Its far from an ingenious solution at all and its one of those points we have yet to see any detail about. There is one way you can stop 'gold-farmers' in their tracks.. its like this: you dont allow money trades between players. Therefore, any form of allowing the buying of currency is a means to generate revenue for the company. If running a few servers is going to cost the earth then okay, lets see the detail, otherwise its just an excuse to create a wow style cash cow. Valve runs heaps of online games and I've never had to spend a penny outside of buying the game.
Unfortunately there is some practicality involved with online games. If it turns out revenue is required to pay for the cost of servers etc, I am happy to hear the argument and be presented with facts to support it.
There are a few issues that get me boiled up and this is one of them.
Ugh, I hate talking about wow - but I played it for a long time before it turned into eaze mode:
My point is that in the end everyone and his dog seemed to be buying gold. Several of my friends did on a regular basis. Just on a matter of principle I never did - the idea of doing so represented completely debasing the entire game.
So what was the result of the silent free for all and my living on principle?
Anything on the AH that was worth anything (i.e. purple BoEs) was immediately inflated to a price I couldn't afford - and I played the game A LOT. All my friends who did buy gold had no problem in kitting their character out, even alts, with stuff I had to work for but could barely afford, if at all.
That was just deeply unfair, in the end I stopped playing. I am still waiting to understand how being able to buy currency is not going to result in a system of unfairness whether it is bought from Frontier or not.
+1 to you sir...
Buying gold in game is a horrible horrible way to make a game. It rewards those prepared to sink endless cash into it and debases those who want to play properly.
Blizzard argues with Diablo3 that they were taking the power away from 3rd parties and making it so that blizzard controlled the issue, but it descended into pay to win, it always does.
Surely the solution is to bind equipment? Though it doesn't stop cargo drops and i don't see how you can if someone has made arrangements outside the game to meet up and get cargo for real cash.
The way to prevent ship purchases though is to tie them to ranks and reputation, that way new players cant buy their way to the top tier ships, even though they can buy the wealth.
Online all accounts should be held by frontier, to stop those outside the multiplayer arena bringing in purchased character files. Your offline characters should be forced to stay offline.
Give people cool things to sink money into, custom paints, looks and other paraphernalia, but nothing that is more than just aesthetics.
The issue is balancing it to prevent the bots and pay to win vs allowing casual players the chance to catch up.
