Allakhazam.com purchased by IGE holding company
As posted by Allakhazam on his boards:\par
The ownership issues here are convoluted. This is how deals like this get done. The size of this is pretty amazing. This is just the announcement for our own users, not the actual corporate announcement, which will likely come much later. We are now owned by a company that owns a bunch of stuff, including IGE. They bought both of us (and several other sites as well) and then split us into separate divisions so that there is no interaction between them. You know my stand on gold selling. Before agreeing to anything like this, I wanted to make sure that there would be no interaction between those divisions and that I would have complete control over the new network, including the sites that used to be part of ogaming. So this means that the Ogaming sites and Thottbot have been split off of IGE and into our network and no longer have any connection with them.\par
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I don’t like Marlboros, but I still buy oreos. I would never buy a Ford, but would definitely buy a Jaguar. Not big on Taco Bell, but like KFC. Many products you use are owned by people who own other products you may not like. It’s the way of the world. As long as the companies are run separately, most people are fine with that. If your oreo cookie wrapper had a marlboro ad on it, maybe that would be a problem. It is important to keep in mind that we are a completely separate company within a large holding company that just happens to own other companies as well.\par
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I realize some people are not going to be happy with this, but the fact is that we are now able to do things we just were never able to do before. This gives us the financial backing and stability to really do a great deal for everyone. Before the financial backing for the site was just me. Now it is a well financed corporation.
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As he mentioned, Allakhazam has always been very anti-gold farming and has turned down acquisition offers in the past. His new business partners, called variously RPG Holdings LLC and Content Holdings LLC, according to a quick Google search, include IGE, OGaming, Thottbot, what appears to be an RSS scooper-site that aggregates other site content, designed to milk Google Ads and Gay Indy.\par
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The real motivation here is straightforward, if interesting.\par
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IGE, which has a severely tarnished reputation among most gamers (ironically, since pre-Yantis acquisition they were briefly seen as “the good guy gold sellers”, as described in this interesting, if sometimes rumor-mongering article) has thrown a good deal of money about trying to purchase their way out of it. Thus the monthly full-page and often back-cover ads in Computer Games magazine (the only mass market trade publication still willing to sell IGE ad space), the abortive partnership with Themis Group, the purchasing of seemingly money losing community sites in bulk, and the hiring of ex-game industry executives.\par
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This “interview” PR piece gives a good overview of what IGE would like to put forth as its spin. This was my takeoff on it at the time. You’re seeing it now for the first time because when it was topical, my employer was already in the news for vocally going after IGE and I thought it best not to throw logs on that fire. But as you can see, my take on IGE is pretty plain. They’re vice profiteers, no more and no less. Like most vice profiteers, they’d prefer to work within the law, but don’t feel particularly bound by it. And they profit off of… well, my work, and that of my friends and coworkers, so I take it a bit personally.\par
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Thus the purchase of sites like Ogaming (which as far as I can tell is famous mainly for its ownership) and Thottbot, which has to be probably the site with the most traffic on the Internet. Note that neither of these sites are replete with mysupersales.com ads. It may well be that, especially in thottbot’s case, the purchase was simply to have an entity within the IGE constellation that was more well known than, well, IGE. And it may be simply that IGE purchased the site simply because it was available, and hey, that gold farmer money was just sitting there. Rumors have always swirled about that IGE purchased Thottbot to “put pressure on Blizzard”, but that doesn’t make a whole great deal of sense unless you’re being fitted for an aluminum foil Helm of Thought Control Warding. World of Warcraft would not spin off its axis were Thottbot to disappear.\par
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However, Allakhazam would spin off its axis were Thottbot not to disappear. While, again, theorizing, as some have, that the Thottbot purchase was simply to put non-IGE sites like Allakhazam out of business is a bit too Machiavellan for believability, the fact remains that as long as Thottbot offered its wares for free, selling a similar service was going to be a hard sell. And here, we finally see at the end of a long series of rumor-control posts by Allakhazam, something approaching a primal scream of truth:\par
The value of the purchase is really obvious. Thottbot and Allakhazam are the two largest sites for the largest MMO game in the world. The two have cancelled each other out financially, since anything one would charge for in a premium service was offered by the other for free. Now with both sites, we can expand our premium service to cover all WoW players. Frankly if Thottbot hadn’t existed I doubt I would have had to sell Allakhazam. Because Thottbot existed and was giving away their information for free (and losing money like crazy to their former company who didn’t care if they made any money off it) we could not make a profit off our wow site even though it was by far our biggest expense. The company that bought both sites was smart enough to realize the potential of combining those two user bases.
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For the end user, this mainly amounts to “Hope all you guys liked using Thottbot for free!”. For Allakhazam, this means that his primary competition just got folded under his banner. And for IGE? Who knows. They’re seeing heavy competition from Asian gold farmers, and the seriously odd set of sites you get from googling “RPG Holdings LLC” implies that, like all mobsters, in the end they just want to go legit as a media company.\par
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Meanwhile, if you do /who Azshara or /who Dire Maul you’ll still see the usual names, and the world continues to turn on its axis, and people with more money than time will continue to buy gold online because, hey, it’s easy and they’re there. Even in games like Guild Wars and City of Heroes, where gold is essentially meaningless, people still queue up to buy it. So much for the theory that a well-designed game will eliminate “RMT”. Hey, it’s easy and they’re there.\par
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There aren’t any easy answers, and there aren’t any good answers, but on the whole I’d rather John Smedley sell me my Cloak of Fire Resistance than Jonathan Yantis, all things considered. At least the former has to live with the impact of his decisions, along with the rest of us.
May 3, 2006 at 8:17 pm
Cool, that makes it easy. *plonk* I could never spell Allakhazam on the first try anyway.
May 4, 2006 at 1:11 am
Smedley is a giant gnome. At least he used to be.
