Item binding to players is pretty much required in order to keep a stable, healthy economy and to prevent RMT from monopolizing important items.
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Item binding to players is pretty much required in order to keep a stable, healthy economy and to prevent RMT from monopolizing important items.
While I'm loving the rage posts because they make me rofl.... I have to say, do any of us completely understand how this will really work in game play? I can't understand why a heated debate is taking place over something that none of us have experienced yet.
Arguing about what you think it'll be like just seems like a waste of time....
The end game grindfest to get these items is one of the things I hate about all mmos. I like to be able to look around and see what's happening but anytime I get the opportunity to go into a dungeon or something, it's my first time there and everyone elses 1000th time there. So while I'm trying to get a feel for the place and actually get to see what it looks like, everyone is down the tunnel fighting. Heaven forbid I get to watch a CS the first time it plays.
People are usually understanding of that. If you're a newcomer to a dungeon, just take your time and do your best. Only complete asses will fault you for something you don't have experience with. Like it or not, the endgame grindfest is what keeps us playing.
how is it a design flaw? you want one of the best pieces of gear for a particular slot, prepare to pay for it. assume the money is gone. nearly every other modern MMO works this way. once you get something better, keep the old piece for nostalgia, for situational use, or for comparison. or get rid of it if you want. it's not the crafter's problem and it's not the game's problem.
do you get to go out and buy a $10,000 smart TV big enough for an entire wall, use it for a year then sell it at the same price you bought it for or more? how about a car? and what about cheap items like socks? the value of commercial items depreciates as soon as you open or use it. FFXI and FFXIV are pretty much the only MMOs with economies which fly in the face of this, and it discourages crafting quite a lot.
if someone buys a couple rings to test out and they bind after a fight, no problem. get SB to 100%, convert to materia and get some of your money back. maybe even turn a profit. but since when in MMOs with functional economies (read: NOT FFXI or XIV) have you been allowed to buy some of the best, most expensive gear in the game only to just resell it without a loss? if you've played any other games, you should automatically expect to be stuck with that purchase. this also makes money more desirable as it isn't just and endlessly replenishing resource as long as you keep whatever you buy with it.
this forces you to make wiser big-ticket investments, which is realistic- and considering leveling will be heavily quest based in ARR anyway... in addition to gear, money is a common reward for that kind of system. so then what happens if you give players ways to introduce more and more money into the economy along with more and more gear? we had that in 1.0 before materia, and materia didn't heal the economy. it only temporarily stemmed the bleeding.
so now in 2.0 we see the potential for more bleeding than materia alone can handle, and a binding system solves that. and yet people are arguing against it simply because they don't like it and want to have free-reign to spend their cash with abandon, without consequence, regardless of the negative impact on the economy.
who can keep a straight face and argue they care about economic health in ARR and still argue against item binding, especially without a reasonable solution to counter?
if that's how you perceived my post, it isn't my problem. rather it makes you part of the problem.
in the meantime you can continue assuming i work for blizzard and worship the game while i continue leading the charge in FFXIV content. but, you know- because i'm as objective as possible about other games and don't flail about with ridiculous fanboy bias, you're going to draw whatever conclusions you want to support your twisted version of reality.
pretty silly.
It won't completely stop RMT, no. The only way you can stop RMT is to completely remove all kinds of inter-player trading.
What binding items to players will do is prevent RMT or other groups from monopolizing an important world item drop, and, more importantly, it will add a much needed piece in a consumer economy that MMOs are based around on. Without items being consumed (that is, being destroyed or permanently leaving the circulation), your producers (crafters) will oversaturate the market and prices will eventually crash beyond hope.
Undercutting is a normal, healthy aspect of all MMO economies that you will never be able to avoid. If people are undercutting each other and RMT, then they will continue to do so until the item in question stabilizes near its actual value, and will simply go up and down slightly depending on the time of day/week/month. The reason for this is because if an item brings in too little money for the effort used to obtain it, fewer people are willing to put in the effort. Conversely, if an item requires little effort for a lot of gain, you can expect that a whole bunch of players are going to jump in on it, and, eventually they'll bring the price down to the item's actual worth.