Station Marketplace vs. Crafting

Rheem@Blackburrow wrote:

I think greed is a little harsh. Of course, we know all too well the effects of greed in business, but it is usually manifest in completely breaking all the rules or even the law. However, it is not so common as we think given the recent economic catastrophes. Most business people do observe the law.
Putting a new product on the market, even if it is added as a subproduct to an existing one, is not greed. It is business. Whether or not it is good business remains to be seen. I agree with those who think EQ2 has reached its cash cow stage. That's when a product no longer finds new buyers or generates new revenue but continues making enough profit to warrant continued production. At this stage of a product's life you usually don't see real new development, so RMT is unusual. I hope it results in a new lease for EQ2.

Ajue@Antonia Bayle wrote:

Yes it can.
The new furniture can according to the info on it.
And other items such as the Crushbone Warrior and a few others can be placed into halls.

Well I bought the set for our guild hall and when i try to place it i am told this item can not be placed in a guild hall. Also I should have read this before buying it said that item can be placed in your house nothing about guild hall.

Ajue@Antonia Bayle wrote:

This actually brings up a point that was discussed last night in-game which I have yet to research....
"What is the return policy of SC?"
Every entity that sells items for real world currency has one be it online or brick or mortar. You buy an item that isnt what you expected or dont like how it looks once you place it (we all know how the dressing room is not truly accurate on all things) and what is your recourse?

Artemiz@The Bazaar wrote:

Since they are based in California I would think that the California laws would apply, and in California you have 3 days to return something or cancel a contract and this right cannot be signed away last I knew of (I haven't lived there for 2 years). I have used this law to my benefit many times.
I am not saying that this is applicable here but in the absence of any other policy it is literally the law of the land.

I'm new and already very turned off. I joined because I wanted to make furniture, have a nice house, etc. If I wanted raiding I'd probably still be on WoW where I already have established level 80s and a guild who's threatening to remove me if I don't return.
To put items like this at all up for station cash is a slap in the face to anyone who is already a crafter or wants to become one. I mean, face it, the new station cash items are from both a graphic standpoint and polygon standpoint, BETTER than what crafter's can make. They're just simply better quality. While I don't think this will ruin crafting, I think it's a huge slap in the face and if it continues, you may lose more players or turn away future players rather than pull more in.
I think it was a bad move. Temporarily you will see money come in, but in the end, I think it'll be a loss. Get your money from account subscriptions, LON cards and all the other things you have for sale (easy mode potions, anyone?). Leave crafting-like items out of the equation.
Two cents from a new player thinking about not sticking around *because* of this change.

Ajue@Antonia Bayle wrote:

The furniture set?
That's odd, not meaning any offense. The info card shown states house or guild hall.
Someone made a mistake somewhere it seems. You may want to PM a red name about that, see if you can get your money back or something.

Pheep@Unrest wrote:

I am ingame right now looking at them in the marketplace and they only say house, not guild. Unless it displays something different once you buy them but I can't see why.

Yes but the card on eq2players said it was placeable in guild hall as well.

Ajue@Antonia Bayle wrote:

Yes, I thought I remembered that, too! In fact, I thought the promotion blurb said something about that....WAIT, it does! Right on the Welcome screen it says, "Redecorate your home or guild hall with one or two pieces of new furniture, or a whole new set! Now available in the Marketplace!" They probably just made a mistake with the placement, as obviously it was intended for use in guild halls as well as private residences.
As far as a few sets of furniture for sale in the Marketplace ruining crafting, I really can't see that. This is one set of furniture. Our guild hall has 830 items, plus I have many character houses. The graphics are nice on that set, but what I find to be the most fun when decorating is putting items together to make entirely new items and create new looks, or using items in novel ways. Judging from all the fountains, gardens and aquariums decorators are always posting in the housing forum, I think carpenters don't have to worry too much about losing all of their customers. Even if someone buys this one set of furniture, they'll need so much more. Even if a bedroom set is offered next week, again, you need so much more to decorate a house.
Also, the set costs 15 bucks. I'm sure they'll sell many sets, but most people will probably still be buying house items for plat. If the Marketplace stuff were available for plat AND they made huge numbers of items available, now that could be a blow to crafters, but no worry there.
Personally, I don't object to the idea of station cash and, as someone stated above, if it brings new life to EQ2 then I see that as a good thing, since I love the game and want to play for years to come. I don't see a lot of difference in paying a few dollars for a new hat for one of my characters or a new table for a character's home and going to a coffee shop to buy a cup of coffee for a few dollars. Actually, I feel better about buying the character a hat. I rarely buy pre-made named coffee since the cost seems so high to me, although I know plenty of folks for whom such an item is a daily purchase and who feel it is a good bargain. I usually make my own coffee. Then, while I'm enjoying my inexpensive cup of yummy home-brew, I check out the marketplace and the LON broker to see where I might toss the few bucks I "saved." Occasionally I find an item I want to buy enough to splurge. I guarantee you I've gotten more enjoyment out of my monk's new appearance cap than I would have gotten out of purchasing any number of other little items, like a cup of coffee that is here and gone in a few minutes.
I do wish, though, that SC appearance items would be changed so they are attached to the account and all characters on that account could use them. As I've posted elsewhere, I think if this were the case I would buy more SC appearance items rather than fewer of them, even tho I would only have to buy one crate of each type of clothing instead of one for each character. As it stands now, I've bought a few hats and enjoyed my purchases, but a character can only wear one hat at a time (well, two actually if you take into account his or her "real" hat, but I'm thinking of the appearance slot.) Every hat my character is not wearing on his head has to be stored, and I don't have room for all of the stuff I have already. I want to be able to put a box of costume clothing in my shared bank where all my alts can swap hats and other clothing items like you do when you're playing dress-up. If I could do that, I think there's little doubt I would eventually own a set of each crate of clothing. My girls do this with their tailor-made costume dresses all the time -- trading stuff around is part of the fun, so it's nice that those items, as well as the NOTD sinister costumes, don't have to be attuned. Please, let me toss the SC stuff in the shared costume chest!

