Perfect WOrld 1st of this type of MMO

So you honestly expect other people to pay for your gaming experience without any form of compensation? The more you pay the more you get holds true for most aspects of life, and whether you're paying with money, time, attention, or love.
The fact that a non-cash shopper can compete with your average cash-shopper is a credit to Perfect World. If someone pours $20,000 for a lv.100 rank weapon... well honestly who was cheated? I guess its awesome that they have it, but I'm okay with spending much less a casting an extra spell or two.

QQ 5 million coins b:shedtear b:shedtear b:shedtear

Vinat - Sanctuary wrote: »

face/palm. because when you get to end game and there is nothing left to do but tw and youre stuck fighting against 200 people who have that much hoarded wealth it gets boring and people give up. they quit. people quitting is bad for business. and sure, there are always new people joining, but its usually around lvl 20/30 that they start to learn what gold is and what charms are and figuring out gear, and the standard of "decent" has become "+7, grade 11 gems". thats 20 mil per gem, times 4 per item, times.. however many items. thats unattainable for majority of the player base, cash spenders and non-cash spenders alike. its in the 20-30 range that i've seen countless new people quit for good. the next group is the 90+ crowd. they spend all this time and (some) money and cannot make ends meet. the game has become a "keep up with the jonses" kind of thing. and that is not fun.

I don't know what you're facepalming about. Saitada's summed up what I wanted to say. If progressing in a game, and excelling at that, is "killing" the game, I don't know what wouldn't kill the game.

People are constantly elevating themselves, and the level of competition is always on the rise. If you stay at the same level, you're just becoming obsolete. That's just the natural order of things.

So is reaching a point where you've accomplished all you've wanted to do, and there's nothing left but to quit and move on.

But that's not a result of "hoarding wealth". That's simply a matter of natural progression and the lifespan of a game. Every gamer starts off newb, then gets better, then becomes good, and then becomes bored.

There's nothing that can stop that, unless the game can constantly upgrade itself to meet user expectations.

go look around and read some of the threads with ppl complaining about the tw situations and the gold price situations. then come back and tell me that people like warren are not hurting the game.

pw has become just like the US economy. the top 2 percent are happy as pigs in ****, and the other 98 percent are miserable.

Vinat - Sanctuary wrote: »

go look around and read some of the threads with ppl complaining about the tw situations and the gold price situations. then come back and tell me that people like warren are not hurting the game.

pw has become just like the US economy. the top 2 percent are happy as pigs in ****, and the other 98 percent are miserable.

Where there are fluctuations in the economy, there are opportunities. People like Warren capitalize on these opportunities to reap in profits, while others would rather spend their time QQing about gold prices.

Even more funny is that Warren and Solandri's continuously posted how they make the money they do. It's just that people don't take it upon themselves to improve on their financial position.

You can't compare real life to a game like this. There's a million different factors that affect people's capability to become financially wealthy.

In this game, everybody started off with 0 coins. Cash shoppers spend money to get their coins. Non-cash shoppers use their brains to get their coins. As you can see, there is no room for the people who don't try one way or the other, and in my humble opinion, that's perfectly fine and reasonable.

so what if a guy is carpetbagging? sure its kind of a dirty practice, but hes not hurting you. whats the point in feeling jealous of a guy whos level is on pause while he devotes his life to collecting worthless pixel money.

really?

thats really shallow. who cares, get over it, its no big deal other than sheer jealousy.

First of all, let me say that in regards to the financial standpoint of cash shoppers vs non-cash shoppers, cash shoppers do have an edge. But as Warren proved (and may I express my profound awe at his ability to play the market, it really is impressive) someone who doesn't pull out his/her credit card can still obtain money. Yes it takes longer but in the end the goal can still be reached. I have never had money issues in this game since I only spend on what is absolutely necessary. I budget my money and make sure that my expenditures do not exceed my coin income for more then a brief period (skill purchases are the primary example of this). Learning to play the market is not only a way to make money, but in one sense, it is another objective in the game.

As for the statements about people like Warren hoarding money killing the game, this statement seems rather illogical to me. They have worked to attain that money, and in the long run, it will be spent anyway. You Vinat are just like so many other people, you focus on the short term and thus you are unable to see the long term effects of these situations. And as Warren pointed out, he is sinking coins out of the economy due to the gold purchasing tax.

The reason 2% of people are rich and 98% are poor (using your highly inaccurate and fabricated statistics) is simply because that 98% encompasses players who are below level 30 and haven't had exposure to the games economy yet and thus feel poorer then they truly are when confronted by the magnitude of the prices they see on things, people who play the game for their own enjoyment and just don't give a **** about the prices of things like speed leveling items and other cash shop items, and people who simply have an over reactive impulse to purchase items. Watching your spending can very easily break you out of the poor bracket as long as you also work to make some money. Playing the market is one of the most profitable options right now since it fluctuates so much.

Working hard is the key to making money if you don't pull out your wallet. In the end though, you can achieve good results.

