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World Transfer Price Reduction (03/03/2014)Follow

#1 Mar 03 2014 at 3:31 AM Rating: Good
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PlayOnline wrote:

As of Tuesday, April 1, 2014, the price of world transfers will be reduced along with the number of days one must wait before transferring the same character again.

  • Optional Service

 
World Transfer	Until              April 1,2014 
                April 1,2014	   and thereafter 
 
Fee per POL ID	$25.00.	            $18.00. 
Number of days that must pass 90    3

May all your adventures in Vana'diel receive the Goddess's blessing.

http://www.playonline.com/pcd/topics/ff11us/detail/11859/detail.html
#2 Mar 03 2014 at 6:20 AM Rating: Excellent
That's really odd that they're cutting down the wait between server transfers that drastically. I could understand maybe cutting it down to a third of what it was, since a month wait seems reasonable, but to cut it down from 90 days to just 3 seems...strange.
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#3 Mar 03 2014 at 8:48 AM Rating: Good
Revenue.

Revenue, plain and simple.

If someone wants to spent $18 every three days to server hop, who is SE to stop them?

I think what has happened is that they finally have the back end process fully automated and perfected. Previously, a human being had to be involved as they pulled data off one server cluster and stuck it on the other, and verified it manually. I think they finally have it set up so the system takes your money and switches your character without any human intervention at all (like it does in XIV. I transferred a char there and it was done in about three minutes.)
#4 Mar 03 2014 at 10:03 AM Rating: Good
I transfered my first character between servers many years ago and it was pretty instantaneous.
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#5 Mar 03 2014 at 10:23 AM Rating: Good
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Yeah, I don't think it's ever been handled specifically by a human.

Still think it'd be better if they took Rift's approach to this, though, with free transfers on a weekly lock-out. Then abolish the $1 per additional character fee while they're at it.
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#6 Mar 03 2014 at 11:28 AM Rating: Good
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Better question: Has SE ever played an April fools prank on us before? Because I sure can't remember any.
#7 Mar 03 2014 at 1:13 PM Rating: Good
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Was this really a thing people cared about? If so that's great, but I never saw a huge demand for it at least among the NA community.
#8 Mar 03 2014 at 1:27 PM Rating: Good
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this is interesting... I don't think I like the 3 day thing.... too much potential for griefers/RMT to mess around
#9 Mar 03 2014 at 1:50 PM Rating: Decent
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Change it to 30 days not 90 and the player base would not be as upset.
#10 Mar 03 2014 at 2:25 PM Rating: Good
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For me there were two concerns with this very short cooldown on transfers.

1) Increased likelihood to Grief / Ninja on a fresh server (there were already a lot of people who would transfer, build a fresh linkshell, get priority on a relic or mythic farm with promise that the guild as a whole would pursue them for everyone, then have the person server swap and do it again after getting a complete weapon. I've personally seen a few people do this, one person in particular comes to mind whom was not afraid to take advantage of everyone and everything around them to accomplish his goals. This scars the community in terrible ways, because now that person isn't just walking the server he screwed people in freely but unable to participate in future-large-scale events because people know him to have manipulated the masses, he instead gets to transfer entirely off server, repeat the process, and feel like a hero 100% of the time, with the only negative repercussion being a small transfer fee when the time came.

2) Market disruption. When we see in the news talks of how the economy of the world is largely controlled by the richest 1-5% of people, it can be a little scary to think about. In a game world like FFXI, there isn't a natural stability, since everything is virtual, there is no limit to the amount of market supply for products except those imposed by artificial time sinks. "Resources" will never run out like they would in the real world. As a result a wealthy enough player could create a drastic shift in those time-sink driven values and alter their worth heavily, creating a sudden uncontrollable demand in one server where some of these items are extremely cheap relative to another server, and altering the market (and whatever particular elements of the game those marketed items also happen to impact on existential levels), while creating a potentially incredible influx of profit for one person in a matter of 6 days time to fruition.


But... upon further examination, it's a damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario.

in regards to #1)
Griefers will always grief, and given enough time, they would probably find ways to take advantage of large groups of people no matter what.

in regards to #2)
By now, every major MMO game that uses separated servers to store character information should have plenty of capability for cross-server markets, just as many have cross-server instancing. There is no excuse for markets to fluctuate from server to server at all, just because of the interests of the players on that particular cluster. Let everyone contribute to FFXI's global market stability so players can quickly establish more accurate value and worth to the items we buy and sell. It's wrong of the developers to charge such a fee for a service that, in my opinion, should be completely free. If that fee is in regards to the technology that was used in the creation of the transfer process, then I would argue customers already pay a monthly fee... so why limit people from playing with one another at all... especially when you obviously have the near-instant capability of allowing us to play with one another for that nominal 18 dollar fee?

