TIMING OF LEGACY PROJECTS

[Segev]

"As soon as we have it working and enough content for it."

Really, we don't have an "official" line on that, yet. We have very rough estimates, but hesitate to make what might sound like promises. We're currently moving on the budget items discussed in the KS and making sure we fulfill our obligations to those who've backed us in it. The former has direct application to getting major progress done on the avatar-builder, so once we have that done and see how fast our people can produce things with the right tools, we should have better estimates.

[Second Chances]

It may even short-circuit gold sellers; why give somebody your credit card to pay them real money when you can go to the AH and spend Stars on it? Players will thus naturally set a conversion rate based on scarcity of each.

Yeah, the reason would be if it somehow became "cheaper enough" to buy inf for real money but, barring some breakdown in the economy like that, it would be a lot safer for folks who wanted to trade money for time to keep it within this system.

Would the RM price of Stars be considered to be pretty fixed, or would it be expected to vary? I was assuming the former, since I was thinking the price of the stuff in the StarMart wouldn't vary based on some player-managed sense of value. If the inf/Star exchange is the safety valve, in what ways do you see that breaking down? Like, would there come a time when farmy folks may not have anything else in the StarMart they were especially interested in? Would folks be able to use Stars to pay the subscription fee to the game? If so, that would be an ongoing reason to trade inf for them (it's possible it might be so convenient a demand that you might want to leave yourself a way to throttle it, if it drove up the inf price of Stars too much)

Anyway, figuring out how to maintain a stable virtual economy seems like it will be a strange and interesting beast. I like the approach you are taking already, though, since you are working on ways to have it benefit more-time-than-money folks, as well.

[Segev]

My first-order assumption is mostly inline with yours, Second Chances. That is, that the real money value of Stars should be relatively fixed, and the value of items in the StarMart (good working name) remaining pretty constant. I do expect, over time, as real money inflates, those inflationary pressures will force us to raise the price-per-Star in real money, but that should happen in line with how our costs rise (and how good is our ability to offset rising costs with more volume rather than by raising prices).

There might be tweaking of StarMart items' pricings as we decide to put things on sale, or we decide older items should be less expensive. I am a big fan of auctions to help us gauge pricing of some things. If we do things like "costume packs" and the like, where there's an element of randomness to what you get for your Stars, I expect the AH-value in Stars (and in-game currency) for certain items available in those to fluctuate based on their rarity and popularity. We could do some behind-the-scenes tweaking of effective Stars-pricing of those items by adjusting their rarity in random-packs.

I would dearly love to use Stars as the medium for paying for subscriptions. One concept I really liked that I read in my research into others' approaches to modern-day games and monetization is that of the "microsubscription." As I conceive it, this amounts to examining each aspect of a subscription (including the possible "tiers" for different-priced subscriptions) and breaking it down to individual perks. You then let the players "build their own subscription" out of those micro-subscription items. For ease-of-use, I would definitely want a "standard package" of subscription options (basically, what you'd get for the "standard" subscription fee, but leaving out the "premium subscription" services), but selecting that is just getting an easy package. You can customize it by taking out things you don't want and adding in things you do.

The drawback to using Stars for subscriptions is that it means the idea of a "stipend" of Stars to spend as part of the subscription doesn't make a whole lot of sense. "I spend *150/month (if a Star is worth $.10 each, roughly, that'd come out to $15/month), and I get *50 to spend each month in a stipend" will have people eventually engaging in the fridge logic of, "Well, why don't they just charge *50 fewer for the subscription?"

I believe microsubscriptions help answer this question. We empower the players who wish to pay a subscription fee to set up a dollar amount per month, per six months, or per year, and give increasing flat stipends of Stars per month to them. The subscription tool will tell them how many Stars/month they need in order to have the package they choose to put together out of the microsubscriptions. If they want a stipend of Stars for incidentals, they can make sure they have enough. If they want their microsubscriptions "paid for" by their real money subscription, they are; it just comes out of their stipend for which they've paid.

