f13.net

Mirroring some of the topics discussed over here recently.

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/basics/antigold.html

Nothin' new, but interesting to see that on their home page. I'd like to see a gold farming company accuse Blizzard of slander and try to sue them. That would be high-larious.

I think the gold farmer response would be closer to:

were in ur relmz, steeling ur moneyz lol

It is an interesting article and combined with some of the things I've read about the Sony Exchange sale to Live Gamer, it sees MMO studios finally opening up about how damaging external RMT organisations can be to them.

However, it will all the effectiveness of this guy on the problem

(http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/thumb/7/7e/250px-Dontcopythatfloppy.jpg)

which is to say minimal.

I wonder just how rampantly farmers steal credit cards and accounts; if it's as bad as the devs say, or if it just happened once or twice and they're using it as a scare tactic.

Seems pretty rampant to me, judging from the comments in game, the forum posts and blog posts/comments about it.

The devs that post here commented in the post about SOE's sale of the Exchange to LG that it's pretty common and pretty rampant.  These are, after all, 'criminal' enterprises. Why does it shock some people that they'll partake in more illegal activities than just break 'some silly EULA.'

It seems frequent enough to cause some bank(s) start blocking payments for Blizzard across the board

http://kotaku.com/357533/british-bank-blocks-wow-payments

... which could perhaps be reason for that article on WoW page in the first place.

Maybe I'm missing something, but wouldn't the easiest solution be for the company that developed the game to sell cash in their own game at a price lower than any farmers could match?  Game devs get more money and players get what they want.   Sure, this would mess with the game economy, but it's already headed toward inflation anyway.  Besides, the goal is to make money, right?

Back when I was playing WoW, I personally knew two folks who'd had their accounts 'hacked' and stuff stolen.  So yes, fairly prevalent.  If the trend follows the (very small) sample group from my experience, that works out to about four percent of the playerbase.  Spread that out among, what, ten million people now?, and you get 400,000 people who've been fucked with.

EVE does that -- their only legit ISK-selling is through game-time-cards. They (EVE) set the price and even offer the equivilant of an escrow system through their website. You find someone who wants to by a GTC and has the ISK, and then you use EVE's website to offer the GTC code to that guy.

He only gets it if he offers the money back.

You could find ISK-sellers making a better offer (more ISK for that cash), but if you go through CCP you run into no problems with the EULA, you know the code is legit, and you know you'll get the ISK. No risks.

Doesn't even mess with the economy, since it's just moving money around. If you're going to do it, that's not a bad system.

IMHO mudflation would drive the prices up, since you'd be replacing time with money instead.
Then the gold farmers come along and try to undercut the exchange rate, and you're back to square one.

And I'd quit because while timesinks driven by catasses suck, moneysinks driven by rich guys would suck more to me.

I have no beef with RMT in general, but it's something I don't care to participate in.

I guess this comes down to the fundamental argument of $$$ vs time.  Should players be allowed to legally buy their way out of content?  If it benefits the game developer, I don't see why not.  If you have more money than time, buy your way through.  If you have more time than money, grind it out.  Either way, it's about satisfying the needs of the customer in a way that doesn't negatively impact subscriber retention.  Right?

Probably, but if people are willing to pay you money just so they don't have to play parts of your game... well that should be sending some signal.

There's folks who only play games while using cheat codes/ game sharks/ hacks.  Does this mean all games are flawed, or merely some players?

Both. And it's as dysfunctional as domestic abuse.

The games are flawed because they nearly always devolve into some form of grinding.

The players are flawed because they do not have the patience to invest time into a goal that is not immediate gratification.

I'm not sure about you, but I don't think it's the game developer's job to change a person's attention span, but I do think it's their job to entertain people.

Beyond that though, there will always be cheating because the problem is unfixable within the scope of a game: Poor people use the internet too.  :ye_gods:

A) Bomb the poor people.
B) Fix the poor people.
C) Live with it.
D) Conduct the Sisyphean task of fighting it.

I don't think there's really a clever way out of it. (IP ban would be awesome, but there are really so many ways to circumvent that, it's not even worth trying.)

Would say as far as these particular people are concerned it's probably the latter -- and it's such extreme case it can probably be ignored, since you can't realistically expect to be able to entertrain everyone with your product. But when on the other hand so many people want to shell out money to skip your content that it allows for thriving 3rd party business to emerge... then it may mean there's actual problem with design of these game bits.

