It’s a fait accompli. The press release is out, the website up. It’s going to happen no matter what.
In the past week, one of the things that has hit me most, is how much the devs and mods are sounding like lawyers these days. Sadly, I don’t mean in their cultured use of Latin, but in their use of obfuscatory ambiguous speech, and their unwillingness to answer the tough questions. As Guk-gate has shown us, they seem to have received training in making statements which say one thing, while leaving sufficient wiggle room to backtrack later. When that’s not possible, they say nothing. So there’s not really much of interest to report on the last days Dev posts.
Hmm, except Mr Smedley thinks it’s a lot like selling trading cards. (He rather splendidly uses the rhetorical trick of “Describe the exception, not the rule” there. He also reminds me why I stopped playing Magic. I couldn’t afford it.)
As for the “vote” on how many servers get exchange? My vote is to call in United Nations election monitors. They’ve already done their sums as to how many servers should change, in order to maximise profits.
There is only one way SOE can prove to me that I’m wrong. (Well, two ways, but canceling SOE Exchange isn’t going to happen.)
If Exchange is really coming in for the good of the players, make it free. You don’t need to charge a fee. You don’t need a percentage. And removing the overheads on the the player would truly let Exchange put IGE out of business on Exchange servers, rather than just creating competition which they can and will undercut.
If Exchange was free, we would not have to worry that any changes in the game were to facilitate the greater flow of money and goods through the Exchange system. Yes you deny that will happen. We don’t believe you any more.
If it’s free, there won’t be any pressure to apply it to servers which do not desire it. We would be more inclined to believe the vote count.
Meanwhile, I found a bizarrely prescient comment over at Lum’s. Either TPRJones is the new Nostradamus, he should read his non-disclosure agreements more carefully, or he should sue SOE for nicking not only his ideas but his terminology. Was that post the birth of Station Exchange?