I'm also toying with some ideas for how to make some in-game currency-sinks that will scale better with the amount of wealth a given PC has, making it harder to hold on to increasing amounts of currency while making the sinking of it an enjoyable experience. The massive currency rewards high-level PCs get will not feel like ho-hum amounts that just contribute to inflation if we can pull it off right.

This may or may not serve to provide sufficient safety valve for currency-to-Stars rates on the AH. We will need to see how this goes, because ultimately there's only so much we can predict before we see how it works. We do welcome ideas and suggestions if anybody has them. I think part of it will be that we're not just having currency-for-Stars on the AH; players can put items up for currency, stars, or even post it with minimum prices in both and some mechanism for determining whether the high bidder was in Stars or currency (if both prices were exceeded). Effectively, sell whatever you want to sell on the AH, and sell it for currency or Stars. (Currency will only sell for Stars and vice-versa, for the obvious reason that selling them for themselves is silly and can only lead to people accidentally screwing themselves. But either can buy other items and other items can sell for either.)

[Manga]

The two mistakes that make people feel anger toward a game are: 1) making it too difficult or impossible to succeed without paying real money; or 2) making the purchasable items worthless by making them too easily obtainable in-game.

It sounds like those two are exclusive of each other, but they're not.  Think of the real world example of personal property:  Some people don't mind driving a tiny Kia, some people have to have a Mercedes.  They compromise based on how much money they have and their needs - the person who wants the Mercedes might buy a Volkswagon instead, and the person who doesn't mind the Kia might have kids to transport and buys a slightly larger Toyota instead.  But all things considered, they're all just cars.  They all get you where you want to go, and the speed limits on most roads pretty much equalize any performance considerations.  So why buy a Mercedes?  Because you like being surrounded by leather, or you like the sound system, or because you like to show off a bit, whatever.  It will still just get you there.

The point is if you make something desirable but *not required*, people will still buy it.  Because it's not required, and the game isn't balanced for it, it's not even needed to be obtainable at all in-game, or at least easily.  Costume items, small bonuses like endurance or small chances of extra types of damage/buffs that aren't necessary but are kind of cool...those aren't needed, but they're desirable.  What you want to avoid is making people either farm heavily or pay in order to get equipment that certain tasks can't be completed without.

[Second Chances]

I am curious about how you'd be dividing the microsub pieces up, but I imagine that at this point that would be total speculation (likewise, on the currency-sinks that scale by wealth... which they will enjoy paying). I suppose you'll share more about that as the ideas develop, though.

This may or may not serve to provide sufficient safety valve for currency-to-Stars rates on the AH. We will need to see how this goes, because ultimately there's only so much we can predict before we see how it works. We do welcome ideas and suggestions if anybody has them. I think part of it will be that we're not just having currency-for-Stars on the AH; players can put items up for currency, stars, or even post it with minimum prices in both and some mechanism for determining whether the high bidder was in Stars or currency (if both prices were exceeded). Effectively, sell whatever you want to sell on the AH, and sell it for currency or Stars. (Currency will only sell for Stars and vice-versa, for the obvious reason that selling them for themselves is silly and can only lead to people accidentally screwing themselves. But either can buy other items and other items can sell for either.)

hm, having people sell various items for their choice of the currency or Stars feels like it will confuse the relative values of each (since it won't just apply whatever the prevailing currency-to/from-Stars 'exchange rate' is). Assuming we are still doing blind auction, then how do I even know how to buy a MacGuffin when I don't know for sure what unit it is being sold for? Like, I could bid all the currency I wanted and it wouldn't matter if the MacGuffins on sale happened to all be for sale for Stars. And to figure out how many Stars you'd offer for it, you have to keep track of what you might be able to sell it for in currency (and then how much currency it would take to buy 5 Agates, and how many Stars you can get for that, etc.)... familiarity with these interelated exchanges would be part of know the current value of a MacGuffin. Or am I overworrying that?

