What if SOE owns IGE??Follow

First off, I think people need to know exactly what IGE and Mysupersales is doing to the Everquest economy, please read this post.....
https://everquest.allakhazam.com/forum.html?forum=1&mid=1075435996761751677&num=0

The question that must be asked is what is SOE doing about it? Honestly, what they have done so far has seemed like little more than a gesture. I can certainly say it hasn't been effective. I don't personally know anyone who knew about the plat exploit and I know a good number of people in a lot of top guilds on Veeshan with my brother being an officer in Fires of Heavens. I have to wonder if these exploits aren't either being used by SOE themselves with them using front companies to sell the plat or if these companies are getting help from inside SOE. They certainly seem privy to the exploits AS SOON they become usable. If it's not SOE behind the companies, are they possibly getting a PERCENTAGE of the sales?

Futher evidence is the casino and Tribute system! Think about the purposes they serve, they certainly aren't there to make your life easier. Yes, the tribute system SEEMS to, but that's just for now while you can still afford it. If all the systems SOE put in place works to drain plat as effectively as they hope, you won't be able to afford the buffs for too long and THAT is what they're counting on. Once the plat is drained from the economy people won't be using the tribute system too often, just when they have raids to do or special events, or LDoN, you get the idea. The point being that you won't be able to afford to keep buffs up but you'll still be using the favor points and draining more plat thus keeping it hard to come by. Favor points will NOT be as easy to get as they are now while the economy is still saturated with platinum.

Heck, everyone thinks SOE fumbled the ball with the release of the tribute system by making favor points TOO easy to get. People bought and handed in items that cost them 2pp each to get a lot of favor and KEPT doing it to earn nearly unlimited favor! SOE announces this for the patch next week though...
<For next week's update, we will be adjusting each character's favor amounts based on any items that were handed in to Tribute Masters that have had their favor values adjusted.>
That seems like a LOT of work, but after it's done people will have less favor, but not get back any of the platinum they spent. Some people spent sick amounts of money to get INSANE amounts of favor, but one week from now they will lose most of that favor and not get a single platinum piece back. Did SOE really drop the ball or did they plan that?

I don't think the people who got 1 million favor will be able to spend it in a week if they keep every buff up at max values from now until then. A COMPANY that powerlevels characters or creates them to sell and knows which items grant the most favor though would certainly be able to make use of that week. Will SOE be changing their favor points too? If they didn't, how would anyone know? If a character had 10 MILLION favor points and they never altered that characters favor, he could PL other characters very well for years

The casino is a more obvious system, a fool and their money are soon parted. More times than not you won't be holding ANYTHING for the money you spent and if you did get something it will be worth a LOT less than you spent. The tribute system is for people who want value for the money they spent.

Why would SOE want platinum out of the economy? It's no secret that EQ doesn't have a very good economy model, heck EQ 2 weapons will wear and break over time, but in THIS version of EQ, having been around for almost 5 years, does it really need to be changed now? What's the point? Okay, there are arguments for and against this so that's a tough question, but if SOE is behind the companies that sell plat, or even getting a percentage of the sales to let them exist, there is a BIG point to it!

If platinum is taken out of the economy at a fast enough rate, the value of platinum will quickly rise. If the value of platinum increases, prices of items should go down, and that's a good thing right? Well, today in the real world your average new car costs about $20,000, right? Your average household has 2-3 cars. 35 years ago a new car cost about $2,000 but most households were only able to afford ONE car!! In EQ terms that's like a 20kpp Windblade being sold for 2kpp and STILL not being able to afford it!

Even if prices drop on items, players won't be able to afford the lower prices. Sure there will still be rich players, especially the trade-skillers, but if plat is harder to get, trade skills will be a LOT harder to raise for those who don't have them already. Trade skills cost tens of thousands to HUNDREDS of thousands of plat to get to the higher skill levels in multiple tradeskills.

A company that sells platinum can make a KILLING! If platinum is worth more, they can CHARGE more for it. Right now 100k is worth about $100 real US dollars(it was at over $200 about 6-8 months ago), before you know it, 50k will cost that much again, and maybe even 25k!! If they have MILLIONS of plat over many accounts on many servers as is suspected, then you do the math, that's a LOT of money.

The last VERY suspicious thing is the timing.... The plat exploit comes out which just about no one knows about except the companies who sell plat, THEN the casino and tribute system arrive to drain plat from the economy. It's said that the reason the casino came out was to get rid of duped plat, but lets be serious, the company isn't using the casino, the players are. The company isn't using the tribute system, the players are. The company isn't going to be running out of platinum any time soon, the players are!

Who were these systems REALLY put in place for? Who is REALLY going to gain the most from them?

Ahh, all my post so far have been on the news threads and I've never actually come to the messageboards before this post. All the same a big difference between my post and that one is that the original poster there just mentioned the possibility of the connection while I actually put up 'evidence' to support the claim.

When the original post was made, tribute was not yet put into effect and we didn't know too much about the specifics, just that it was meant to help drain plat out of the economy. Since it's come and gone and the way the first day of tribute was handled and able to be exploited so, you really have to wonder again if it was really a mistake or something SOE did with intent to actually HELP the companies that sell plat.

It BLOWS MY MIND that they are going to go character by character and alter tribute based on items that were handed in, why would they do that? I'll tell you right now, I didn't buy GoD yet and I didn't earn any tribute so it's not because I'm losing anything. It could have been handled other ways like making a 200k favor cap and ELIMINATING any favor over that, or WIPING all favor, saying they were sorry and having us start from 0 or even giving every GoD enabled character 50,000 favor points so we could test it out, instead they are going through THOUSANDS of characters over across EVERY server and altering their trubute. That really makes me think that certain characters aren't going to get touched like IGE and Mysupersales characters and just everyone else. Their are TOO many things pointing to a connection between these companies and people are starting to wake up to this fact.

Even though I didn't see the original post until it was added to this thread, that post didn't really cover anything other than the idea.

You hit the nail right on the head! The fact that they can, and ARE, alter EVERY player's tribute amounts(in a mere few hours even) does show that they CAN do something, the real question is why aren't they? If something works in favor of the common player you know they are quick to fix it.

There has to be a reason they aren't doing anything to stop these companies. Banning "hundreds" of accounts certainly didn't do anything....

Does ANYONE even know of a single account that was deleted?? I certainly don't know of any. Did they actually do anything or just tell us they did?

Thanks for the post, and i LOVE your icon. :D Very cool.

Could be true. if so...oh well. they're making more money off us..its no surprise to any of us that Sony likes money.

on the other hand (as much as I'd like to believe Sony is pulling the strings), the casino and Tribute system are serving some pretty valid purposes. they are putting a TON of money and garbage items BACK into the system. how long have you seen vendors with hundreds and hundreds of lumberjack caps, gator legs, treewaeaves, etc.? this is a great way to get the economy thats flooded with garbage BACK into the system and still reward people for it.

good move if you ask me.