From the money perspective, a game that people will pay you to not play is totally rad.  Which is why I'm surprised we don't have company RMT already.

Eve's solution is truly the best solution. They don't create the ISK so it doesn't affect the economy and it doesn't disenfranchise players as much as ISK being sold directly from the company. Also, because it's linked to timecards there is zero actual RL cash flowing to the sellers, so the RMT companies can't use it. It enables people with more money than time to buy the ISK they need, and it allows the people with more time than money (or who can't justify the RL money cost on a game) to still pay for the game. They even have a system where you can buy charactes. If you could do that in WoW I'd still be playing that game (what burnt me out was wanting to play another class but getting burnt out gearing it up for arena).

Also the "grinding for money means your game sucks" only applies to DIKU games like WoW because they use it purely as a longevity device. Games like EVE use ingame wealth as a form of ante (your ship blowing up hurts your pocket) which enhances the game experience.

That article about the bank banning Wow transactions sheds new light on this... My buddy owns a business and when he started accepting credit card payments he showed me the contract they made him sign. It was scary. Basically if there is a dispute, you agree to always be in the wrong, unless you have absolute proof the customer made the purchase, which is nearly impossible. Also, the more disputes you have the more likely it is that Visa/Mastercard will pull your contract and not allow you to use their services anymore. If banks start dropping MMO companies, they are going to have a BIG problem.

As far as EVE goes... Buahahaha, they have just as much Gold spamming/Farming as any other MMO. I think that the game card thing actually helps the spammers because it sets a minimum value on ISK. The only thing about EVE that hurts gold farming is full PVP.

Except it doesn't work well in WoW. Oh, making money and grinding and RMTs happen all the time. But there's only one of six currencies in WoW in which that works, and the only real things of value of BOE goods that you can disenchant for uncommon consumables. Gold's not going to help you get Raid drops, PvP purchases, Arena purchases, Reputation purchases, nor Badge of Justice purchases, all of which net you better gear than the BOE stuff you can buy at auction. Yea, as has been discussed, there's ways to still make cash like people opening raid or arena slots to others for a fee. But even then, these types of operations probably don't bother with Gold because, per above, at that level of play there's really not much to buy. UO this is not.

Other games have done this to some degree, but I think it's more obvious in WoW because there's more people banging on it.

That is a way to combat RMTing. There's enough commerce for the majority of players not at the endgame (you can be 70 without being in the endgame), so you can say you didn't remove commerce altogether. Meanwhile, the best stuff is locked behind content guards that can't be bridged :-)

The third party RMT can still survive in EvE is because the first  party micro transaction has a poor interface.  If it was as convenient to buy and trade parts of timecards as it is spaceship parts, the market efficiency would make it unprofitable.

Except that it's all subjective.  ALL of it.  There is no universal metric for what one person will find as 'grind' vs 'deep game play' or 'fun' vs 'mother fucker what do you mean I have to kill/ craft/ explore/ harvest 12 more widgets.'

Here's a secret, I fucking hate UO.  I tried it a few years ago between COH and WoW going live and didn't get the love.  I still don't.  It wasn't a graphics thing, because I play plenty of throwback games.  It was just a horrible experience of random crap from struggling with the UI to having to find a direction that I didn't bother beyond two days.  However, there's so much love from folks here for it at times that they make WUA look positively neutral.  This doesn't mean either one of our opinions is flawed, just that we're looking for different things.

That's my biggest problem with RMT; players buying their way past the content. If players would rather pay cash out of their pockets than play parts of your game, then those parts need to NOT EXIST. Those are wasted development dollars, and the resources put towards those areas need to be shifted to other areas. Let's say the Dungeon of Second-Best Adventure took a dev team 120 hours to build. And let's say half the playerbase buys their way past the Dungeon of Second-Best Adventure. That's 120 hours that could have been spent elsewhere.

Most MMO's are fun the first time through.  I think that it's the subsequent times through the content that most players would prefer to bypass.  How do you reconcile this from a developer standpoint?  I'm not sure. 

What strikes me funny is that many MMO's devolve into little more than forcing players to sit at the keyboard for hours doing repetitive tasks only to be rewarded by a pull of the slot machine every so often.  People beg for this shit... so there's obviously something to it. 

Something to try: after a player reaches max level in a game, once, he can generate all his characters with max level from then on. You don't need to raid in order to get your Tier 5 gear. You just click a "Tier 5" button on your character sheet and it appears in your mail box. (Just in case the player's inventory and bank are full.)