May 4, 2006 at 1:16 am
“And they profit off of\’e2\’80\’a6 well, my work, and that of my friends and coworkers, so I take it a bit personally.”\par
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Maybe if your work wasn’t shoddy and ill conceived there wouldn’t be a gaping hole for a 3rd party to legally make some money.\par
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I don’t see any of the major auto makers complaining because people are hiring other people to drive around and do their errands for them. I own a Chevrolet and 3rd party professional errand runner owns a Chevy and I pay him to do the menial mind numbing tasks that I don’t have the time to do. We both bought a copy of the game, uh, I mean car so who cares.\par
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The difference is that cars don’t come with built in, lame ass repetitive tasks. Imagine if you had to try and start a car 100 times before it actually started. Or if you wanted to drive from L.A. to Las Vegas but you had to do it 10 times before you actually got there.\par
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I buy gold all the time, I’m in a high end raiding guild, have a family, a job, a life and all that stuff. Buying gold means my play time is quality play time. I don’t have to farm some suck ass dungeons 500 times to get gold for raid preparations and repairs and all that other crap. I can log in and raid with my friends or I can go farm gold by myself while they are raiding.\par
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I bought the game, the gold farmer bought the game. The developer got paid. The developer banned the gold farmer. The gold farmer bought another copy of the game and the developer got paid again. That looks like a win-win for me and the gold farmer and a win x3 for the developer.\par
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And now because of the terrible gold farming it looks like a few good people who were scraping money together for their websites will start to get paid and make some real scratch. Boo-hoo. This is a travesty.
May 4, 2006 at 3:52 am
The problem is that gold farmers don’t want to move the hell over so people who are actually playing can do anything.
May 4, 2006 at 4:43 am
Another problem is that some of us want to play a game where RMTs aren’t allowed. So we sign up to a game in which everyone who plays has to agree beforehand that they won’t do RMTs. But it seems that for some people, agreeing not to do something is no bar to doing it.\par
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There are games where RMTs are welcomed (stationexchange-enabled SOE servers; Project Entropia, more directly). Why don’t you go play one of them, instead of agreeing not to do something then turning around and doing it?
May 4, 2006 at 10:04 am
Vleskoe says:\par
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I cheat because I feel its beneath me to actually play the game. Instead I take advantage of the poverty of others.\par
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paraphrase
May 4, 2006 at 10:31 am
Lets hope IGE hires Mike Lescault.
May 4, 2006 at 11:29 am
Once you pass a certain point in your life (job, kids, marriage, or whatever), your free time becomes constrained, while cash becomes less so. If you still want to play games, the current time played -> uberness ratio holds little appeal.\par
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So what to do if you still want to play? For some folks, the answer is to drop some dollars on a third party who can cut out some portion of that time sink requirement, leaving the player free to enjoy more of the parts of the game she/he considers fun.\par
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There are lots of related issues and problems. Who knows how well/poorly the farmers are treated? How can an in-game economy be kept balanced? Should it? Is it fair for third parties to profit from a game they did not make? If not, why? The list goes on.\par
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Ultimately, any time a game has portions that are considered un-fun by a sizeable number of players, said players will seek a way around the un-fun parts to the fun parts. This is inevitable. Note, too, that the definition of “un-fun” varies strongly from payer to player and may or may not wholly or partially equate to “is too challenging.”\par
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In games like WoW, at the least we can say that a sizeable number of players (based on the dolalrs pulled in by third parties) consider farming for/earning gold to be an un-fun activity in some way.\par
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I am sure if the time-sink components to MMOs were removed, other third party endeavors would soon show up to address other “un-fun” aspects of the game. But until catassing (or being dragged up the money/level/gear/power curve by a catassing friend/relative/spouse) is scrapped as the ultimate way to victory in MMOs, we will be stuck with farmers in their current incarnation.
May 4, 2006 at 12:44 pm
Allakhazam always had a weird layout that I could never get used to. Then their servers got slow as hell. Then they started charging for their content. So, I found it elsewhere. If IGN wants to charge for this information, people like me will go elsewhere to find it. There will always be enough cheep bastards like myself to found new sites as the established ones get gobbled up by OMFG-IGE-MyAssHurtz-Amalgimated. Frankly, I don’t care who owns who. I don’t care what ads they run (irritating ones get blocked out of hand). I just care if they have the information I want in a format I can acess it. And *gasp* I bet I can still enjoy the game without any of these sites.\par
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As for the gold pharming / selling thing? On one hand, it wrecks the game economy. Money and items are moving around the market for reasons beyond their ingame value. This is a bad thing for any game that wants to even aproximate a realistic enviornment. On the other hand, people are broken. No patch or clever game concept or click thru terms or majic monkey dust is going to make people stop trying to “win” by means outside the game.
May 4, 2006 at 1:22 pm
As was mentioned at the AGC, RMT will vanish as a hot-button topic within the next 3 years. My guess? It’ll go internal.\par
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C’mon. IGE’s made HOW MUCH money? Don’t you think that Sony, Sigil, NCSoft, et al aren’t itching to figure out how to take advantage of that without pissing off the players irrevocably?\par
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Station Exchange is only the beginning.\par
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Honestly? I’d rather it be internal. Ban the farmers, internalize RMTs and make it more reasonable for Average Newb to buy and sell shit.\par
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I mean, hell, who wouldn’t want to sell their yard trash loot for $0.75?
May 4, 2006 at 1:36 pm
“And they profit off of\’e2\’80\’a6 well, my work, and that of my friends and coworkers, so I take it a bit personally.”\par
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But you guys are the ones who designed a system that rewards hours played over just about anything else. Which disadvantages people without much free time *but* rewards you because you charge monthly. So when you add people with lots of money but not much time into the mix, you can see that you’ve created a need in your consumers which you don’t adequately address. Enter farmers.\par
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I mean, in terms of the RJR/Nabisco metaphor, you guys make Oreos and own Jenny Craig. Then you proceed to express MORAL OUTRAGE at plastic surgeons offering liposuction. You’re actually angry because someone other than you is funnelling your mark’s money. Which is understandable self-interest, but I don’t see why the mark should side with you.