[Segev]

Hm, you do have a point about the blindness of the buyer to the sellers' prices is an issue there.

The problem I see with trying to set currency/Stars conversions to any sort of automatic system when people use one or the other while the other or the one is what was "asked" for is that it opens things up to market manipulators to do deliberate short-term manipulations that grossly distort the exchange rate just long enough to exploit the automatic parts of the system. A massive sweep of purchases of 1 Star each for enormous sums of currency right before bidding with 1-2 Stars on something and hoping this will catch the distorted exchange rate to sell for a paltry number of Stars would, at BEST, hurt the market overall even as it gave the desired currency to the seller. At worst, it could make sellers look at what they've been paid and wonder why things are selling for so little.

The easiest mechanism would be to simply let people set a price in either Stars OR currency for any given item, and show histories of what items have gone for in each so that buyers who want to buy something can see if it's available for the currency they seek to spend. If not, they can go first trade the currency they have for the one they need and then bid.

I suppose an even easier method, now that I think of it, would be to ONLY allow in-game currency on the "buyer" side, so those who want to buy things with Stars have to first put Stars up for auction and get in-game currency from those. I think that diminishes the feel of directly helping out players who've gotten the rare item you want, though. Mechanically, not all that different, but something about it feels less cool to me in theory.

[Second Chances]

The problem I see with trying to set currency/Stars conversions to any sort of automatic system when people use one or the other while the other or the one is what was "asked" for is that it opens things up to market manipulators to do deliberate short-term manipulations that grossly distort the exchange rate just long enough to exploit the automatic parts of the system. A massive sweep of purchases of 1 Star each for enormous sums of currency right before bidding with 1-2 Stars on something and hoping this will catch the distorted exchange rate to sell for a paltry number of Stars would, at BEST, hurt the market overall even as it gave the desired currency to the seller. At worst, it could make sellers look at what they've been paid and wonder why things are selling for so little.

Yeah, whatever method you use to blunt the effect of manipulation (averaging values over some period of time, etc.) could eventually be overwhelmed with enough volume. At the very least you'd have to have limiters that would cut in after the rate varied more than some amount.

The easiest mechanism would be to simply let people set a price in either Stars OR currency for any given item, and show histories of what items have gone for in each so that buyers who want to buy something can see if it's available for the currency they seek to spend. If not, they can go first trade the currency they have for the one they need and then bid.

One plus, if you could get active trading working using both currencies, is that you can use that as the basis of a probably-harder to manipulate exchange rate (identifying some set of items that see a decent volume with both currencies, and comparing how much of each type it takes to buy the items in that set). Of course, if you have trading working using both currencies, then an automated exchange rate becomes kind of unimportant. :/

I suppose an even easier method, now that I think of it, would be to ONLY allow in-game currency on the "buyer" side, so those who want to buy things with Stars have to first put Stars up for auction and get in-game currency from those. I think that diminishes the feel of directly helping out players who've gotten the rare item you want, though. Mechanically, not all that different, but something about it feels less cool to me in theory.

Because they would end up holding "gamebacks" rather than Stars? Presumably they would be among the bidders that would be helping the AH buyers convert their Stars to gamebacks, though. Making gamebacks the ingame currency, and treating Stars as more of a commodity, does simplify things.

[silvers1]

Regardless of how you choose to implement this Star System...   I hope you do keep it to decorative/fluff/costume items only.
If there is even a hint of something that resembles Neverwinter's Zen cash shop, I probably won't be playing.

One important thing that I hope you don't forget is the community that CoH attracted, which tended overal to be more mature and
much less elitest than anything else out there.   Any flavor of a PAY2WIN system will attract a completely different crowd than
what made CoH great.

[Segev]

Regardless of how you choose to implement this Star System...   I hope you do keep it to decorative/fluff/costume items only.
If there is even a hint of something that resembles Neverwinter's Zen cash shop, I probably won't be playing.

