Virtual sales now linked to grief playing? This argument always turns into a mud slinging contest.
Still watching the virtual sales arguments over at MUD-Dev. Everyone has their own views of the evil enterprise, including some allusions toward player sales trending a grief player market. I mean come on people, does everyone have to draw conclusions that a user who pays for a character doesn't have an investment in the character?
Let's get something straight. Everything in the world is about investment. For some people time is cheap and money is their goal. For others, time is scarce, but money is more abundant. Both of these are resources. And with any resource, you should be allowed to use whatever resource you have most of in order to get what you want. In some cases a conversion must take place (a farmer must convert grain to money to buy clothes), but for our purposes we'll assume this process is transparent.
As a player with infinite time on my hands, I'm extremely likely to grief play. I'm on during all of my natural moods, and everyones mood changes with hunger, lack of sleep, time of day, stress in the environment, etc... As a matter of fact, I'm giving a larger amount of time to grief play if I wanted to. Generally I keep it to a minimum so that there are people I can play with the rest of the time I'm not greifing. So you sell me your character and start another one. You spent some time, and I gave you some money, a basic sale. The equation of trade here is pretty equal. I spent time to make money = random online guy spent time to make money. Of course his time was spent to make my money, and my time was spent gleaning money from the company I work for. I'm not seeing a difference.
At this point I'd say that I'm not really likely to grief play right off the bat. I just bought the character, I haven't spent thousands of hours online. I think I'm going to actually enjoy the game for a while. Now, maybe later down the road, a month or two, I get disenfranchised and I start greifing. I'll probably grief just about every time I get on after that, because I generally get on at the same times (same people), and it is a stress release, because not having time, means I didn't get to keep up with the rest of the uber players and I'm not uber anymore. I want to kick the newbies in their joobies.
Do you see a trend anywhere there? The grief playing isn't from the online sale, it is more from becoming disenfranchised with the game. Both players are equally likely to become grief players. And in every case the game designers are equally likely to blame this pattern on sales of virtual items. I mean, how can you balance something that is outside of your control, where there is another pool of resources (cash), that if you fail to take into account will cause your economy to fail and if you do take it into account there is the likelihood it will make items artificially hard to get with just in game resources.
I won't even go into the principles I would use to try and fix the problem. Everyone has their set right? You have to take into account real world influence, assume an infinite amount of time, assume an army of small computers running group behavior for AI controlled player characters, the list is endless. Just don't take variables out of your equation, and then blame the results of their reintroduction on virtual sales because intelligent players will call bullspit. No wonder the current trend is towards massive numbers and high turnover rates with people playing a game for just a couple of months. The worlds aren't compelling enough for anything more. They don't contain enough depth. Every time the next thing comes out it appears to be that much better, enough such that people gravitate towards it. Support your game darnit, add content faster than user's can explore it, have the environment fight back a little, build some tension, OR waste your money complaining publicly about sales of your virtual items, paying lawyers to write injunctions against auctions sites, and paying your cronies to cancel accounts that are taking advantage of the problems in YOUR game.