May 4, 2006 at 2:37 pm
This thread is silly. Assuming the game rules forbid it (and most do), RMT gold/item buyers are cheaters. Cheaters should be banned, dragged to the street, hung from the nearest lamp post and then shot. Sadly most local laws do not allow this.\par
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If you want to cheat, get a console and load up GameShark. Do not cheat in multiplayer games. If you don’t have the time or the patience to play them honestly, don’t play. There’s overabundance of other games to play, and if you are playing with yourself, I couldn’t care less what you do. Just don’t ruin _my_ game by cheating. Ruin yours.\par
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And those lowlifes who make a buck by providing ’service’ to these scums are only slightly above drug dealers in my books. Sadly local laws do not allow shooting of them them either, but they could (and should) be sued out of existence. MMO publishers don’t have the guts to build up a case (and/or lobby up a suitable law) to get rid of IGE and their kind. They are terminally afraid that their precious EULAs might take some bruising in the process.\par
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Blizzard could sue every goldseller that operates in the US market to the ground with smal fragment of what they cash in from WoW, but sadly they think that spending that money to actually fight the problem is not cost-effective, because no spreadsheet is showing them how much they are losing in monthly fees because people who are fed up with these cheaters are cancelling their subscriptions.\par
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MMO oldtimers are getting really jaded due to RMT crap, and when the market loses it’s most vocal support due to a constant cheating problem, which is not addressed like it should be (by *suing* the idiots ruining the games - buyers and sellers), there will be pain in the future for the MMO developers and publishers.\par
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I myself have played more than a dozen different MMOs. I’ve spent considerable time (maxed out chars etc) in six different games. Currently, out of those six games, two are in my permanent shitlist for ignoring cheaters, another two have lost my interest due to other issues (mostly clueless developers running them to ground for non-RMT reasons), and out of the remaining two I still play only one. I *used* to have five or six different MMO accounts open. Now I have two, to a single game. And I have little interest in the new offerings, before I’ve spent considerable time watching if the management has any intention of keeping the game cheat- and RMT-free. Most don’t, so I never become a subscriber.\par
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If RMT isn’t eradicated thru brute force from games that are not designed to be officially RMT-enabled for all of their subscribers from day 1, MMOs all turn into Project Entropias, and cease to be games. If I want to play online for money, online poker is a much better option. At least there everyone knows upfront what the rules are, and actually play by them. Oh, and you can make a lot more cash if you know how to play compared to the chump change that floats in RMT farming.
May 4, 2006 at 2:47 pm
And those lowlifes who make a buck by providing \’e2\’80\’99service\’e2\’80\’99 to these scums are only slightly above drug dealers in my books. Sadly local laws do not allow shooting of them them either, but they could (and should) be sued out of existence.\par
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So you (nearly) equate the selling of virtual property in a video game with the sale of illegal drugs, and lament that it is illegal to murder the people who sell gold in video games.\par
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(boggle)\par
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Hopefully you don’t a) live in the U.S. and b) vote regularly, but given how the country is lately I’m afraid I’m going to be disappointed on both counts.
May 4, 2006 at 2:53 pm
Gold selling is here to say sorry to say. Just follow the almighty dollar. Gold/Item selling isn’t going to put someone off a game, as much as some fanatics (looks over a few posts above) say it would. If the game is good on its own merits, gold/item selling isn’t going to keep you from playing it. The $$ involved will force the companies that make MMOs to internalize it, the increase in cash flow far outweighs the small number of players you’re going to turn off by such practices.\par
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When it comes down to it, playing a MMORPG requires a massive investment of resources. Some people have a massive amout of time to invest but can barely scrap together $15/mo to play the game. Others have little time to spare in their life, but lots of spare cash. No company in their right mind is going to tell either one of those people NOT to play their game. All the anger and vitriol in the world isn’t going to change that fact.\par
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We might as all just welcome our new 60 ft. gold selling master.
May 4, 2006 at 3:54 pm
“”So you (nearly) equate the selling of virtual property in a video game with the sale of illegal drugs, and lament that it is illegal to murder the people who sell gold in video games. “”\par
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No. Only when they do so to facilitate cheating in a game I play, breaking the rules of the game.\par
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Real world is already filled with cheating and stealing scum. Games, by definition, have a set of rules. If you don’t want to play by the rules, you should not play. Get the hell out and don’t ruin it for others. And DEFINITELY don’t ruin it for your personal profit.\par
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The fact that RMT sellers are way less interested in ‘legalized’ RMT games clearly spells it out - the people who want to buy, do so to cheat, and sellers primarily do business in games that outlaw RMT sales, because the cheater market is so large.\par
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Drug dealers sell illegally (’against the rules of the game, also known as law as far as drugs go’). They could instead do business in legal goods. Same goes for RMT farmer/seller scum. If you want to go sell plat in EQ2 exchange servers, or L$s in Second Life, knock yourself out. It’s ‘playing by the rules’ over there. Not so in 95% of the rest of the MMO servers (there it’s pretty much comparable to selling illegal performance-boosting steroids to the competitors - ones that are illegal to buy and sell)\par
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I guess you also think it’s ok to use performance-boosting drugs in competitive sports. “Win at all costs. Rules are for sissies.”
May 4, 2006 at 4:08 pm
Jarnis, I think you seem to be forgetting that we’re talking about a form of entertainment and not professional competition. I’m glad you gain another level of enjoyment by taking your MMO of choice as serious as you do, but for every 1 of you there are 9 others that just play the game for a few hours of entertainment and distraction.
May 4, 2006 at 4:10 pm
“”If the game is good on its own merits, gold/item selling isn\’e2\’80\’99t going to keep you from playing it.”"\par
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Yes it does. UO economy, among others, was utterly wrecked by it. After certain point, only way to get a large house was to pay real dollars for it. It caused lots of lost subscribers, which were masked for a long time by the loony hoarders who kept opening new accounts to get more houses…\par
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WoW is already sliding towards that. See: AH prices of truly rare items, plus the fact that people pay utterly nuts amounts of gold for prime twink gear. Bought by idiots with too much RL money (which is then spent on WoW gold, which gets spent on twink gear - commonly sold by RMT farmers, who then turn around and sell the gold to the next idiot)\par
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In many cases, once RMT crap starts running rampant, RMT purchases become the ‘way to keep up’ with the rest. ‘I must buy gold because of the inflation messing up all the prices means that I can’t afford anything without doing so. ‘Just like the age old ‘I must radar because everyone else radars’.\par
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RMT purchases are fine, as long as they are in the game rules, and are allowed up front. Then they are not cheating. Everyone can choose to play a game where their real life bank account equals win. Check out EQ2 exchange servers someday. Everything sold in ingame money is priced utterly nuts, because everyone is buying plat with real cash. The game is completely unplayable there without spending real money to buy virtual things. Project Entropia is also unplayable without spending tons of PED (also known as $$$) - however, at least there it’s by design.\par
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I do not want to play such MMO ‘games’, but I have no issues if someone else does. Just don’t come a break the existing rules of a game that some of us are playing by the rules, just because you worship the allmighty dollar and think all is fair as long as you don’t get caught (and ‘because everyone else is doing it as well’).
May 4, 2006 at 4:13 pm
“”Jarnis, I think you seem to be forgetting that we\’e2\’80\’99re talking about a form of entertainment and not professional competition. I\’e2\’80\’99m glad you gain another level of enjoyment by taking your MMO of choice as serious as you do, but for every 1 of you there are 9 others that just play the game for a few hours of entertainment and distraction. “”\par
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I play it for fun as well. Part of the fun _is_ the competition, but to be honest, the fact that others cheat makes me mostly sad. What sends me to unstoppable ‘hulk smash!’ rage is that RMT sellers and buyers ultimately always drive the ingame economy straight off the cliff, ruining the whole gameplay for me - even if I see no reason to compare my epix for yours - simply because I’m left with two choices - spend silly amounts of time grinding ingame money, or succumb to buying ingame money with real cash. Just because everything worth two bits ingame becomes priced according to the ingame purses of the cheaters.
