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?
Now that one will be a problem for guilds. The argument could be posed that the botters aren’t “playing the game” but still, they’ll cause an all-out war with legit guilds over contested content. The problem is that the botters are registered with LG so is SOE even responsible for doing anything to “fix” it at that point?
I don’t know (and no one will until it happens) that brokers would be empty because everything is in the LG system because if players aren’t buying with RMT then the sellers will have to take their stuff back out and put it back into the in-game brokers/AH. Supply and Demand, etc. I’m quite certain that regardless of all the “this is Vanguard, we’re old-school, we’re not going to tolerate RMT” brow-beating, greed will rule the day in the beginning and people will try to cash in and sell their wares. The real measure of the community will be in whether or not people stick to their guns or jump in and start buying.
Hmmms. That fourth line in the second paragraph should have ended with “be a member of [Uber Guild of Raiding]”. I guess the brackets I used the first time were unworthy of making it into the comment. :)
The problem isn’t with people that legitimately play through the content, win rolls and decide to sell items on LG. It is with the bot teams that will be camping and farming all of the tradable items that might be worth anything. Even those few players that would otherwise be lucky enough to kill these mobs will now have to compete with pre-programmed scripts that log toons in at the exact time a mob spawns, kill it, loot it and log out before anyone even has a chance to wonder WTF just happend. That is where the gameplay is headed with this type of system.
You do have a point that not having an item that someone else does will not affect your game… But, how affected will you be when you browse through the broker and find only junk? How will you feel when you need an upgrade and the only option you have is to spend real cash on it? Not everyone is lucky enough to be a member of . Some people actually depend on the broker and would like to have items on there instead of for sale on LG.
It’s not about not having an item. It’s about not having a choice. As you say, they may not “win”, but, I promise, we will all “lose”.
I’m strictly speaking of the non-existent player-player competition that players think exists every time RMT comes up. Not the old EQ style inter-guild content competitions which may or may not exist to that extent in VG.
If Item X only drops from Contested Boss Y then does the “average player” ever have a chance of seeing that item anyway??? Probably not. Is “contested loot” bound? If so, this particular argument is moot because bound items cannot be traded. If it is tradeable, then someone has to be seeing this content, killing Contested Boss Y, winning the roll for Item X then making a decision to sell it on the AH for a gold price or sell it on LG for a cash price. Will it sell at $50? Who knows? It’s not a Item Shop with set prices, it’s an RMT AH. Players set prices and players decide for themselves if they’re willing to pay that price. Pixels are only “worth” what someone is actually willing to pay, and the particular currency (cash or gold) doesn’t matter for that reality. But once again I’ll return to the point that someone else having Item X while I do not has no bearing whatsoever on my game. They don’t “win” nor do I “lose.”
Wow. There is a huge difference between separate servers and having it be activated on all servers by default, especially with the effects on the economy. One wonders if continuing to push the envelope on adding RMT to pre-existing non-RMT games as a way of testing it out for some future title is going to start to damage the SOE brand name at some point down the line.
When players discuss a lack of competition in a PVE game world, they often forget how much competition there actually is – for in-game resources and content. Vanguard has precious little instancing by design. This means virtually everything out there drops from a contested target, some of which are on long timers. What happens when it becomes known that item X from monster Y is worth $50.00 real world dollars. Do you think the average player has any kind of reasonable chance at EVER seeing that item in the game at all? Of course not. Unless you fork over the $50, you’re not going to see that item. Not a big deal, right? It’s not a competition, right? Multiply that by every other timed named in the game.
Enjoy your gaming.
I’ll disagree — with the exception of the “buying/selling characters” bit, which I think is just silly anywhere it’s done.
Only normally tradeable items can be used here. It’s not like we can roll a level 1 character and with a little cash equip him in APW gear.
People get so effing uptight about what other players do. Vanguard is a PvE game. There is no real competition nor is there equality in modern PvE.
Someone who plays all day every day will get to level cap before me. Does that affect my game? NO! Someone buys a level 50 character, so *poof* they’ve obviously gotten to level cap before me. Does that affect my game? NO! Even if someone was able to buy their APW gear (which they cannot) would that affect my game? NO! Would that affect the raider’s game? NO! They’ll still be raiding. They may feel anger or some emotion that their “work” or their “achievements” are now worthless, but that’s only because they have obviously put too much personal value on said “achievements” to begin with. Raiders tend to stick with their raid guild, so that means whatever some other player outside that guild does *has no effect whatsoever on them* so get over it.
What if I buy gold from some farmer? At least now I won’t be subject to identify theft and credit card fraud. What would I do with that gold? Probably buy a boat from a crafter, which *would* affect *my* game, giving me an extra toy to play with and extra travel options. Isn’t that putting the money right back into the economy? Or, what if the crafter puts his boat up for cash purchase rather than gold purchase in the AH? Now I’m literally paying the crafter for his “work.” What if the crafter pays cash for his ingredients? He still has to manually play/work to level his crafting to make those boats; you can’t buy status.
I think we all need to take a look at how often the word “work” comes up in these discussions, then consider what that final G on the end of the MMORPG acronym stands for…
I agree, I think it undermines those who work hard to get what they desire.