Or screw that. Don't make the player grind to max level in the first place. Players can level manually, OR they can click the "MAXIMUM POWAR" button and start out with a character that has everything.

I think it would be a very interesting experiment. It would also be rather pointless to put that in a game, if the game is about aquiring levels in the first place. It's kinda like playing Bejewelled, and having a big red button on the side that says "Click here to win!" But then, I don't know any RMT companies that sell high scores for Bejewelled....

Well, things only have value if they are perceived to be valuable to the playerbase.  Gold gets you the shiny you want sooner.  That has value.  The rarer the shiny, the more value it has.  This is what perpetuates the grind in many mmos.  People want to have the best gear in the game mostly because it allows them to stand above the average player.  In buying gold, you're buying perceived status.  Well, there's also the mechanics issue... better gear allows you to kill tougher monsters which allows you access to better gear, etc.

You already know all this, but the psychology of it still fascinates me.  It's as if the MMO industry thrives on the fact that most people are disillusioned with their real lives and can only find some perceived status in these alternate worlds.  They're in the business of generating virtual self-esteem. 

Same here - and I probably fit the profile of a UO lover more than you, having played at release. I have great memories of the game, because of the people who played it with me, but not because of the game itself (which sucked.)

I'm at a point right now where I am playing nothing that resembles an MMO, and I fear that I have grown to hate them. Compared to other types of games, the only thing they offer is a method to have your gaming accomplishments evaluated by others. I think I may just be past the point where that matters to me, especially when those accomplishments in MMOs have more to do with stamina than any kind of skill.

This is usually caused by people 're-rolling' into character of another class. So the problem of repetition comes (in part) from character being stuck with single skillset that cannot be modified beyond some small adjustments like WoW talent trees etc. If you want to have other play style, you have to raise brand new character from the very beginning.

Matrix Online dealt with this in interesting imo way -- a character could switch to any 'class' i.e. combination of skills with very little limitation. At lower level you'd of course have access to just part of skillset of any 'class', but you were still free to play any style and change at will. So there was never need to repeat something with another character because you generally didn't need more than one character to experience various play styles. SWG sort-of had that too with their ability to pick character abilities from different 'class' sets, except iirc SWG did also the dumb thing and forced players to re-grind experience shall they ever drop some ability and then want to have it again.

I liked UO's system the best, where your single character could be built into anything you'd ever want. The only reason to have alts at all is to have instant access to multiple roles with your buds, or a crafting mule. Otherwise, you could play UO forever on one character and see and do everything the game offered. I went through four complete template changes in the time I played.

It's that one aspect of UO I wish was emulated more. SWG sorta got it right except it over-drove players to achievement with those Master boxes, as an attempt to help guide players who got all confused with UO's be-anything template. I think you help newbs understand it better by simply giving them the goals (do X and Y to become 'class' Z) while giving veterans ways to experiment. A biyotch to balance though.

Exactly. And it's even more poignant in countries where RMTing is the way of playing.

  Actually, some of what you said just isn't true.  A friend of mine sells arena points/ratings for gold on a weekly basis, he runs 3 arena teams over his 3 alts, and brings in about 8-12k gold per week, which he then turns around and sells for cash.  The current purchase price for gold FROM players runs at about $25 per 1000gold.  Given, he doesn't collect all the cash himself, the two other guys that help him to rank up the teams get some split too, but to guess each of them is making $100/week minimally, makes it a pretty lucrative enterprise, given you can do this in all of about 3-4 hours per week.
 
  Nonetheless, the usefulness no longer comes from players having the gold to use in game to buy anything, the benefit is that they are able to unload the gold for real cash, which is then sold back into the system by the third party gold sellers.  Which more likely than not use the gold to buy arena points/ratings, and the cycle continues.

What part of "making money and grinding and RMTs happen all the time" isn't true?

You substantiated what I said: there's no real value for Gold in the system for people at that level. That your friend makes it to sell to RMTers who sell it back doesn't invalidate that premise. That's not helping him gain Arena ranks, and the final consumer of the gold he's selling to RMTers still can't buy much that's worth buying*, because it's all locked behind the other currencies.

*You can cap out of the AH in lowbie purples, but you need to be able to do something with it. If you're not getting raid drops, arena purchases and so on, it's not because you can't afford the gold. It's likely you can't afford the time. No amount of gold's going to buy your way around that problem, because you're not going to suddenly gain 3 hours a night by going from quest blues to BOE Kara drops. It's just a matter of how much you $$$/gold you spend before you realize that.

