Possible Idea to Stop Automatic Buyer Programs Mentioned...Follow

Really, when you think through this issue fully, you find that it is nothing to do with automated programmes at all.

It is about market fixing (or manipulation if you like).

All of the "antisocial" market activity that is being discussed can be performed manually, the use of the bot "buyer" is merely a convenience.

I have to admit, that not long after the introduction of the bazaar, the thought of a bit of market fixing did cross my mind. I rejected it after some thought, for two reasons. First of all, I still play the game for the battles, the tactics and the friendships. Secondly it is simply part of my nature to oppose greed and extremes of any sort.

Having said that, I will admit to occasionally buying up items that I percieve to be priced too low and storing them away for later "dribbling" back in to the market. As do several others who post on this board (having posted and told us about it more than once).

What we are discussing is market fixing in its purest form and if you did such a thing with coffee beans in the US you would would be breaking several federal laws and be in danger of a number of years in prison.

This is so of all the regulated financial and commodity markets in the developed world.

So the real question is, do we want to see the economy of Everquest become a "regulated market" (in the way that most real world markets are?)

Or, do we want to hold on to the "benign anarchy" (my definition) that we have all enjoyed/tolerated for the past five years or so?

You've heard the saying "beware what you ask for, because you may get it!" I'm sure.

Everytime the player base pushes the developers to changing the game mechanic to solve a percieved problem, the world of Everquest irreversably changes for all of us. And, not all the changes we have seen in the past have been for the best, have they?

When you break this issue right down to its basics, what does it really matter if some person buys up all of the White Dragonscale Helms and squirrels them away?

The behaviour may be obnoxious yes, but the price you have to pay for freedom is tolerance of obnoxiousness isn't it.

So you desperately want a White Dragonscale Helm? Get some people together and go get it!

Right?

You see, one of the risks in market fixing, is getting it wrong.

The penalty for cornering the market in coffee beans, only to find that the market has moved on you and now everyone drinks tea, is bankruptcy!

I really do believe that this disruption to the EQ economy is self correcting.

My theory on the matter is that the type of player that will spend RL money to buy PP to then buy the "uber" items to equip themselves are temporary players and will soon enough disappear from the game.

I see this as temporary abheration that is symptomatic of the generation of players that came into the game looking for the "quick fix", they've levelled fast and easy, got to the mid level of the game and think they can shortcut to the high end of the game by buying their equipment. Even if they do manage to do this and get themselves into elemental guilds, they will discover that they are woefully equipped both skillwise and attitudewise to deal with that level of the game.

They will then either re-learn what EQ is about and become decent serious players (the minority), or leave the game (the majority).

Meanwhile, those of us who play the game in a serious fashion will continue to group with our friends and allies and get ourselves ornate - elemental - LDoN equipped and the market price of items will be irrelevant.

The more socially oriented players will continue to do LDoN missions and equip themselves at their own pace with LDoN gear as well.

The only people who loose out in all of this are the dedicated soloers. You can guess how unhappy that makes me feel

I take serious offense to your statement. I was mostly in agreement with you until you had to throw in a cheap shot directed at "dedicated soloers." I solo mostly not by choice, but by fate. I have a group of friends that I am able to play with maybe one day out of every week, and a guild full of nice folks that sometimes are able to group with me, but are usually playing their lower level alts. So I solo. And I do fairly well. Most of my equipment is bought in the bazaar, ye, about 75% of it. The other 25% is either solo quested (Qeynos Badge of Honor, for starters), or my little band of friends go to places like Velketor's Labyrinth, Tower of Frozen Shadow (though I spend more hours soloing here than grouping) or Umbral Plains and we kick some serious butt. We work more and more like well oiled machines because we find that we're the only people out there competent enough to group with (I don't know how many LDoN adventures I've been forced to fail because of horrible pullers, or inattentive tanks). I thought that as I went up in levels, I'd find a majority of players being good, but I still see about the same saturation of idiots that I met in my 20s when I started trying to group.

I also solo because it makes more sense. Should I solo for 3 hours, get 3 yellow xp, and possibly 1 or 2 uber items, or should I attempt at finding a group, lose 1 or 2 yellow, and be so sick of EQ that I almost forget to loot my corpse after my last death? It always seems that there is a shortage of clerics offering rezes when you need a rez. I died 7 times in Lake of Ill Omen because I was bound there to help save a friend (long story, but suffice it to say she was caught off guard when the servers went down for updates the last time when she was in the Sarnak fort, so I bound there to get there quickly) and a War Bone Skeleton murdered me 7 times as I popped. EQ wouldn't give me control of my toon until I was already at 60-85%hp already, and a naked druid isn't very well equipped to handle hits. And of course, there wasn't a cleric to be found who would rez me even once (I lost 90% of my level that day because the tank walked blindly into a pack of Raj mobs, and trained them on me without saying he had made a mistake, and died 7 times trying to get out of LoIO). So as you see, if I rely on myself, I get somewhere. I AM a self-made-man. If it were up to the average EQ group, I'd still be sitting at 25-26 gaining xp and then dying again. And that's why I learned to solo, and I do it so well, too.

