Apparently, people do think that RMT would be affected and it just wouldn't shift towards plat or something else again.
We are ignoring that some people have a vested interest in Kronos being tradeable. This isn't a benign discussion about how to better handle the game disruptions of the krono.
Yeah and I'm pretty sure that some of those people are using Krono to keep their actual play accounts subscribed. I know that the hoarders exist and frequently come up with ideas like, "Make the Marketplace accept Krono's for Daybreak cash because now I have 5 years worth of subscription time for all my accounts saved up in Krono's" besides the RMT types
I mean, it would be cool to trade krono in for cash and buy heroic characters, potions, or something else. I know (god forbid someone mentions) Blizzard and World of Warcraft have this implemented - it did however HUGELY affect the price of tokens (re: inflated greatly).
I wouldn't be surprised if Krono sales exceed 50% of DBG's revenue stream from Everquest. That's just a wild guess but the genius is how it allows them to monetize wish fulfillment without a single key click or mouse drag of 'new' creative effort on their part. I also suspect that the Krono portability across servers by account is part of the genius. Without access to data though it's hard to know, but are Krono purchases for use on TLP servers helping to incentivize Plat farming on Live servers? I've wondered how they've been able to keep EQ afloat with the fairly limited number of active players I see on my Live server and extrapolated to the other Live servers. Kronos are probably helping to keep the whole thing working.
Players destroy economies, not Krono. You could completely remove Krono from the game, but the economies on the TLP servers would still be destroyed. Why? Because everyone who goes to play on them (with rare exceptions) knows exactly how to farm everything to the max, they would charge just as much plat for the items as they do for the equivalent amount of Krono now. At this point, they have enough experience to gauge how much plat is available in game depending upon the server's age and what expansions have been released. If you want Similarly, Krono are not responsible for the prices of chase loot items, quite the reverse in fact; chase loot items are responsible for the drastic increase in the prices of Krono. Removing Krono will in no way lower the prices of chase loot items nor will it prevent them from rising further in the future. It will only make it more of a hassle to buy and sell them, since you can't sell them through /trader. Krono on most servers were fairly cheap (in the 200-400k range) for a long time, it was not until after the introduction of chase items that they started skyrocket. People will still do the exact same amount of mining as they did before, they will just sell the plat, and items differently than they currently do. The change you are asking for will also go against one of the primary reasons why Krono were introduced; it will reintroduce the huge risk of players being scammed when either buying or selling plat. If one actually wanted to stop the destruction of the TLP server economies, lower the cost of chase items, and decrease what you call "mining Krono"; then they need to convince a significant majority of players to stop paying those obscene prices for items and Krono. Far, far more spam bots from cross servers trying to sell items to everyone but this time for real money instead of Krono. Trading in for real cash will never happen, there are far too many IRS issues to deal with for a company like DBG. Likewise I do not see them making it exchangeable for anything that is only buyable via real cash for sure. I am not sure how open they would be to allowing them to be converted to DBC though. Remember, all of the changes to how LoN packs as well as DBC (and SC before it) were given with subscriptions have been due to the accountants within the company not liking how much people were accruing and not using. This is what lead first to requiring one log into LoN regularly to get your packs (before it eventually closed down completely), then to us having to log in and claim our DBC every month, and finally the addition of the "Oh! Buy this stuff instead of saving your DBC." window. There are simply more active players online than what you see. For the better part of a decade now, most people in EQ have been at the point where they just group with their guild and a fairly small group of people outside of the guild. Some will occasionally go outside that group outside of those, but it is not common. Add to this the fact that people can readily play in instances at the higher levels of the game, makes it even easier for the game's population to hide. Then there are all those who regularly box other characters to support or supplement their main, which in some cases further increases the population. So while the population is not some insanely high amount, I would bet that it is more than enough to easily support EQ itself.
