Once again I am on one of my tyraids to gather information about a subject that has intrigued my intrest for sometime now, RTM. As we all know RTM has been a legal TOS activity of EQ2 for a few months now. But because of my ongoing curiosity into these matters, along with not owning this game, i come to you, the players, for a little insite and, hopefully, answers to my questions.
As I said before RTM has always peaked my intrest. Ever since the release and first introduction of RTM, through "UO" i have been amazed, vexed, angered, and always curious as to how these transactions would shape a game world (would that world have a Laissez-faire RTM enviroment). Well it finaly happened. I view the servers that have this "legal" RTM as an experiment. An experiment to see how these actions define, shape, and alter the gaming enviroment, weither for the greater good or evil. As it has been a while(since station exchange was released) now I feel that my questions might have more relivance than say "3 months ago". So lets break the essay format and get right to the questions.
Do any of you play on an RTM and a regular server? If so how would you compare the economies of the 2? Does one have a significantly stronger currency than the other, or are they pretty much the same? is inflation rampant on an RTM server?
We all know a significant portion of people participate in RTM. How would you classify the economy (real world) of the station exchange itself? Have the prices (real world) fallen dramaticly from over abundance of plat, weapons armor, etc?
What is the player bases skill level compared to a normal server? (I for one am under the asumption that people that are on the buying end of RTM are of an inferior skill level, this is because they lack time to dedicate to the game and look for the easy way out)
And finaly... do you think that the servers and the station exchange will eventualy collapse? and if so is it because of an inflation in game currency that destroys the (real) market value of items? or is it a (real) market crash due to high prices that kills the in game economy?
don't answer them all if you don't want... now that i re-read it, it does seem like a short essay test :D I simply find this part of your game simply amazing and would like to know a little about it. I have been doing a lot of research lately on american currency and it's history and in my research foreign currencies had to come into play. My obsession with video games has lead me into the research of RTM as a currency exchange and I would like to research the paralleles of game currency along with a (real) foreign currency, as compared to a US dollar.
Thanks for the insite in advance... :D