Valuations…

I get this a lot – a big MMO News Item goes noisily berserk, and while everyone else is loudly Going Bananas, I’m left sitting here going, ‘Hang on a minute… I’ve seen this before…’

This time it’s the news that the alleged Diablo III will be pretty much entirely an RMT-based affair, offering we players the chance to strike it rich with our loot drops, by flogging those ultra-rare super-pixels to other imaginary heroes, for cold hard coin out in the meatspace. Commentators rightly question how this might change the social dynamics of the overall experience, but I’m sure we can already see a microcosm of it it in action already.

Back in 2005, SOE launched two ‘Exchange’ servers, The Bazaar and Shadowhaven.

These servers, something of an economic experiment, started life fully RMT enabled in a manner similar to the alleged Diablo III. I guess the reasoning being that if you can’t stop gold farmers, why not legalise them and then ‘tax’ them for a cut of the action. I remember there was a lot of scorn and kneejerk ‘RMT is the Devil!’ type news about them at launch – probably from people who never had any intention of playing EQ2, let alone on Exchange Servers – and then it all went quiet. This was all way before the current movement to Free-2-Play began, and EQ2 Exchange Servers required a standard subscription as well!

In light of the alleged Diablo III fuss, I thought I’d see what happened to them. Turns out that in 2006, Shadowhaven was merged into The Bazaar, but then that same year, when dedicated PvP servers were added, one of those, Vox, was added as an Exchange server. PvP player coin and item looting, AND an RMT Real Life Cash Exchange house!

1. Kill people
2. Rob their corpses
3. Sell the loots on officially sanctioned auction house
4. Profit!
   It doesn’t get more hardcore than that, and you’d think it’d be an unmitigated disaster, but apparently, both servers are still alive at least:

SOE: Server Status, Exchange Servers

I’m not sure what those ‘Population’ numbers mean; characters created? Certainly not concurrency! The PvP-RMT server is twice as populated as the PvE one though, which is interesting.

In March 2008, SOE appear to have handed off administration of the Exchange server to a third party, Live Gamer Inc. I’ve no idea what the deal was there, but I guess the whole endeavour proved to be either too costly or fiddley to run in-house, or more profitable spun off to someone else to worry about.

A browse through Live Gamers’ web-based auction house listings (found here) is informative. They broker Cash, Characters and Items, it seems. As of writing, there are about 700 characters listed for the two servers, but at least 90% of those seem to be speculative Level 1 name sandbagging attempts. The remaining ones are mostly Level 90 maxed out characters, and are generally listed from $80 to over $300 buyouts. Reserve starting bids are usually $10 less than that. Mind you, listed and sold are different things and I only saw one character with an_actual bid_ against it, a L54 Warden which if unopposed, will sell for $2.50. Very much a buyers market, I’d say, with such customers that there simply going for the Buy-It-Now option.

Coinage seems more straightforward, and 10 platinum costs $0.28 on The Bazaar, and $0.30 on Vox, but seems to only be available in blocks of 1000pp a go. Doesn’t seem to be any volume traded stats here either. I’ve no idea how long it would take me to farm that on my EQ2X L65 Inquisitor, but long enough for me to not want to give up my day job, that’s for sure.

The Items category, or rather ‘item’ singular is what I came to see, with the alleged Diablo III nonsense in mind, only to find it basically unused, with one single stack of 100x L82 Damage Shield buff potions, listing for $2.00. It’s hard to explain why the sale of actual loot seems to have been completely abandoned. Perhaps the items are too transitory; below level cap, they are quickly replaced, and at the cap, well, I wonder if in this context, a character itself is nothing more than a collection of specific end-game loot items. It would account for price variances between otherwise identical L90 Inquisitors, for instance.

Clearly gold and characters are the real trade here, and I wonder if that won’t be the case with the alleged Diablo III. Anyone getting fiscally involved in these strange variants of gaming-as-income is going to be pretty clued up about mudflation, deflation and many other flations besides, and it’ll be whole characters that keep their value, through upgraded gear, rather than the single pieces of swiftly obsoleted gear themselves. A well maintained character keeps or even increases its utility – items won’t. I’ve no idea if Blizzard is including character trading facilities in the new system, but they’ll need to if they want to achieve the stated aim of killing off black-market RMT.

Perhaps EQ2 Exchange is an invalid comparison anyway. I don’t even have anecdote to rely on here and know no one who has even rolled a character on there. I can only imagine that they are pretty quiet places, given how marginal they were even before EQ2X’s Freeport Server came along and started erroding the existing EQ2 Live numbers in general. I wonder if we’ll see an EQ2X Exchange server, or if the whole thing has turned out to be a useful experiment close to running its course. A system like Exchange lives or dies on a large pool of interested customers. If all that’s left is a small community of would-be businessmen all trying to sell to each other, there doesn’t seem much point in the thing existing at all.

Interestingly, an academic paper on the First Year of Exchange (2006), found here – PDF link, does have some nice graphs, and puts the average price of a platinum piece over that year at $7.38, compared to today’s $0.028, and prices a ‘high-level character’ at $2000, compared to a seemingly standard $90 today. Clearly EQ2 Stuff is not a sound long term investment! The paper also suggests that the whole Exchange programme had little or no impact on black market RMT, and that it was never a significant source of income for SOE, which all makes me dubious about Blizzard’s stated reasons for their own go at the thing.

The alleged Diablo III is obviously going to be far more popular, and perhaps more successful in that the whole thing will be a de faco automatic opt-in ‘Exchange’ type system, rather than EQ2’s tentative peripheral side-show. By playing it at all, you are a potential RMT trader or RMT customer, but I wonder how many regular single-player gamers will actually get involved in the salesmanship of it all and how many are just going to ignore the whole business?

Interesting times, certainly!