Yeah nah. I don't really follow this. Unless you consider terrible traffic and less than idea air quality luxuries. Having said that, I did live in Adelaide for 13 years.
It's a fact, not a matter of opinion. People definitely do pay a premium for the luxury of living in LA/SF/NYC. Just look at the rents as you move further away from the center of the cities.
You and I may argue whether it's worth paying that premium, but that's a separate conversation. Location is the most important valuation metric in real estate. A one acre piece of land in rural America could be worth $5,000. An acre in Manhattan is worth $90M+.[1]
Diablo III's downfall was that there were price floors and price ceilings. They set a minimum price for gold, which would be higher than its true value. This led to people selling their gold outside of the RMAH, and killed the liquidity of the in-game currency.
Items also had a maximum price limit. This meant that items worth more than $250 USD at the time had to be sold for lesser value items, or for gold (which had the downfalls listed above).
The problems with Diablo III were the restrictions on the marketplace. Blizzard never allowed prices to hit their true equilibrium, and it created an off-site black market along with other inefficiencies.
There is no reason that a game economy should be ruined in one way or another by a real-money exchange rate. There are many games where players buy & sell in-game currency for real money, where the in-game currency holds a very steady real money value.
Take Runescape for example. One million Old School Runescape Gold has been worth roughly $1 USD for the past 6 months. The volume of in-game currency which has been bought and sold in that time period is in the tens of millions of USD.
In all honesty, we request a close up of the ID, as well as a picture of the buyer holding the ID up to the camera with their face in the picture, while holding a piece of paper saying they are buying from our website. It sounds ridiculous, but I know other companies who do this as well.
Let me start by saying that I agree with most of your points 100%. I am an advocate for privacy, and I think it's crazy that businesses need to ask people for photo ID to make fairly simple purchases.
I sell digital goods for online games. This means I do not have shipping receipts that will make me eligible for seller protection. The reality is that more and more businesses are providing services and products which are intangible. I'd imagine more than 50% of PayPal transactions these days do not involve shipping labels, yet their entire claim system revolves around them.
What I've noticed in the past 5-8 years is that Paypal has really cut down on real fraud. When I started doing business in 2007, there were kids who couldn't have been older than 15 years old buying stolen PayPal accounts on sketchy forums, and using them to buy digital products like MMO currency. We'd get hit quite regularly with real fraud.
Today, it seems that there are much less of these stolen accounts in circulation. Paypal has clearly cleaned up their act and put a bunch of security measures in place to prevent unauthorized access to people's funds. Nonetheless, unauthorized claims and chargebacks still happen. These days it's just people who spend a bunch of money, and decide later to try and get it all back, everyone else be damned.
There's not much you can do to screen for them placing those disputes. All we can do is collect as much information as possible, from all our buyers, to make sure that no real fraud gets through our systems. I do feel that if we did not have security measures in place, the stolen Paypal accounts might show up again.
But yes, long story short, I really wish there was a better way than collecting people's ID's. Unfortunately, we are in an awkward transition where it is very difficult to prove someone is who they claim to be, without requiring invasive evidence.
To hijack my own post, there needs to be way more transparency on how these cases are decided. If merchants are given a set of rules to follow, and are told what information we must gather to prove payments are authorized, then we can go ahead and collect that information. If our customers refuse to provide that information, and we are faced with a dispute, at least we will understand why we have lost.
It's actually quite easy to get customers to provide proof of identity before completing a service. However, after a service is completed, it becomes basically impossible. If we know what to collect before delivery, we can collect it. And if we are confident that we have the appropriate information to win a dispute, then we can sell more confidently and increase our customer purchase limits through Paypal, thereby increasing the amount of revenue we accept through their service. It would be a win/win situation.
Right, although I believe at Stripe, disputes must be initiated through the buyer's bank. The disputes I am describing are unauthorized claims placed through a Paypal account. Disputes placed directly at the bank are more difficult to initiate and usually result in temporary account closure.
They're a lot more work for the buyer. Filing an unauthorized dispute on Paypal can be done by pressing a few buttons online, and then just hoping for the best. Your bank accounts remain intact, and your Paypal account is restored within 24 hours.
Paypal has so many things wrong with their company. The majority of employees, even in the business support department, have absolutely no clue what is going on. They will give you an answer to a question, you will call back later, get a new agent, and then you'll get a completely different answer to the same question.
Half the time the customer support is clearly just improvising, because the system is such a mess that there are no clear processes for fairly common situations. Let me give an example. A customer on our website makes an order for digital goods. We collect photo ID, check their IP, call them. The customer then opens an unauthorized claim. We call in and outline the information we have.
Half the time, the agent will tell us that the information we have collected is irrelevant to an unauthorized dispute. Let me clarify that. The photo ID documents, IP address on file, and phone number of the buyer are considered irrelevant in a claim where the buyer alleges they did not authorize a purchase. Absolutely ridiculous, right?
Then magically, if you call back and connect to the right agent, they will actually look at your evidence and use it to help determine the case. These cases can be upwards of $500, and must be extremely common. And yet, somehow, there is no clear standard for what proof we need to collect in order to win an unauthorized dispute.
The company is a headache to work with. Half our time is spent verifying and doing risk management in our business, simply due to the horror that is PayPal.
It's a fact, not a matter of opinion. People definitely do pay a premium for the luxury of living in LA/SF/NYC. Just look at the rents as you move further away from the center of the cities.
You and I may argue whether it's worth paying that premium, but that's a separate conversation. Location is the most important valuation metric in real estate. A one acre piece of land in rural America could be worth $5,000. An acre in Manhattan is worth $90M+.[1]
[1] http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/13/2100-a-square-f...