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[POLICY] Displaying Coin

Discussion in 'Census: General Discussion' started by DanKinney, Jan 10, 2012.

  1. DanKinney

    DanKinney Guest

    Should we continue to display the coin balances for a character within the data feeds?

    Argument in Favor

    • Information good
    • Coin is another metric that can be used to rank character progress and achievement
    • By hiding this in the feeds, it would not be available for third-party sites and applications to display

    Argument Against

    • It makes it easier to identify characters that have lots of coin for spam and potential attack

     
  2. Lantis

    Lantis Guest

    This one is kinda itchy.  Displaying it can be very useful if one was to write, for example, an application that displays all data about your own character (quickly check on your phone how much money an alt has, for example).  But unless there can be some kind of control, I'd favor hiding this information by default, as the risks of griefing/spam are potentially too serious IMHO.  Rich characters could quickly become the target of "Can you buy me this Master spell please?   You got 10,000 plat, you can afford to give me 100 plat!".

    Money was one specific field I decided not to include in RosterMaster for these reasons.

    So my personal vote would be against reporting that information.

     
  3. Quicktiger

    Quicktiger Guest

    I rank based on coin currently, but I do not display the actual values or coin currently.  I am still of two minds on this, and was going to let Sony make the decision on if I should do this before I actually display the true value.

    Note that it's still "what is carried" not what is in the bank, so the numbers really don't mean much anyway other than which players to take out on a PvP server, or which characters to hack the accounts of (and with alts linked, well...)

    Is there a risk of hacking?  Sure.  Are there other metrics which could be used instead?  Sure.  Successful players or new players are both likely targets of would-be thieves, and there are already ways to discover those.

    So, should plat be exposed?  I sure don't know, even yet. I also don't really think there's significant harm.

     
  4. Quicktiger

    Quicktiger Guest

    BTW, I wonder if you aren't asking the wrong people.  Developers may have a fully different view than end users.  About my own characters, I don't care if others know how  much plat I have, so as a developer I should just show it.  I think those who are worried about privacy are using their personal views or trying to guess what other's views would be.

    This seems like more of a question on the public eq2 forums than for developers to answer, or SoE should answer it for us. :)

     
  5. Dedith

    Dedith Guest

    I'm in favor of having it, as it would be nice see where all your coin is across your accounts/toons (via linkage to alts or manually linked).  But I would not be opposed to an option in eq2 to hide that value (and hide alts, and hide this toon, etc)

     
  6. DanKinney

    DanKinney Guest

    I'm looking to you as a sample of the customer base.  Any final decision needs to involve a much wider group of people, including the game producer(s) and community reps.

    While you guys are developers, many of you are long time players and have a much closer understanding of the game data than my team does.  While I work for SOE, I don't have the deep, emotional connection to the game that some of you do.

    -dan

     
  7. Bella

    Bella Guest

    Now personally I love being able to see that information and to be honest I'm not too concerned about people asking me for plat or anything else. That being said though I think it should be hidden by default. I can completely understand people not wanting to share that information and while it can be used to gauge people's accomplishments it can also just be a indicator of someones desire to horde plat and never use it and the broke person's ability to spend like it is Earth's last day. I don't think it should be excluded though - it should be a option and the person can hide or not hide it.
     
  8. Dark_Grue

    Dark_Grue Guest

    I don't see plat as a real indicator of accomplishment, but that's just my personal view. It'd be a simple thing to create a leaderboard should the data become available (I've already gotten some leaderboards set up for my own guild), but that's not the sort of competition I'd really want to encourage in my guild. While plat isn't a limited game resource, I'd sure wonder why people are hoarding it to be "on top", when the guild's bills need to be paid. And I just don't want to know. It's not quite as ugly as Bank of America posting my account balances on their website, or as tacky as discussing my current salary with my co-workers, but I feel it might tread upon similar grounds at times.

    While I like the idea of giving the players the ability to control what information is included or excluded in their profiles, giving individuals such fine grain control would imply they can pick and choose pretty much any information to be displayed or not, making those choices tedious and ovewhelming.

    Also, as developers, we don't want to be faced with situation where we're displaying lovingly-crafted sorted tables where most of the data is "unknown" because the players have turned it all off. The data is most useful and the best applications can be developed when we can rely on certain data to be there.

    Plat doesn't have to be one of those always-there items, but the a la carte character data model wouldn't bode well for application development if it's taken too far, either.

    Though come to think of it, it would open up the field for a Dateline-esq "to catch a plat farmer" sort of data mining site, which watches for characters to log in with large plat balance, log out with significantly lower (or zero) balances, and attempts to correlate the data with other character balalnces. It'd probably be too cumbersome to really do that requesting the data externally, but I'd sure like to see someone try it.

     
  9. Falqour

    Falqour Guest

    Hello everyone! I just got access to this forum and I'm excited to be here, so I'll drop my two coppers on this thread, hope you don't mind. :pI'm in favor of keeping coin reporting accessable. It is a metric, though yes, the importance of that metric in terms of character development certainly could be debated. I see this information as valuable on two distinct levels:personal Value - an application that can show someone their cash-on-hand balance of all their own characters would be handy.Global Value - an application that could provide useful data like median wealth statistics on a given server would be informative to players just starting out as well as people who auction off loot rights. On eq2.Permafrost, this is a huge deal. (where I play)I personally don't feel the privacy issue is an issue. On my server, it's blatently obvious who all the rich people are anyway. (again, mostly due to public auctions) Begging the folks with a lot of plat already happens, and has always happened, I don't see how knowing the exact amount of the cash they have on hand is going to change that.However, in typing that out, I just realized how this system could be misused... Again, in public auctions, it would be nice to know exactly how much plat your opposing bidder has... Hmmm...

     
  10. DanKinney

    DanKinney Guest

    We are going to be removing coin from the feed from all characters.

    Thank you very much for your feedback.

    -dan

     
  11. DanKinney

    DanKinney Guest

    The coin is now omitted from the character results.

    -dan

     

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