One important thing that I hope you don't forget is the community that CoH attracted, which tended overal to be more mature and
much less elitest than anything else out there.   Any flavor of a PAY2WIN system will attract a completely different crowd than
what made CoH great.

That is more or less our intent with the StarMart items, though I would not rule out the possibility of things like what CoV did post-Freedom and having some Classifications or Specifications require a microsubscription. We will be striving to ensure that any mechanical effect of StarMart items will be either negligible, or well within the range of other earned-through-play items (and just providing a different variety of approach).

But an important thing to remember is that, if we implement this as I hope, those who want to "pay 2 win" will be able to. They'll take their Stars, purchased with real money, and go to the Auction House to buy the super-cool items they want in order to be more powerful. The thing is, these items will not be created from whole cloth the way a StarMart item is; spending the Stars does not cause code to generate the item. The origination of those items, however, began with somebody playing the game and earning it through game activities (whether as a drop, as a craft product, as a reward for a mission, or something).

So "pay 2 win" is something I am sure will be said, by some, about the game. But ultimately, those who "pay 2 win" are paying fellow players for their surplus stuff, and those other players now can access anything they want behind the pay wall with the Stars so earned. "Pay 2 win" players thus empower those who are not paying real money to access things in the StarMart anyway.

[Minotaur]

That is more or less our intent with the StarMart items, though I would not rule out the possibility of things like what CoV did post-Freedom and having some Classifications or Specifications require a microsubscription. We will be striving to ensure that any mechanical effect of StarMart items will be either negligible, or well within the range of other earned-through-play items (and just providing a different variety of approach).

But an important thing to remember is that, if we implement this as I hope, those who want to "pay 2 win" will be able to. They'll take their Stars, purchased with real money, and go to the Auction House to buy the super-cool items they want in order to be more powerful. The thing is, these items will not be created from whole cloth the way a StarMart item is; spending the Stars does not cause code to generate the item. The origination of those items, however, began with somebody playing the game and earning it through game activities (whether as a drop, as a craft product, as a reward for a mission, or something).

So "pay 2 win" is something I am sure will be said, by some, about the game. But ultimately, those who "pay 2 win" are paying fellow players for their surplus stuff, and those other players now can access anything they want behind the pay wall with the Stars so earned. "Pay 2 win" players thus empower those who are not paying real money to access things in the StarMart anyway.

This is something that will need very careful monitoring. The people who this screws over are people who don't pay to win, but are net consumers of the top end stuff as the price inflates due to the P2W brigade. Essentially the ability to P2W creates more demand from people who otherwise would set their sights lower, raising prices for all, and raising profits for the farmers. Also I see another category to be added to the decorative/fluff/costume items in the store, convenience, my major CoH purchases were storage inventory slots etc which were not game breaking, but sure as hell helped QoL.

[Segev]

I'm going to try to respond to what I think are Minotaur's three main points:

• The "pay 2 win brigade" will cause inflation of price of high-end products
• This will hurt players who do not "pay 2 win" and instead play the game
• Convenience items.

I'll take the last first, actually: Convenience is hard to separate from power, entirely. Other than "fast transport," what would you suggest as good "convenience items" to sell in the StarMart or as microsubscriptions?


The other two are more closely tied together.

From what I understand about the cycle of a play2win game, they typically exhaust their playerbase after a frenzy of paying for the highest tiers of success and deciding it's hollow with nowhere to go anymore. If we do wind up with that kind of player for a while, the cycle should still be in effect, and they'll eventually move on to elsewhere. This will theoretically cause the prices of high-end items to stabilize.

On the other hand, the mediumcore players who normally go to the AH to pick up the super-rare items that they just can't find for themselves will likely have scads of in-game currency. They can use that to buy Stars from pay2winners who are looking for enough currency to fund their expensive habits without having to spend the time gathering the grist for the economic mill (i.e. currency and other drops). This then puts them back in the range of the pay2winners bidding Stars for rare items on the AH.