(and not you personally Ralence).

  The part that I was addressing was when you referred to arena points/ratings sellings for gold;


  It's not about the gold for the players anymore, it's all about the conversion of gold->cash.  The part that you're not seeing is that the BEST pvp gear in the entire game is bought/sold this way, which makes Gold a very valuable currency to everyone, for the people willing to buy it, and for the people who are willing to sell it.  And in the case of WoW, I'd bet that more than 75% of the playerbase at 70 is involved in the Arena system in one way or another.  So we are talking about the best items in the game, at least for a large amount of the players.  It does, in fact, take a huge timesink out of the game, the logical progression for PvP gear being BG's for S1, Arena for S2, then Arena for S3.  To grind out a full S1 set, I can't even imagine the total time investment you'd need, seriously, it has to be close to 100 hours (Rough guess, but probably a lowball and not as far off as you'd think)  Alternatively, you can do Arena only each week in under 2 hours, the difference is buying 1000 points is a lot easier than losing every match for 3 weeks to get the same amount.

  So technically, you are buying yourself a time saving, as the current scenario is nothing more than a time sink.  Grinding out the honor points slowly in order to NOT play as much, which really is the end result here.

  It's really not locked behind any other currencies as you implied, because the direct exchange of Gold -> Arena points happens on a daily basis, and clearly people do feel that the points are worth buying for gold/cash, or there wouldn't be the current scenario.  The only benefit to the people selling the points is that conversion back to cash, and as long as that supply/demand wheel keeps churning, people will continue to do it.

You were about six or eight years too late.

I'm trying to understand the other side. I've done several raids in EQ2 in the last week. It's mind-numbing standing around waiting for people to show up, then it's a boring fight because everyone knows all the tricks of the raid mob and explains it to those who don't (me) beforehand, because any surprise just wastes more time. Then it's just applying a known combat formula repeatedly until you win. Then hope that you get lucky on a roll between 24 people on the pitiful handful of loot that drops.

No wonder some people spend money on it. I've wasted about 6 hours over three days on five raids. That's valuable time to me, because I don't have that kind of time to sit waiting for people to get their asses someplace, in every case I was on the other side of the gameworld and got there and hour (!) before some people. Yesterday a cleric took a half hour to get from Feerrott docks to the CT area (!!!). I believe these people have brain damage.

But I'll be damned if that motivates me to spend money, I'll just stick to the solo game and being a second-class citizen rather than a first-rate mmogtard. No wonder I'm the minority opinion, a sane person wouldn't bother with such drivel.

Raids on "Farm" status are undenably boring bullshit.  I like first time and new boss kills.  Even if you have a strategy, the players are different vs the ones who came up with the strategy, so you always have to massage it.   Figuring it out until it clicks and you down the boss is more fun than knowing it's going to die when you get there.   If everyone got loot or tokens, or SOMETHING so that you didn't have to kill the guy 37 times before moving on, I'd be much happier with raiding, even though I already enjoy it

I am also not in the majority on this.


Wouldn't have mattered, the game's system was still shit. Those of you with the uber memories of it always speak more of social ties (or manipulation) than game-related bits.

   Plus, that bit that Darniaq mentioned he loved?  Drove me apeshit in SWG.  Discarding advancement for other advancement is crap, regardless of the game.  Suppose someone said, "Sure, you can have a Rogue alt in EQ2.. but for every level you gain your Shadow Knight is going to go down a level."  It'd be bullshit, but somehow it's "ok" for UO/ SWG to do it.

Derail.

You could have an alt in UO (and later in SWG). But you could also customize your character. So your SK could have stealth, but no pet or something. Min/maxed to death, but a cool system imo.

In UO/SWG, you would get all those skills, all the time. With alts, you can only play one or the other. So I'd think it's more like, without that balancing system, you could have a Rogue alt in EQ2, and for every level you gain, you get Shadow Knight powers.

There's also the FFXI profession system - apart from the cockupuncture intrinsic to the game itself, it's fairly good.

Your character can change professions at any time (professions are like classes,) and progress on any given profession is always saved. Additionally you have a primary profession, which you play at it's full level, and a secondary profession which is played at half the level of the primary profession. A secondary profession usually offers something viable to the mix as well.