WaffleChan - Sanctuary wrote: »

so what if a guy is carpetbagging? sure its kind of a dirty practice, but hes not hurting you. whats the point in feeling jealous of a guy whos level is on pause while he devotes his life to collecting worthless pixel money.

really?

thats really shallow. who cares, get over it, its no big deal other than sheer jealousy.

Interesting use of the term "carpetbagger" referring to Warren's business practices, including your statement that Warren has "kind of a dirty practice". I do believe that you fail to understand the meaning of this word, and it's origins. Or else you are equating Warren's smart ways to make money for his character, as "a dirty [business] practice", because you are either jealous, or you're just trolling.

“Carpetbaggers” is a pejorative slang term denoting men who adhered to the newly formed Republican Party, which followed the demise of the Whig Party, and gained control of Arkansas politics and government after the end of Civil War. Many of these men were former Union soldiers. The correct term is Radical Republicans.

Southerners coined the pejorative term carpetbaggers and claimed that these men came into the state with only what could be packed in a suitcase made from carpet scraps. The belief was that these men were uneducated opportunists who came to Arkansas only to plunder and take advantage of the bankrupt, defeated, and humiliated people of the state. Noted carpetbaggers included Thomas Meade Bowen, a lawyer, and Powell Clayton, an engineer (both of whom had served as Union generals), as well as former Union soldiers John McClure, a lawyer, John Newton Sarber, a lawyer, and Stephen Dorsey, a businessman.


Despite the ire directed to them by pro-Confederate natives, those dubbed carpetbaggers did leave behind a fairly positive legacy. The most substantive and positive change that the Radical Republicans created was a statewide public school system. There had been no statewide school system previously, and educational advantages were few. The fact that the population was to be taxed to operate the schools met with opposition. Part of the new educational system was the creation of Arkansas Industrial University, a land grant school. It is now known as the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County) and is the largest university in the state.

Invective much? You know, this could be a really illuminating discussion regarding the value of merchanting and gold trading to the game overall and other players in general. If we could keep from calling each other idiots for a while, we might be able to have that discussion.

And to make a step in that direction, I'd like to play devil's advocate to some of the more outspoken voices here. First, I would like to point out that there are many cases where apparently innocuous behavior that seems to be well within our rights and natural abilities can, when taken together with other such behavior, result in a thoroughly bad outcome, and that when we understand how such effects emerge, we rightly change our moral opinions of that behavior so that it is discouraged or outright forbidden. An obvious example of this is environmental pollution. One person dumping his used oil on an old gravel pile in the back or burning his trash is no environmental catastrophe, nor usually particularly harmful to others. Moreover, it is disposing of one's own property as one wishes (providing that he own the property where he does the disposing.) But we realize that if everyone, or even a significant proportion of the population were to do this, serious harm to others would occur. Therefore, such behaviors are legally banned, and morally frowned upon in most quarters. What is important in theorizing about such behavior is that the harm be identified and the mechanism for causing that harm be well understood.

In order to illustrate both the harm and the mechanism, I would like to take issue with something WarrenWolfy said upthread:

But... but... I'm a COIN SINK.

In point of fact, you're not a sink, unless you decide to one day just walk away from your character, leaving your coins unobtainable to anyone else through any legal means. If, on that day, you have any gold in your accounts, you'd also be a gold sink, which would kind of defeat the purpose of a coin sink to begin with. What you are right now is a coin and gold (an whatever else you trade in) warehouse.

The difference between a sink and a warehouse is important here. As a warehouse, the goods, gold and coins you stockpile you will eventually release back into the game, of course, at prices that benefit you. So what are the effects of for-profit warehousing? First, prices of things that are only offered occasionally and during events, such as the infamous packs, are moderated. Because these items are cheapest when they are on sale in the boutique, merchants compete with each other and consumers of these packs to buy them up. This tends to raise their price (in coins) by raising the price of gold (since gold is the only way to actually put new packs in the game).

Cash shoppers can counter this by buying more gold, but that costs real money, and even though new zen purchases do increase when packs go in the boutique, it's never been enough to keep gold prices steady. When the event is over, their price continues to rise because now they're scarcer, but merchants begin almost immediately to sell those packs and recoup their profits, dulling the effects of their sudden scarcity, and keeping prices from going too high, at least until packs start really running out.

All in all, I'm willing to accept the moderating effects of merchants on such prices as an overall positive effect, but I do want to point out that it comes at the cost of higher overall prices, in order to provide for the merchant's profits. This includes gold prices, because while, as has been pointed out in a different thread, while the process of gold trading is symmetrical, where every piece of gold bought by a gold merchant (thereby raising prices by decreasing supply) is eventually sold (increased supply means lower prices), there is always a period of time where that gold is just in someone's bank or inventory. Since there is more than one such merchant, there is always a significant amount of the total gold purchased on the server that has been effectively removed, creating a sort of false scarcity, and since we are now talking about the cumulative effects of multitudes of merchants, it has been removed indefinitely. The laws of statistics tell us to presume that at least some fraction of gold that's just waiting around for a price increase is gone forever. And as more people move into gold merchanting more and more of that gold, that was actually bought by someone to contribute to the game and enhance their experience, is removed in this way. In fact, calculating how much gold is presently "missing" from the economy is a simple matter of multiplying the average profit per gold of gold merchants over a certain period of time with the overall number of gold merchants in that time, and dividing that number by the average price of gold during that time. That's how much gold had to be sequestered during that time to effect enough scarcity to raise gold prices enough to account for the profits experienced.

