Broken Toys

Prokofy pays a part of my IRL living expenses.
I do not pay a part of Scott’s IRL living expenses (yet).

Therefore, I win this thread.

E-celebrity does funny things to people.. and by funny I mean generally makes them act like schoolyard idiots. But still, funny is a nicer way of saying that.

# Users of games see virtual worlds as somewhat boring games.
# Users of virtual worlds see games as somewhat shallow virtual worlds.
# Both users tend to impose their grammar on the other, sometimes violently.
# Both groups of users see the opposing group as a threat.

That should say a subset of each group of users see the opposing group as a threat.’

The rest of us, not so much.

Prok: Not to be accused of trotting out the old The Price Is Right *BZZZZZT* noise with excessive glee or anything, but the /correct/ response would be that I belong to the co-ed fraternity of Linden-significant-others.

I still win this thread. :>

@brent

Um, let me explain how it works, dear.

And if you’re not willing to hear it from me, you’ll hear it from, I dunno, Cisco, IBM, Google, Samsung — somebody.

I pay for your real-life expenses with my tier, but your entire platform that you toil away on pays for *my* real-life expenses by enabling me to run a small business.

And collectively speaking, those of us who pay this tier and have businesses in Second Life, were we to average out our incomes, well, I’m not sure that they wouldn’t at least equal, if not surpass your salaries. You’d be afraid to find that out, wouldn’t you? Because to find it out would help you learn your place, one way or another. If we make more, you should respect us. If we make less, you still should respect us because if we don’t make more, you fold. There’s no way you win by making us lose.

It would help you stop being a common little sandbox script kiddy griefer harassing a paying customer like me on forums if you knew that you need more of us, and need to show us respect, if you want to keep paying your real-life expenses.

Ultimately, you are the wife of, say, a garage mechanic. The mechanic repairs my truck, which I use to have a business and support other people’s businesses, and that frankly puts your mechanic role…in its place.

Win all the threads you want, sweetcakes, those win/lose notions are old MMORPG vestiges that you need to weed out of your hippie product to make it presentable for the wider world, or you will have no more job for your Linden-significant-other.

I have more e-money, therefor, I win, durrrr.

For the mechanic analogy, I’d agree. If the mechanic didn’t have the autodestruct trigger to my engine, I’d agree completely.

Prok, may I ask why you’re upset?
As has been stated here by yourself and others, you’re the real winner here. You’re erudite, successful, rich, famous, sure of yourself to the point of not being able to stand for anyone’s insults, and have a healthy future for the next few years on Second Life selling virtual goods provided flame wars like this don’t trigger the fall of Doissetep and white out the Digital Web.

What more do you want from us, and why do you want to aruge with us on our levels? Leave us morons to our pathetic joystick waggling and go back to the sophisitcates.

“That should say a subset of each group of users see the opposing group as a threat.’

The rest of us, not so much.”

This was implied by Lum’s original statement, it’s just that needless complexity tends to confuse an issue rather than illuminating it

“Win all the threads you want, sweetcakes, those win/lose notions are old MMORPG vestiges”

/sigh, too true… but ‘the market will sort it out’, won’t it?…. :​(

It’s a feedback loop tho that’s hard to break out of… the current MMOs are about win/lose. This means most of the people who end up playing them are also about win/lose. This means most of the people interested in designing them are also about win/lose… this means they are unable to understand how to design a better game, which is not about win/lose. :​?

And yet, in this sea of incompetency, unseen by the wider world, perhaps someone out there working on games actually knows how to do it right. We won’t know for years tho, unless WAR manages to be that game.

>Shut up and pay me your $10 a month, little man. My Porsche needs some performance upgrades.

Your pixel Porsche that you bought with your spacebux?

I pay a lot more than $10 ROFL.

/* Bartle believes that RMT is inherently bad in DikuMUD systems that are not designed from the ground up to support it. Prof seems to find the inherent slaughter gameplay of the Diku systems childish and boring, and would rather have her metagame of land acquisition and market valuation with a real money stake to make it all the more interesting.

And in the end? You are both right. */

Sadly, some still want to continue this apples and oranges argument.

I’m reminded of another fine quote… “The internet means never having to forget what highschool was like.” – Scott Kurtz, pvponline.com

Pardon the typo’s

>And you shall realize that there is *NO SUCH THING* as one thing that does it “right” for everybody.

