Yes, it's milestone madness over at Star Wars: Galaxies. First we hear via IGN (and Greg) that the game just passed the 300,000-subscriber mark. Now I'm here to tell you that the eBay trade in SWG virtual goods has just topped, for the first time, the numbers for reigning eBay market leader Ultima Online.
Read it and weep, UO fans: as of this Wednesday, eBayers had in the previous 14 days paid a total of $124,577 for SWG goodies while the virtual stuff of UO brought in only $122,564. This effectively reversed last week's figures of $114,939 for Star Wars and $124,051 for Ultima, thus giving a nod to speculation that the new Sony product is sucking the very life essence out of EA's flagship MMORPG.
All this has been discussed here and on my blog. What you may not have heard, though, is that while the price of UO's currency, the Britannian gold piece, is holding steady, SWG's currency, the credit, seems to be dropping like a stone. Just a couple weeks ago, I'm told, a million credits was going for $300 -- this week the price is around $70.
I shared these numbers with a veteran UO trader, and he noted the obvious: "There's gotta be a working dupe in that game." A dupe being, in layman's terms, a bug that allows players to bypass the normal drudgery required to make in-game money and pile it up by the gazillions. And indeed, according to one wise guy over at Exploiter.org (motto: "You create worlds... we destroy them"), there have been at least three such bugs in SWG, only one of them fixed to date.
It goes without saying that the existence of such bugs is extremely demoralizing to the many players who don't exploit them. What bears noting, though, is that even while the SWG dupes are crashing the SWG currency, the economy itself continues to grow like kudzu.
This suggests two things. (1) The size and growth of an economy are no measures of that economy's fairness. And (2) the exchange rate just might be.
Discuss.
Was looking for a reference to current VW numbers and so took a look at the latest version of Bruce Sterling Woodcock's standard reference, http://pw1.netcom.com/~sirbruce/Subscriptions.html
Take a look at SWG's growth curve. Looks exactly like the cliff that Jool's UO business fell off...
Posted by: Dan Hunter | Oct 05, 2003 at 19:59
One thing to consider about this - in SWG there is an ENORMOUS curve for getting into the housing market. For a guild to even exist it needs to buy a Player Association Hall, which can range in cost from as little as 250k to 500k or more.
Well, after you and your buddies have bought your guild hall, and perhaps a house or two, what else is left for you to spend money on? Not a whole lot. THAT is the problem. Buildings, clothes and furniture have no decay on them, and worse yet, there is no actually NEED to own these things, outside of vanity. The only real remaining thing to spend money on are weapons, armor and healing medications at this point.
Buy a droid? It's generally good for a LOONNNGG time. Ditto on buying creatures (given out by the Creature Handler class).
Duping isn't nearly as bad a problem as an inherent design flaw that doesn't take enough money out of the economy.
Posted by: Talent | Oct 08, 2003 at 15:26
I agree. Since I first earned my million there is nothing to spend it on. There are alot of people earning 1 mill+/day. Practicly the only thing they can do with the money is 1) stockpile and 2) ebay!. The only thing im doing right now is to go to theme parks. And do like 1 hour of work. There isnt much left to spend time on. Exept maby grind jedi and sit in a cantina all day.
Posted by: Landor | Jan 25, 2004 at 20:20