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Gold Capped: This is the wrong way to do epic gems
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! Epic gems are here, and they're designed differently than we're used to. To be specific, they're designed without fairness baked in, which is somewhat of a new feeling for people who weren't around buying epic gems in The Burning Crusade. Fairness is actually the wrong word for this. Life isn't fair, and neither is WoW. Instead, I'll talk about balance. Blizzard has gone to great lengths to ensure that the game remains fun for as many people as possible by trying to avoid changes that suddenly disadvantage an arbitrary subset of players or shift the desirability of choices made a long time ago. Balanced changes don't force competitive PvP and raiding group to play the gold-making game to be on a level footing with the competition. They also don't provide a tangible itemization difference between the profession perks of different crafting professions.
World Bank report finds selling virtual goods in games more profitable than 'real' economy
A report commissioned by the World Bank's infoDev unit has cast fresh light on one of the more fascinating aspects of our brave new interconnected world: the virtual economy. The "third-party gaming services industry" -- where wealthy but impatient players have someone else grind away at online games for them in exchange for monetary reward -- is one of the focal points of the study, chiefly owing to it having generated revenues in the region of $3 billion in 2009 and now serving as the primary source of income for an estimated 100,000 young folks, primarily in countries like China and Vietnam. What's encouraging about these findings is that most of the revenue from such transactions ends up in the country where the virtual value is produced, which contrasts starkly with some of the more traditional international markets, such as that for coffee beans, where the study estimates only $5.5 billion of the $70 billion annual market value ever makes it back to the producing country. The research also takes an intriguing look at the emerging phenomenon of microwork, which consists of having unskilled workers doing the web's version of menial work -- checking images, transcribing bits of text, bumping up Facebook Likes (naughty!), etc. -- and could also lead to more employment opportunities for people in poorer nations. To get better acquainted with the details, check the links below or click past the break.
CCP Games introducing new economic measure in EVE
CCP Games generally takes a hands-off approach to EVE Online's economy, letting the collective actions of players determine what happens. But at times there are bottlenecks in terms of supply. CCP Greyscale cites the example of how the limited number of T2 blueprint originals (BPOs) decreased availability of items while driving up prices. CCP stepped in by introducing 'invention', where players can attempt to create higher-end items via R&D, eliminating the issue of supply and normalizing prices. CCP Greyscale's latest dev blog is called "Alchemy" and looks at the newest issue they've identified with EVE's economy, the inflated price of rare moon minerals. Greyscale says, "In particular, two rare moon minerals - dysprosium and (to a lesser extent) promethium - are becoming ever-more expensive as increased demand puts pressure on a limited supply. This is likely to become an increasingly large issue as time goes on, with prices for these minerals continuing to rise due to demand, and the increased price being passed on to the consumer of the final product." As we've mentioned in the past, these rare minerals in New Eden are something that the largest, most powerful alliances have sought to control and thus has been one of the drivers of conflict in lawless 0.0 space.