Even if they start flooding the market with Stars and drive prices way up (inflating Stars on the market in the process), this will make in-game currency deflate in value relative to Stars: less currency will buy more Stars, because the players who make the mega-sales in Stars to the pay2winners will have Stars to use on their own stuff, but also for use on the AH.

In short, having in-game currency be what it always is in these games will help combat any inflation in Stars because those same inflations will keep the value of people's time spent earning in-game currency rather consistent. So I think this will actually self-regulate. The pay2win crowd can't likely push the Stars price higher than hardcore players pushed in-game currency price for rare items on the AH. The presence of currency, deflating in relation to Stars, will allow the players who push for more currency in-game to buy Stars for the AH. Currency-sinks will guarantee that pay2winners want currency, too, so they'll have reason to buy it with Stars, and again, the players who sell stuff for Stars are likely to still use Stars on the AH, as well, if they find they have more of those to spare than currency. [/list]

[Manga]

Segev, when you start talking about conversion rates, you're getting into dangerous and ugly territory.  Star Trek Online does that with Dilithium (in-game) vs Zen (real money) conversion.  They have an epidemic of people who farm Dilithium by running several hours of daily missions with multiple alts, and then convert it to Zen at a horrible conversion rate because time means nothing to these people, and they want free lockbox keys and ships.

The more those players farm, the worse the Dilithium vs Zen conversion rate becomes.  That's how their system works, via supply and demand.  That makes it so now, players who want to use Dilithium they earned running missions to buy things in-game are out of luck unless they are willing to farm as well to get a LOT more Dilithium.

Meanwhile, with all of those farmers, the Energy Credit system and market are virtually broken because those farmers are flush with billions of EC and are paying amounts for items that most non-farming players can't remotely afford.  And the answer to that problem?  We're told to farm more to get more EC.

So I would suggest instead having a forked currency system where all *useful* items are for sale both with in-game currency and with real money; each mode of purchase has its own price set; and they are not convertible, meaning you can't sell a real-money bought item for in-game currency or vice versa.  Real-money purchased items sell and convert to "Stars", in-game purchased items convert to in-game credits.  No currency conversion means no inflation.  If people want to "pay to win", they can do it without breaking the economy.  Farming will still exist, but it too will have only limited appeal because the farmers will actually spend what they earn.

A good measure of a sustainable economy is if a player can purchase standard enhancements plus a reasonable number of costume changes just by running regular leveling-up mission content.  No requirement to run special task forces or dailies, or crafting, or any of that other stuff just to remain effective at level.  Too many games such as SWTOR and WoW fail that test entirely right now.

[Minotaur]

I'm going to try to respond to what I think are Minotaur's three main points:

• The "pay 2 win brigade" will cause inflation of price of high-end products
• This will hurt players who do not "pay 2 win" and instead play the game
• Convenience items.

I'll take the last first, actually: Convenience is hard to separate from power, entirely. Other than "fast transport," what would you suggest as good "convenience items" to sell in the StarMart or as microsubscriptions?

Extra inventory slots for enhancements, salvage etc.

The other two are more closely tied together.

From what I understand about the cycle of a play2win game, they typically exhaust their playerbase after a frenzy of paying for the highest tiers of success and deciding it's hollow with nowhere to go anymore. If we do wind up with that kind of player for a while, the cycle should still be in effect, and they'll eventually move on to elsewhere. This will theoretically cause the prices of high-end items to stabilize.

On the other hand, the mediumcore players who normally go to the AH to pick up the super-rare items that they just can't find for themselves will likely have scads of in-game currency. They can use that to buy Stars from pay2winners who are looking for enough currency to fund their expensive habits without having to spend the time gathering the grist for the economic mill (i.e. currency and other drops). This then puts them back in the range of the pay2winners bidding Stars for rare items on the AH.

