I found the Station Exchange paper to be of great interest. I remember first thinking that somebody should do something like the Exchange back when I was working on UO2 nearly ten years ago, but even so, I’m glad that someone else took the slings and bullets for the idea.

Sara and Raph both have good commentary. My own thoughts: I’m surprised the revenue earned was so low. Less than $300K in revenue earned in a year is a significant amount of cash if you’re a small company, but it risks being mistaken for a financial error in an organization with the revenue streams of Sony (and SOE in particular). After all, a game that has 100K subscribers and charges 10 bucks a month brings in a million bucks a month in revenue, and both EQ and EQ2 are higher on both counts.

The real interesting thing is the savings in customer service.

Prior to the introduction of Station Exchange, 40 percent of customer service time was spent on disputes over virtual item sales. Since the debut of the Exchange, the overall customer service time spent has dropped 30 percent….Even so, Station Exchange has had little if any effect on the popularity of trading EverQuest II goods through third party auction houses.

The math is a tad ambiguous, but would seem to suggest that Customer Service calls dropped by 12% total – ACROSS ALL SERVERS. If that translates into reduced headcount, this has the potential to be significant. Remember, this is DESPITE the fact that they concede that there seems to be no reduction in actual trade going on.

One wonders how effective it would be in a game that was actually designed with it in mind.

The other interesting thing is that the average seller is much younger than the average buyer. Which, of course, utterly validates the whole ‘more time than money’ theory.

It’s extremely curious that Berserkers cost 3 times as much as Assassins.

Perhaps the most interesting insight, though, is the idea that players don’t buy to cheat, but rather to surpass a roadblock instantly. Which is to say, players spend money to get past bad design. Which raises the obvious question: do older players pay because they’re more likely to have cash, or are they just more jaded and less likely to put up with bullshit timewasting designs?

Original comments thread is here.