Of course you'r entiteled to your opinion but

1. now you speak of soloers only that complain about lack of progress - what about these that don't complain and feel perfectly well?
2. your quote clearly shows a dislike of dedicated(!) soloers. I wonder where this comes from because I can't imagine how a soloer could have ever gotten in your way and spoiled the game for you.


Edited, Tue Feb 3 08:04:20 2004 by Leiany

!?! ---------> regarding a certain subject or just your state of mind?
No! ---------> you say no to.......................(please insert along the dotted line)
Wrong! ---> what exactly is "wrong"?

try again dumbass
thanks for playing

Edited, Tue Feb 3 15:03:07 2004 by Leiany

Please read the whole thread again then you will realize that I object the point of view that EQ wasn't made for soloers (brought up by Illuien in the first place).

My quote you were using ended with "or did I misinterpret you there?" which should give you a hint. ;-)

I am a soloer myself partly because I like it and partly because as a European I play on Vie what's off-peak-time for the majority. At 8 p.m. middle-european-time there are about 15 people in BB and about 6 in EC. Everfrost is even mine all alone if I travel there for mammoth meat.

Just for the record - that's not a complaint, if I want to group I can do so over the weekend :)

Edited, Tue Feb 3 10:34:16 2004 by Leiany

easy

one i dont solo 100% of the time. but im a 65 bard i can solo whenever i wish (and i do) however i also group alot in the planes and am in a guild that raids the planes.

but as for soloing in an MMORPG is because even if i solo i still have other forms of interaction with people only available in the MMO type of game.

and Leiany sorry for jumping on you im an avid defender of solo'ers rights

well....maybe its my fault - as a non-native english speaker I should probably not resort to satire/sarcasm/cynism too often ;-)

@Iluien: I think you misunderstood what TincMetals wanted you to remove.

But to make up for not reading his posts completely there's part of a sentence missing in your post.

And as you are calling Soloers as disruptive to the game as "Yantis", Illuien I think you should try the Betty Ford Clinic (which will only save your life - it can not bring back the thosusands of brain cells you destroyed in being drunk probably most of the time.)

Ahh Leiany, have I bumped into you before on the board? Perhaps under a different name?

Editing someone's quote is a silly ploy.

A little bit of selective cutting and pasting and voila a nicely edited "quote" to further your argument. The problem though is that everyone can see the original as well as your edited "quote". So it only serves to make you look stupid.

What I actually said was;

"If you choose to solo in preference to grouping you [are] as disruptive to the game as Yantis in my opinion"

A statement I do not resile from in the slightest.

Here is the essence of of my argument to support this opinion.

(I don't have time to present the whole case at present.)

The game is designed to be played by groups of people working together as a team.

Now we can debate that point 'round the houses if you like, but it is fairly easy to pull up statements from the developers who have stated this many times.

However it takes only the tiniest bit of logical deduction to come to this conclusion by simply playing the game.

There is simply nothing of consequence that can be achieved in the game by soloing. You cannot solo a mob, that will drop loot that is at the relative level of value you need to equip yourself, at any level.

Turn it around to restate. Any mob that you can kill solo will drop equipment that is only usefull to a character several levels lower than you. In most cases many levels lower.

So even based on just this simple bit of observation, it is clear that the game is designed to be played by groups of people who get together to work as a team to equip themselves. (So that they are prepared to move up to the next level of encounter and so on...)

Having established that the game is designed to be played by groups working together, let me move on to my justification for my original statement.

Someone who chooses to play solo has two choices in the way they can obtain new equipment for their character. (Putting aside nonsense like begging etc.)

Go out and hunt for it.

Or buy it from other players.

I've already established that it is not possible to solo mobs that drop equipment that is considered appropriate for your level. So a soloer either settles for a life of always being poorly equipped compared both to his/her grouping counterpart and the level of the mobs he/she is trying to fighrt, or;

Raises Platinum from somewhere and goes and buys the equipment from someone in the bazaar.

So, this gives rise to a key question. Where does the soloer get the PP from to buy his/her equipment?

Before we examine possible answers to this question, lets look at one simple but compelling example of the proposition I put above.

An Enchanter gains the ability to cast Kodiac's Endless Enchantment at level 60. Is it possible for an Enchanter at level 60 who has chosen to play a solo career, to solo kill any of the mobs that drop Kodiac's Endless Enchantment?

