Sad indicator of the game and a little jealous at the same time.

[Allurana]

<p>Since LON has gone live and the LON cards are now dropping in the game, I decided to create a saved broker search that would show me the cards others had found and were up for sale.</p><p>After roughly a week, there are about 4 to 5 pages of items in that search on the broker now AND I would estimate about 85% of the listings are by the known plat seller/farmers on the Blackburrow server.  You know who I am talking about, I am sure it is the same on all the servers.  They look like names picked from the random name generator AND they list their stuff on the broker not from a house AND they have had stuff on the broker forever in all the usual categories that come out of treasured chests from solo/easy heroic encounters out in the world.</p><p>I actually play EQ2 game for fun, I actually enjoy playing LON (although I suck horribly at it - I win 1 out of every 20 games I play haha), and I actually really like the collecting aspects of LON.</p><p>I have played in EQ2 a decent amount since LON has released killing quite a few green and up con mobs and have yet to see one LON thing drop.  It just staggers my mind to try and comprehend the raw volume of mobs the plat seller/farmers must have to kill each and every day to already have SO many LON items on the broker already.</p><p>Yes, I am jealous and not afraid to admit it.</p><p>But it does bring up a VERY solid question for SOE...</p><p>Why are you not (or better yet ARE YOU) monitoring how many mobs are being killed each 24 hour period by single characters and removing these "obvious" farmers that "obviously" are the gold generators for the plat seller services?</p><p>I know this post will probably get a TON of whiny liberal hippy type responses about like, "I play a lot and kill a lot of stuff and I don't want to be banned", blah blah blah.</p><p>I think that if a character is logged in 23 hours in a 24 hour period and the database logs shows them killing mobs nearly continous for 75%, 80%, 85% of that time in the same or just a couple different zones - don't you think that would be some sort of RED FLAG???</p><p>Am I jealous?  Yes, I actually wish I could play the game more.  Do the plat farmers effect my game?  Yes, they do - especially back in the days when I was doing lots of writs trying to level my guild.  The handlers in Barren Sky, pretty much everyone that has done that writ a few times will know what I am talking about.  That area is perma killed most times of the day.  SUPER EASY mobs to kill and they drop multiple gold items pretty regularly.  I was not unheard of to do about 3 to 4 sets of writs in about 90 minutes and walk away with about 2 plat profit from the junk loot.</p><p>I content that the plat seller/farmers have a MAJOR effect on the broker economy.  They "harvest" the lion's share of the items (like LON cards) off the mobs and then basically set the prices for those items on the broker which other real players emulate.  Where is the competition in that?  They just price fix their items and wait.  They know that people will buy them eventually.</p><p>Sorry to vent, but I would really like it where SOE could have made the LON items drop rate a little more generous so that it might actually be realistic to get a drop INSTEAD of having to jack up the drop rate to be SOOOOO rare to account for the plat farmer/sellers who kill more mobs in one 24 hour period than I kill in probably a month of playing.</p><p>Thanks,</p><p>Allurana</p>

[Luier]

<cite>Allurana wrote:</cite><blockquote><p>Since LON has gone live and the LON cards are now dropping in the game, I decided to create a saved broker search that would show me the cards others had found and were up for sale.</p><p>After roughly a week, there are about 4 to 5 pages of items in that search on the broker now AND I would estimate about 85% of the listings are by the known plat seller/farmers on the Blackburrow server.  You know who I am talking about, I am sure it is the same on all the servers.  They look like names picked from the random name generator AND they list their stuff on the broker not from a house AND they have had stuff on the broker forever in all the usual categories that come out of treasured chests from solo/easy heroic encounters out in the world.</p><p>I actually play EQ2 game for fun, I actually enjoy playing LON (although I suck horribly at it - I win 1 out of every 20 games I play haha), and I actually really like the collecting aspects of LON.</p><p>I have played in EQ2 a decent amount since LON has released killing quite a few green and up con mobs and have yet to see one LON thing drop.  It just staggers my mind to try and comprehend the raw volume of mobs the plat seller/farmers must have to kill each and every day to already have SO many LON items on the broker already.</p><p>Yes, I am jealous and not afraid to admit it.</p><p>But it does bring up a VERY solid question for SOE...</p><p>Why are you not (or better yet ARE YOU) monitoring how many mobs are being killed each 24 hour period by single characters and removing these "obvious" farmers that "obviously" are the gold generators for the plat seller services?</p><p>I know this post will probably get a TON of whiny liberal hippy type responses about like, "I play a lot and kill a lot of stuff and I don't want to be banned", blah blah blah.</p><p>I think that if a character is logged in 23 hours in a 24 hour period and the database logs shows them killing mobs nearly continous for 75%, 80%, 85% of that time in the same or just a couple different zones - don't you think that would be some sort of RED FLAG???</p><p>Am I jealous?  Yes, I actually wish I could play the game more.  Do the plat farmers effect my game?  Yes, they do - especially back in the days when I was doing lots of writs trying to level my guild.  The handlers in Barren Sky, pretty much everyone that has done that writ a few times will know what I am talking about.  That area is perma killed most times of the day.  SUPER EASY mobs to kill and they drop multiple gold items pretty regularly.  I was not unheard of to do about 3 to 4 sets of writs in about 90 minutes and walk away with about 2 plat profit from the junk loot.</p><p>I content that the plat seller/farmers have a MAJOR effect on the broker economy.  They "harvest" the lion's share of the items (like LON cards) off the mobs and then basically set the prices for those items on the broker which other real players emulate.  Where is the competition in that?  They just price fix their items and wait.  They know that people will buy them eventually.</p><p>Sorry to vent, but I would really like it where SOE could have made the LON items drop rate a little more generous so that it might actually be realistic to get a drop INSTEAD of having to jack up the drop rate to be SOOOOO rare to account for the plat farmer/sellers who kill more mobs in one 24 hour period than I kill in probably a month of playing.</p><p>Thanks,</p><p>Allurana</p></blockquote>Those farmers pay the same $15 a m onth as you and I, quit being lazy!