Galldora wrote:

From the pre-announcement discussions to the actual implementation in-game there may have been changes and the changed decisions didn't get back to those who write up EQ2Players making the announcement a bit inaccurate for the release information.

Gee... EQ2Players being late and/or not accurate. Is that a first? *laugh*

Rijacki wrote:

Yes, but it states this on the welcome screen, not just in the EQ2 Players write-up, so if they really changed their minds about where these items can be used, I guess the change didn't get back to the people putting that screen together, either. Personally, if I plunked down 15 bucks for that set after reading one second before on the rather annoying welcome screen that the items were for use in homes AND halls, I'd be pretty frosted if I couldn't get a refund when I discovered they had made a mistake. I don't think that would be the case, though. I think if one were to call and explain this misunderstanding, they wouldn't have any trouble getting a refund. I've always found customer service to be really accommodating. (Truly, I have.) Heck, they've even been really accommodating when I was the one who made a mistake, and this is their mistake.

I agree. It is fabulous. I just don't think I should have to pay an additional $15 per house that I want to put it in.

I was wondering about the return policy myself. I had two characters with names that were too similar and it had been bugging me for some time. So I thought I could buy the renaming potion on any of my characters, but discovered I could not pass it to the one I wanted. So now I am stuck with a potion I do not need or want.

I am on a long hiatus from eq2, but logged in yesterday for a few minutes as I was told to by a friend for the big server crashing party in Antonica. Wow... I'm a bit disgusted at the marketplace furniture (I have been very anti marketplace from day 1). It is way prettier than most of what carpenters can make and SOE should be ashamed at giving that for RL cash instead of giving it to crafters. A few statues was one thing but as already stated several times, this is the beautiful furniture crafters have asked for for ages instead of moldy old splintery wood.
Side note: I've been playing a little Runescape in my free time (I played it a bit before eq2 launched, as my first MMO) since I quit EQ2 for now, you can sit in the chairs in your houses, and you can build a costume room in your house which can STORE 1 of nearly every armor/outfit in the game and show it off to poeple and it takes it away from using up bank space.

Zehl_Ice-Fire wrote:

hmmm....swore you quit on "principal' cuz you got caught breaking the language rule. We said you would be back...good to see ya.

For the love of all that is holy.
This is the most ridiculous thing I ever spent 10 pages of time reading.
I filled an entire tier 2 guild hall with stuff from quests/drops/broker.
If I could buy stuff from SC on my server, I would probably have a few of those too. But I gave my local crafters PLENTY of coin to equip the first guild hall, then the second, and hopefully sooner or later I will equip a Tier 3 with locally crafted items.
There will always be people who are not willing to pay money to (that which must not be named) to get plat, or pay money for SC to get items.
I personally would use SC to get some cool furniture, but I certainly wouldn't spend any more than a dollar menu lunch on it.
The player crafted stuff works perfectly fine.

The biggest problem I have with the new SC house items is that the quality and beauty supercedes what I can make. Seriously, after 80 levels of crafting one would think I could apply finish to my woods to make them glossy, or create matching woodtone furniture sets. If I could make similar sets in a dark mahogany wood, or a light maple, then ths SC stuff wouldn't really bother me. As a decorator, I want my work to look as good as it can- I will not however spend RL cash for it. It willl sadly dissapoint me when all my work starts to look like crud compared to other homes.

Rivenly@Oasis wrote:

Rivenly, I could not have said it better. What bothers me is that my efforts produce work that is substandard. It bothered me before that the furniture I made looked shabby, but that was all that was available. Now there are lovely pieces available... but obviously made by a better crafter than I... I guess I truly wasted 80 levels.

Rivenly@Oasis wrote:

While I think that player design of homes will always be needed, and that home designers can turn incredibly mundane objects into works of art, I agree with the above statement mainly with regards to making MATCHING furniture sets. We've gotten a lot of zone art as furniture, but in such dribs and drabs and some of the best of it as live event furniture, that it is nearly impossible to make matching furniture sets for rooms such as have appeared on Station Marketplace.
I call what they're doing there the Rooms to Go approach, whereas what carpenters get, even if you mix in the live events and holiday crafting, is the Greater Norrathian Flea Market approach. Did we get any complete sets of the remarkably beautiful furniture available in Unrest and Castle Mistmoore at the time that EoF launched? Of course not. That furniture has been added in in tiny increments over a span of years, and we STILL don't have a full bedroom or dining set of it. I'm not even going to go into the fact that Maj Dul has so much gorgeous furniture and we got an entire tier full of TENTS instead. And the only Maj Dul furniture available since, in the many years we have had since DoF came live, has been put in as live event rewards rather than carpenter made.
That is what I object to. I don't want to look in my recipe books and see a rummage sale. I want to see complete sets of furniture from instances for various rooms of at least the variety they gave the Mara recipes. From the Mara set, I can easily complete a bedroom or a living room or a dining room and have it look very nice. I can't think of any other really GREAT looking furniture that arrived as a complete Rooms to Go selection for us. Put recipes in in that form, all the items from a room in an instance, as there are all the items for a room in the SC selections, and I won't be inclined to complain. Same wood tone, same upholstery color.....how hard, exactly, is it to apply a tint or wood texture to an object? If it's meant to go together, just like in real life, the colors and woodtones should match. Work on that and I'll be a happy little carpenter.