Teehee, reading this post over here on The Friendly Necromancer made me smile. I love seeing how happy people are playing their games of choice. If you haven’t read it yet give it a peek, and I’d stick around to read the other great posts too.
Sony Online Entertainment has partnered with Live Gamer to provide Vanguard: Saga of Heroes customers with the same exchange system that our EverQuest II customers on The Bazaar and Vox servers enjoy. Live Gamer exchange provides the security and transparency needed to trade virtual items with confidence, and with the Live Gamer system, participants will be able to both auction and purchase virtual assets (characters, coin, and items) securely and safely and without the risk of the fraudulent activities that plague 3rd party websites that are not authorized by SOE to provide these services.
Participation in Live Gamer exchange is not mandatory or required, but those wishing to participate in this new service must first register an account with www.livegamer.com. Once registered, you can then utilize the in-game system to upload virtual assets to your Live Gamer account and auction them to others. You can also use your Live Gamer account to bid on and purchase virtual assets and to send them to your in-game characters / accounts.
Live Gamer is offering an in-game incentive for trying the system out. Customers that register with Live Gamer within the first two weeks will receive a jewelry box which when opened will offer a choice between one of three items, each targeted towards one of the three key professions. For more information about this offer, please visit www.livegamer.com after the service has launched.
We will append this post with availability dates for the new service as soon as possible.
For more information on how to set up your Live Gamer account, please visit this link in our Knowledge Base.
The following thread is available for discussion of the new Vanguard Live Gamer Exchange service.
I’ve posted my thoughts on RMT and how it affects SOE’s games in particular before – when Station Cash came out. My opinions over all have not changed a great deal. I don’t mind RMT in games that don’t already have a $15 monthly fee. I agree there’s money to be made out there. It’s the wave of the future (or the past depending on how you look at it) and why not. I feel it crosses a ‘greedy’ line when you have both RMT and monthly subscription fees (depending on the items, I don’t mind fluff stuff at all like the gear from station cash and pets – I am on the fence about potions and the rest), and I feel a little more strongly about the Vanguard changes for a few other reasons which I’ll mention below.
Number one is that there’s no choice for Vanguard players. All servers will be changing towards this Live Gamer partnership and they’re not going to open a new server for it. For those people who have played since beta it’s a sudden change where they have no say in the matter. This is a reality of gaming, should players really even get that much of a say? I’m not really sure. I do know that people hate being forced into something – give them a choice and they’re MUCH more likely to give your idea a shot.
Number two is that (my opinion remember! Not fact!) I think this will affect the markets in a big way. On one of the most populated servers (Seradon) it’s already hard to find items for sale on the broker. Once this is implemented, why bother putting anything up for sale at all. You can put it on LiveGamer and then just make real life money from it. Or you can play the market even better and purchase everything off of the broker for plat and then sell that on Live Gamer and make yourself a tidy profit.
I think SOE is doing this as a guinea pig project. Vanguard already has a dwindled community. They (developers) have been working VERY hard to pull it out of the rough. It’s a fantastic game and I’ve enjoyed playing it for the past 2+ years. There’s very rarely been anything bad I’ve personally said about the game. However even with all that, it has a very small population.
Which makes it perfect to test out new ideas on. If the loyal community of Vanguard deals with the change well, and it’s popular and makes money, then why not push it towards other more popular games. If it doesn’t work well and it’s a huge flop – well, at least it’s only the four servers of Vanguard and not one of the ‘bigger’ games. Harsh words? Maybe, but I don’t think it’s all that far from the truth.
I’ll continue to play, I don’t echo the thoughts of others about the sky falling, but I doubt the game will have the same over all feeling that it has for me right now. A community of amazing people who work really hard to accomplish their goals. I expect an influx of gold sellers making legit accounts to sell their money and yes I expect people to buy from them. This whole RMT thing wouldn’t be such a big hit were there not some sort of market for it out there.
These sorts of announcements really don’t come as a surprise any more, and it’ll be interesting to see how it goes.
Can I buy your stuff?
stargrace