Uthgaard |
11-11-2010 08:40 AM |
A game is defined very heavily by its economy. Time is money is more than just an expression, it's an intermediate currency that represents the amount of time it takes a player to generate value. The value of items is influenced by its quality in comparison to other items, and the numeric value of the price tag is going to be directly proportional to the amount of time it takes to acquire the item, and inversely proportional to the amount of money that a player of the average level on the server can be earned in the same amount of time. Then supply vs demand brings it up or down accordingly.
So when a player finds a method to introduce plat to the economy, eventually the means of acquiring plat by playing the game begin to lose value (for everyone) - and logically following, so does playing the game, as content is rendered useless - and players entering the game find themselves at a huge disadvantage.
So, it's important for the health of the game to prevent situations like this when they occur, identify them rapidly, and reverse the damage done. But don't think that we depend solely on some server red flag to identify plat entering the game, or that it's set to some arbitrarily high number because the guy got to 21 million in one day, or that we wouldn't have known if he hadn't been flagged. There are a lot of methods - both active and passive - that are taken to keep on top of things.
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