Again though, it's got some problems:

Unlocked professions make an already grindy game feel exceptionally grindy, and there are usually profession combos that are far superior to all others.

You're a raider who cries about "discarding advancement".  UO wasn't for you.

In your example, yea, that's bullshit. But UO didn't have classes. You could reduce the Swordsmanship skill while increasing the Smithing skill to get the bonus to Hammer damage (going by memory here, and that was a long time ago). And there were times you didn't need to hit absolute maximum 100 points to be effective. Back when I was farming Dragons in, err, Destard I think, I had a combination of Magery and Barding skills that worked really well. Switched over to taming for a bit when T2A came out. I liked my zergling troop of Ostards. Sure screwed up the PKers enough to get me outta there :-)

The point wasn't that this was a better system. It was that it allowed for more player discovery. Sure there was plenty of min/max 7xGMers (maxxed out in 7 skills to have spent all of the skill points you could get at that point, which was 700). But that was not the only way of playing. Nowadays most DIKUs just transfer that level of "choice" to whether you spend a dozen hours raiding for some stat adjustment, or a hundred hours doing so.

You know the Arena stuff better than I do. I could never be bothered with it. The cash doesn't seem all that worth it for the investment they made to get to that level, but obviously it is to some people. And this lines up with people selling raid slots so newbs can get spots on boss drops.

It's really hard to give a crap about RMTing though. I don't know that 75% of the WoW players are into Arenas at some level, but I would say north of 75% of WoW players couldn't care any less about RMTing. I know dozens of folks whose first MMO is WoW and have thought nothing of buying gold for themselves, kids, family, etc. And they're doing this at level 40  :ye_gods:

Who was Ultima for anyways? The millions of people who went on to play SWG?

Oh wait...

It can't just be that UO was a crap game, could it? Don't pretend that a big part of the vaunted freedom of choice in the skill system was the result of breaking the EULA with EZ Macro. Don't tell me that half the fun of the game wasn't exploiting design flaws and making other people feel shitty.

The only thing that UO had going for it over countless MUDs on the scene at the time were it's graphics. Even Brad McQuaid knew that.

UO didn't do anything to eliminate alts. You could mix around your skills yes, but you were locked into your skills for a significant time depending on the skills in question. You could make small changes to your template, sure, so the equivalent of switching from a warlock to a mage in WoW was relatively common (people changed from old fotm mage setups to new all the time). If you wanted something different like a thief, GM crafter, townie, or whatever you were much better off making a new character for that template.

UO is like Saturday Night Live. Whether one liked it or not, that opinion is based on a specific era of the game. It's been around so long and changed so much, it's almost impossible to have liked or disliked the total experience.

I personally liked it for the 18 months from 1999 to 2000 that I played it. I could never get back into it though the times I've tried. What I liked about UO was either changed enough or no longer there to like it again. Much like SWG. Maybe this is one of the core challenges for sandbox games vs DIKU in general.

• Sandbox game- it is constantly changing, and being a sandbox, it can change in any area at any time for any reason. The game could change so much as to be nigh unrecognizable upon return.
• DIKU- Most change is either is side-features, like housing or crafting, or to add more ways to grind. The core game itself hasn't changed. Mostly what has is the "bests" (best gear, best place to grind, best guild, best instances, etc).

That's probably been thought of and debated out by now though... here's me catching up :-)

Probably  :dead_horse: at this point, but my only concern is the in-game impact. Sure, people will farm lucrative stuff no matter what the reason. But adding a real-money incentive adds another layer of... I don't know. Intenseness? Rudeness? Uncaring? Difference between messing with someone's game playing and messing with someone's business.
Give it up man. You don't get it and you never will. And that's ok.

(http://killingbatteries.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/angry-hobo.jpg)

UO was a crap game as much as any of them are crap games.

/ranton
Through all this talk about selling gold/leveling services/arean points/raiding spots, etc. I just have to ask, "To what end?"  I'm still looking for the punchline.  People are paying real money to get their characters to max level and to max items so they can ...

What?  So they can what?  Stand at the bank in a major city and slowly spin so all can see?

Everything I see here is about people obtaining stuff, but that stuff is really only designed to get you more stuff.  If you bypass the entire system and get the very best stuff right off the bat, all you have left to do is wait for the next expansion?  So you can bypass it and get the best stuff and wait again?

