1901

Sorry. I’m not going to hash it out again in a long back and forth, but yes, the influx of real world currency for items will have an inflationary effect on gold prices on the gold AH. AlexB says that’s only an increase in nominal price, but to beat that, you have to buy gold with real currency to get the inflation adjusted price on gold.

If you choose not to engage in RMT, that will indeed lead to more grind than if an RMT AH had not been included, all other factors being the same.

1902

This assumes that you only ever buy items for gold. If you ever sell items for gold, however, you’ll be selling them for “inflated gold value” and it won’t matter how much gold is in the system. In the long term all this is really likely to do is to put a lot of gold in the system and trivialize the in-game gold sinks. It doesn’t matter if a UberItemX is worth 1 stone of jordan, 5 pgems, or 5,000,000 gold if you’re getting it using the proceeds that you got from selling UberItemY, an item of roughly equivalent value.

1903

Mordrak, I’m not even saying whether or not the gold prices will fluctuate due to the RMT AH. I’m disagreeing with your assertion that it will create “extra grind” for everyone.

1904

Where did I say everyone in what you responded to?

1905

That’s a fair point, but I think what will happen is that relatively common items will see minor inflation, but rarer items will see much higher inflation. If there’s a disparity in how the inflationary effects spread across the items, you could see greatly increased grind for some items. There’s no reason to assume the inflationary effect and proportions will remain even between the two systems (a system without an RMT AH, only gold and a system with both).

So if there is an inflationary disparity between different segments of the market, it absolutely does matter how much gold is in the system.

1906

You said “If you choose not to engage in RMT, that will indeed lead to more grind than if an RMT AH had not been included, all other factors being the same.” Are you saying that I, specifically, will experience this? I assumed you meant “you” as in “people”. Either way, it doesn’t matter if you mean everyone or not, but the way you’ve been stating that particular opinion suggests you feel it’s going to be pretty much universal, correct?

1907

If you choose not to engage in RMT, means anyone who doesn’t choose to engage in RMT. That’s not everyone, since obviously some people will choose to engage in RMT.

The prices on the gold AH will be universal, in that they will be the same prices for anyone using that specific AH.

1908

I’ll regret this.

Okay. So, I don’t know if there’s been a straight answer yet as to whether or not you can buy gold without going through an intermediary item, but let’s assume you can’t, since that would make sense. In that case, wouldn’t that serve as a DEflationary force on prices, because you are extracting liquidity from the market? I don’t understand where we’re perceiving any inflationary pressure whatsoever as coming from. Even if you believe that crazy people will buy junk off the money house and sell it on the gold house at exorbitant prices, those prices won’t hold unless people are willing to go out and farm for them, in which case you’re only hitting a price mark you were going to hit anyway.

More likely, I think you’re going to see a split between the money house and the gold house with little overlap in the Venn diagram. If you get an item that you can sell for money, you’re either going to be smart enough to sell it for money from the start or one of those insane people that write WoW addins to handle this sort of thing for regular humans will grab it toot sweet and move it to the money house. Reaching any conclusion as to whether and how that split in goods will break out requires us to make an assumption about the willingness of the market in general to spend money on imagination goods that aren’t even permanently useful in the game (you outgrow your gear in Diablo - you don’t keep the sword you had at level 1 all the way through).

I will say, though, that if they do let you sell characters and they don’t have the balls to let buyers check their teeth before they put in a bid, I’ll lose a little bit of respect for them. You absolutely cannot just leave that joke sitting on the sidelines. Frankie Boyle would have the sack to say it. Or I guess they could just not do it, and then they wouldn’t get in trouble, but there are so many horrible and hilarious things you could do with that situation. In fact, I think I just convinced myself that they’re probably not going to do it, since they haven’t even had the balls to let you kick a panda in the ass in the past and I don’t see how you avoid that particular area of dark humor, because I guarantee you that if they don’t make the joke I will find somebody that will.

1909

An efficient RMT AH will, over time, make things cheaper, not more expensive. This is just an obvious result of the fact that you’re increasing overall supply of everything. In many ways this will make grinds easier, not harder.

Ratios of value will certainly fluctuate if certain commodity markets saturate. It may be that the rarest items become worth more in comparison to lower tier items but this doesn’t mean “you have to grind more” really. It just means that relative values will shift over time. For example, you might get a medium tier drop. At the beginning of a ladder season that might trade for 3 lower tier items. Later on that might trade for 6 lower tier items. If you are trying to trade up, this sucks, but if you’re trying to trade down, it’s great. One person’s “grind” just got better one person’s got worse.

But in general this just makes things easier. For example, inflation in WoW makes it easier to get the gold for a mount or to acquire lower tier items because you can acquire valuable items that have retained their value and then trade down at a really good ratio. Prior to the inflation you would have worked harder to get less.

