Packs, CashShoppers, and the Economy

packs are an addiction
i dont enjoy charging
but i cant not do it for packs

The TRUE way to fix anything cashshop wise is to make it non sellable to others...no it wont hurt the pwi wallets either.

FiDollaYou - Sanctuary wrote: »

But... complaining about packs while simultaneously buying/selling them sounds an awful lot like the folks that managed to convince McDonalds to change the fryer oil so they can feel good about supersizing their french fries. Or for a better analogy... complaining about the federal government (in the US, anyway) wasting money, but voting for a corrupt representative because he'll at least funnel some of that wasted money towards your state.

"I can't control myself, so I need YOU to change to help me." or "Everyone else is doing it, so I have to do it to be competitive."

I think you're aiming a bit too broadly here. The ones complaining about how bad packs are for the economy and selling the packs aren't the hypocritical ones. The ones complaining while opening the packs are. You seem to think that if Warren stopped selling packs, that would somehow lessen the number of packs being opened. It won't. There is no constraint on the supply of packs - there's an infinite supply of them available via the cash shop. If Warren stops selling packs, all that happens is the people who would've bought from him will instead buy from someone else, who replenishes his supply of packs from the cash shop + what Warren would've supplied.

The case you're describing applies if the supply of an item is constrained. Say dull claws were evil and ruining the economy. If Warren were out there grinding on mobs which dropped dull claws so he could sell them, then he would be increasing the supply of dull claws and contributing to the problem.

But in the case of an item with infinite supply like anything in the cash shop, the only factor which determines how many get sold is buyer demand. The seller has zero impact. Even if you somehow banned all cat shops selling packs, players who wanted them would just learn how to convert coin to gold on their own to buy the packs themselves. And they'd end up buying the same number of packs as would've been sold through cat shops. In fact they'd probably buy more packs if you did that since you've taken a bunch of players who were too lazy to learn how to buy gold, forced them to learn how to buy gold, and eliminated the cat shop middlemen and the cut they're taking out of the transaction.

FiDollaYou - Sanctuary wrote: »

As I understand it, your complaints about packs are that they are having a severely detrimental effect on the economy in game. If I've lumped you into this group by mistake, and you haven't complained about the packs, then I apologize. In any case, presuming that I understand correctly, I further presume that you'd like PWI to remove the packs from the CS because of the effect they are having on the economy. You want PWI to stop selling them, yet you will happily go on selling them to other people. How does that not meet the definition?

This is an interesting turn on the discussion. I have a long but relevant story here, so bear with me. I encountered pretty much the same situation in the mid-1990s. Back then, I was young and idealistic like you. I was a (relatively) old-time Internet fogey. I believed in the ideals held by most corporate and school sysadmins at the time - that the Internet should preferably be used for the betterment of society rather than personal gain.

In 1994, a year before the World Wide Web became a household term, a bunch of my labmates and I wanted to see a movie, but didn't know the showtimes. I thought to myself, hey, the movie theater is near MIT and probably gets a lot of techie customers. Maybe they have a website and we can find the movie showtimes that way instead of having to sit through a recording on the phone. I searched for them, but nope, they weren't on the net.

Then I thought to myself, you know, someone should set up a website which lists the playtimes of all movies at every theater so all the movie theaters wouldn't have to set up their own individual websites. Then I thought to myself, hey, I could do that. Register movies.com, set up a simple database, etc. Then I thought it about it some more, and because of my idealism, I decided that if someone was going to set up a website like that, it should be the movie theaters themselves. I would be wrongfully infringing on their turf for personal financial gain if I set up such a site myself. So I dropped the idea.

Fast-forward 4 years to 1999. A friend of mine had another friend who realized that domain names were like virtual real estate. So he started buying up all the generic word domain names he could. Like movies.com, computer.com, vacation.com, etc. He confided in my friend, and my friend started doing the same thing. In the incident I described above, I actually had the idea 4 years before them, but because of my idealism, I didn't take advantage of it.

Because he capitalized on this opportunity for personal gain, my friend is worth over $100 million now. His friend is worth over $2 billion and lives on some island he owns in the Bahamas. Both of them are known as movers and shakers in the domain name industry, and get invited to meetings and contribute ideas which shape how ICANN controls domain names and DNS. I OTOH am a regular joe making an upper-middle class salary and my idealistic opinion of how domain names should be handled carries zero weight with ICANN. All because I was idealistic and they weren't.

The lesson here is that the world doesn't change direction based on idealism. It changes direction based on power. If your idealism forces you into decisions which strip you of power, you neuter any influence you might have had over how the world will change. If you believe in certain ideals and wish to promote them, you are much more likely to succeed if you first do things for personal gain which give you power. Even if the things you do violate your ideals. Once you're in control of that power and influence, then you can start using it to promote your ideals. It doesn't matter if people call you hypocrite - you're still the one calling the shots, not them.

By running successful cat shops, Warren and that other big Sanctuary merchant have established reputations that they know how the game economy works. By making fortunes selling packs, they've established a reputation that they understand the pack economy thoroughly. So when they say packs are ruining the game economy, it means something. It carries a lot more weight than if some random joe "claims" that packs are ruining the game economy.

Solandri - Heavens Tear wrote: »

I think you're aiming a bit too broadly here. The ones complaining about how bad packs are for the economy and selling the packs aren't the hypocritical ones. The ones complaining while opening the packs are.

Actually, I wouldn't label them hypocrites either. It's sort of like how I complain about my job, but I still go to work because right now it's the best opportunity I have.

The only people that I would dismiss as hypocrites are the ones who come up with some sort of moralistic argument why other players should stop driving up/down prices, when their motives are that they feel they have some sort of special entitlement to be able to buy/sell for the prices that they want.

For example: the never-ending supply of people who come on the forums and who want everybody else to stop buying Gold so that way they can get cheap Gold. They'll constantly try to call every other player an idiot for supporting greed, when they themselves are motivated by personal greed, but they're in denial.