/rantoff


Gold alone doesn't get you anything but nice mounts and items for twinking.  You might get some basic items at 70, but without faction you will be really limited.  If there was an in-game RMT for gold, then perhaps that would be the system used to use for currency to these 3rd party agencies.  However, the basic issue is still there.  At some point, you will have to give the 3rd party your account to level you (the original complaint by Blizzard.)

Selling gold ingame may solve some issues, but the original problem that started this thread would still exist.  In fact, it would make payment to the 3rd party a bit easier for them and much harder to track.  Player buys gold from Blizzard.  Player now uses this gold ingame to pay 3rd party.  That gold is clean now because it was obtained legally.  Now the 3rd party just has to put the money up on the market at just below what Blizzard charges to make their RL money.  Even if Blizzard set the price incredibly low, the 3rd party would just increase their ingame gold cost for their services to adapt.

It does have an impact on subscriber retention.  People who don't want to spend outrageous amounts of money to remain competitive in online gaming are not interested in competing in a game where players can use their IRL financial status to buy their way to the top of the game.  If everyone in WoW was simply encouraged to pay Blizzard $250 for their season 3 pvp gear or their legendary blades of azzinoth there is no way I would continue playing.  That's a whole new realm of unhealthy addiction I would like to avoid.

ORLY

WoW dailies are great to generate gold for the casual player. I do about 3 a day for about 35 gold which gives me all the gold I need each week to pay for PVP repairs and a few other things. Of course I don't need 5k epic mounts, but if I did I could do more dailies and probably buy one in about 45 days or less. Most daily quests only take 10-15 minutes tops, so they are good for people who only play an hour or two at a sitting.

Being able to change the world is something many people want to see no matter what style of game.  There is a huge difference between the environment changing and the rules changing though.  No one likes the rules changing out from under them.  Even horrible mechanics get resistance.

Rule changes are not limited to sandbox games.  The rigid DIKU models might make things a little easier to design so changes may not be as warrented, but looking at WoW, DoaC, EQ2, etc. we can see none of these have been perfectly stable.  The difference between these and SWG is that none have gone to the same extremes, and in the long run these others made positive changes.  SWG's problems were with management, not the genre.  The lessons learned apply equally well to all games.  Seeing as they're all DIKU with the exception of UO though, only one style really gets the benefit of their failure.

Waylander, if you're rebutting me, I was just making the point of turning around the idea of money unbalancing a game vs time unbalancing it. Some people have more money than time, some more time than money. Right now (legally) mmo heavily favors those with time. I just made up the numbers, I don't play WoW.

Some day it'd be nice if neither extreme time or money expenditures were rewarded compared to more casual play, but the rabid group apparently must be pleased, and we must EARN that epic gear somehow, because otherwise it's meaningless.

You just described the old school American work ethic.  Work hard, get rewarded.  That's where the whole mindset springs from.

Yes, I know it's counter to the 'current age' work ethic of "coast along, cut & run" AND it's only a game.  But hey, games are all about illusion and doing things we don't do in reality, right?  :drill:

Be interesting to see if there exist tendencies to use cheat codes among differing generations.  Who am I kidding... most people my age don't bother playing games anymore.

There is. There's been some good books about studies done how just how differently today's tweens think from teens and young adults who one group labeled the "gamer generation" from older adults who grew up in the 70s and 80s and have a very Baby Boomer work ethic.

That's what makes this so interesting. There's folks who want to play any game the "right way". There are other folks who don't care how they have fun as long as they're "having fun". And then there's the fact that DIKU-style experiences drive people to acquisition for the sake of acquisition, at a rate that can never remain a constant due to real life.

I've only ever bought one thing with RL cash (a UO house in land-locked Trammel). It was worth it then, for the emotional ties I had to My Very First MMO(tm). Nothing since has come close. But that's just me not buying stuff because there hasn't been anything since I thought was really worth it. However, that first-time feeling can happen to any person in their first MMO. And WoW is the first MMO for a shitton of people.

The best part is that EULA/TOS aside, nobody is fundamentally wrong:

• The buyer is not wrong for wanting to continue to maximize their experience.
• The seller is not wrong because they're feeding a market by fulfilling a need.
• The game developers aren't wrong because they don't want people not playing their game as intended.
• The game publishers aren't wrong because almost no matter what happens, they're getting paid for it anyway.

