Buying Items on Ebay?

[Occhidiangela]

And, as always, fun is where you find it. :)

The way the 'official' economy has evolved since D2 was presented to us all, in the matter of trading for various items, strikes me as an "almost" effective way to dilute the market for eBay sales. The Duping sprees, and weak item identification method that prevents an easy and swift dupe elimination sweep every week or so on the Realms, set up the counterfeit press as a valid competition to the official Blizzard Government Mint.

The three chips for a neato sword recipe had the outcome of putting almost everyone into the trade economy. (Duped SoJ's were IMO the counterfeit hundreds). Perfect gem recipes also made possible everyone's entry into the trading economy. And pre LoD, with the Unique Ring Recipe, you could enter madness of the SoJ economy if you used enough gold find and gambled often enough for rings once the formula was known.

The six skulls rare upgrade recipe was OK as another commodity market, until the dilution of Rare Affix pools in LoD made the uber rare as a prize possession a thing of the past.

Absent dupes, it was in theory possible to trade, and trade up for, almost any item findable by using easy enough to find in game items and working the trade window feature. Two things:

1. Trade scams and trade cheat scripts
2. Dupes

Destroyed confidence in the trading process, and to a certain extent, the official currency. That irritation factor alone made use of the in game features such a pain in the arse for some that it was less trouble to work the transaction on eBay, even though that too hazarded the trade scam problem. And some folks did not care if they were trading in dupes, just as some Texans bitch about illegal aliens but hire non green carded folks to do their yardwork. :P

Beyond that, for some, a valid in game goal is the "Dream Set Up," and putting a particular set up together for PvP duelling is a goal of play.

While, for the PvM side, dream set ups tend to reduce such challenge as is present, on the PvP side, a wholly different element of the game, equipment is a huge factor in getting the 'best build.' Folks still duel for fun, and fun is the point of the game. While the PvP element is, shall we say, Swiss Cheese as to features and bugs, it represents 'a source of innocent merriment' in the duelling genre that is an inherent game feature.

So, fun is where you find it, and if you find it in duelling, then . . . it is within the game's scope and purpose. With the consumable gems and skulls, there was an opportunity to keep the trade for stuff while in search of the best duelling set up within the game context, except for one small thing:

That yearning for 'instant gratification.' This is what drives eBay sales of D II stuff. 'I gotta have it.' The activity makes me wonder if any of them really understood what 'thou shalt not covet' really was getting at, on the philosophical level. :o It took me a few more golf clubs than I really needed to one day wake up and realize "yep, that's what that is all about!"

That little quirk in some folks, aided and abbetted by a great deal of modern society and the entirety of internet commerce, seeps into everything, including PC games on the Internet.

PT Barnum was right, but if the mark is still having fun, what the hell, it's his money. :)

This whole discussion resembles the arguments made in re 'scoring' via seduction versus paying a prostitute for particular chills and thrills: if what one is after is sex, then the prostitute is a more optimal solution in time and effort. If what one is after is anintimate relationship, the prostitute is a non solution. If what one is after is 'a notch in the bedpost' then the sex itself is almost incidental to the rest of the process. In other words, what game you are playing determines what process and what goal is important, and their relative weight.

Now, when it comes to PT Barnum, I could get started on the obsession, by some, for Italian Pottery that drove me nuts while I was living in Italy. Them Italians were geniuses, the way I looked at it: they cooked dirt and sold it to American women by the sackful at a huge profit. :D Segnore Barnumo had the right of it. :D (I tried doing that in Italian, but it did not come out correctly.)