Player Vendors tied directly to PayPal

What I was thinking was that players could purchase special vendors that are in fact tied directly to paypal.

Players who would receive a vendor like this would need to pay a monthly subscription fee to Portalarium.

The vendors themselves would be Avatar-bound, meaning that only the Avatar paying the subscription fee could own the vendor.

Think of it more of renting the vendors from Portalarium rather than buying.

One downside to this could be that the vendors may actually enhance the ability to scam people in some small way, only because of the increased convenience factor. SO, one fix for this could be to actually hire a person to set the prices for items based on current market value, to keep the prices within reason.

Another downside could be that this would interfere with the 'Portalarium trusted merchants' program which is fairly new. Still, I think Portalarium would benefit more from this suggestion than the trusted merchants program, and also there's no real reason to pick one or the other.

Thoughts on this? Am I off my meds again or do people think this is good beans?? Make sure to vote or comment below!

 

RMT should stay out of the actual game as much as possible.

I understand it's going to happen and people will always do it. I agree with ports stance of we don't condemn it but we don't accept it either. Do it at your own risk and here is a place to do it, away from the game forums but still visible.

I am not familiar with the port trusted merchant program but sounds like it would just be a known scammer list after a while.

 

maybe instead of PayPal... accept COTO payments in Vendors...???

 

I'm not sure that 'Port doesn't accept RMT' is accurate, given that you need to do a lot of RMT transactions prior to earning the privilege of becoming a trusted trader.

In a sense, they're promoting it. But maybe it's not intended to be that way.

 

I like this idea, but I think they could do this anyways, for every player vendor (and even the public vendors), and still also have a monthly subscription for the PayPal direct privilege.

 

Or sales tax so that depending on how much you use the merchant, how much you pay. If they are going to embrace RMT, might as well go all the way with it and get a piece of that pie. While I have a merchant, I only used it to unload pledge items, so I don't think it is fair to pay rent for that.

Technically though anyone who did not get a pledge deed is paying rent to have a deed to put a merchant on. And that rent can be a RMT thru store crowns. So essentially this is already implemented to charge rent for merchants, but I dislike the idea of moving RMT into the game itself as that ruins any possibility of a gold economy existing.

 

One thing to consider is chargebacks. I guess Portalarium would have to work directly with PayPal staff to build a system that disallowed chargebacks for purchases via these vendors. I mean, it's not like the vendors are able to scam the buyers because they will always get what they're purchasing. But is something like that possible? Part of why I brought this up and think it would be epic is the uniqueness of having this work in a scam-free way.

 

@yarnevk I'm not sure how Portalarium would be able to script in taking a percentage of the purchases, although I admit I think that might be more fair in some cases. How would/could that work?

 

Basically cash to COTO's to tax. People could grind for it or they could just buy COTOs. Exactly the same way there is a usage tax on weapons thru durability, pay COTO to keep using them. Any COTO sink works this way, it is an indirect way of getting cash into the game.

 

This thread is going gold.

I vaguely remember suggesting this idea months ago as part of another post but not in a good way.

 

I see one (extremely) large problem with allowing RMT vendors in the game.

Liability

Currently, the Player Marketplace on this forum has the following message:
We will not restrict exchange of goods but we will not officially endorse these exchanges due to liability issues and staffing bandwidth.

If they were to allow RMT vendors inside the game they would have to accept full responsibility and liability for any transaction made in this way.

 

Well if they put it into the game the vendor would take the item and payment so there would be a lot less likelihood of items running off and payments having issues. They would simply block an entire account if there was any payment issue and there would be no risk for item loss as they can restore the item. It would take man power though so they would have to make enough money off it to make it viable.

 

This would imo make sota stand out as very innovative and be a great attraction to new players. A game where people can draw money out of the game for items sold in a easy manner would attract massive amounts of players. Details would have to be ironed out, and i wouldn't have a base price for items, it would be best by a player making their own prices else one vendor is as good as another but this or variants of have great appeal.....A big +1 from me.

 

The integration cost will be very expensive to do it right and there are too much at stake to rely on the availability of PayPal or any other payment services.

Aside architectural challenges, another definite downfall would be what happen when a player made a payment, then do the refund right away? Would the system just suspend that account? What will happen to the items that were purchased? Many things could go wrong. Many possible edge cases that they may not be discovered during the development and QA, which will end up causing more headaches in the long term.

 

Personally I don't see why paypal wouldn't be able to disable chargebacks for this type of thing. There's no way the purchaser wouldn't be getting their virtual goods in these cases. The NPC vendor isn't capable of scamming or not giving the item to the purchaser hehe. If anyone can make this happen I'd put my money on Mr Innovation Garriott.

Great point about the availability of PayPal though! I guess Portalarium could ensure that the payment system would run off the game servers, that way the payment service is always up if the game is, i suppose. Or better yet, they could just create their own payment service lol. Not sure what kind of startup dough that would cost though..

 

No it would not, did you listen to trial feedback? The greatest perception of this game is that you have to be rich to play it. Adding RMT market into the game means you cannot grind gold to earn things, things are only available if paid for in cash. You already see this in the marketplace that nobody wants gold they want cash.

 

There'd still be a certain outcry for gold. A couple things might help ensure it retains it's value: Adding a high priced gold sink vendor. And, ensuring gold can also be sold on the PayPal vendors.

 

Another thought here. What would prevent large guilds from 'renting' one vendor from portalarium, and then sharing it between members?

An item cap could make something like this a struggle. Maybe set it at around 20 items or so? or have higher subscription fees for more item count?

 

i doubt it would be easy to implement paypal on vendors... but portalarium buying back cotos or store credit easier.
But i rather like Portalarium focus on developping a mmo Game than a casino.

 

I'll add: What better way to fix this problem than to alter that perception to ''you will get rich by playing it''??