Let's discuss:
Imagine a fairly new player. He gets the hang of how things work in virtonomics. He participates actively in the contest for presidents and wins a nice VIRT prize. (EDITED after Waerth's correct remark)
Then he starts to contemplate about what to do with his virts. He decides he wants to use 5 of them rightaway. He takes a look at the virt market. Currently, those 5 virts would probably quite easily fetch him $1Tn. So that's option A.
Now, that looks a bit boring because this player was actually dreaming of starting a vertically integrated production line that starts with oil. How cool would it be to have his own oil well?! So, let's calculate: he can buy a well with a capacity of 60M barrels. Given that he has no qualification in mining yet, most this oil will come out as low grade oil.
The independent supplier offers this at less than $150. So his 60M barrel well is worth about $9Bn. Compared to option A, that's quite a large discrepancy!
Now, I'm not saying the independent supplier should charge $16k per barrel. And I'm definitely not saying there should be no independent supplier at all! If any more are taken away, the game will lose even more of its appeal to players that want to play for free. (even though they're not paying, they are important in helping the game reap revenue from the paying players)
But I am saying that this is an issue. It takes away a bit of the fun when the rational decision would be to sell virts on the stock market rather than startup a dream business.
Maybe there should be an independent supplier of virts? Maybe the price of the independent supplier should be tied to the price of the ores the independent supplier offers? Ludicrous ideas. Hopefully you guys have better ones or have other perspectives :-)
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