I think not.

A level 60 soloing Enchanter has no chance of obtaining A VT key, so that eliminates VT mob possibilities.

Is a level 60 soloing Enchanter going to take down Rumblecrush? Laughable.

So how does a level 60 soloing Enchanter get a copy of Kodiac's Endless Enchantment?

Raise PP and buy it at inflated prices in the bazaar. (Yes now it can be researched. Tell me, how long do you think it would take, even if possible, for a soloing level 60 Enchanter to gather up the components needed to combine the spell?)

So we get to the crux of my argument.

Players who choose to solo in preference to grouping find it ever more dificult to equip themselves satisfactorily. They find it increasingly difficult to raise the PP in game and eventually find that virtually their entire game time is spent farming for PP.

They then find that they are competing more and more ferociously with other players who prefer to solo, both for the camps and mobs and for the items in the bazaar.

What solution do they turn to? Buy the PP from IGE/Yantis perhaps?

Heck. I'm bored and stuck late at work, so what the heck?

Um... It's "massively multiplayer online roleplaying game" MMORPG

The change from "massive" to "massively" changes the direction of that word completely in the sentence. The word massive would seem to apply to the size of the game ( it's not just a multiplayer online rpg, it's a massive multiplayer online rpg). But when you put "massively" in there, the massively applies to the word multiplayer. It's not just an online RPG, or a multiplayer RPG, it's an online RPG that's "massively multiplayer". There is indeed an implication that the multiplayer aspect is intended to be highlighted.

I'm not going to bore you with a long description of how the terms came about. Suffice it to say that the "massively" in MMORPG is there specifically because it includes both a large playing environment *and* an abundance of roleplaying interaction.


Now, you are correct that none of that requires that you group or form a guild or interact with your fellow players in order to play the game. However, it's not unreasonable for someone to state that you will be at a disadvantage if you don't do those things. Um... It's also not unreasonable to question why someone would pay $10+ a month to play a MMORPG if they don't want to interact with any other players. Why not just play one of the zillions of single player games instead?

I personally think the answer lies somewhere in between. People who mostly solo do play the game for player interaction. Even if they say they don't. They simply wouldn't play a multiplayer online game if they didn't. However, they don't necessarily want to interact directly with the other players. Just having other players in the environment is sufficient for them. You can still buy and sell stuff, listen to (and take part in) chat, and still generally get a sence that you are in a "real" world, while still not grouping or guilding. Personally, I think you're missing the main point of the game, but if someone wants to pay their money to play that way, that's entirely their choice.

@Iluien - I try to explain it as understandably as I can for u:
Neither the EULA nor the code of conduct or any other official single word from SOE speaks agains soloing EQ.

Now if you personally think it's "wrong" to solo EQ I propose you start your own thread on the subject, maybe even a poll and we will see who (apart from you) thinks soloers are a disruptive force to the game.

In your opinion probably it would benefit my server more if instead of working my char up the hard way from scratch as a soloer slowly and unnoticed to the players around me I just bought a 50 lvl toon and began to shout "Enchantress 50 lvl LFG!"

But I hope this is not the case, otherwise your opinion'd be far beyond stupidity.

Edited, Wed Feb 4 09:24:17 2004 by Leiany

Just to give you a hint about the disruptiveness of pure Soloers my dear Iluien:

As you don't want to convince the Soloers to change their ways but just want them to quit EQ I ask you now:

Imagine you and 5 others where the only ones who are not purley soloing on your server. Do you think it'd benefit you if the 1000+ soloers left the server exclusively to your 6-toon-group?

Have fun with avoiding a simple "yes" or "no"

:D

Back to the original topic of this thread (which was not SoloING is TEH SUxxORS LOLLOFMMFHG!!!11!! btw)

I like the bazaar system the way it is. When I finally save up enough to purchase an item I really want I don't want to wait for someone to approve my bid which could take anywhere from 10 minutes to a week or more, how would you know how long it will take someone to approve your bid? Would you only be able to bid on one item at a time. Would the item be locked out while you have a bid on it? What would stop someone from locking out all of one item indefinatly?

An auction system like that doesn't work unless there is a timeframe set on auctions like Ebay. Who wants to wait a month and a half to outfit a new charactor they create, as auctions end and they are outbid, and since you can only have one bid out on any one item at a time you would have to wait for a new auction to start. This wouldn't stop the bots anyway as they would just create snipe bots that outbid on auctions in the last second. Remember they have nearly unlimited PP.

A system like this would make it easier for people that monitor their trader constantly, but that does not make it more fair. It would be like an automated version of the EC tunnel. Most people will agree that with few exceptions the Bazaar is a much better system. Or else you would still see the EC tunnel full of Auctions.