It might be fine for official servers but it would be a disaster on playerworlds, where playerworld staff and managers will inevitably manipulate the system.

Probably wise. It should be voluntary, and it'd be the perfect opportunity to start paying servers based on the income they bring in (if any).

I don't see a problem with that. If one gralat buys one Hypothetica Nickel, and the Hypothetica Manager mints a billion Hypothetica Nickels, the Hypothetica Nickel's value plummets. It's like the stock exchange that way.

The Hypothetica Manager's friend buys a bunch of Hypothetica Nickels (or worse, is given them). The Hypothethica manager proceeds to deflate the currency, and his/her (well, okay, his) friend then proceeds to sell the Hypothetica Nickels for USD at a lower price per nickel than the new value placed on them by Cyberjoueurs (but a higher value than what he originally paid for them.)

I don't think that we need to have a dollar to playerworld currency exchange rate. Just do like other games and have a dollar to a global currency. "Global Gralats". These global gralats would not interfere with the normal playerworld currency, it would remain seperated.

For example Gunbound has in-gamed earned "gold" and money bought "cash". You can't buy in-game "gold" for money bought "cash", you can only buy "cash" items with it. Just an example.

I don't see how playerworlds could manipulate the system that way. They sell their items for global gralats and it's up to them what to charge for them. If they charge too much then nobody would buy the stuff so it's not a rip-off.

The only reason it would be better to have "global gralats" instead of just saying "pay with cash" is because not every country pays with cash. =P

I still say make it like 10 global gralats = $1 US. This way you could sell in game items for as little as 10 cents US but it still keeps an easy to remember transfer rate. You'd just tack on an extra 0 for items... like if you wanted a game item to cost $2 US you'd make it 20 global gralats... real simple. =P

Insider trading...good point.

's a good idea, I suppose. My big concern is that the two be interchangable if not Exchangable: That you can mine on Kingdoms for 8 hours and make a whopping 3 plat, or you can go donate $5 and get 50 gralats, and you can buy whatever you want with either. Sure, maybe a golden double-axe is 50 plat -or- 3 gralats, but the point is you can use either. (Ideally you could use both, but I'm sure there's a way that'll be a problem.)

But even with the best systems we've come up with here, the problems of fraud abound - remember alchemy? One small gold nugget, a water, and a dievil foot makes a large gold nugget? Something like that...For one, all of those would have to be fixed...then you'd need to Serverside the tracking of Money Drops, so no two people pick up the same one...then you'd have to make that accessable for all servers, assuming you don't want this to be a Gold Only value...

Would it violate the ToS if a playerworld made a scripted currency of their own that required players to pay for it?

It wouldn't violate the ToS but there's various "rules" that exist external to the ToS. In any case, it would be highly unlikely that it would be allowed since it could expose Cyberjoueurs to liability.

Well graal's largest problem is making profit, or atleast making enough profit so that the company owning it doesn't have to worry about it costing them tons of money.

Graal online isn't suppose to make other people a profit, servers that are played by "everyone" (the gold and classic servers) could use a global currency shop system and try to balance the differance in what it costs to keep the server up and how many people that upgraded play it...

The classic servers allowed to use the system should be overseen by a global on a periodical basis. And as for corrupt managers and the staff that they manage.. there will always be a risk like that. Managers should make sure that staff cannot give out stuff if they aren't allowed to do so (simple? or not :\ ?)

Interesting. May I ask you where you've got that information from?

Probably the thread Unixmad made not too long ago saying Graal wasn't making a large enough profit to support itself and that they needed to think of some new options.

Just a guess though :p

I know this thread. Perhaps I missed something, but for me it doesn't sounds like the company has a great pressing problem. He just explained his decisions and told us what would happen if the company would give more and more things for free.

I don't think Petrol, or whatever his name is, was saying it's a pressing problem - but it is a problem. Perhaps I missed something ;)

Call me crazy...

But I highly doubt penny penching Unixmad is losing money on Graal. I don't doubt he's making small profits, but If he was losing money, you'd be getting something like this when you go to forums.graalonline.com :
http://vccslitonline.cc.va.us/images/HTTP500.gif

I mean seriously, he's not running this game out of the kindness of his heart. He'd pull the plug or sell the rights (If there are even any) in a second if he wasn't earning income off of it...

unixmad also said that money isn't everything to him

and i still think that adding such a feature will simply kill the community in terms of balance. like i said, i dont want to see little rich noobs owning me on zone because their parents can afford to buy them everything. :/

Unixmad's behaviour is erratic when it comes to the profitability of Graal. He uses profit as a justification for requiring players to buy or at least get staff positions on servers in order to test scripts online, but then when we point out how his forum policy is hurting profits, he goes "LOL IT'S NOT ABOUT THE MONEY!!!1"

LOL BUT ITS NOT ABOUT THE MONEY!111

might i add "cash" items ruined Gunbound

It ruined it for you.

I'm sure it vastly improved it for its owners.

Can you imagine paying for something and then the playerworld getting shut down for whatever reason?

For that very reason, this honestly could only be used on gold worlds and maybe very reliable playerworlds. Preferably ones that are helped by high staff. Like Era, or maybe Zodiac. Classic.

The owners aren't the ones playing the game now are they?

They are the ones getting the paycheck though.