If it is a meaningless amount, it won't provide any balance between casual and hard core.
It has to be big enough to be useful.  With several characters grouped together, it could add up, especially as the characters gain offline xp and get better jobs.

Would most people be willing to spend that much real money for ER credits?  I strongly suspect NO.   

However, it does establish a price and if someone is rich enough to afford the accounts, they can get the gold. 

I have been in the same game as people willing to spend hundreds of dollars (and in one case more than a thousand dollars) in order to obtain in-game money.  People like that do exist.

Depends on whether a mecha costs as much as a Titan in EVE.   

There should not be a system that "balances" the difference between the fruits of the effort of the hard core player and the casual one.


On another note, lets talk a little about legitimate exploits of the economy. I am wondering how active a roll Masthead intends to take when balancing materials. For example, could a guild pool its resources and buy up all of one type of much needed resource, and jack the percieved values of that resource up without Masthead adjusting the droprate of that resource?

A lot of games have this happen, and it generally causes hyperinflation. Can we expect the same here?

Masthead has said that such tactics are expected. Remember that all income of resources can be controlled via warfare. So if you don't like someone jacking up prices, go take the resources for yourself.

If you ask me, the real problem is not the sellers of in-game currency, but rather, the buyers.  These are the real cheaters that plague online games these days, and need to be sought out and punished without prejudice. 

If the buyers are allowed to "get away" with their cheating habits they learn nothing, and continue to provide a market for those other unscrupulous bastards that ruin games via spam/farming/etc.

Ah no. For gold sellers to be effective, they actually to bot the content. Doing it as one person with one account would not get them profitable returns. Botting will be technically possible, but very difficult with the combat system and open PvP.

And here's the caveat.

I don't want to "farm bots" at all.  I don't want to see them.  Ever.  If I'm seeing bots then it follows logic that somewhere out there, there's someone with phone in-hand dialing some gold-selling service, asking to buy it.

Again, the problem is not the bots, but the market to which they ascribe.  Eliminate the buyers.  Destroy the market completely.  Keep the game's (simulated) economy sacrosanct and "natural".  Otherwise, suffer an economy rife with hyper-inflation driven by real world exchange rates.

It's up to the developers to determine how this issue is addressed, if at all.  It's my hope that they're as hardline as I am.

-sz.

Another tool to combat this is to make barter more important. Allow sellers to sell items on the market for X credits or Y quality 4 voltaic load. People may not have credits but they may have resources/components/items.