Right, that’s what I’ve been saying. And that’s why I’m banging on these eggtards from Terra Nova, who keep insisting that it all be One Way, One Truth, One Light, which is the socialist paradise life of gaming, which will, uh, “fix broken reality.” They need to read this thread.

This thread is now officially about orange juice.

I prefer 100% from concentrate. How about you?

I felt like Balboa on the cliffs at Darien up there. I felt like Armstrong in the Sea of Tranquillity. It was as if, in finally understanding that the MOO and my hoped-for map of the MOO were in fact one and the same, I had stumbled upon some mythic place I never thought I’d see, a latter-day El Dorado or Shangri-La that I had long heard rumours of but couldn’t have guessed I’d someday get to gaze on with my own two eyes.

It was no paradise I had discovered, of course. Not really. The mythic place I had in mind was in fact that same unfortunate, legendary empire that so fascinated Baudrillard – the realm whose cartographers once produced a map of such faithful detail it blanketed the entire imperial territory, bringing on the decline of the empire and with it the eventual rotting away of the map. This fable, as told or perhaps retold by the great Argentine storyteller Jorge Luid Borges, had long since worked its way into the mythologies of post-modernism, looming for years at the edge of any conversation in which anyone took for granted the fundamental and probably fatal inability of contemporary society to distinguish between reality and simulacrum.

I think my observation in the previous thread has been proven beyond any reasonable doubt.

I guess the real question you should stop and ask yourself right now is: in entertainment, what is “doing it right”?

Am I doing this right? and is this blockquote thing new, or has everyone just been ignoring it before now.

At the very simplest level, it’s very easy to tell if a game is ‘doing it right’: is it fun for the individual player. Now, when someone evaluates something like this, it is for both short- and long-term.. do they feel it’s fun in the present differential, but also do they feel it’s worth it long-term.

Or you could just evaluate it using something like Mr Bartle’s player type categories, or something, /shrug. The ‘doing it right’ then is as simple as making sure everyone is able to do what they want to do, and that all your pieces don’t conflict with each other.

I apologize for having really said nothing except the obvious in this post. One more time for practice tho:

Bartle believes that RMT is inherently bad in DikuMUD systems that are not designed from the ground up to support it. Prof seems to find the inherent slaughter gameplay of the Diku systems childish and boring, and would rather have her metagame of land acquisition and market valuation with a real money stake to make it all the more interesting.

True, but the existence a ‘plurality’ (cough) of other viable systems has nothing to do with making fun virtual worlds in the game genre.

while im practicing this quoting thing i might as well address Neva’s statement here:

You don’t find *that* dirty, but you want them to sustain your illusion of a perfect utopian socialist paradise — one complete with mass killing! Ah, fidelity to real life!

Neva, please stop saying it is perfect utopian socialist paradise. Have you SEEN the amount of whining from partisan elements that goes on in an MMORPG forum?! Do you perceive the rifts in the playerbase, the unfriendly attitudes and insular guild cultures, the feelings of betrayal from game evolution and the angry, bewildered customers deciding it’s no longer worth it to play a game?

It is no paradise. And there’s not even very much killing. :​(

Sure, It’s great to make money, and im more than happy to pay the game makers who make those games for my enjoyment. The difference is I dont want to pay you, some gold farming, exploiting asian(or european, or latin, or american, etc) sweat shop, or other person who gets in the way of my enjoyment of the game. The ability for you to make money doesnt mean crap to me, the ability for me to unwind and let the constant deadlines fade away for awhile, thats what has meaning.

Personally, I’ve “played” Second Life, and found it an overglorified perversion simulator, complete with furries, child porn, and other than that no real game. It’s an AOL chat room with avatars and the ability to script objects. Im sure theres some great stuff going on there, but god, give me a reason to get to it.

The Devs make my nice little orc murder simulator, I’m more than happy to pay for it. To say that the ones making those games are trying to push some socialist agenda is not only spurious, it’s also plain ignorant.

Remember blind capatilism is just as dangerous as blind socialism. Read Keynes to start with, Adam Smith had the general gist, but he also made some mistakes. (You would know that if had ever taken more then Econ 101)

And to sit there on your high horse and proclaim how intelligent you are, well, it’s only morons who do that.

Hee hee, I totally Milorolled Prok.

Thread win + coup de grâce!

Um… Lum? Can you please not write about anything anymore that will bring the bad people?

I’m scared now.