Now that the economics of merchanting, at least merchanting gold, has been dealt with I also want to point out some of the other effects. This will be much shorter than the above, I promise. Mainly, this has the effect of concentrating wealth in those who have the capacity to merchant. Without merchanting, this sort of wealth concentration would only occur with extreme cash shoppers. This would mean fewer high-end gears in game, because merchants are often responsible for concentrating the large amounts of wealth needed to obtain them. It means at least some free players or players who cannot pay much money to buy zen can compete with heavy cash shoppers during TW, at least, if they ally themselves with other cash shoppers.

In the end, I am skeptical of such similar merchanting providing sufficient social value to justify their existence. The negatives are pretty big, and the positives accrue first to the merchanter before they are felt by anyone else. However, there is one positive that I'm not willing to lose, and that's that the ability to merchant provided by catshops and the auction house give people of limited financial means the ability to win, if they are smart and can figure stuff out. I do feel, however, that if you have the financial ability to purchase zen, and you play the game a lot for your own entertainment, you should purchase zen, regardless of your ability to earn an income in-game from merchanting. Doing so counters the effects merchanting has on sequestering gold and raising its prices, and the servers you're playing on need to be payed for, and the devs need to feed their families. Of course, how much you buy is a personal decision, based on how you value the game.

So, merchanting should probably only be done if you have a goal for your profits , something specific you want to buy with 'em, and so long as you supplement your in-game wealth from time to time with purchases of zen, so long as you are financially able to make such purchases. If you're merchanting just so you can be rich, and you never buy any zen, you're just raising everybody's prices.

Gosh what you see in the forums. Blah Blah Blah this, Blah Blah Blah that... Okay he made some money. Who cares, just play the game. If it doesn't entertain u, quit? Gosh, TBH he kinda' deserves it. I mean okay leaving your pc on 24/7, just to get rich in a Pixel game does seem dumb. But who cares, it's his pc, and what he does with it is his choice. But don't flame him just Cuz' he was smart enough and conservative with how he manages his time to make money in the game.
P.S. In MY OPINION, I would never spent my life 24/7 just to make money in a Pixel game. But that doesn't mean you shouldn'tb:kiss (No offense)

Saitada - Sanctuary wrote: »

The idea behind merchanting is to make a profit.

The idea behind making a profit is to be comfortable at the least, and wealthy at the best.

Your argument is spurious at best.

Your thought failed. Try again.

~S

The idea behind making a profit is not necessarily to be comfortable or wealthy, but may be to accumulate the funds needed to accommodate some personal venture. Indeed, someone who accumulates a fortune simply to possess it, and not to use that fortune to benefit himself or others is generally thought to be a miser, suffering from the venal sin of greed.

I've been playing since CB, and yes 75 is my highest toon, yet I'm sitting on easily 500M+ worth of coin/gold/merchandise.

Why am I only level 75 after over 1 1/2 years? Frankly, I get bored easily with grinding and typical MMO adventures.

But what I love about MMO's is the economy, working with numbers, and playing the market. Call me strange, but I love doing it. Just like real life, I have my financial situation on a spreadsheet (yes, I'm wierd, but I love it).

Why am I accumulating all of this wealth? Cuz it's fun (for me at least). Am I hurting the poorer players? Directly, probably not (but lets face it, the QQ'ers would find something else to complain about). If I didn't like doing it, I wouldn't be doing so, but to call someone like me (or anyone else) greedy for accumulating wealth and being financially smart with our expenses is rather ignorant.

Robert Kiyosaki once wrote (indirectly quoted):

Poor people never ask me how I made my fortune. They do, however, always ask me for a job or for a loan

If your going to be poor, except it. You have the same opportunities to have wealth as everyone else, yet you choose not to educate yourself. There's nothing wrong with that, but please accept the consequences of your actions (or lack of).

Pressa - Heavens Tear wrote: »

awesomeb:victory

IMHO, Warren is very enterprising and he excels at that. I do wish I can be like him, but too lazy to do so. b:chuckle

Whatever Warren and his competitors put out into the game, if it's reasonable, buy it. If not, I'm incline to say that there are no such things as free. Everything has a price tag to it.

Though he is hoarding gold, the impact will be far greater if they are all released into the market at once.

Let's say Warren and his competitors released all the gold that they are holding and I daresay, the price of gold would fall overnight, making whatever you own in game depreciate sharply.

The mounts, the fashions, the mats and everything else, suddenly has lost it's value. That 5 million mount which you have paid for a while ago? Congrates, it's only worth less than 500k and lower (dependant on amount of gold released into the market).

But with that much gold being dumped into the market, the market will just collapse because suddenly, everyone can just buy gold. b:victory