While refreshing my house in Asheron’s Call this month, I heard the news that Turbine is finally cracking down on people attempting to sell in-game items on places like eBay. And it’s about damn time.
Technically it’s never been allowed in the first place. AC, like most other MMORPGs, has clauses in the EULA that forbid people from placing any such in-game items up for sale for real-world cash, but it’s never been all that heavily enforced before. A problem like that usually has to grow and reach a certain point before it becomes worth the hassle to start getting the lawyers involved.
Players are generally of two minds about it. One side generally agrees with the EULA, and believe that it defeats the purpose of being a game in the first place if you just go and buy all the best stuff. You’re supposed to actually play the game and *earn* your way up the loot and exp ladders. It’s unfair for some players to get to skip ahead to the newest and hardest parts of the game just because they shelled out $100 on eBay, when others have been dutifully working towards that goal for years. The other side argues that hey, it’s a free country, what two people agree to trade for is none of your business, inside or outside the game. It may be against the EULA, but Turbine doesn’t have the right to place such restrictions in the first place. It’s a longstanding, complex debate with no resolution in sight, so I’m certainly not about to provide a solution here.
It is kind of new to Asheron’s Call, though, and there’s a slight twist. Normally there isn’t much in AC that would even be worth paying real cash for in the first place. In games like EQ they’re often selling the extremely rare and powerful items, and large quantities of in-game currency, but those aren’t as important in AC. The loot system is a lot more random and generous in AC, and in-game cash doesn’t really buy you much anymore and is easy enough to earn by yourself. What *are* of interest though, are characters and houses.
Characters are important because the level of your character roughly corresponds to his strength, and determines where you’ll be able to travel and hunt. Want to play in the Valley of Death? You’d better be at least level 100. Wanna get to level 100? Well, that’s a matter of time, and that’s what most of these potential buyers are trying to avoid. Playing normally, getting a character to level 100 can take a *very* long time. I’ve been playing on and off for about three years now, and my highest character is level 68. Until recently you could have joined an ‘xp chain’ which took advantage of flaws in the allegiance design to accelerate your experience gain, making you reach those higher levels much faster, but that’s been fixed recently so it’s now back to the slow exp grind to get to that point. Some people are simply too impatient, and are thus willing to pay real money in order to skip all that levelling up and reach those higher level areas sooner.
What’s the consequence of selling characters? Not much, really. Whereas before it was Person A playing Character X, now it’s Person B playing him. Big whoop. Nothing is really lost or gained in-game. They may be robbing themselves of the experience of levelling up and seeing the rest of the game (i.e., the old adage about enjoying the journey as much as reaching the destination), but that’s their loss.
Houses though, are a different matter… Houses are different because they are an *extremely* limited resource. There are, last I remember, around 500 cottage-style houses on each server, and far fewer villa- and mansion-style houses. During primetime there are usually around 1000 players online, and that implies a total server population of around 4000. (One guideline says that roughly 1/4 of the total players are actually online at peak times.) That’s only one house for every 8 players, and almost everybody wants a house for its prestige and storage value.
So how do you get a house? Well, theoretically, you just have to be patient and lucky. Houses do occasionally become available as people stop playing, can’t keep up the maintenance cost on them, and so on, so all you have to do is raise the cash, look around and keep an eye on houses whose leases are about to expire, and hope you get lucky and catch one some day. In practice though, it’s not so simple because you’re also competing with the eBayers. Since houses are in such high demand, they’re a high-value item to sell, and the eBayers actually have complex systems of automated bots which would scan for and snap up houses as soon as they became available. With these bots running 24/7, your chances of getting lucky on your own get reduced to almost nothing.
The end result then is that if you wanted to get a house, you pretty much had to buy one off of eBay. It’s an awful lot like scalping — sure, they can get you what you want, but it’s still not exactly legal and it’ll cost you dearly. Worse yet, you *have* to get it from the scalpers. It’s as if they bought up every single seat in the stadium, so the only way to get any seat at all is through a scalper at 10x the price.
All other arguments aside, the housing portion was really suffering from the eBay phenomenon, so it’s good riddance to the eBayers as far as a lot of players are concerned. Unfortunately, there is still the enforcement angle. Banning such sales on eBay only drives them underground to other auction sites that just outright ignore the game companies. It happened in EQ, it’ll happen to AC, and there’s still no perfect solution to be found.