May 4, 2006 at 5:05 pm
Long time watcher, first time poster.\par
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I am low on time and well financed. My personal fun time is dictated by me and not by those I enjoy my free time with. I have many hobbies and I enjoy all of them at my leisure.\par
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For example:\par
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I play paintball. The games start way too early in the morning for me so I show up when I am ready. I often show up in the middle of a match and walk on to the field right behind the opposing team and spray them with paint from behind. It’s fun. (I have a really expensive marker too.) Other players get angry and call me a cheater but I pay well for my time. The other players often leave but there are always more to replace them.\par
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I play chess in the park. I always pay a very large man to remove my opponents\’e2\’80\’99 rooks and pawns after the first 5 moves. They always get angry and leave, but I win. There are always other that will play.\par
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I play MMO’s. I have my toons power-leveled and purchase all their gear. Yeah, I may not be as good as other players but honestly I pwn them anyway. They call me a cheater and I laugh. I work hard for my money. Stupid kids have too much time on their hands. Wait till they have a wife and kids.\par
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So RMT in games is just right for my life style. Plus I get punched in the mouth less.
May 4, 2006 at 5:06 pm
Comments re “people with more money than time” sound like a dominatrix calling down a hooker. The goal is the same with either “service”, but some people don’t see the need for the spanking before the climax.\par
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What kind of freak fantasizes being broke, naked and unable to fight two rats at a time? :)\par
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Unfortunately, we design and build games with linear, progressive content, so its not good for us as an ongoing subscription service if someone wants to try and skip 3 months of content.\par
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Buying gold is bad because it funds farmers, and farming is bad because its basicaly raqueteering — The 9th Sheet of Assiping would be yours if you could kill Garg the Flusher, but you can’t, because he’s permanently camped by farmers.\par
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Primary reasons people buy gold are: Content they are stuck on and wish to proceed past, catching up with friends, not wishing to repeat content they have already seen multiple times (2nd, 3rd, 4th characters, etc).\par
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There are two sides to the argument. There are players who feel that a level 60 character should be the result of 60 levels of work. And there are players who feel that a level 60 character is what you need to hit molten core with your buddies.\par
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Designers seem to favor the former, prohibitive approach - you have to see the content in the order we decided. Players seem to favor the latter enough that this is an issue.\par
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If a player can choose their level, there’s nothing to stop them choosing level 1 and a sequential experience. But because we enforce the sequential experience on them from the start, and every time they create another character, if what they really want is a level 60 character, they’re going to have to go outside the system.
May 4, 2006 at 5:54 pm
I agree with everyone who says that RMT is here because the game design sucks arse. It is truly as simple as that.\par
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What is going to happen though is that RMT is going to go internal. It is inevitable. Think about what most of the RMT allow you to do. Skip boring, repetitive tasks that “designers” have put in to make you waste time and spend more money through subscribing for longer. That is the only reason those tasks are there. Anyone who says otherwise is a liar, pure and simple.\par
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Now, I can either spend $30 over two months, via subscription fees, because that is how long it took me to get something or I can spend $30 over one month via a subscription fee and a RMT. To the owner of the game, they don’t care (so long as they get the money in the RMT). The developer may think they care, but if they really cared, they wouldn’t design the game to be so fucking dumb in the first place.\par
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People might say, but it is cheating (please note, I’ve never RMT’ed I don’t see the point in wasting more money on something intangible)! Is it really cheating or is it just really crappy game design. In a game about gathering and managing resources RMT for resources would be cheating. But what are most MMORPGs about? I doubt many people are playing them to gather gold alone. Most players have something else in mind, be it taking down the big bosses, just hanging with friends or dominating in PvP. If a grind for resources is the best way a designer can come up with for allowing players to achieve their goals, the designer is shit. Fire them now.\par
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The grind is only there to keep people playing the game to keep them paying their subscription. Offering RMT simply allows people to skip the grind. So long as the owner of the game gets the money either way, I don’t think they are going to care how they get it. Players just have to realise that they can get stuff in multiple ways, choices! How great is that. People can be time rich and money poor or money rich and time poor, why can’t they both play (and achieve their goals)?\par
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As an example, the epic mount in WoW. Really, what is that? It is a time sink. People farm gold and buy the mount. Maybe that keeps them playing for an extra month. Why not let people just pay Blizzard $15 and get the mount. What is the difference in the end? That some catass (thats me cos I ground the gold for mine) feels they should be entitled to a fast mount cos they have the time to farm for it and people who just want to have the cool shiney but don’t have time shouldn’t have it? Doesn’t that sound stupid to anyone else?
May 4, 2006 at 6:25 pm
I blame everyone.\par
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But why not just make everything in games no drop. Especially gold or anything worth value to another player. Use a token system for epics, etc etc….\par
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Items (except for tradeskills), gold, cybersex take your pick.\par
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Would probably make tradeskills actually useful.\par
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For some reason developers think they need to mimic a real world economy when in effect its all about the loot and barbie dress up.\par
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Hell I don’t even use gold in WoW anymore….except for repairs (I have enough gold to last probably 1000 runs) and I would rather have a blacksmith repair my armor to give him another skill point.\par
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Solve the problem of needing a money sink. I deal with money everyday in real life I could give a rats ass If there was no “wegotathrivingeconomy” in wow.\par
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Just give me a nice qiraj staff, and a nice armor set to show for all my catassing.
May 4, 2006 at 6:53 pm
I won’t get into the arguement (again) about whether RMT is destructive or not, but there is one thing I have to comment on. RMT is NOT cheating in the meaning outlined bere by Jarris and elgoog.\par
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elgoog gives several examples, such as where he pays someone to remove someone else’s chess pieces from the board. This is absurd, because the rules of chess do not allow for someone to do that for you. However, in comparison, it is perfectly okay for a friend of yours to give you 100 gold in WoW. It is perfectly okay for your friend to give you their left-over uber equipment. In fact, that’s a main reason for guilds to exist, so that the members can pool their resources and share their loot to help each other. This gifting of stuff happens all the time in the game, yet no one complains.\par
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RMT is only different in that you are paying someone to be your friend long enough to give you the loot. Any effects of RMT on the game are virtually identical to your having a friend that farms gold for himself and gives you some.\par
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Plus, for those of you that would rather all those people buying gold would go out and get it themselves, your game would be exactly the same as it is now. Because if each of them went to farm their own gold, they’d just replace the RMT farmer in the looting. It wouldn’t mean fewer people in your way if the farmers were all banned, just more non-farming players in your way.\par
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In the end, the effects to a game economy by RMT are mostly imagined by those opposed to it. What few negative effects there are balanced by the fact that the in-game money supply is temporarily reduced by the inventory of the farmers; that gold is out of circulation until it’s sold, and acts as a temporary money sink.