Even if they start flooding the market with Stars and drive prices way up (inflating Stars on the market in the process), this will make in-game currency deflate in value relative to Stars: less currency will buy more Stars, because the players who make the mega-sales in Stars to the pay2winners will have Stars to use on their own stuff, but also for use on the AH.

In short, having in-game currency be what it always is in these games will help combat any inflation in Stars because those same inflations will keep the value of people's time spent earning in-game currency rather consistent. So I think this will actually self-regulate. The pay2win crowd can't likely push the Stars price higher than hardcore players pushed in-game currency price for rare items on the AH. The presence of currency, deflating in relation to Stars, will allow the players who push for more currency in-game to buy Stars for the AH. Currency-sinks will guarantee that pay2winners want currency, too, so they'll have reason to buy it with Stars, and again, the players who sell stuff for Stars are likely to still use Stars on the AH, as well, if they find they have more of those to spare than currency. [/list]

Other games that do this have a different mentality to CoH. In many of them, I have 3 or 4 at most to uber-outfit. CoH was an alting game, meaning that many people wanted to outfit many more characters and per character they didn't have vast amounts of cash. CoH I at least fairly seriously outfitted the best part of 100. Had the prices been inflated by P2W, I'd never have been able to do that. In fact they were deflated by the use of catalysts and the ability to flat out buy some account bound IOs with cash (which I only ever did when they were on a serious sale).

[Segev]

I'm perhaps missing something, but I seem to be hearing that pay to win in a direct sense somehow deflated the cost of items. (The account-bound IOs to which Minotaur refers.)

I can flat-out state that, unless I'm utterly misunderstanding you, TheManga, that your assessment of "no inflation" if there's no conversion between currencies is wrong. Historically, MMOs have in-game currencies. Those with just that currency and an auction house still see mammoth inflation. As more people get into the game, more currency becomes available, and as more people hit highest levels and run out of things on which to spend it (or find ways to exploit existing systems to farm it more efficiently than they can spend it), currency becomes less and less valuable and AHs become more and more a prohibitive part of the game to anybody who isn't a proficient marketeer (or already fabulously wealthy).


Two things will help mitigate the "dilithium mining" problem, I think:

• The Stars are not generated out of nowhere; somebody bought them. There is, ultimately, only so much currency anybody is going to want to spend real money on, and demand will fall to the point that even the hardest-core farmer will find other things to be better uses of their time.
• There will exist ways other than selling currency on the market to get Stars.
  
  • Selling other items will get a better return for the time spent farming them at some point, because demand will be higher for them than for currency in any amount
  • This will in turn cause farmers to make those other items more available, which will lower their price relative to currency and Stars both
  • There will be methods of winning Stars that are not paid for by players at all, if we can pull it off right. Sponsored activities and using coupons and offer codes when shopping for things they would have bought anyway, for instance.

This isn't to say there aren't challenges and potential problems to overcome. But part of the inflationary problem stems from the Zen being generated from nothing and there being no sufficeint currency sinks. By making it so that Stars or currency can buy anything on the AH, the farmers will be encouraged to spend their time on the most lucrative of items (and, in so doing, reduce the price of those items in both currency and Stars). Having more than one thing they can "mine" to get Stars will ensure that no one thing ceases to be in demand relative to the others based solely on the farming for sale on the AH.

[Minotaur]

Segev, I suspect you neither played the market much nor mega outfitted a lot of characters.

What happened:

Catalysts meant you could transmute IOs into others. The most expensive IO in the game was at one point the PvP +def, I sold 3 for 4BN each bought with alignment merits. Post catalysts, the prices came down because you could transmute other PvP IOs into that one. I forget what the price dropped to, maybe 500-600M.

Things like kinetic combat triples got very expensive because of a particularly desirable set bonus, being able to buy attuned whole sets or triples when they put them on a half price sale meant the prices came down (or at least stopped inflating) together with being able to transmute the unfavoured proc.

