Its funny we were speculating about the movement of items and the like caused by GR in my coalition channel last night.
My thoughts, GR will inevitably cause an normalisation of pricing between the markets if not an outright market merge. (yes please to the latter)
Depending upon excatly how much effort is involved in side switching, I can easily see the following occuring.
Take a character and run the GR missions until you are right on the cusp between red and blue. Say you are blue side, take something which is pretty cheap here, say pet sets. Buy a whole bunch of them, run the one mission to tip you over the edge, then sell to redside.
Then being 'just' red it should be relatively easy to run back up to the cusp. Buy something thats cheap red and more expensive blue (IM thinking luck charm would be an easy example), then run that final mission to bring you back to blue.
There are obvious ways to limit this, Say there are 10 'rogue' points to go from one side to the other (1-5 red 6-10 blue), what you do is instead of putting a new villain at 5 that last mission puts you all the way to 1. Puts a barrier there to some degree, but that just slows the process it doesn't eliminate it.
To go all chemical analogy on folks, the disparity between the markets is an enthalpy difference, it will drive a reaction (item transfer) forward. The difficulty of the side-switch is the activation energy required, make it high enough and only a small portion of players will be motivated enough to transfer items. (The reaction is energetically favorable, but kinetically slow without an external stimulus think burning/oxidation of wood)
If its low enough, there will be a flood of the items, and that will quickly work to normalise the differences, leading to a defacto merged market anyway.
Gamers being what they are, someone will quickly find a way to minimise the effort (activation energy) required, which is akin to catalysis.
As a 60 month vet, a loyalty program member and sight unseen a GR pre-orderer I know I'll be in the beta at somepoint. I'll be paying VERY close attention to the effect on GR on the markets, as well as all the other testing I would normally do.
I actually posted in another thread about this, granted it was briefly. What I personally see happening is a merge of the markets, specifically to prevent the long term reprocussions of leaving them separate. Players are smart enough to know that there will be a way to exploit this (ex, buying the celerity +stealth procs on blueside and turn "evil" and sell it on redside) The real money traders already had a field day with AE (in case you're curious, the prices pre AE for a billion was about $100. Pre AE death as a means of farming, it was like $26) This will only give them a new "AE" to exploit as they flood the markets and increase their own stockpile with the intent to make real money off it.
Merging the markets, while there will be a large change to get used to in the beginning and it will be exploitable for a time, the prices will eventually balance out and any long term damage to the already crippled/recovering in-game economy will be avoided.
As far as the influence/infamy issue goes, it was correct when someone(forgive me for not specifying who) said that the official explaination for the in-game currency not being likened to gold is a joke. it's a currency, you buy things with it, it has in-game value; hence, it's money/gold. I can definately see the currency being "frozen" for the duration of your being on the other side, but what makes more sense to me would be what WoW has going for it. (put down the torches and pitchforks and let me explain :P)
In an effort to reduce the purchasing of gold for the game using the real money traders (as far as I know this was the reason) The goblins of WoW became the bookies/money transferers from one side to the other. Have an alliance character that you want to trade money to on a character on the horde? ok, you'll take a 30% hit to the amount you want to transfer, but at least it's something, right?
So I can definately see the implementation of a system similar to this, if for no other reason but to keep the players happy(by not having them start off on the other side with zilch) and to keep the real money traders from capitolizing on the situation GR is going to bring.
My thoughts, GR will inevitably cause an normalisation of pricing between the markets if not an outright market merge. (yes please to the latter)
Depending upon excatly how much effort is involved in side switching, I can easily see the following occuring.
Take a character and run the GR missions until you are right on the cusp between red and blue. Say you are blue side, take something which is pretty cheap here, say pet sets. Buy a whole bunch of them, run the one mission to tip you over the edge, then sell to redside.
Then being 'just' red it should be relatively easy to run back up to the cusp. Buy something thats cheap red and more expensive blue (IM thinking luck charm would be an easy example), then run that final mission to bring you back to blue.
There are obvious ways to limit this, Say there are 10 'rogue' points to go from one side to the other (1-5 red 6-10 blue), what you do is instead of putting a new villain at 5 that last mission puts you all the way to 1. Puts a barrier there to some degree, but that just slows the process it doesn't eliminate it.
To go all chemical analogy on folks, the disparity between the markets is an enthalpy difference, it will drive a reaction (item transfer) forward. The difficulty of the side-switch is the activation energy required, make it high enough and only a small portion of players will be motivated enough to transfer items. (The reaction is energetically favorable, but kinetically slow without an external stimulus think burning/oxidation of wood)
If its low enough, there will be a flood of the items, and that will quickly work to normalise the differences, leading to a defacto merged market anyway.
Gamers being what they are, someone will quickly find a way to minimise the effort (activation energy) required, which is akin to catalysis.
As a 60 month vet, a loyalty program member and sight unseen a GR pre-orderer I know I'll be in the beta at somepoint. I'll be paying VERY close attention to the effect on GR on the markets, as well as all the other testing I would normally do.
Merging the markets, while there will be a large change to get used to in the beginning and it will be exploitable for a time, the prices will eventually balance out and any long term damage to the already crippled/recovering in-game economy will be avoided.
As far as the influence/infamy issue goes, it was correct when someone(forgive me for not specifying who) said that the official explaination for the in-game currency not being likened to gold is a joke. it's a currency, you buy things with it, it has in-game value; hence, it's money/gold. I can definately see the currency being "frozen" for the duration of your being on the other side, but what makes more sense to me would be what WoW has going for it. (put down the torches and pitchforks and let me explain :P)
In an effort to reduce the purchasing of gold for the game using the real money traders (as far as I know this was the reason) The goblins of WoW became the bookies/money transferers from one side to the other. Have an alliance character that you want to trade money to on a character on the horde? ok, you'll take a 30% hit to the amount you want to transfer, but at least it's something, right?
So I can definately see the implementation of a system similar to this, if for no other reason but to keep the players happy(by not having them start off on the other side with zilch) and to keep the real money traders from capitolizing on the situation GR is going to bring.