May 4, 2006 at 6:54 pm
Oops, looks like I did get into that arguement again. Oh, well.
May 4, 2006 at 7:29 pm
The one thing that those speaking in favor of RMT are missing is that no one makes you play an MMO.\par
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If you sign up for WoW, DAoC, or EQ2 or what have you, that’s your choice, and the price of entry to play in Blizzard, Mythic, and Sony’s playground (other than the money for the box and subscription) is to abide by their rules.\par
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So don’t click that “Accept” button, break your agreement, and then think you can justify it afterwards by complaining about how much time it takes to level.\par
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This is an MMO. You knew what you were getting into when you bought it. If you don’t like it, DON’T PLAY.
May 4, 2006 at 10:15 pm
Jesus, lock this thread and the burn it. It’s making my eyes bleed.
May 4, 2006 at 11:32 pm
Here’s the thing though. If developers and publishers supported their fansites with something more than concept art. (Read Advertising Dollars, or Bandwidth, or Hosting, or Trademark licenses, or something tangible) Maybe they wouldn’t have to sell out. It’s hard to say no to the only guy buying stuff when your trying to eek out a website. Bandwidth, programmers, time, effort none of which are free things.\par
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Here is what is more interesting now though. Now, every MMO that comes out, any one who manages to put together something reasonable is going to have to either have someone with VERY deep pockets, or run a subscription service. Which if they run subscription, Zam.com is just going to make a free version, thus undercutting the people trying to do the right thing.\par
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Guess what, developers and publishers are going to do. Not a damn thing. They’re making money. Sure, they’ll lose money because of farmers, but it’s smaller than the money they’d lose from actually investing in their communities. So oh well.
May 4, 2006 at 11:47 pm
“Any effects of RMT on the game are virtually identical to your having a friend that farms gold for himself and gives you some.”\par
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Except that my friend wouldn’t be spamming me with group invites, whispers and emails about buying gold from him. Also, he’d probably share the good farming spots and log off occasionally. I probably wouldn’t have to pay him 800 gold for that rare drop he found that perfectly suits my class, either. Oh, and he wouldn’t be trying to ninja all the good stuff he can’t use when I group with him.\par
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So I’m assuming that in this case, “virtually identical to” means “nothing at all like.”
May 5, 2006 at 12:47 am
I feel it is sort of sad that we can not even really comment on Scott\’e2\’80\’99s commentary because we (yes, me too) are hung up on whether RMT is bad or good. RMT is at the root of the discussion and is corner stone to the entire Zam, Ogaming, L2O, Allakhazam buy up. I am ashamed of myself because my very first post was a snarky, facetious cow plop that was really off topic (I was bated.) But that is what the RMT discussion does to us (me). Turns me into an idiot (idealistic.)\par
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I honestly can see both sides of the argument. And many folks here and elsewhere are taking the middle-ground (realistic.) Whether it be providers pedaling their own goods, or having free trade servers and non-free trade servers. I do rebuke the statement that this is all to blame on shoddy game design. Yes, there are a lot of different mechanics that could be used but the current generation of games that use them are not exactly the most played. It\’e2\’80\’99s funny how the games without economies are not as fun as the ones with.\par
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I think the fundamental break down between the two groups is not morals or fair play. It is the concept of \’e2\’80\’9crules for games\’e2\’80\’9d vs. \’e2\’80\’9cI pay for my entertainment.\’e2\’80\’9d One sees themselves as participant in sports league and the other sees themselves as a movie goer. The first is happy as long as the ref does his job and the other is happy if all the cell phones are off (oh and the movie doesn\’e2\’80\’99t suck.)\par
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I think what Bob said is closer to the topic. These communities are either subsidized (by gold ads) or straight out purchased by RMT profiteers. The perfect early example is L2Orphus. The site was started by a 16 year old kid who had a knack for layout. It just happened to be the most frequented Lineage 2 sight up through the games launch. Then school starts, kid puts up a paypal donate button (no real donations), and the O gaming network came to the rescue.\par
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If it keeps going like that I recommend everyone here makes a fan site for each new MMO. Do what you can to get the hits and wait for the buy out check. Rinse, Repeat.
May 5, 2006 at 2:24 am
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Erh, nice philosophy. Drive away the people willing to spend more money on the game that might go towards developing more content for you. I like your angst, but maybe you could direct it at the farmers, because the folks who pay for their gold probably have zero interaction with you and you probably wouldn’t even be aware of them if it weren’t for the farmers locking you out of content intended for you for the sole purpose of lining their pockets.
May 5, 2006 at 8:08 am
Well reality of the world is that whenever you have a system that requires time to progress (time farming, time leveling, time aquiring something) people will use money to shorten that time. Arguing morality is silly, its just waving of the epeen.\par
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Its just the way it is, fighting against it is fighting the tides and attempting to stop the sun from rising. Even if you succeed you lose. I think in the end Korea will end up driving it into acceptance and given the size of their market (in terms of number of players AND companies involved in the trade) that will spread everywhere.\par
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Best thing a developer can do is say to themselves ‘Real money will be used to circumvent aspects of my game. Which aspects are they going to be and how can I make those aspects more appealing than circumventing?’. Get the answer right and the involvement of the additional service companies declines. Wrong and they drive the system. Hint for when the design helps RMT … “The players will need to do/gather/kill X several hundred times in order to get Y”.
May 5, 2006 at 9:14 am
“Arguing morality is silly, its just waving of the epeen.”\par
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Nonsense. Not wanting to play games with people who’ve been supplied with a huge motive to cheat me and act like jackasses has nothing to do with the size of my virtual genitalia. (Virtual genitalia, hm… apparently MMO character customization still has some areas to expand into. Hur hur hur.)
