This should be a non issue now as you can make more cash buying xp runes and reselling. I bought 90 the other day and sold em all in 2 days making well over 300kk. Why are people still buying adena from the selling sites, makes no sense?
PS, good job NC finally making this activity cheaper and legal cornering the market from the sellers only after 7 years of screwing your game over but people still don't recognise the obvious and will continue to buy from the sellers for reasons unknown.
This surprises you? Does it surprise anyone? People have been setting up bots on L2 to farm mats and adena and then sell to players since the game came out. Nothing has been done about it since open beta, and nothing will change.
This surprises you? Does it surprise anyone? People have been setting up bots on L2 to farm mats and adena and then sell to players since the game came out. Nothing has been done about it since open beta, and nothing will change.
What's odd about all this is that NCsoft gave people one strange work-around... purchase things from the in-game store and make some Adena with it. This removed illegal RMT from the equation and put money in NCsoft's pockets - yet somehow this isn't cool with the folks there.
I think all Runes should be made tradable, but perhaps the number that you can trade be limited. What if you wanted to purchase a Rune for a friend as a gift? You could do it before with the 50% Rune, but now you can't. There's no way to "gift" someone something out of the store (that'd be awesome if implemented), so now there's yet another option that no longer exists.
It's unbelievable how awesome this game is but how backwards the company can be at times.
They don't want to lose their only revenue stream left, which is ppl buying from them, not other players in game. I can understand that, but what's annoying is this whole "buying adena is a punishable offense" crapola. The adena sellers are litelrally in your face pming you in game and ppl r still booting w/o being banned. So the two most serious punishable offenses are still running rampant.
They don't want to lose their only revenue stream left, which is ppl buying from them, not other players in game.
This is true, but Adena buys things that can't be purchased through the store. Equipment is not sold there, neither are things like enchants, element stones, life stones, et cetera. So if someone buys anything from the store to sell them for Adena, all I see it as is that someone purchased something from the store and gave NCsoft money.
This opposed to NCsoft not seeing any money because some people simply wants to buy something in-game to sell.
It's a sketchy topic, I admit. I do almost wonder if NCsoft is going to make the Soul Shots in the store bound soon enough as well, because buying those and selling them for Adena is a little too easy. Is it a bannable offense if you do something like that? If it is, then the rules should be a bit clearer.
Edit: Anyone happen to know what the rules are like for this sort of thing in other F2P MMOs? This is the first F2P MMO I've played, so it's a murky area.
Most other F2P mmos let you either gift items or sell them, or what a lot of people do(even for regular non F2P mmos) is buy a game card and sell it ingame for whatever the currency is, and exchange the code on the back with the customer.
EQ2 had a pretty awesome shop system last I played, you could gift items to characters and they had a large selection of them(vanity armor sets, cool looking mounts, nothing game breaking but a lot of variety), it worked quite well and I was someone who bought the official SOE "currency" and also used ingame gold to buy shop items, so really it's not only pushing illegal RWT out of the picture, but it's just a huge boon to any players that want to stay true to the "f2p" aspect of the game, as they now have a chance at those shop items without costing them money they may actually need for IRL expenses.
While this happens, NCSoft loses no money, because the player selling the points/coins whatever has to buy them himself, and continue to do so if he wants to keep doing what he does. The trick is to balance the system so that a player can buy/sell these items without completely destroying the economy. Like the guy who posted this thread, selling those exp runes at millions per pop translates to a few million a pop for each exp rune, which cost around only a dollar, even at NCSoft pricing(which is expensive considering it's not even a real currency you're buying~)it will completely blow the server up.
It's not easy to do and most mmos end go going the pay-to-win route with a poor choice of items in the shop, you can already see it starting to form here with the insta-heal HP and CP pots being sold. We don't even have any vanity clothing(perma not this temporary 1 week ****) and we already have OP items that directly affect the amount of *** you kick.
Honestly, I would like to see a gifting option or the exp runes remain tradeable(the 1 hours). L2 needs to look at games like TF2 and study how the shops work, I was actually thinking those exp runes might take up the role keys have in TF2, or SOJs did in D2. Currency itself isn't used up like at all until high levels or you decide to buy pet gear/extra stuff, so why not have an item that anyone can use whenever they want, take over the role of the main "stabilizer" of the market? If RWT was suddenly allowed and the NC prices went to around what other mmos are(a dollar for 100 points, 1 cent/1 point typically), a 50% exp rune would be worth probably around 1m, not a huge amount, not a particularly small amount, but a nice even number.
The problem here is of course people like the OP, not saying you're an *** or anything, but you clearly have some disposable income that you can throw towards an mmo, some people may have a few thousand they can throw, some may have a few bucks. This, obviously, is the major problem in any f2p/cashshop mmo, you get a rich dude that's a ******* and he ends up running the server cause he got an inheritance or something blah blah. All you can really do to stop that is not sell items that directly make you OP via the shop, sure the problem still exists where a super rich guy will have super gear cause of his super rich status, but that will always happen, regardless of whether or not you use the NCoin shop. I can run the ingame market a lot easier than it is to work a job and buy NCoin, so why stress over someone having more money than you do? The thing is not to sell items other players cant access due to no IRL money, or if you do, let those players buy those items ingame with adena/gold or whatever the mmo uses.
An mmos currency is formed in a few ways, grinding(billions of mobs and "making" more money), playing the market(you lose marketing fees but still aren't really altering the current amount of gold ingame, you are just switching who's hands it's in)and last but not least, cashshops. This would typically be a problem because you get money coming into the game from the first method above, and it's not going anywhere. The second two methods don't really affect the gold ingame, it just moves it around. Now this is a problem because when you have no gold sinks in game, people get waaaay too rich and have nothing to do with the money. Fortunately or unfortunately, whichever way you want to think of it, we do have quite ridiculously huge goldsinks in game due to all the Korean Impossible-to-Win RNG games, like treasure boxes.
So basically, RWT should be made "legal" asap via the shop, right now they are losing what I'm sure is thousands each day because of illegal RWT'ers, actually *especially* now since all these new servers started up. NCSoft needs to really buckle down and make a proper cashshop, more vanity items, more permanent items, deals for NCoin, more reasonable prices for NCoin in general, and obviously the ability to gift items.
It just seems so silly to be throwing money away(into the hands of others)for no reason other than an odd stance that "RWT is strictly forbidden" when you just enabled "legal" RWT for a little while with those destiny packs, and with exp runes. Just during that short period you gained probably hundreds if not thousands of bux that went to YOU, NCSoft, not some random scrub halfway across the planet. How aren't you guys seeing this as a good thing? How aren't you looking at other mmos and seeing how they run their cashshops(successfully)? I realize you don't have unlimited resources but it doesn't take much to get like a dude or two to think of a stable system with a good selection of items, or even easier, use the forums and playerbase to TELL YOU what they want ingame for vanity mounts or whatever else, not only does that save you work but you get items you know people will be interested in, so hold onto your butts, cause you guys have your work cut out for you.