I've never been a fan of Eve online, but I've had some friends that played. The one thing I liked about the game I had heard about from other friends. Essentially, the economy was really complex and vibrate. Anyway, my friend that played it was telling me, people could buy and sell game time as an in game item.
That was rather interesting to me when I thought about the applications in Warcraft. Say, someone wanted to buy gold. They buy a month's time to the game...and then sold it for 15k in the AH. What are the consequences?
First off, illegal gold selling would virtually disappear. It makes me think of Prohibition in the United States in the 1930's. The United States Government desperately tried to stop alcohol and the organized crime it spawned. Eventually, this was a dismal failure and instead Prohibition was repealed and the government just taxed it.
When applied to gold and game time, players that want to buy gold suddenly have a safe way to do so. Why risk getting your account banned when you could buy it safely. That's a huge plus for the portion of the population that would consider buying gold in the first place. No risk! At the same time, players who have plenty of gold could buy the game cards and play for free. Both sides get something they want. All players benefit from players no spamming trade chat!
Best of all, for Blizzard, they get all the gold buying revenue in their pockets instead of some going to third party companies. With no reason to hack accounts since people aren't buying gold, their customer service burden is lightened. If people were afraid of their credit cards getting hacked and buying tons of cards, then maybe the cards are only sold in your local game stop or what not.
Everyone wins. It isn't that different than what the Guardian Cub was. There's essentially one big difference. I myself bought a guardian cub. Then I was done. Even if they allowed all the pets and mounts to be droppable, once you have them all, then you are done. For game time though, I'd keep buying every month. Repeatability would make it a long term solution to both keep demand high.
No comments:
Post a Comment