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!

Spent an eye opening few minutes visiting the new Tenebrous Island Refuge in EQ2X the other day and found myself quite startled at the scope and scale of the place.

Player housing is something EQ2 has always done very well, even from launch, with its weekly rental Inn Rooms in the various city suburbs and large houses in the central districts. Once inside, any furniture type objects can be placed in the room using a surprisingly intuitive 3D placement system, and then there they are. Standard furniture items can be bought and a whole crafting profession, Carpenter, exists to provide more. Additionally, quests and events offer more trophy related items, and I’m finding that collection aspect of it all very compelling.

In many MMO’s a character’s accomplishments and history are very transitory things. Pieces of armour come and go, moving from aspirational motivators, to prized possessions, to bank storage keepsakes, to vendor trash in a surprisingly short time, and often we’ll end up with only memories, and perhaps blog posts, to remind us that we did anything at all. Player housing then, as implemented by EQ2, can be made to function as an outstanding kind of semi-permanent ‘trophy cabinet’. It’s how Hobbington Crescent uses our Kinship House in LOTRO and very much how I use my Four Room South Freeport residence in EQ2X. It’s an Aladdin’s Cave of curious knickknacks obtained from outlandish places and desperate deeds.

Technically, it’s a very clever way to go too; it’s very difficult to break a game by adding scatter cushions, and I’ve never heard of an instance where a bookcase has needed a forum-enraging nerf to restore game balance. Objects of purely aesthetic value tend to be immune to mudflation or expansion obsolescence, their desirability unaffected by any further changes to the game. Development-wise, I’m sure the overheads are low – much of the placeable furniture I’ve seen existing in-world as scenery anyway, so has often already been modelled and texture in the course of normal world design. And it’s a fun extra dimension to the overall ‘life in EQ2’ experience.

They do a variety of houses to put this stuff in, but lately they seem to have gone crazy with it all. More and more novelty houses are being added, mostly in concert with the EQ2X Station Cash push, and it makes sense. If you’ve moving toward micropayments in a stat-based game, the cosmetics are the area you’re least likely to cause fan-rage in. The vocal hardcore typically don’t care much about mounts, pets and housing, allowing things to be made and sold in relative peace.

Increasingly, we’re seeing more geographically themed dwellings, elaborate housing based on particular zones and styles, but this latest one is something quite new and possibly even game changing:

EQ2Wire: SC Tenebrous Island Refuge

It is indeed, a field. It’s a special magical field on a floating chunk of rock, suspended in an endless evening sky, based on the Tenebrous Tangle region of the Kingdom of Sky expansion, but it’s still just a field. It costs a one-off 1350 Station Cash, ($13.50) and has no in-game upkeep costs. The idea is that you build the entire house yourself, out of the various resizable room dividers, floor tiles and assorted other bits and pieces turned out by the Carpenter trade skill profession.

Initially, I thought $13.50 was laughably steep, but the more I thought about it, the more tempting it seems. For starters, that pictured field in the link above is absolutely huge. It’s an unfortunate choice of very distant screenshot, and you have to go ‘Visit’ the portal and have a look for yourself to appreciate the scale – it’s about the size of South Freeport or the inner city bit of New Halas. With a bit of design flair, you could easily build a whole village on that rock, let alone a sizable house.

I find myself comparing it to a Second Life sim, rather than anything MMO-ish, and it’s interesting to look at them side-by-side.

On price, the Refuge costs $13.50 to buy and no upkeep itself. Gold level EQ2X or Subscription to EQ2 Live is about $10/mo, but a Bronze EQ2X person could probably use the house too.

A Second Life region on the other hand, as detailed here,  which seems to me to be roughly the same kind of area, costs an initial $1000 and a further $295/month to maintain. I’m possibly overestimating the surface area of the Refuge, but not by a factor of 74. (I’m using the ‘Full’ region for comparison. Possibly a ‘Homestead’ region is a closer technical match, but you can’t have one of those unless you already have a Full one anyway.)

On capacity, the Refuge has a placeable item limit of about 1,100. A SL region has a prim count of 15,000, but it’s worth noting that a typical piece of EQ2 furniture is a multi-prim affair. If it takes more than an average of 13 pine cubes to make an equivalently detailed piece of SL furniture, than EQ2 actually gives you more bang per buck here.

On occupancy, a standard SL region has a stated avatar limit of 100 per region, which I personally think is a laughable fabrication. I’d say at 40+ people, things begin to fall apart. EQ2 lists no character limit stats for the Refuge, but I’d guess it’ll be the same as anywhere else in game – turn the detail down for crowds of more than 20, but probably workable at full raid sized groups. 24-man raids on the guild leaders house!

There are fundamental differences of course. SL allows user uploaded assets and, EQ2 has only a fixed inventory to choose from. This is only a problem for content creator types looking to start virtual businesses, and at this late stage I’d say the variety of existing furniture ‘building blocks’ available in EQ2 are probably up to the task of keeping things interesting, allowing exercise of building skill in how you use those blocks. I’m expecting SOE to begin adding many more functional and literal building block type components in due course.

SL allows scripting, which allows people to make things ‘do things’, while EQ2’s furniture is largely static. Still, they have player writable books, and anyway scripting is as much a problem for SL as it is a positive feature, causing lag or simply being made to do bad things by malcontents.

On usability, I’d say EQ2 wins, for the kinds of things folks will be doing with this Refuge. Placing objects in a 3D space is always tricky and SL does have better camera and placement controls, but the depth and complexity of those tools is not always helpful for simple tasks, such as putting up a painting. Working with Stuff in SL is an ever more specialised and arcane set of professions in its own right, much of it carried out in third-party applications like Photoshop, Poser and Blender. In EQ2, you can do less, but do it there and then.

One thing EQ2 does have that SL does not, is a massively multiplayer online game just outside the door of its housing instances. SL just has more houses and shops on the whole, and people have to use, if anything, even more imagination to entertain themselves than in the supposed Role Playing Game of EQ2.

Performance-wise, EQ2 triumphs over SL in things like Walking Around, Running, Seeing Long Distances and Not Using Gigabytes of Bandwidth During Play, so that’s nice. Also, you are unlikely to have your EQ2 floating island bombarded by a cloud of self-replicating todgers all blaring out the crazy frog song. But I think the main reason I’m tempted by the whole thing is that while I am never going to have $1000 + $295/mo to blow on a virtual lego-set sandbox, I might be persuaded to drop a one-off $13.50 on something a little more limited but a lot more accessible.

Incidentally, if you are tempted, I’d wait a little bit longer; The Kingdom of Sky is made up of three differently styled regions, of which the Refuge is only one. I’d expect Barren Sky and Bonemire themed islands along before long if this one sells well.

While not as trendy or fashionable as many other MMOs, I am always fascinated by EQ2’s continual development, expansion and redefinition. To find myself making comparisons to Second Life at all is remarkable in itself. It’s also going to be interesting to see what people create with their 1100 pieces of furniture and massive floating island.