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The East Cons Red
First up: Jim Rossignol with a field report on Korean gaming (from Walkerings)
Next: Nick Yee on historical precedents (from Raph Koster)
Finally: My own commentary on both of these… soon, promise.
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about 4 years ago
Intriguing. It looks like South Korea is the first nation in the world to really embrace the computer and computer entertainment as the epicenter of it’s culture.
Forget Mandaran, Cap’n Mal will probably be cursing in Korean.
about 4 years ago
LIAR!!!
about 4 years ago
The first article, while long, was interesting. The second article is broken up into 16 pages of the author quoting other people, with maybe four paragraphs per page.
I’m on DSL (in the middle of nowhere colorado) and have given up reading that page due to excessive load times. I pitty the anyone on dial-up trying to efficiently read that article.
I’m currious, since I only made it to page four, does the author come up with his own ideas, thoughts or opinions at any point? Or does he just continue to incessantly quote other people for the remaining twelve pages?
about 4 years ago
RE: the Nick Yee article… yes, the first step in defining the enemy is to anonymize and separate. “Chinese farmers” accomplishes that well, even if people believe they’re using it as a purely descriptive term. Then comes denial and demonization… “Those people” are the problem, not us. And Nick’s right about the solution (us not creating the demand), but wrong that it will ever, ever happen, even if player logs were made public. Why? BECAUSE PEOPLE WANT TO BUY GOLD. They want to have fun in a game without sacrificing a major portion of real life to un-fun activities in that game. Does it trouble them that they might be driving harmful activities? Maybe, but people are very good at rationalizations. Observe:
You know, I love to eat meat, but I would never kill and skin and gut an animal myself. But I’m happy to let someone else do that for me. I’m happy to remain ignorant of the behind-the-scenes world of meat packing, you know? I don’t want to watch the sausage being made, I just want a few links with my omelette. Is that so wrong?
And yes, I’m aware that animals are sometimes made to suffer. It’s awful. I try to patronize companies that claim to be free-range organic cruelty-free operations, but I realize that I’m mostly conning myself. I don’t really know where the meat is coming from, but will I still eat it? Yup, sure I do. I don’t have the time to raise my own livestock, for god’s sake, or become a full-time hunter/fisherman. Do I agonize over the ethics of my choice as I’m enjoying my tasty steak? Nope, never once. Do I consider the bleak, bland existence of becoming a vegan? Please.
Yet amazingly, I can still think of myself as a moral person. I give a wave of dismissal to the hunters yelling at me “Shoot your own dinner” with one hand, and to the PETA girl screaming “Meat is murder!” with the other. And poor Manuel down at the slaughterhouse, doing the job that is beneath me while making the Perdues a little richer, doesn’t even evoke a twinge of white guilt.
Why? Because 1) in the grand scheme of things, there are greater evils in the world to spend my energy worrying about, and 2) I figure that I contribute to the world in so many other positive ways, and if I want to be a selfish bastard for a moment and have an order of Buffalo wings, I goddamn deserve it. I’m sorry if the chicken got debeaked, or if Manuel doesn’t have health care, but I didn’t ASK for it to be that way. I’ll gladly pay extra for the wings from a cruelty-free farm with a union processing shop, if any are available. But if not, I’m still having wings tonight. Denying myself is not going to make the world a better place by any appreciable degree, nor is eating the wings going to make it a worse one.
-/|\\-
about 4 years ago
WAY off topic, I have never understood the “meat is murder” thing. Yes eating meat results in the death of a living thing… but so does eating lettuce. I mean just because it doesn’t move around doesn’t mean it’s not alive. Ohh well back to reading the articles.
about 4 years ago
> They want to have fun in a game without sacrificing a major portion of real life to un-fun activities in that game.
Maybe, the solution is make games without un-fun activities?
Also people “play” with a profit motive are people I don’t want to play with. They skew the economy, monoplize content, and are a nuisance in general. Any game that doesn’t do its best to stop this behavior is a game I won’t subscribe to. Nationality is irrelevant.
about 4 years ago
“Also people \’e2\’80\’9cplay\’e2\’80\’9d with a profit motive are people I don\’e2\’80\’99t want to play with. They skew the economy, monoplize content, and are a nuisance in general.”
You just described every uber/raid guild/supergroup/gang (whatever any given system calls their local dog packs). Money is only one form of profit in the world, power or more precisely precieved power is just as profitable. Even the vast majority of players qualify as playing for profit.
Profit is a advantageous gain or return. I have yet to see someone kill 500 foozles just for giggles. They do it for levels, money, items or other ‘profit’.