The effect of catalysts was interesting, the prices of purples homogenised, instead of being 20-800M, they became maybe 200-400.

In CoH farming couldn't target particular items other than in VERY broad terms (magic or tech salvage).

[Second Chances]

Catalysts, and having store-supplied sets for sale, are interesting since they actually increase the supply of the items folks were after (yeah, technically, the enhancement you used the catalyst on had been dropped, but imo the net effect was like adding the desirable enhancement, at the cost of the one you didn't care about, and the catalysts required). So far, it sounds like Segev was talking about buying items that had been dropped in the game.

I was assuming there would also need to be a faster way [than changing the drop rate] to add more items if it turned out that there was a supply/demand ratio that was considered "bad". For some reason I was thinking of that in terms of MWM creating items on the sly that it would put up for auction at some price (as if it was a player) to influence the supply and price but, as you point out, that can also be accomplished in an overt way by purchases using Stars. Unless you had a way to make the availability temporary, though, you wouldn't be able to stop as easily as you could if you were using the "phantom seller" approach.

On a sort of unrelated note, the catalyst approach is nice in another way, since they provide a way for you to spend money to have a chance to get happy about a drop you would otherwise consider disappointing.

[Manga]

I can flat-out state that, unless I'm utterly misunderstanding you, TheManga, that your assessment of "no inflation" if there's no conversion between currencies is wrong. Historically, MMOs have in-game currencies. Those with just that currency and an auction house still see mammoth inflation. As more people get into the game, more currency becomes available, and as more people hit highest levels and run out of things on which to spend it (or find ways to exploit existing systems to farm it more efficiently than they can spend it), currency becomes less and less valuable and AHs become more and more a prohibitive part of the game to anybody who isn't a proficient marketeer (or already fabulously wealthy).

I oversimplified a lot so it wouldn't take up 3 pages of text. 

My point was that currency conversion drives very rapid inflation.  Without it, that inflation isn't there.  The in-game currency becoming inflated on its own (due to an auction market presence) takes much, much longer, so you have a lot of time to plan for that and work with it.

Here's a more detailed (and longer) version of what I pointed out above:

All *useful* items for sale in the microtransaction store would also be sold for in-game currency in a separate store.  They would not be tradable/convertible for each other.  I mentioned that above briefly - the net effect of the presence of all those useful items in both stores will reduce demand.  By a lot, especially if they are updated often.  And they would provide an in-game currency sink.  Useful items would include things that are necessary for gameplay, but not cosmetic stuff.  It will also introduce an effective cap for items listed in the auction house, because it establishes a "retail" price for each item, and only a fool would pay more than that.

At any time, the auction house relevance can be re-asserted by making an item limited edition - only selling a certain number, or during a certain time.  But be careful with that, because they should not be items considered critical for gameplay.

Additionally, you can use have drops that players dump at vendors sell through the in-game vendor system as "second hand" at a discounted price.  That could be an excellent way of having impatient long-time players feed discounts directly to new players.

There's more I could type, but I think I bored everyone enough already...

[Segev]

I will confess to not seeing how currency conversion leads to inflation faster than anything else, but also to not having quite enough experience with it to reject the claim. I would be interested in the theory behind why that is, however. Is it just that, somehow, Stars are so much more desirable than the time one would spend working for real money that in-game currency is all but valueless to those who have it compared to them?

The major problem with approaching it as you suggest, TheManga, is that it defeats a large part of the purpose and immediately steps us back into it being "pay2win." Selling the "useful" items on the StarMart (whether or not they're also available at in-game vendors) directly is, essentially, saying that the work people put into playing the game to "earn" the items is valued only at $X, and diminishes the sense of accomplishment when one earns it through play because that other guy also has it just for shelling out some cash.

