P2P Virtual Currency Exchange Launches 128
miller60 writes "In the wake of eBay's decision to halt auctions of virtual property, new companies are entering the market to fill the void, including one allowing gamers to trade game currency directly with one another rather than buying from IGE or other exchanges. The company, Sparter, says this eBay-like "peer-to-peer" approach will result in lower prices as sellers compete. It incorporates a reputation system and escrow for gold delivery. Sparter received venture funding from Bessemer Capital, signaling that VCs still see opportunity in the virtual economy, even if eBay doesn't."
ebay hasn't delisted all virtual property (Score:2, Interesting)
http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?sofocus=
guess it's just a matter of time before they find everything out.. too bad ebay execs are a bunch of anal fucks.
Re:Grind; buying money (Score:2, Interesting)
Generally, it's because a game has rules, and breaking the rules is considered cheating.
But, of course, the question becomes whether or not buying gold should be against the rules. If your game is so unfun that people are willing to buy their way into the end - maybe the problem is with the game, and not with people.
In the case of FFXI (since you said gil...) the reason its swarmed with gold sellers is because the game is designed that way, not matter what Square-Enix says. The game easily allows resources to be monopolized, and is set up so that leveling period is essentially impossible without the very best gear. Since the best gear is easily monopolized (no instances) it costs a lot of in-game currency to get. (While FFXI does have the equivilent of WoW's bind-on-pickup, it's rarely used except for quest items.)
So even though the rules say that players can't buy gil, the game is set up such that the only way to play is to amass large amounts of gil. Since the only way to do that according to the rules involves wasting massive amounts of time competing directly with other players for the same rare resources (remember, no instances), this means lots of time spent grinding solely to get ready to grind.
It becomes cheaper to simply buy gil than to waste time working at the game in order to be allowed to play it.
So the problem FFXI has is that the only way to play is to get lots of gil, but the game makes it so that the only way to get lots of gil is to play almost non-stop. Ultimately this means that the only people who can effectively get gil are people playing the game as a job who intend to sell it. It's set up to encourage currency selling - but then the company makes it against the rules.
The only reason gold selling exists in the first place is because the game is designed to make it profitable. If there was no value to the gold in the first place, people wouldn't be willing to buy it. Because the games are designed in such a way that makes the in-game currency worth enough that people are willing to buy it, they create the market.
If the MMORPG producers really want to stop currency selling, they'd design their games in such a way that the ingame currency wouldn't be so valuable. It's the game design that makes the game currency market. They should either enter the market they created themselves, or remove the market entirely. It's their game.
Re:Grind; buying money (Score:2, Interesting)
As of late, Square's also been relatively good at slightly lower-quality replacements to some of the more powerful gear, drops of which ARE being monopolized by the gold farmers. In many servers, the only way to get a riddill (same attack power as most weapons, except you attack two to three times per turn), byakko pants (the only leg-equipment that increases attack speed by 5%) or a speed belt (a 6% boost) would be through a gold farmer. While these items are all but impossible to get w/o some sort of gil trading, most of them have slightly lower-grade cousins that can be obtained via side-quests.
Consumables are a slightly different matter: accuracy-raising items with a 30minute timer are a virtual necessity to play will cost you ~20K gil a dozen, and if you're playing the ninja job properly it would cost you that much an hour to cast their spells. While equipment can generally be sold off at prices equivalent to the purchasing price, the consumables have no refunds other than in the form of levels for the user -- and not using them will change a player to anywhere between half-as-effective and completely useless. Players grinding for cash can expect to earn ~10K~30K an hour. Mob hunting, fishing and mining are still viable income-earning opportunities, and they're as dry as the rest of the game.
What Square doesn't have is a half-decent game management structure to control goldfarming. They pulled a silly move by not splitting servers by region, forcing US players to start from scratch in a world where there were maxed-out level Japanese players everywhere, most of whom had already taken up most cash-making opportunities. Rampant begging for items and powerleveling ensued, animosity between Japanese and the 'no-skills' US players (how in the hell should we know how to play when the game just came out over here?!) grew almost immediately, and thousands of players decided they needed a shortcut to catch up.
Goldfarmers followed and quickly started filling up game servers to service these new customers; for some reason most farmers were not banned for upwards of a year despite constant report-ins by both the US and JP community, which may have sent further messages to players that purchasing gils is OK. They have just recently come up with a 'Special Task Team' to combat goldfarming, but as far as I've seen the landscape hasn't changed much.