![]() ![]() Each NPC corporation has its own loyalty point store, and there's some variation in what each organisation stocks. In EVE, players who complete NPC agent missions are given loyalty points with the agent's corporation. Most MMOs have some kind of reward token system that lets players grind for something other than just currency. With this system, every item in the gold auction house effectively becomes a microtransaction as it has an equivalent price in gems, and every item in the cash shop has an equivalent price in gold. Players with a lot of gold can then buy up gems and buy cash shop items without ever spending a penny. Players with cash to spare can buy gems and then sell them to other players for gold in the gem exchange. Other MMOs have since adopted similar systems with microtransaction currency in place of game time, and Guild Wars 2 is one of them. This simultaneously provides a way to play the game effectively for free and a way to safely buy ISK that bypasses RMT farmers. Every PLEX is initially purchased by a player for cash and then injected into the game to be sold to another player on the in-game market for ISK. These are tradeable in-game items that can each be redeemed for 30 days of game time, but the clever part is the effect this has on the game economy. In 2008, EVE Online released something I consider to be one of the most important business model innovations in the MMO genre: PLEX. #2: Gems are Guild Wars 2's version of PLEX Certain products will also sell on a cyclical basis, dropping in price during peak play times and rising later in the day or week. Keep an eye on gameplay trends like the increasing median player level and predict which items are about to rise in demand or drop in supply. As in EVE, there's also big money to be made from predicting market trends in GW2. Crafting ingredients and intermediary components can even sometimes be bought for close to their vendor prices and then crafted into products you can resell or vendor for a profit. When the price of particular crafting materials like copper ore is high, certain items can be bought en masse and salvaged for profit. High supply of an item will push its lowest buy order price down until it hits the vendor price, but some items can be turned into profit before they hit that low. Players can list items for sale and set up buy orders just as in EVE, and that means the same laws of supply and demand are in effect. It's a global marketplace on which players from all servers can list their goods, making it an enforced analogue of EVE's Jita 4-4 trade hub. The Guild Wars 2 Trading Post operates under many of the same market conditions as EVE's Jita 4-4 trading. Others set up region-wide buy orders for items at below their potential resale value and use courier contracts to move the items to Jita 4-4 for resale or refine them into minerals. Some players don't even leave the station they make money by playing that single market. The majority of players buy their goods from the game's main trade hub in Jita IV Moon 4's Caldari Navy Assembly Plant station, so it's here that the highest trade turnover can be found. Trading is probably the most effective money-making profession in EVE Online, with top traders earning billions of ISK per day and maintaining a stranglehold over entire regions or products. #1: The Trading Post is like Jita 4-4 trading In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at four Guild Wars 2 game mechanics that are similar to those in EVE Online and how lessons from EVE can be applied to GW2. The same strategies that work for faction warfare fleets in the depths of space are currently helping guilds win World vs. GW2's Karma system resembles a heavily restricted version of EVE's loyalty point mechanic, and PvP in both games may be more similar than it appears. ![]() GW2's Trading Post bears a striking resemblance to EVE's Jita 4-4 market, and many of the same market tricks that work in New Eden have proven just as effective in the land of Tyria.ĮVE's PLEX system lets people buy game time for in-game ISK and undercuts illicit RMT by giving players a legitimate way to buy ISK, a system that's very closely mirrored in GW2's gem trade. But dig a little deeper past GW2's fluffy exterior and you'll find it shares some core game mechanics and ideas with the world's biggest PvP sandbox. With its single-shard server structure and sandbox ruleset, EVE Online seems to have little in common with a sharded fantasy themepark like Guild Wars 2. ![]()
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