Quote:
Originally Posted by maskedmelon
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In the open world with a free market economy of P99 Blue, it affects players in a number of ways. Normally I stand unopposed to people employing real life assets to purchase success in a game. After all RMT vendors are essentially doing the same thing when they buy a coffee with the cash they've earned from RMT and nobody cares that their money came from selling pixels in an elf simulator with shitty graphics.
That aside, the RMT in a world like P99 Blue distorts not only the economy, but in-game demographic. Sure some places will always be more popular than others, but when people are deriving external benefit for their success in game, then popular in-game locations/items become that much more important. The long term implications are not so dire however, provided RMT vendors focus their efforts on accumulation of items rather than plat itself. In the end the effect would be a supply glut, driving prices down and making rare items more available. This would greatly benefit the 'experiencers' among us, but would miff the 'achievers'. Unfortunately, item and plat accumulation are not mutually exclusive activities and farming rare items inherently brings an influx of cash with it due to junk drops, which only exacerbates the problem with inflation.
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I'd normally agree with you, but due to the unique nature of p99, it'll actually drive prices up. By unique I mean money camps like Fungi and Tranix have been and will be camped 24/7 regardless of if someone is doing it to RMT or to gain in game pp. The demand for money camps, regardless of reason, is disproportionately high. Whether they are RMTing or not the same number of items are going to enter the server no matter what. I would say that supply is going to stay constant no matter what.
Scenario 1: If supply is constant, and you have a pool of players with legit pp as your demand, as long as both stay constant price stays the same.
Enter in the RMTer scene, you still have a constant supply, but now along with your pool of legit players with legit pp as your demand, you have an additional pool of players using either $$$ as currency, or buying pp they wouldn't normally have with $$$. Either way, your supply is constant, and your demand is now the demand from scenario 1 + the additional demand from the new group that wants to obtain via RMT.
Supply stays constant, demand goes up, price increases. So the net effect of RMT is that prices increase items.