Someone (or many) are going to argue that I'm wrong for saying that. Obviously I pre-disagree. This is not "thou shall not covet thy neighbors wife" stuff. This is more along the lines of bribing someone to get a better set at a Baseball game. Instancing helps RMTing. Compartmentalized economies help RMT. A shitton of people help RMT. The only bulwark towards absolutely chaotic growth is Blizzard's policies. But if you look at the growth curves for xtrans-based games, ya end up questioning just how much longer flat-fee is going to matter. No matter how big this generation of gamers are, the next one is much bigger.

The point is I think you have to earn it, because it is meaningless without having to earn it. That could change if choices were actually relevant, that you could be proud of a really good setup not because you earnt it but because it's a sweet setup. In WoW you pick up a cookie-cutter spec and wear whatever decent gear dropped for you and away you go.

That's if you want gear to matter of course.

Agreed. And they sort of all are crap games. That's the whole point of this derail, if I recall correctly.

I'm reminded of the raging EQ1 debate that happened after that hysterical review was posted. An unbiased new review of UO would be just as brutal.

And it's not really a question of me 'not getting it.' I played both of those games and liked them very much at one point in time. I've moved on, and whatever made those games fun for me is something that exists only in fond memories. If the game itself was fun, I could pick it up and enjoy it today.

Then it's more like you don't get it anymore? Because honestly I could put it up now and think "This is better than WOW." (In fact I've been thinking of going back to it.) It's clearly not mass market, but it does have its audience.

Koreans?

  I personally agree with you, I don't see the point of it.  Right now I get pretty excited when my WoW 3v3 arena team wins 5/10 games for the week, for me, the playing is the fun part, we lose a lot (more often than not), but we have fun.  A few of my guildmates, however, hate the whole situation that currently exists with the Arena points/ratings selling, for them, it's not fun to lose to someone better geared than them, and when they spent the time for what they have, and others don't, it really puts a rash on their ass.

  I guess I'm just the old guy that doesn't give a shit what anyone else does, as long as it doesn't interrupt me having fun.  For them, they feel the RMT situation is ruining their fun, and a few of them have stopped playing as a result.

  If someone wants to spend their RL cash to "win" the game, have fun?  It's not as if this is EQ with static "one of a kind" mobs that only 20 people can experience per week.  If anything, I'd think those that rush to the end just get bored and quit anyways, especially in a game so based around gear/char advancement.

  Perhaps that's the real reason for the Blizzard intervention, people getting to the "end" without spending the required timesink investment can be a threat to retention?  Hell if I know.

When I played the heck out of Diablo II and UO, it didn't seem to need a lot of RMT, (UO I could see for a house since that was shitty if you hadn't started like I did) I could get gear and gold for not a lot of time invested.  I could start and stop without feeling behind the power curve.  CoX sort of has that feeling once you get someone up past 35, then you can start making money (still a pain to transfers influence back and forth).

I think of bowling, I can buy a ball that is $1000, buy shoes $100, buy a special glove $100, a bitching shirt and plaid pants, and some nachos and I'll still not get above 100.  Just because I'm rich and want to spend for good equipment doesn't mean I can use it effectively.

To me if you got it by time investment vs spending money doesn't matter to me, it is what you do with it once you get it.

To a point, I agree with you. But I mentioned over in the WoW forums about battleground twinkage. With two players of roughly equal skill, the most twinked has a dramatic advantage. I draw the line at buying gold, but that would get me the Nethercleft enhancement (appx. 250-300 gold on my server) instead of settling for Cobrahide. Plus all the enchanting mats I could buy for skillgrinding.

I admit I totally ignore the pvp aspect of it. That's where it gets really ugly, because unfair advantages (time OR money) make it very not fun for the disadvantaged player.

I wish they'd dump EQ2's pvp servers. Hate to get nerf batted because of a minority rules server.

I thought EQ was dumping the exchange server business because there was too much fraud? (People buy item with stolen credit card, trade itto someone else for plat, Buy something else, trade it for plat, then sell the plat.) The chain is too large at that point and you have to just make it a loss. Or piss everyone off.

There's fraud in the system because of the method it's done.  There's no escrow house, and it's all third party to third party. SOE was just looking for a way to make the e-bay listing fee on items, not to implement full on RMT.  RMT where you buy the items/ gold/ levels directly from the company is about the only way to avoid that fraud system and completly do-away with RMT farmers/ PL services.  Of course it again begs the question, "why play at all if everything can be bought?"

Like MTG.

