no inferences about zkeys' prices being overinflated from the data. The market value is likely to fall somewhat when the monthly tonics recycle, but the net impact of the tonics on the expected cash value of a zkey is small. My sense is that players will misvalue the impact and that the price will settle at around 3-3.5k.

You're still wrong about whether you benefit from XTH. If in the alternate reality with no XTH prices of zkeys double, and you make more zkeys from PvP play as you did from XTH each month, you are better off in the alternate reality. XTH screws over regular PvP players pretty thoroughly.

moriz · Apr 09, 2009, 06:06 PM // 18:06

the duping of ectos did raise the amount of gold, and directly affected inflation. ectos after all, directly generate around 3k-4k each. the duping of armbraces merely raised the expectation of the amount of gold. the actual amount of gold did not change. the total change from duping ectos would affect prices permanently, if not corrected. the total change from duping armbraces is however, not permanent. of course, this is assuming a long time passes. the amount of gold in game is vast, so all the duping of armbraces is expose that there's too much gold in the market, and better money sinks should be added.

my comment about winning/losing is taking into the account of the COST of having more money. does doubling my ingame income worth the loss of $$$ that i have to spend into the game? generally, from a gameplay perspective, no. i'd rather that money goes towards something else. and i'm quite confident that the majority of players would agree. if there are people who wants to spend that kind of money, i doubt it will affect the gameplay value enough for enough people to matter. that's what you'll have to convince me of, btw. so far, you haven't done so for me at least.

Martin Alvito · Apr 09, 2009, 07:06 PM // 19:06

The fact that I know players that have bought 10+ accounts specifically to play XTH proves conclusively that at least some subset of players prefers in-game money via XTH purchase to IRL money at current account costs. The existence of online gold sellers also proves conclusively that some players prefer to spend IRL money for in-game gold.

It doesn't have to be the case that the majority of players prefer to do this to screw up the markets. You just need a decent-sized minority that's willing to pay a lot. Most players never engaged in RMT, yet botters screwed up markets.

In many ways, XTH is more efficient than an online gold seller. If you average 20 keys per month, the cost of an XTH account is $10 and the cost of 1000k is $80, you've come out ahead in a year. Now, you have to be willing to wait to recoup the full costs of your investment, so you can't have a hugely discounted future value on the keys.

It doesn't matter whether there's a trader where you can dump your ectos if the market for the item is liquid. It's dumb to trader ectos when you can go to Kamadan AD1, spam WTS ectos 24/100k, and sell them just as quickly for more money. It's also dumb to trader ectos if you already have maximum cash on your account and characters (which wealthy players generally do). All the trader does is establish the bargaining range within which buyers and sellers price the items on the secondary market.

Thus, creating extra zkeys and armbraces increases the amount of in-game currency. This doesn't affect the amount of underlying gold in the system, but major transactions aren't made in gold anyway. Note that the impact of additional ecto on the amount of gold in the system is minimal, since few players trader ecto and almost never in quantity. The market for ecto is so liquid that tradering ecto is just dumb.

A11Eur0 · Apr 09, 2009, 08:23 PM // 20:23

I keep seeing the same fallacy in all of these arguments: that zkeys are only, or even primarily used as currency. That just isn't the case. The sheer number of people using zkeys to actually open the Zaishen Chest is staggering. Hang around the RP guy a minute before RP's are released, see how many R6+ zaishen ranks get spammed in one spot...this happens in every district of GToB, LA, Kamadan that has the tourney guy. There are tons of keys being used...they're not all being hoarded and used for currency. In fact, I'd be surprised if more than 25% are.

Sure it's increasing the amount of currency in the game, but it's not as much as you're all making it out to be.

Bof · Apr 09, 2009, 08:28 PM // 20:28

"The market for ecto is so liquid that tradering ecto is just dumb." Tell that to the power traders who crashed the market at one time getting 5k for each ecto, then turned around and bought them all again for 3k.

I dont see the logic in the removal of XTH raising the price to 10k. Yes if you remove the incoming supply (partially) the price is going to raise. The price of Zkeys were at 5k... the max they would hit would be around 7k probably then deflate back down to 5k.

Martin Alvito · Apr 09, 2009, 08:33 PM // 20:33

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bof

"The market for ecto is so liquid that tradering ecto is just dumb." Tell that to the power traders who crashed the market at one time getting 5k for each ecto, then turned around and bought them all again for 3k.

Get your facts straight, please. The reason people tradered ecto after the perma SF update was because of a shift in expectations. Everyone knew that the supply was going to increase rapidly, and that the price would fall. This led to a glut of sellers and no buyers. At that point, you trader your ecto because it is suicide not to. You know the price is going down, so you rush to the trader to sell before other players *rationally* sell and drive the price down.

We call this a "panic" in economics. It is fully rational behavior given market conditions. Everyone would prefer to coordinate and not drive prices down, but individual incentives to cheat on a cooperative bargain set off the panic.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bof

I dont see the logic in the removal of XTH raising the price to 10k. Yes if you remove the incoming supply (partially) the price is going to raise. The price of Zkeys were at 5k... the max they would hit would be around 7k probably then deflate back down to 5k.

My point is that 10k is the absolute maximum ceiling that I would consider even remotely realistic. Keys were at 7k early on. You would think that in the absence of XTH 7k is the likely equilbrium, but it may be the case that the price was going to continue to rise somewhat.

Quote:

Originally Posted by A11Eur0

There are tons of keys being used...they're not all being hoarded and used for currency. In fact, I'd be surprised if more than 25% are.

Sure it's increasing the amount of currency in the game, but it's not as much as you're all making it out to be.

You just don't appreciate how many zkeys XTH dumps into the system monthly. 25% of several million is a lot of zkeys. Further, the soaring prices of certain items simply cannot be explained by any alternative hypothesis. It has to be the case that well-off and rich players are becoming richer very rapidly for prices on limited items to jump the way they have. The only possible explanation is that there are a lot more trade markers in the hands of these players. If the problem is increased ecto drop rates, why didn't this happen back before the Chaos Plains were nerfed?

wu is me · Apr 09, 2009, 10:50 PM // 22:50

Quote:

Originally Posted by moriz

then someone else tries to undersell that and go for 10k, and then someone else tries to undersell that and goes for 5k.... gee, we're right back where we started, except with a lot less keys.

noobs these days.

lulwut.

O
M
Fvking
G
!!!

Ok that clearly demonstrates your absolute, COMPLETE lack of understanding of the concept of Supply and Demand.

Well, all the points are on the table, and mr Martin's already done a good job of explaining things, I see no point in discussing with a few people who don't understand economics.