Also, if you look at WoW you tend to think that gold will lose value more than other things. However it’s important to realize that in WoW, gold has a special place as almost the only thing that is easily tradeable. The majority of valuable items in the game cannot be traded at all. With a game like D3 (which is presumably similar to D2) all items will be traded. If the rare items start to be where all the money is then people are going to spend their time farming those rather than farming the lower tier commodities which should help keep values in line.

1910

I’m sorry, but all I could think while reading this was

1911

Well first, you can buy and sell gold itself Brian.

Second, StGabe, the issue of inflation came up in the context of whether the game pushes you (or punishes you) if you choose not to use the RMT system more than if it wasn’t included. And most people, as they play the game, are going to be trading up for better gear.

Third, if the drop system is similar to Diablo 2, the kind of targeted production (I’m going to farm X boss, for Y item) won’t exist like it does in WoW.

1912

P.S. while an efficient market may make it easier to get items overall, and therefore make your grind “easier”, it could still be the case that it makes the perception of grinding difficulty seem worse. That is, as it becomes easier to get items of a certain tier, you’ll start to take that for granted, and then grind towards the higher tier stuff. Had it not been for the market you’d have had lower tier stuff and been happy but now that the market is there you start thinking, “hey I don’t just want X, I want an X with perfect stats” and the grind for that might indeed be quite difficult.

However you shouldn’t let that misguide you: the “grind” will still be easier overall. If you want a specific set of gear, having lots of people throwing that gear up on a market will make that gear more easy to acquire than it would be without that market.

1913

Well, I don’t want to spend pages upon pages rehashing it, but my original assertion to RobotPants that he was refering to was this:

Given an arbitrary desirable item X, where desirable is defined as valuable enough to be posted on the RMT AH, X’s gold price will be higher than if the RMT AH had not been included in the game. For someone who doesn’t wish to engage RMT, this will lead to a longer grind for gold on average in order to buy that item.*

But anyway, I didn’t post to start this conversation again. Sorry, bye folks.

Edit:*And to better represent the overall argument, I also asserted this would influence how they go about desigining drop rates, etc such that the inclusion of RMT itself affects everyone, whether you engage in it or not. So on multiple fronts, RMT affects even non-RMT players by just being included.

1914

And that’s not true. An efficient market, for gold or money, will make it easier to acquire X, overall, than it would be if the market did not exist. It may be that grinding specifically for gold is a terrible idea, because gold is oversupplied, but that just means that you’re going to have to “grind” for other stuff and then convert that to gold at the inflated rate.

The existence of an RMT market doesn’t really enter into it. Gold will become inflated if and only if there aren’t enough sinks and it’s too easy for gold to enter the system and not get cleared out. It’s just another resource that will be getting farmed in parallel to resources like rare items.

1915

StGabe, I’m not arguing an AH versus a no-AH. I’m talking about a gold AH and an explicit, sanctioned RMT AH versus just a gold AH. The existence of an RMT AH does enter into it, because the influx on the money supply.

Grinding stuff to convert to gold at an inflated rate, isn’t necessarily going to be the 1:X ratio evenly across the economy you think it will, imo.

Nor have I seen any MMO really control mudflation, even when they were actively banning people for engaging in RMT.

Edit: You can reread the thread StGabe. But I’m not refighting this. Ugh.

1916

This is more like poker than blackjack. You’re not playing the house, the house just takes a cut.

Yup, you got it! That’s a distinct possibility indeed.

1917

Except the house can change the rules at any time without notice which makes it a loss less like poker. I’ve never played a poker game where my card was suddenly devalued for balance reasons, or drop rate changes.

1918

Dude, stop taking this stuff so personally. I just don’t get the whole grind aspect of your argument. You can get every item in the game by playing normally. Just knowing some rare item exists and is being sold for real money doesn’t mean you need to put more hours into the game to earn enough gold to overcome the gold inflation to buy it.

Plus, it doesn’t really mean anything if you keep posting after saying goodbye every time. ;)

1919

The difference is whether you’re playing against the house. The house doesn’t do much with respect to the rules for poker because they’re not in the game. They just take a percentage of every winning hand.

However, the house doesn’t change the rules for play for any of the games it hosts, whether it’s in them or not. What they do do is change the rules for wagering and special conditions thereupon, which is why you’ll find some casinos that are more generous than others when it comes to laying down odds in craps or differences in the policy on insurance at the blackjack table. In both cases, the mechanics of the game remain the same (you could argue that insurance institutes a change in that it forces the house to look at his card and tell you if you lose, but I don’t think it’s a clear-cut change in play).

1920

Yeah I know. I’m trying to psych myself up to that level of willpower. You know, “I think I can, I think I can…” It will work eventually.