May 5, 2006 at 11:51 am
I think the root source of these differences come largely from the background of the players, and is probably related to differences in how they view exploits. Exploits are, essentially, rules errata.\par
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Long-time gamers that grew up with pencil-n-paper RPGs and boardgames are used to loopholes in the rules. They’re also used to players that would exploit those loopholes. Usually, though, they’d only get to do it once and then the DM or group would tweak the “house rules” to make more sense. It generally wasn’t viewed as scummy to use one of these ONCE, but nor was it tolerated that a loophole be abused. And anyone that insisted too much in looking at the fine points of the rules for that sort of thing on a regular basis was termed a “rules lawyer” and usually not appreciated as a player in a group. Most players coming from this background would probably view exploiters as dispicable as rules lawyers, breaking the unspoken pact amoung players to play fair in the game.\par
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Those gamers growing up with single-player video games as their background, though, seem to have a different outlook. In a single-player video game, finding a chink in the developer’s armor isn’t called an “exploit”, it’s called a “secret” or an “unintentional easter egg”. Sometimes it’s called what it is, a “cheat”, but even then the meaning isn’t one of disgust such as would be used about someone cheating at solitaire. It’s generally considered okay to use these, if that’s what you want to do for fun. Few people thinks less of you for it. Many of these people would probably tend to view exploits in MMOGs as just another way to play … until it’s been used on them directly in PvP, then some tend to change their minds. But fewer of these gamers are likely to view exploiters as despicable for breaking some sort of common unspoken bond between the players, it’s just not as strong a part of their background as it is for older p-n-p gamers.\par
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Then there’s the even younger gamers, who grew up with CT and Half-Life. They’d tend to side with the older gamers, because FPS hackers are indeed scum. There I can agree, cheating in a strictly PvP game is just downright evil.\par
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RMTs are in the same class as exploits, to a certain degree. As long as it’s not directly harming anyone, why worry? The old-school gamers will never understand that, because of course these people are just scum for being cheaters. While the younger single-player video-gamers don’t understand why those old guys are so pissed off about something that doesn’t effect them directly.\par
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These are all generalities, of course. There are no doubt many many exceptions to this, but I’d bet there’s a little kernel of truth in there.
May 5, 2006 at 1:23 pm
“as long as it’s directly harming anyone, why worry?”\par
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Problem is, it _always_ directly harms every player who does not cheat - assuming the game has any economic system whatsoever. Only MMO I’ve played in the recent history where RMT didn’t really matter was City of Heroes/Villains. Influence was mostly irrelevant, but it also meant that the game didn’t really have an economic system at all.\par
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In games with economies, with part of the playerbase holding an effective ‘money cheat’, it will always end up driving up the prices of ingame items, often to a point where people start quitting because they can’t stomach the money grinding (and refuse to buy ingame currency).
May 5, 2006 at 2:27 pm
In-game economies have been wildly inflationary in all MMOGs, even well before RMTs became popular.\par
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That’s like trying to blame global warming on cow farts.
May 5, 2006 at 3:03 pm
Anyone remember Frontier or First Encounters?\par
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First time I fired it up I was horrified. I could *choose* to start raw, or without so much as using a cheat, I could *choose* to have millions of credits and a cool ship. Up front.\par
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The games, despite being horribly buggy, were still amazingly successful.\par
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So why don’t MMO devs embrace the same concept. Make initial character and gold options something I can buy. Let me start the game with 1000 gold, if I pay for that type of account. Let me buy a character within the range on the server or within the range I already have. Let me choose an initial equipment set.\par
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It would significantly reduce the demand for farmers, maybe make them unprofitable. And its clearly something that enough players want to create an issue.\par
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And why do you care how I get to level 50? Isn’t it how you get to level 50 that matters?
May 5, 2006 at 3:22 pm
Why is it suddenly OK to break the game rules when it comes to RMT? I certainly don’t want to play any game that allows it, and the game I do play outlaws it. Everyone agreed to those rules before they coughed up their credit card.\par
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How is this any different than the various other game rules that everyone says they will abide by? Should the use of exploits and third-party programs also be OK because some people don’t want to bother with something? You can’t just ignore specific game rules if you don’t them!
May 5, 2006 at 4:33 pm
That would be because I’m talking about game design - i.e. the development of new games - rather than game implementation.
May 5, 2006 at 5:18 pm
It’s nice to see folks like TPRJones who bring a bit of common sense to the table. People up in arms because someone else bought some gold need to stop worrying about what their neighbors are doing behind closed doors and just play the game their own way. When it comes to WoW, some things to consider: The best gear is BoP stuff from instanced dungeons. A gold buyer is NEVER going to have the best, or even second best, gear in the game. If you outfit yourself at the AH instead of running endgame instances, you might find a few decent, competitive items, but nothing like the BoP stuff. So … what’s the complaint again? These “cheaters” don’t have an advantage in gear over you. They didn’t “work” ingame for their money? Neither did Joe Blow who just happened to have a Glowing Brightwood Staff drop for him - sheer luck, an easy 1,000 gold profit at the Auction House. There is no “level playing field” by design when you have those kind of random drop windfalls based on pure luck. So, someone can buy that luck. So you’re left with complaining about the economy. And the effects of gold farming on the economy are hard to pin down. It does introduce more gold into the system, but as has been pointed out, if players just farmed for that gold instead of bought it, the result is the same. And even if you could prove that farmers cause inflated prices at the AH - why are you buying your gear at the AH when the best stuff, once again, is Bind on Pickup gear from instances?
May 5, 2006 at 7:29 pm
“People up in arms because someone else bought some gold need to stop worrying about what their neighbors are doing behind closed doors and just play the game their own way.”\par
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Not sure who you’re talking to here. The point isn’t what my neighbors are doing behind closed doors, it’s what they’re doing to my gameplay experience. I don’t want to deal with gold selling spam, farmers in every high level questing area, AH inflation (Potions aren’t bind on pickup, and depending on your guild alchemist for them just means he gets to do the farming instead of you) ninja looting on sellable drops in groups, and guild scandals involving selling the guild bank for cash or taking all the tradeskill drops and recipes to sell for cash. (All of which I’ve seen.)\par
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As for TPRJones’s theory about the source of the differences being the background of the opinion holders, it’s a good reminder, but not for the reason you state. I’m another long-time pencil and paper gamer, and the division goes back that far as well. We’ve been calling each other rules lawyers and munchkins over these things since at least the mid-70’s. (I’m guessing you’d have thought I was in the first category back then, and that I’d have thought you were in the second. In my nostalgia for those days, I usually forget the name-calling was just as bad as it is now.)
May 5, 2006 at 10:41 pm
It reminds me a lot of the arguments over Social Contract Theory pack in my poli-sci days. Definately a parallel there.
