Trusted Trader Official Rollout
We first mentioned this a few months back, and we’re happy to say that we are ready to officially launch the Crowfall® Trusted Trader program! As most of you guys know, real-money transactions are an area of online gaming that is absolutely rife with fraud. The reality is that it happens in every game. Gold famers, leveling services, resales of items and accounts purchased with fake credit cards -- these are realities that hurt the game, the developer and the player community.
There are a number of ways to deal with these issues, and none of them are perfect. As long as the demand exists, there will always be companies and individuals willing to break the rules to fill that demand. Our approach is a bit novel in that we decided to divide these transactions into two categories: transactions that we feel are beneficial to the game, and ones that are harmful. For the beneficial ones, we created a program to support, foster and curate a select group of partners who are willing to “play by the rules” and give them our stamp of approval. We fully sanction those transactions. And, because we have sanctioned these particular companies (and transactions), we feel no hesitation AT ALL in dealing with the ‘unsanctioned’ transactions as harshly as possible.
We called these partners our Trusted Traders. Players who engage with these companies can do so with our permission and support. We only permit our Trusted Traders to engage in one kind of real money transactions (RMT): the buying and selling of retired pledge packages and items for Crowfall, i.e. a secondary market for things that we don’t sell any more. We’ve been doing some testing on this for several weeks, and are please to officially launch the program today.
The general idea is that if you want to sell or buy a retired pledge package or item as a RMT (rather than just trading it in-game), you can utilize the services of a Trusted Trader to do so within the Crowfall rules. We selected the Trusted Trader because, as the name implies, we believe they are a company we can trust to do the right thing for our game and our company. If you are unhappy with the transaction, let us know. If we receive valid complaints about a trusted trader – if we feel they aren’t continuing to earn both our and your trust – we will remove them from the program.
A retired item can be defined as “any pledge package or item that no longer appears for sale within the Crowfall Store”. Today, we are still selling mounts and strongholds for Kickstarter and 2015 packages to people who purchased during the Kickstarter or 2015 period respectively (so they are not yet retired). However, the Kickstarter and 2015 pledge packages and some other items specific to those period packages are retired.
We are launching the Trusted Trader program with two partners: AnsheX and MarkeeDragon. AnsheX is best known for their significant history of buying and selling items in Second Life. The site’s founders were also very active members of the Shadowbane community. MarkeeDragon is most recently best known for working with Eve Online but Gordon has known him since the Ultima Online days. We have confidence that both companies will treat Crowfall customers well, and be a well-trusted source to facilitate transactions of retired items and packages.
If you want the specific rewards that came with a Kickstarter or 2015 package, our Trusted Traders will have them for sale whenever they purchase one from a current player. Those early pledge packages had a higher reward to consumer dollar spent ratio per our plan to reward our earliest backers more generously. Trusted Traders set their buying and selling prices. We take a small fee to cover the support costs of this program, but to be clear: we have no expectation that this program will generate profitability for ArtCraft. We are doing this because we recognize that RMT exists, and we can’t stop it. By legitimizing the transactions that we find acceptable, we hope to channel the behavior in a way that protects our customers and Crowfall.
In addition, MarkeeDragon is also participating in our reseller program, selling the current Crowfall catalog to his audience. This is similar to the Eve Online reseller program, and allows us to partner with people that have already aggregated large audiences (tens of thousands of people) which have not yet heard of or become backers of Crowfall.
If you experience any issues with our Trusted Traders, please work with their customer service first; if you have an issue that is not resolved, please contact us via support@crowfall.com. We do expect that there could be some issues we didn’t spot in our earlier testing, and we appreciate your help if you report problems you experience using these sites. We are committed to ensuring the Crowfall players can approach our Trusted Traders without any reservation for the safety and surety of your transactions with them.
As a reminder: we strongly advise against buying and selling any items or packages outside of the Trusted Trader program, and ArtCraft takes no responsibility for any billing or support issues (or fraud) that you encounter while dealing with non-sanctioned companies or individuals. In other words: if you decide not to use our program, you are not only in violation of your Terms of Use, you are on your own!
Retiring the stronghold bundles + upcoming stronghold price increases
As we move to player buildable strongholds (rather than our earlier pre-built stronghold design) and flesh out the world and city building systems for both the Campaign Worlds and the Eternal Kingdoms, our pricing for the strongholds currently in the store will be changing.
At the end of August (2016), expect the currently offered stronghold bundles to be retired. We will also be retiring the Kickstarter and 2015 variants of the fort, keep and castle at this time.
In building these systems, it has become apparent that we are going to be able to offer players a LOT more flexibility than previously expected; instead of ‘locking’ the structure of the castles and fortifications, we now expect to allow players to custom create the stronghold layouts using modular pieces. That means the previous bundles will be broken into distinct parts:
- A parcel with the area of land detailed in the description (or more!)
- A central building, as specified
- A set of wall and tower pieces that allow you to re-build the fortification as shown – or, you can mix and match these (and other) parts to create a stronghold of the layout you prefer
Note that once we break out these components and sell them separately, the prices will likely be significantly higher than the bundles currently available in the store. Everyone who already has a stronghold in the package or on their account is getting even more value than we first anticipated, which we think is great -- earlier backers should always get the best deals!
During the month of August (probably mid-month) we will announce the new stronghold pricing so you can see compare the prices and still have a chance to pick up one of the old bundles before they are retired. September 1st, we’ll shift to the new (higher) prices.
You can also look for more details coming on the world building system, as we are making great strides in our development!
Summary and thanks!
For those who only wanted to skim the above, here is the TL;DR version:
- Trusted Trader is officially launched for secure RMT on retired items and packages.
- Kickstarter and 2015 strongholds and mounts being retired at the end of August 2016.
- Stronghold prices going up at the end of August 2016 as we move from pre-fab strongholds to a build-from-components model.
As always, thanks for your support as we build Crowfall and we’ll see you in the playtests and on the forums!
Todd & Gordon
Co-Founders, ACE