[Allurana]

<cite>Luier wrote:</cite><blockquote>Those farmers pay the same $15 a m onth as you and I, quit being lazy!</blockquote>LOL!  That was great.  I laughed, I cried - you made my day. haha.

[Dasein]

What the farmers themselves are doing is not violating any rules by itself (although they may be disrupting certain zones). You've not actually described any problem here, either. In fact, it seems to me the system is working quite well. The LoN cards are fairly rare, yes, but there are other means of obtaining them, and the 'farmers' by no means have an exclusive lock on them. However, LoN cards, being relatively rare and more importantly, very new, fetch a nice premium. There are lots of people with large surplusses of plat that are willing to pay a high amount for the cards, and the market will reflect that.

[Ardnahoy]

<p>/sigh</p><p>Another "I hate teh Chinese plat farmer" post. Everything wrong in this world is the direct result of a plat farmer. The game is ruined because of plat farmers. You can't finish a quest because plat farmers are following you around, secretly looking into your quest journal and letting other plat farmers know which quests you're on so that they can camp every spawn you need, just to make your life impossible.</p><p>I love plat farmers. I've purchased over $200 worth of plat over the years and have no regrets. All I have to do in real life is stay one measly hour later at work, and I earn the equivalent of what some poor slob in a third world sweatshop has to do in a week to acquire. Stay one extra hour at work and my baby conjuror gets a 50% horse and a few master spells. All thanks to the long, mind numbing grind of teh plat farmerz.</p><p>The harder they work, the cheaper and more plentiful stuff is on the broker, and the cheaper the plat.</p><p>If you want these cards so badly, why not try shelling out a few bucks to buy the booster packs? You won't have to deal with any plat farmer or have to grind on any easy mobs, you only need to cough up 3 bucks. How long does it take a normal person to generate $3 of income? My kids make more than that for just doing their chores.</p><p>Stop hating on the farmers. They do the dirty work so that we can enjoy the game.</p>

[Allurana]

