Posted 30 May 2010 - 23:58
1. I have bought a lot of FSP, I am not sure how many but between 20 and 25,000 of the loyalty points worth. If my math is right that is around $1000+ paid into the game. I am not sure of the exact number because when I got my income tax refund I bought a bunch more and brought myself back up to 12000+ like the initial amount.
2. I am not rich, I live on a fixed pension.
3. I think the marketplace works right. Originally you had to find someone to trade your FSP for gold with. At this time most people that needed gold sold their FSP on the Upgrades page for 50,000 gold. 50,000 not a hundred plus thousand.
Then they created the marketplace. It allowed people that wanted to sell their FSP to list a desired price. Normally this was 99-100k. If someone needed cash fast, they would list at maybe 96k. A great price, no?? Well it had a problem, usually their was only one page of people listing FSP for sale. Often there were days with no FSP for sale and that is not counting when some one would create a bot to buy all the FSP listed for sale.
If you needed FSP for forging, or crafting, or upgrading your character or guild, you almost always had to buy FSP with real money. You could of course try doing a FSP reward in hopes of actually receiving free FSP. Even if it worked you got listed on so many spam sites you basically had to abandon your e-mail address.
Almost everyone had lots of gold. You could not deposit but 25% per deposit you had. We used to round robin shipping gold for deposits because otherwise you were a target for the thieves. Buying FSP to avoid being robbed was usually impossible. People bought items or hid gold on the AH or set up partnerships where they would each have a few items for sale on the AH and the partner would bid for them. You could find a sacred knife going for over 1,000,000 gold.
4. The adding of the buyer's/bidder's side of the marketplace has caused the seller's side to all but be abandoned. I am glad the seller's side is still there for if there is a crash in prices but I am equally glad for the bidder's side. The price fluctuates freely. When something happens that people suddenly need more gold than FSP, like a special event, the price falls. When they have the +20% sale of FSP, the price falls. When people do lot of upgrades or just decide to hoard FSP, the price rises.
5. Any player can get free FSP by getting enough gold and buying them on the marketplace. If you think this is too much work, why are you here.
The game is NOT about having FSP. It is not even about being the highest ranking player (though some think it is). The games is about social interaction. If you get a personal thrill or any enjoyment of sniping "monsters" that have virtually no chance of fighting back and harming you, you are one sick person. You need to see a psychologist/psychiatrist bad. No the basic game is boring. It is a social game. The guilds are what keep it going. The guilds are like your old school cliques. Guilds are about friendships.
If you think the game is about anything else, you are either very dense or very new to the game. The gold you earn in the game is monopoly money. The FSP you buy in the game or earn through bounties or farming is monopoly money. It does not matter if you are rich or poor. It is not real. It has only as much significance as YOU personally assign to it. If it does you have a worse self image than me and I was required to go to a shrink and have been locked up in the loony farm twice for attempted suicides.
6. I am well known by a few for arguing against the PvP system. It is not the idea of PvP I am against. It is the way it is implemented here. I think it should be fair and balanced like the AH and the Marketplace. Those two parts of the game HCS got PERFECT.
7. Be happy there is an Marketplace that runs like this one. The other choice really is to go back to the either no Marketplace or a buyer's Market like before where the sellers lists the FSP they are willing to sell. Even if they keep both sides and put caps on the prices it will be a seller's market. Oh and I think HCS is trying to keep the price down. Had they not created the events, FSP would probably be about 200k now. They were sometimes at 170k before the caves were opened, and regularly were going for 155-165k.