So with Going Rogue you Devs missed an opportunity...

You know, it's amusing to me that this faux-RP argument keeps getting rehashed when real life banks have no problem storing money for criminals and will completely preserve client confidentiality from the law. The term "Swiss bank account" exists for a reason.

And this whole roleplaying "argument" is silly to begin with. If canon says the markets aren't merged, are you seriously going to argue with it?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

They don't call them criminal masterminds if everyone knows.

Also who says WW knows about the link to the BM.

Some archanos spies could easily make hordes of profit buying form Wentworths (since no one knows they are spies) and filling demands at the market. Nemesis automatons could be doing this to fund his operations as well.

How many times have you gone to investigate an office only to find the people are steampunk robots? Who knows how many citizens are cold mechanical awesome inside?

Then we have the Rikti spies, they are even harder to recognize then those damn nemesis bots!

There is a whole slew of bodies making it back and forth between the islands and Paragon every single day and you say not even a fraction of these people with double identities could be working the market?

I'ld say any hero who RPs while using WW should already feel iffy about the source of the 4 gallons of heavy water and human bodily fluids they purchased and any in game change isn't going to effect that just because people are activly doing it instead of NPCs.

I vote to merge the markets. It would help both sides - I notice a lot of salvage discrepencies (something sells for 100,000 blueside but 100 redside, for instance) that would aid blueside as much as red. Having more people redside won't address the issue as much as simply merging the markets would.

The two sides fight different foes throughout their careers, and drops are linked to whom you fight, so they have vastly different salvage pools. Adding more people to one side or the other will not change the simple fact that one side gets more magic, the other side more tech. Merging them is the only way to get those two pools to mix.

If you're interested in making the markets function better, which is a worthy objective, then find another way. There is simply no need to do (or recommend) something divisive and frustrating to a substantial number of players, and something likely to look particularly dumb to those who don't play.

And it would look particularly dumb to those who don't play the game (ie: potential players). Put the following into a marketing message, and think through how somebody who doesn't play the game would react ...

"Come play our superhero game in which heroes and villains trade powerful items with each other, and heroes are too thick-headed to notice, too weak to stop it, or all players just pretend that the markets are not merged, even though they really are merged and we all murmur the word "canon" to explain it, or the heroes are really happy about trading with villains because they get their phat lewt cheaper that way!

By the way, even though black markets and legitimate markets are *NEVER* fully and completely integrated in reality, we have fully integrated them for your purchasing convenience in-game! Come one, come all!"

I get why markets wouldn't be merged. Heroes and villains don't want to help the other side. That's simple. I read through the complicated and, frankly, silly rationalizations offered for having Wentworths and the Black Market merged and all I can think is ...

"WTF?"

I support the objective. I believe it would be better to reach it through other means.

Is there something wrong with the gun running aspect of keeping the markets seperated?
Does it give an advantage to any player that another player wouldn't have?
To me, it seems like it is adding an interesting meta game (even though I have no intention of playing it, heck I don't even play the market as it is now. Conceptually it does sound intriguing).

Economically, allowing for this would naturally do what a market merger would. Players would search for whichever item would give the highest yield, and then bring them from side A to the side B. If it is as profitable as people claim, I imagine that more people will try to do it. The more people that do this, the more people they have to compete with. It would bring the prices down on the side B as supply increases and raise the prices on side A as supply decreases, until it more or less hits equilibrium.

It seems that doing a market merger while acheiving the same effect, would be a much more disruptive event. Frankly, I don't see the arguement for it since they both achieve the same objective. One allows for people who want to play the market another way to do it, and those who don't to still reap the benefits of a market merger. Or are we saying that people who play the market are bad people for finding another method to make inf?

The profitability of gun running depends on how long it takes to complete the side switching process, which we still don't know yet.

I would like to begin by saying that both sides of this argument have merits.

Frankly, however, I do not think that the markets should be outright merged, but... there are a few options I WOULD like to suggest.

1)neutral market, same as in WoW, larger cut taken:
This evens out the most ridiculous imbalances, but only if people play the "market mini-game"

2)bleed over after 24 hours:
Simply put, you put an item on the market at WW, it takes a day for Shady Mac to arrange for it to be sold without being noticed. You put an item up on the BM, after a day, Shady Mac finds a fence who can get it quietly sold and all official and legal looking.

This means you will not see 1326 clockwork winders on one side selling for 300, while you're paying 10,000 or more on the other side.

This also means, a hero got it, heroes get the first whack at it.

THIS SAID... IF this happens, I would very strongly suggest something be done about the BM/WW lost connection with mapserver problems. If the quantity of information increases, the chances of a lost connection will also increase.

Throttling the transfer speed of the auction server/application/procedure would, I believe, effectively resolve this issue.

3)merging markets between servers:
I am not sure if this is already being done or not. I know when I transferred, the market info seemed different.

This ultimately keeps a difference between what is available based on the game mechanic differences between redside and blueside, but reduces the vagaries of understocked auctions and increases the size of the market, making it more stable.

Once again, it would also make the connection to mapserver lost issues worse, see above for details on how this issue could be mitigated.