Some just prefer their profit to be wallet sized and tradable at the local food store.
about 4 years ago
I liked the Nick Yee article, except that the precident doesn’t really work. Virtual currency and items are in-limbo as far as legality (and even existance) goes, whereas washing clothes for profit was clearly legal. The only “law” against gold farming is from an EULA which is very poorly enforced.
about 4 years ago
> WAY off topic
Um, no. What I’m saying is that I buy gold the same way I buy meat…without a lot of thought for how it got to me. Even if I did think about it, I wouldn’t accept responsibility for encouraging other people’s bad behavior through the simple act of buying gold/a cheeseburger.
> Maybe, the solution is make games without un-fun activities?
I dunno. I think Warcraft did a pretty good job with that…it’s easy to level up, quests are for the most part fun and rewarding, hell, everything is fun, in moderation. Yet people still buy gold. Why?
I think that most people are using gold-buying to tailor the game to fit their playstyle. Most people don’t want to buy thousands of gold and twink out all their characters with every conceivable purple BOE. They just want a little extra to get their level 40 mount, or to get some healing potions for PvE, or something, because they don’t have the time or inclination to farm for it themselves. And that’s what you’d have to do, FARM for it, because just saving up the gold you get through normal play through natural progressions up the levels is not going to get you enough to get the items at the level where they’d be most useful.
So is the answer then to increase the gold supply? Make all mobs drop ten times as much coin? No, because if they made gold that easy to accumulate, something else would just become the de facto currency, and then people would be buying THAT instead, to fund an increased “standard of living”.
No, RMTs are a natural outgrowth of any system that allows unregulated player-to-player trades. If players can do it, the will do it. The only answer I can think of is therefore not to allow unregulated player-to-player trades. That’s the only way to ensure everyone “earns” their own way. And then you’re right back to a situation where you can’t hope to compete with the people that have unlimited playtime, which is a whole other argument.
-/|\\-
about 4 years ago
Sorry was commenting that I was way off topic not you. You where well on topic.
about 4 years ago
Someone should read Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s “Meat Manifesto”
http://rivercottage.net/foodmatters/article.jsp?ref=foodmatters.200304115126
about 4 years ago
xaldin: There is an order of magitude between real profit and virtual profit.
Robin: I don’t deny the motives of the buyer. What I blame the buyer for is encouraging the sellers and all the things that come with them.
about 4 years ago
“xaldin: There is an order of magitude between real profit and virtual profit”
No actually the end result is very similar.
An uberguild/hardcore players monopolize content just as much.
All diehard players cause the economy to skew. Singlehandedly I could change the average price of an item across the server in WoW and I wasn’t even all that much of a heavy player.
General nuisance … that’s broad enough that it definitely covers a LOT of non gold farmers.
No at the end of the day I don’t view that there is any order of magnitude difference between the two. Everything that they’re accused of causing I can point to history of many, many guilds/etc doing the causing.
At the end of the day it all boils down to the system’s design honestly.
about 4 years ago
bleh note to self don’t type comments when on a conference call. One ends up repeating phrases.
about 4 years ago
First, I don’t see that RMTs really have all that much of an effect on game economies. As xander points out, any hardcore player is going to effect the economy, whether it’s a gold farmer or an uber catass. Sure, without RMTs going on there wouldn’t be as many gold farmers and thus less uber-player skew, but if you expect all those players that are buying the gold to go and become uber-players then the end result would be the same. Gold farmers are not increasing the effect, just shifting it from the players buying the gold to themselves.
Secondly, I don’t see that RMTs are something that developers should be fighting against. Developers seem to have this mindset that “the players must play the game the way WE intended, not the way they enjoy playing it”, and I think that’s horrible. These people are paying to have fun, and everytime a developer decides they aren’t having the right sort of fun they just annoy their customers. Sure, if player A’s gameplay is directly interfeering with other players’ enjoyment of the game, then something should probably be done. But don’t go making arbitrary rules to force your players to do what you wanted them to when their actions aren’t interfeering with others.
about 4 years ago
The problem with using that rule is the definition of what constitutes “directly interfering with other players’ enjoyment.” I don’t enjoy paying inflated prices for things, being spammed by gold sellers or competing with farmers for drops and spawns, so to my way of thinking the people who do those things for outside profit are doing so at my expense. After all, I’m paying for the game, and they’re profiting by reducing my enjoyment of what I’m paying for.
While game design can minimize those behaviors, I’m not sure any design with an economy (and what fun is a game world where you can’t trade with other players?) can eliminate them altogether.
about 4 years ago
But if all the people that are buying the gold and items didn’t, and went and got it themselves, then you’d just be competing against them instead of the farmers. The don’t increase the competition, they just offset who it’s coming from.
It sounds to me like the real complaint here is that the game (whichever one it is you play) needs more servers or more spawns to service the needs of a cramped playerbase.