<cite>Jagone@The Bazaar wrote:</cite><blockquote><p>/sigh</p><p>Another "I hate teh Chinese plat farmer" post. Everything wrong in this world is the direct result of a plat farmer. The game is ruined because of plat farmers. You can't finish a quest because plat farmers are following you around, secretly looking into your quest journal and letting other plat farmers know which quests you're on so that they can camp every spawn you need, just to make your life impossible.</p><p>I love plat farmers. I've purchased over $200 worth of plat over the years and have no regrets. All I have to do in real life is stay one measly hour later at work, and I earn the equivalent of what some poor slob in a third world sweatshop has to do in a week to acquire. Stay one extra hour at work and my baby conjuror gets a 50% horse and a few master spells. All thanks to the long, mind numbing grind of teh plat farmerz.</p><p>The harder they work, the cheaper and more plentiful stuff is on the broker, and the cheaper the plat.</p><p>If you want these cards so badly, why not try shelling out a few bucks to buy the booster packs? You won't have to deal with any plat farmer or have to grind on any easy mobs, you only need to cough up 3 bucks. How long does it take a normal person to generate $3 of income? My kids make more than that for just doing their chores.</p><p>Stop hating on the farmers. They do the dirty work so that we can enjoy the game.</p></blockquote><p>Let me try and bring this derailing back on track a little bit and clarify the original intent of my post...</p><p>I do not "hate" the plat farmers, I didn't say that.  I do think that they have an adverse effect on the game.</p><p>Plat buyers are just as much of a problem, but you are on an Exchange server so that is okie dokie to do.  BUT I am on a NON-Exchange server by CHOICE.</p><p>To further clarify, my post was to ask why and/or if the farmer problem is being addressed on the non-Exchange servers.</p><p>Since the release of LON, SOE has changed the game in ways that all of us will probably not fully comprehend for quite some time.</p><p>It is general knowledge that developers and designers of games like this one try to strike a balance in terms of game economy and how many of each and every item in the game "comes into the world" and they try to balance that flow so the economy stays healthy and the game is engaging on many levels.</p><p>Thus the reason for my question, they just introduced a new in-game item that can either be obtained via Real Life money and/or via loot drops from mobs in the game.</p><p>Some of us in the real world do not have very big disposible incomes such as you alluded to in your post.  Thus the most viable option for us to be able to enjoy this new aspect of the game is via mob loot drops.</p><p>Well here comes the problem...</p><p>Knowing that SOE has set a "drop rate" for these items based on trying to maintain the balance between drop rate and healthy economy, it leads all people with 2 cents worth of common sense to realize that they would need to set a pretty LOW drop rate do to the sheer volume of mobs being killed on a daily basis.</p><p>I am putting forth that on non-Exchange servers if the plat farmers were not killing their 10,000's of mobs per day, SOE would have been empowered to make the drop rate a little more liberal for items such as this since it is obvious the intention was to allow them to drop off any old mob in the world that is a green con or higher.  They would face a lot of political heat if they made this drop off named only, instances, epics etc....  Lots of flames would come from that.</p><p>So since SOE is sort of forced to allow them to drop off all mobs with color AND they need to maintain a healthy drop rate to game economy ratio AND add in the fact that plat farmers are mass killing mobs each day messing with that ratio - the question I posed above came to my mind.</p><p>I make no judgements against the farmers, they exist because buyers exist.  The buyers are the problem.  You are on an Exchange server - have fun using your disposable real life income on game items and coin all you want - it was set up and designed for that.</p><p>I choose to not be a part of that type of game and thus am on Blackburrow a non-exchange server.  People who buy from those services on my server, I do judge.  I feel they are doing the game and the rest of us a grave injustice by patronizing those services hence the reason they exist in the first place.</p><p>I can not fault anyone from trying to make a living anyway they can, and I do not advocate SOE cancelling or banning the plat farmer accounts.  I would like them to investigate them (like they already do) and MOVE them to the exchange servers.  More cheap labor and resources in your market for you to buy.  It would be a win-win for everyone.</p>

[Kendricke]

<cite>Allurana wrote:</cite><blockquote><p>Well here comes the problem...</p><p>Knowing that SOE has set a "drop rate" for these items based on trying to maintain the balance between drop rate and healthy economy, it leads all people with 2 cents worth of common sense to realize that they would need to set a pretty LOW drop rate do to the sheer volume of mobs being killed on a daily basis.</p></blockquote><p>And yet, there are 5 or more pages of booster packs on Butcherblock within the first 2 weeks of them being available per your own original post.  Of course, that doesn't count all the boosters that have apparently sold during that time...nor the boosters that players have merely found and kept for themselves.  </p><p>In my own guild, we've had players picking up boosters with brand new characters in newbie zones.  I'll remember to tell the member who picked up two boosters in two different zones one night (Steamfont/Feerrott) that the drop rate is apparently too rare as well.  </p><p>I'm not sure if the rate is high or low, really.  Of course, I'm not exactly going out of my way looking for boosters, either.  They drop or they don't, and I'll get them when I get them.  </p><p>What I do know is that it's going to be hard to convince me that any item with 5+ pages on the broker after 2 weeks is THAT rare.  </p>

[Amalthea]

Guys, a couple of points here:1. The constructive portions of this discussion really ought to be continued on the <a href="http://forums.station.sony.com/strategygames/forums/list.m?category_id=7" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Legends of Norrath forums</a>.2. On Exchange servers (The Bazaar and Vox), paying real-life money for in-game items is allowed.As always, if you feel as though EULA-breaking activity is going on in-game, you should always /report and /petition so that it can be investigated.