I’m pretty indifferent to small time RMT (as in, individual people just trading stuff on e-bay and whatnot) if only because I don’t think it’d be possible to wipe it out completely. Besides, on the mechanical side, somebody selling items to somebody else is no different than somebody giving items to somebody else out of charity. If you’re going to eliminate RMT on a small scale, it’d best be for personal or moral reasons, not gameplay ones.

No, it’s the gold farmers that give me headaches.

I’ve found the easiest way to think about farmers is to not think about the real-world side. As far as your world is concerned, farmers simply represent a massive outflow of resources from the world to the playerbase. They’re money taps. The real question is less “why do those money taps exist?” (because the answer is largely “human nature”) but rather “what can we do about those money taps?”.

/boggle the Milo D. Cooper remark!
Yes, nerd rage has no statute of limitations indeed!
Its a pity that it flew right over P.Neva’s head…. (Flying wangs will have to do I guess …)

You know, I do think that P. Neva’s paranoia about the “game gods’ ” nefarious plans to stamp out RMT and Virtual worlds is NOT wholly unwarranted. There is a remarkable amount of antipathy towards virtual worlds and the like from traditional MMOG devs and publishers.

One has just to look at what happened to SWG (a nice sand-box style world albeit still an MMOG) when pew-pew-pew twitch style gameplay was stuffed down its throat via the NGE. As always, SOE makes for the perfect villain in this case. So yeah, I do think there is a precedent for devs, “game gods” and publishers to go out of their way to destroy “virtual worlds” and and when they can get their hands on one. Of course, there is that ongoing crusade to destroy RMT in traditional online games and the huge resistance to actually trying to implement or design RMT into any of the newer MMOG games (there is no RMT friendly MMOG game in the works I believe), All the newer ones (Age of Conan, Warhammer are the usual “ban all RMT” – nope no innovation there, same old same old 1999 Diku mods). The traditional MMOG designers have been fighting the same fight with the same old 1999 gameplan with very little change through the years.

So yeah, not to be a troll (heh). P. Neva in her clumsy, loutish manner do have a glimmer of a good point that the gaming industry does not GET “virtual worlds” and RMT. And the traditional gaming industry as represented by Bartle and Lum, blinded by their old and traditional 90’s era MUD design mindset – WILL TRY TO (or are trying to) impose their prejudices and mindsets AGAINST ANY SORT OF RMT (and virtual world type gameplay) in traditional MMOGs.

Well, thats what I think she’s trying to say. Its very hard to read through her posts, much as its very hard to read the works of Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky in this modern day and age (well what with our educational system). Also, the non-relevant crap and insults in her posts do not help.

In short – she does have a point (I think) – Your all biased prejudiced old farts who will go out of your ways to discredit Virtual worlds and RMT given the chancce.

>What annoys me is when they don’t want it but the RMTers decide they know better and give them it anyway.

And who can stop them? And how? Perhaps have a big committee in the sky, and shout REALLY hard, stop!

>there are “worthy” virtual worlds that are neither games nor capitalist wonderlands

Do you have a problem with capitalist wonderlands?

“And who can stop them? And how?”

This is actually a very good question. How can we stop RMT seeping into games where we don’t want it? The brute force method (just wiping out gold farmers by force) is one way of dealing with it, but there must be better solutions that don’t depend so heavily on CS staff.

I can see the counterargument being “well that’s not what it was designed to do, but that’s the way people are playing it”.

Which is fine. Because just like reality we have people who play by the rules, and people who break the social contract we all didn’t sign. RMT in some virtual constructs is a driving force or an actual part of the mechanic holding it together, whereas in others it promotes gold farming, griefing, spam account hacking and real life lawsuits. And no one can honestly claim that ‘the game needs to change’ when you have millions of people playing by the rules and some bad eggs are spoiling it for the rest of them.

And not all RMT is good even in an “RMT is good” setting. I wonder if you could sell user generated content stolen from thier developers in Second Life on a black market? Wouldn’t that suck just as much as people selling stolen accounts?

Anyone got an answer to my apple juice or new game question?

I’ll need something that won’t aggrivate my teeth- I’m having the back four extracted on Thursday and I could really do without the added pain of having pulp falling into the holes left behind in my gums.

Logically, I should just stick with water, but I’ll need some nutrients somehow.
And yeah, Innocent smoothies are good. I’ll stock up on some of the big cartons of them