Auctions:

[Agmen of Eladesor]

Well, you're in a yes/no situation. I would consider these auctions, especially of ships, to be more of surplus sales from authorized (and maybe unauthorized) sellers.

The funny thing is - you might find the captain of a Russian ship selling it on the black market. It's well known that many ... toys ... have found their way into other hands that way. But to use your example of an American aircraft carrier, well - there was a British aircraft carrier on eBay for a while. There's a guy down in Indianapolis that sells surplus military equipment - from his front yard. I've seen jeeps, trucks, APC's, and once he had a tank wrecker out there.

I actually consider these ship sales to be more along the lines of simple crew transfers. Those things happen quite frequently in real life. What the auction fees do is to provide the 'salaries' for the new crew, maybe some training.

Ever since the ability to 'sell' custom characters because allowed (and if you missed that, you can pay someone to create and rep a ship for you), and more importantly, now that the /movechar command is working (THANK YOU, CANNON, even if I havent used it yet) - this can enable people to get something to try and RP that they may not have done so in the past simply because of the time involved.

For example, I have 3 personal and 6 shared accounts. Between those accounts and characters - I have 1 in one group (PanGal), one in one group (APM), 2 in one group (Harvesters), 1 freelancer - and ALL the rest (13 characters) are part of the BHG|/BHG|Core. So if I decided that it might be fun to RP a pirate or someone in Gallia - or even get an Order character up and going to combat the hordes of Bounty Hunters coming my way - well, I'm either going to have to spend a lot of time that I don't have on doing all the missions and other things - or I can simply 'transfer ownership', do a name-change, and I'm now in business. It's easy to trade and make money - I can do a couple of hours of that and make 60 million. It'd take a heck of a lot longer to rep up an Gallic cruiser.

I have a life outside of freelancer, surprising as that may be to some of you. Wife, kids, grandkids, work, house, pets, and other hobbies (including semi-professional poker player) take up time as well. I'm all for free enterprise and the exchange of goods given for value received.

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Oh god... The end of days... Agmen agreed with me.