The Greystone Chronicles: Book One: Io Online by Dave Willmarth

Author:Dave Willmarth [Willmarth, Dave]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-10-20T23:00:00+00:00

So the founders of Jupiter Technologies elected to eliminate the need for a black market in Europa. They created an in-game auction house that included a real-world component tied to the Europa Online website. So players could place a piece of epic loot up for auction in game, and it could be seen and bid upon by players in game, or in the real world. There was a straight exchange rate – 1 US Dollar equaled 1 gold, and 1 platinum was 1,000 dollars. Players had the choice of the auction proceeds being paid in either game gold or real life currency. This also reduced the annoyance of gold farming bots that took up server space, and physical space in the game. Because while there was no way for a player to use real dollars to purchase massive amounts of game gold, wealthy players would have been tempted to establish a currency black market that would allow them to invest real world cash in-game to purchase property, for example. But with the dual auction house, a wealthy player could simply put something simple up for auction, say a bundle of low level herbs like milkweed. Then arrange for someone else to bid a ridiculous million gold for it. Several forward-thinking banks had in fact created a corporate character account just to accommodate these transfers for their clients. This system had an added advantage for Jupiter Tech’s bottom line, thanks to some quick thinking by their lead accountant. The auction house had been designed, just like nearly all the games that came before, to charge a fee for each transaction. This had been set at 5% of the transaction amount. The original intent had been to “put some cash back into the economy of the game”. Which translated into “paying staff to monitor and maintain the auction house coding and website”. This percentage was set in contemplation of only occasional use by each player, buying and selling crafting materials or the occasional high end gear. However, with the unexpected growth of the game to hundreds of millions of players, and the increasing reliance upon the game for real world income, the auction house had become busier than even the wildest projections. Hence the meeting requested by the lead accountant, Seshat (Her actual name was Miriam, but everyone on staff had chosen, or had been given, a mythological name for themselves. Seshat was an Egyptian goddess of numbers and writing). She had posted a series of historic charts showing transaction levels, projection charts for the same, incomes from the fees, costs for maintenance, etc. The three founders all followed along with limited interest, as they had all been peripherally aware of these numbers already. And when she was finished with her charts, Richard said as much. “We’re aware of the numbers involved here, Seshat. I assume you have something else for us?”

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