These are just my opinions, but I would define Name changes, Server changes, Race changes, etc all to be standard service options. Charging extra for these so called "features" is simply introducing Micro-Transaction based income into a game entirely designed around non-micro-transactional services, favoring monthly fees so players don't have to deal with that crap.
#11 Mar 03 2014 at 2:46 PM Rating: Good
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FUJILIVES wrote:
in regards to #2)
By now, every major MMO game that uses separated servers to store character information should have plenty of capability for cross-server markets, just as many have cross-server instancing. There is no excuse for markets to fluctuate from server to server at all, just because of the interests of the players on that particular cluster. Let everyone contribute to FFXI's global market stability so players can quickly establish more accurate value and worth to the items we buy and sell. It's wrong of the developers to charge such a fee for a service that, in my opinion, should be completely free. If that fee is in regards to the technology that was used in the creation of the transfer process, then I would argue customers already pay a monthly fee... so why limit people from playing with one another at all... especially when you obviously have the near-instant capability of allowing us to play with one another for that nominal 18 dollar fee?


For this one, it would be amazing if they were able to merge the AH across servers. There would still be those bazaar-only items that would be local, but it would greatly increase the chance of someone selling that item you need for skilling up a craft or buying that by-product of your farming session. Probably rough to implement, but it would be a great change for keeping the economy limping along a bit longer.
#12 Mar 03 2014 at 3:41 PM Rating: Good
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Camiie wrote:
Was this really a thing people cared about? If so that's great, but I never saw a huge demand for it at least among the NA community.

I don't expect that it was really about the demand, but moreso a chance for SE to cash in.

The 90-day restriction is likely a common deterrent for people that would think about hopping servers just to get Alexandrite, Heavy Metal Plates, etc... This change might make people "pull the trigger" and do it, knowing that they can go back in 3 days, or even go raid another server's supply.
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#13 Mar 05 2014 at 8:13 PM Rating: Decent
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Or SE's way of getting ppl to move together while making money then rather forcing ppl to server merge. This has a lets give them a choice before we shut more servers down smell to it tbh.
#14 Mar 06 2014 at 11:46 AM Rating: Decent
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JamisonP wrote:
For this one, it would be amazing if they were able to merge the AH across servers. There would still be those bazaar-only items that would be local, but it would greatly increase the chance of someone selling that item you need for skilling up a craft or buying that by-product of your farming session. Probably rough to implement, but it would be a great change for keeping the economy limping along a bit longer.


So, I'm not the only one who feels that way.

One ultra AH would use less resources than a nigh empty AH per server, I think. An interface overhaul would be nice, too.

Squeenie will never do it, though.

Edited, Mar 6th 2014 12:47pm by Demoncard
#15 Mar 07 2014 at 1:00 PM Rating: Good
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Doing that won't do jack for lower level gear or crafting supplies. All it would do is increase competition to sell relevant, currently sought after items. Imagine now that someone could literally monopolize an item not on just one server, but every server if they had deep enough pockets. Here on Odin, the AF upgrade mats were camped (likely with a bot) and their prices were inflated by some jackass who owns the character Yuritahime for over two months.

Yeah, no thanks.
#16 Mar 07 2014 at 2:41 PM Rating: Excellent
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Lower level gear likely has no hope, as there's no profit in making it for those few people who actually bother to put anything on except a weapon. For crafting mats, however, the limit of 7 AH slots means it's next to useless to list anything that is illiquid with a small population. Increasing the overall liquidity (by adding more buyers and sellers) makes it much more likely that you can get your items sold or have items available to purchase,

I highly doubt there's any possibility of this happening, but a dwindling population is definitely not good for the economy.
#17 Mar 07 2014 at 4:59 PM Rating: Good
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I think the solution to the illiquidity of crafting mats is more likely to be along the lines of the guild shop sales. Have a "bargain shop" or something where people can sell their crap and then let people buy it back at twice the sell price. People will only be able to buy stuff that's being sold - but would be a heck of a lot more stuff available than we see now.

Or if they want to still make it a PITA - they could have a bargain sale depot where you could sell all crafting mats, but then they could show up in the inventory of guild shops? I dunno. I imagine it's impossible from a spaghetti code perspective.

Edited, Mar 7th 2014 3:00pm by Olorinus
#18 Mar 07 2014 at 10:21 PM Rating: Good
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The AH slots and short sell window are what's really hurting it. If I have 20 items to move NOW and 7 of them go for 100k+ profit, while the others are under 10k, what am I going to bother with? Would I take the chance on the lower profit items if they just get returned 3 days later?
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