While the same might be true if that other guy bought it on the AH for Stars for which he paid real money, the number of Stars he paid is set by players' sense of how much their time and effort was worth, and you know somebody "earned" it. It's not a "cheap" one for any reason related to the fact it was bought with (ultimately) real money; it was generated the same as yours. And even if its owner paid real money to obtain it, somebody got the Stars he spent on it.

Again, the point from my perspective of this whole exercise is to make the game truly free2play if you are willing to play it hard enough, and to do so in a way that allows players to reward each other. To allow a certain amount of pay2win because there are players who just need that leg up due to more money than time or other constraints, but make even that behavior a net positive for the community as a whole.

The idea to put things up on the AH as a clandestine act of spontaneous creation by the company is an interesting one. I hadn't quite thought of it that way. Something similar though that I had thought of was allowing Vendors (the NPCs) to also play the AH, buying and selling items (from a finite inventory of currency, Stars, and goods) as well as selling items retail. This would take very careful design of them to make it not a bigger problem than solution, however.

I think I get what Minotaur and others were saying about catalysts and how they helped, now, though. It's because they made rarer high-end items less rare, but kept real money from simply bypassing all rarity concerns entirely. I'd honestly prefer to manipulate our crafting system to do that job, if we can. Sufficiently awesome crafting stations and tools (and maybe powers?) will (hopefully) enable transformation of one item into another, possibly via breaking-down and re-building processes. Makes building your crafting capabilities up (even if it's not a "skill" on your character, necessarily) rewarding. And allows those who like that part of the game to interact helpfully with the AH by being in a position to produce things that have gotten in way too high a demand.

[Second Chances]

The idea to put things up on the AH as a clandestine act of spontaneous creation by the company is an interesting one. I hadn't quite thought of it that way. Something similar though that I had thought of was allowing Vendors (the NPCs) to also play the AH, buying and selling items (from a finite inventory of currency, Stars, and goods) as well as selling items retail. This would take very careful design of them to make it not a bigger problem than solution, however.

Yeah, amongst the ways that this will differ from some entity trying to manage a real world economy is that you can just create new items and, if you need to decrease the currency supply, just delete the currency you get for them. I don't think you can initiate it in an automated way without worrying about being gamed, but if you set up monitoring software and establish a set of alerts for various conditions, you could have people examine a given situation to see if it qualifies. The actual performance of the task -could- be automated, if you had a tool that was designed to let you specify complicated criteria, and if it had system-only knowledge of things like standing bids. You'd probably want to be able to tell it things like,

over X period of time, occasionally make and sell the item, until the time expires or the remaining pending bids are lower than Y. If you reached Y, sell five more or until the remaining bids are lower than Z (whichever comes first). Don't sell more than W items, in any case. Report the effect of your progress in this graph.

Which sort of gets into another difference from a realworld would-be economy manager... you can potentially know how much inf exists and where it resides, and how much is in circulation and how many of each item are out there and stuff like that. Of course, it will just be a ginormous mound of useless data w/o massaging (and less than useless if you massage it badly), so it isn't magic, but the point is, you can only guess about totals like that in real life.

The cool part [for me >_>] is what is similar to realworld, though. Like how the use of the currency or the items is out of your hands once it is awarded to a player. They can decide to hoard or trade or sell or delete or whatever they like, and your hands are about as tied as those of any central bank's.   It's such an interesting mix of similarities and differences that the stuff involved in managing it would probably make for an interesting economics paper.

BTW, I would suggest having ways to expose some of the public economy info via an API. Like, you may show ingame customers of the AH a vector graph of the price of some item over the last week, but make more info on sale price history available via API for the numbers-obsessed, so that they can have a shot at pointing out problems.

[Segev]

From my own professional standpoint, programming those automated systems to handle similarly complex situations is exactly what interests me. I do computational intelligence by training, and I think having them behave like vendors who want to maximize their profits will serve well. And if we see behaviors that are poisonous to the system out of our NPC vendors, it will help us identify WHAT is motivating these bad acts so we can correct them, because the decision-making process is open to us.