May 5, 2006 at 10:50 pm
[...] First of all, RPG Holdings, LLC acquired Allakhazam (and if you’re really behind on the news, they already own Thottbot). If you want the full rundown, Lum and Corpnews have got that covered. So why do we, the possibly non-RMT buying public, care? Well, for starters, Alla has really bungled the transition. When sites like Warcry are taking a hard line stance against IGE and RMT, which Alla has until recently also disavowed, it makes them look pretty bad. What is most interesting is the response on Alla’s own forums, indicating that a great number of the vocal community members have cancelled their paid accounts. So will they truly vote with their feet? Will sites like wowguru.com pick up the slack and offer an alternative (at least for WoW)? Ultimately this is going to be a an important study of exactly how anti-RMT your average MMO denizen really is. If Alla pulls through with the zam.com network none the worse for wear and with a deeper pocketbook, then score one for the acceptance of RMT, at least in the eyes of gamers. IGE has certainly tried this before, but not with any site as high profile and with as much ‘gamer cred’ as Allakhazam.\’c2\~ If they can successfully put Alla’s web and MMO savvy to use then it will be time to chalk one up for the RMT guys. Time will tell as to the results. [...]
May 5, 2006 at 11:16 pm
Yes, I think Social Contract theory has a lot of relevance - the problem is that apparently we don’t agree on the details of the social contract. Possibly game theory would provide a better model, with the different sides of the argument trying to maximize different types of returns.
May 6, 2006 at 12:11 am
Indeed. Which goes back to each players personal background. The social contract presumed from a p-n-p background is different from one presumed from a single-player videogame background which is also different from one presumed from a CS or Half-Life background. And since it’s mostly experienced on a subconscious level (most arguements are worded such that have an implied “of course” in them; “of course RMTs are cheating” or “of course RMTs are okay because it shouldn’t matter to you what I am doing”
it’s hard to hold a real debate. Each side just has a gut feeling that the other side is either a cheater or a buttinski.\par
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Obviously the TOS (which many people don’t even read) isn’t doing a proper job of outlining the social contract among MMOG gamers. Perhaps a more effective alternative could be hashed out, perhaps something explained and reinforced in game during the tutorial phase or something (think inserting punishment/reinforcement effects directly into the early game mechanics, which means treating the players like trainable psychology subjects but what the heck most of them almost as smart as lab rats on a good day). Sadly while I can see what we have now isn’t working and have an idea of why I don’t have any good ideas of how to fix it yet.
May 6, 2006 at 12:15 am
Although, Sony may be on the right track with having some servers being RMT enabled and others not. In a way, it lets the players choose their social contract instead of being forced into one they may not agree with or fully understand. Maybe more choices for the player is the only viable answer. *shrug*
May 6, 2006 at 2:10 am
When I choose a game to play, one of the many factors I consider is the rules of that game. For example, if I was considering joining a M:tG league, a lot of my decision would be based on their rules on deck construction. In the case of a MMORPG, whether or not they allow RMT is one of the significant rules.\par
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What really pisses me off is when a game says up front that they do not allow it — WoW, for instance — then takes no substantive measures to stop it. That’s when I start feeling really cheated. It’s like going to a M:tG tournament that announced ahead of time “no proxies” and then having my opponent fill the table with random lands labelled “Black Lotus”, “Mox Emerald”, etc., while I struggle to compete with the cards I actually own, and the tournament organizers don’t do jack.\par
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You think people don’t quit games because of it? The gold farmers are not the only reason I quit WoW, but they’re one of the major issues. I’d still be playing if Blizzard had kept their promise to me that RMT would not be taking place.\par
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The rules of the game are the rules of the game. If you don’t like the rules, don’t play the goddamn game. Don’t give me this “I’m paying to have fun, so I should be able to break any rules I don’t think are fun.” That’s not how games work. Not ones that other people want to continue playing, anyway.\par
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I really, really suck at FPS games. I love them, but I just don’t have the reflexes. Too old and too slow. So … should I be allowed to use an aimbot? After all, I bought the game, right? I should be able to have fun however I want. Just like the people with no time to play a MMORPG to reach the goals they want, I don’t have the physical ability to play a FPS to reach the goals I want. So, TPRJones, would it be okay with you if I showed up on your favorite CS server with every cheat and hack known to gamerkind? You don’t care what I’m doing behind closed doors, right?\par
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I worked out some very rough numbers for WoW. Assuming a “normal” WoW player account is actively killing/looting for 3 hours a day, every day (the rest of their online time being spent LFG, playing in BGs, helping guildies with quests, more LFG, crafting, waiting for the rest of the raid group to show up, random ganking in STV, looking at stuff on the AH, etc.) that’s 21 hours a week spent adding gold and items to the economy. And I’m probably being generous here — I know an awful lot of my own WoW time was spent on non-profitable things. A commercial gold farmer’s account, on the other hand, is generally played by multiple people. The ones I tracked for a month or so were literally online 24/7. Assuming that 3 hours out of those 24 (1 hour per shift) are spent on end-of-shift matters like mailing loot to the sales mules, trading seats, etc., that is 147 hours a week spent generating gold and items. Even if they’re grinding in the exact same places, one account used by a commercial gold farming company has 7x the economic impact on the game as an account played by a legitimate player. And, of course, they’re not grinding in the exact same places. The gold farmers have characters optimized for farming, not fun, so they farm more effectively than everyone else, and they know the most profitable places in the game, and spend all day, every day, there. So, taking these factors into consideration, in terms of total economic impact, a gold-farmer is probably equal to a lot more legitimate players than even the raw numbers suggest. If they’re just 50% more effective, that would bring them to a bit over 10x the economic weight of one real player. I’ll round down. Further, not all of the players on any given server are doing any serious grinding at all. Many of them make it to 60 and maybe go on a raid once or twice a week and spend most of time PvPing, hanging around talking, whatever. Plus, people grinding to 60 have only a limited impact because they’re focusing on the best exp, which is rarely in the same places as the best loot, especially where quests are involved, so they’re barely in the equation at all. (whether it’s their main or an alt doesn’t matter; they’re putting their allocation of playtime into levelling, not farming) So let’s cut our 21 player-hours of gold grinding per week in half, to account for all the people who are doing something else, like PvPing, levelling, or goofing off.\par
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Based on those numbers, one commercial gold farmer has 20x the economic impact of a legitimate player. If just 5% of the active accounts are owned by commercial gold farming operations, that 5% outweighs the entire population of legitimate players. They’re the tail that not just wags the dog, but can pick it up and swing it around in the air.\par
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Obviously I’ve pulled a lot of these numbers out of a dark and smelly place — I don’t have access to Blizzard’s metrics. But I’m fairly confident that I’m in the right ballpark. It might be 15x or 30x instead of 20x, but it’s up there somewhere.\par
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I am, or was, rather rich in WoW. Probably one of the richest people on my server who had not bought gold. I am very, very good at making money. One of the reasons for this is I pay very close attention to the auction house — not just prices but trends, items, who’s selling what, etc. (I’m not entirely without economic impact myself; at my peak, 1.5%-2% of all the auctions on my faction’s AH were mine) Certain names … names known to be commercial gold farmers’ item sales mules … were always very prominent there. I would estimate that at least 75% of the purple items, and an unknown but very large percentage of the blues, were sold by those known gold farmers. So if anything my estimates are actually on the low side. And those farmers are in collusion on prices, too. It’s not in any of their best interests to get in price wars with each other; they have set prices and keep them high. If someone undercuts them substantially, they buy the item and re-sell it at their price.\par
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They keep prices high, so more and more people buy gold from them in order to afford that gear. Then much of that gold goes right back to the RMT companies again when their customers buy their items on the AH, and gets sold again, over and over.\par
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You ask how commercial gold farming is different from someone twinking a friend, or a guild helping out its members? Quite simply because nobody, no matter how good a friend they are, spends 147 hours a week farming in the most profitable spots possible to twink a friend. Most people don’t bother doing serious gold farming at all except for things like mount money, and they stop once they’ve got that mount. (and the money is out of the economy) The money and items that go to the twinkie or the guild are those acquired in the normal course of gameplay. The game is designed to accomodate such transfers of wealth between players — the actual farming activity is minimal, and has little overall effect, and it is more than outweighed by the social benefits of friendships among players and mutual support among guildies, both of which serve to make the game more enjoyable for players and keep them playing longer.\par
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There are two reasons why companies aren’t readily going to move into sanctioned RMT.\par
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One of them is simple: Players don’t want other people buying gold and gear. People cheat to get an edge over other players. If everyone is doing it, then there’s no edge. Players choose games where their particular skills and attributes will give them an edge. For instance, someone with good reflexes plays FPS games; someone who is good at planning grand strategies is likely to play 4X games; someone who has uber leadership skills is likely to be running a major guild in a MMORPG. In the case of cheaters, it’s their willingness to break the rules, to violate not only the EULA they agreed to but the social contract (”no cheatin’!) among the players, that gives them an edge. If the rules allow everyone to do what the cheaters have been doing, they have no edge. So, most people who want to cheat will not be found playing on a RMT-permitted server. Think about it: how many players would a CS server that advertised that all bots, all hacks, all cheats, were permitted have? Some might stop by to try it out, but they wouldn’t play there.\par
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The other one is legal. This is the can of worms that Sony has opened, and is going to regret one of these days. If RMT is sanctioned — especially handled through the company itself — that creates a presumption of ownership of virtual property. Even if you and I might be persuaded otherwise, Juror Joe Sixpack isn’t going to be. “This young feller done paid a hundred bucks for a magic sword, seems to me that he owns hisself a sword.” So what’s the company’s liability when something happens to that sword? What if it breaks? What if it gets nerfed? What if a better sword comes out and nobody wants the old one anymore? (people sued GM when they started making Cadillac convertibles again because the ones they’d bought 20 years ago weren’t the last Cadillac convertibles any more) Do we really want to play games where the legal department has to approve any game balance decisions so the devs don’t get sued by whining paladins? Or what about when something happens to the whole game? Look at the roar of anger from SWG players who bought the new expansion just before the entire game was gutted and rebuilt into something different . What if they’d bought a few hundred dollars worth of gear for their characters that was now useless? What if they’d done it in AC2 just before the shutdown was announced? “Seems ya sold him a magic sword, and now he ain’t gonna be able ta use that sword, so seems ya owe him his money back.” That’s a can of very squirmy worms, and those worms have teeth.\par
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You think I’m imagining this? It’s already happening in foreign markets; it’s only a matter of time before it happens here. Thanks, Sony.\par
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All legal and economic aspects aside, though, the bottom line is this: You agree to the rules of the game when you play it. Saying “I don’t like the rules, so I’m not going to obey them” is cheating. If you don’t like the rules, go play a different game with rules you like. Cheaters are scum. I don’t want to play games with cheaters. Not Monopoly, not CounterStrike, not World of Warcraft. When other people are cheating to win, leaving me unable to compete, I have two choices: cheat too, or quit. And I won’t cheat.\par
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Does anyone happen to have any figures on how popular Sony’s Station Exchange servers are? And how much RMT continues to go on on the normal servers?
May 6, 2006 at 3:36 pm
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I think you’re actually trying to critique Blizzard/Mythic/Sony/etc. here, which was not my point at all. Maybe it is actually better, economically speaking, for MMO companies to allow gold farmers.\par
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But, for whatever reason, most don’t. So when you say “I will not do X” and then turn around and do X, you still broke your agreement, even if you think you’re doing the other person a favor.\par
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I’ll give you some credit though. “Baby, I lied to you for your own good” is a creative excuse.
May 7, 2006 at 5:18 pm
I’ve seen this issue go back and forth for the last several years. I honestly don’t see any major dynamic shift in this situation other than publishers / developers actually selling the items and money to the players themselves. That would (or should) drive the farmers and botters out of that particular side of the business. There are major downsides to this approach, of course.\par
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At game industry conferences, I always hear about how new design structures will change, alleviate or eliminate the major problems caused to players by the RMT market, but I haven’t really seen that happening yet.
May 10, 2006 at 10:52 am
Clearly there are two sides to this argument. The people with well paying jobs willing to pay to avoid the ridiculous timesinks built into the game by the developer and the people with no jobs and therefore no money that are forced to absorb the timesink and hate everyone for it and get some wiggle room out of it by calling it cheating.\par
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I LOLerblade at the latter group!
May 10, 2006 at 12:45 pm
Clearly there are two sides to this argument. The people with well-connected friends who can purchase designer steroids, and the people too weak to get ahead…
May 17, 2006 at 8:21 pm
Jesus, lock this thread and the burn it. It\’e2\’80\’99s making my eyes bleed.\par
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one word…die
May 17, 2006 at 8:24 pm
die
May 21, 2006 at 6:30 pm
Oh no, an MMO that acutally makes you earn stuff? Why not just start everyone off w/ 300 trade skills and epic gear across the board? Then, look! No time spent.\par
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Jesus, when people actually have to work for something, they end up with a Sequoa up their ass. If you don’t want time sinks then play something else. Don’t come to a game and gut the economy.
August 23, 2007 at 9:29 pm
buy wow gold