Ah, of course. Everything should just be a card/ miniatures game whose central design idea is getting idiots to shell out $400+ dollars every 6 months because the latest set came out with the "i win" gimmick that crushes all the "i win" gimmicks from the last two sets.  Oh sure, there'll be SOME counters that aren't crushed, but those were relegated to pointless 'non-ladder' game play by the rules system that says "oh, no son. You have to keep buying whole sets, not just a few upgrades."

Yeah THAT wouldn't suck more than the current games AT ALL.

Because it's fun?

Waiting for the shiney to drop isn't half as fun as having and using the shiney. The secret of internal RMT is 1) making it cheap, which means players buy it easily and it undercuts any external, fraud-riddled external RMT and 2) getting rid of any way for players to earn RL cash off their characters (dupe bugs, auction houses, etc). I mean, if it cost me $80 to auto-powerlvl my character to maxlvl through an authorised internal RMT channel, or $1 to buy a rare item I need for my character, why would I go to an unauthorised, risky channel?

What would use the shiney on if you already have everything?

That only works if getting the shiny is the only reason to play. Typically when people buy things in MMOGs they are trying to skip one or more aspects of the game they don't enjoy/have no time for in order to play one aspect they do. Dropping money on a fully kitted WoW arena character skips the leveling process and the BG grind and you can get right to arena. Someone buying ISK to replace their losses in a war is skipping the missioning/ratting/trading/mining/whatever process in order to get back into the war in a decent ship. In both cases the player is not destroying the game for themselves.

What are all the pvp'rs who, after they are fully geared out, reform new teams to sell points gonna do when everyone can buy their fully kitted out arena char direct from the company? Somehow I don't think continuing to play for the joy of playing is gonna work there. Also when they are going up against fully geared ppl and have to work a little harder to win I bet that joy of playing is in a bit short in supply.

I keep forgetting how much you all hate PvE.  :oh_i_see:

See, if you buy everything from the company, there's no point in PvE at all.  Then you're left with only the arena game, or only the BG game.  How's that working for Fury?

Oh right.


In EvE I could see it working, but that's a World game with shitty pve. Some of us LIKE pve for the sake of pve.

I do too. It's true that with RMT you could buy a copy of the game, buy your level and gear, and then fucking quit without ever having logged on, because you're already done.

What's next? Buying out quests and keys?  :uhrr:

So the joy of pvp is selling points or wtfpwning people in inferior gear?

If they came up with a way to get gear, money, or whatever it takes, so you could do the PvE or PvP without having to grind time, then maybe people wouldn't feel the need to RMT.

Why is time and the amount of people you have with you allways the most important thing?  That seems to be what matters in PvE.

In PvP, I feel that most who play level up games don't want a fair fight.  They feel that if some newbie could kill them, then the game isn't worth playing.  Of course those that come from a FPS feel that the game is nuts to keep other out, and that unfair fights suck.

Fun PVE and grinding cash are very different things. I play singleplayer games all the time, no PVP at all! But there's also no grinding for hours and hours and hours to participate in other parts of the game either (JRPGs aside). Is it fun grinding 5000 gold for an epic flying mount? What about on your 2nd alt? Is it fun to plow ~200 hours into battlegrounds over a few weeks to be able to compete in arena? Is leveling your upteenth character to 70 to try out another class fun? PVE is fine and fun and blah blah blah I'm not stepping on your baby, but when you're asked to do it over and over again it gets old.

Okay yeah, that's understandable. I thought we were talking about buying EVERYTHING in the game.

I don't disagree on any of the grinding shit.  Really, I don't.  I'm one of the first people to say that insisting groups kill the same  mobs over and over for months as a retention tactic (which is ALL it is.) is bullshit.   A loot scheme closer to D2/ HG where lots of stuff drops and 'bosses' have better, but still random, gear is preferable to me. If combined with a token/ dkp/ badge system of some sort so that just killing bosses for 'coin' can get a specific loot drop rather than relying on the RNG would be even better.

Using the shiny is more fun than getting it?

I'd like to see a list of five items from any modern MMO that really made the game more fun unto itself. And I don't mean five different styles of speedy-feet like WoW horses or SoW boots. I mean stuff that actually made the day-to-day play of a game more fun by it's very use to you as a player.

Because all I see is an infinite series of gear that provides micro stat boosts that make your skills better. That's fine since it works. But getting some drop from some mob doesn't radically change the game to make it more fun. It just extends the fun you're already through positive feedback.

I say the reward is separate from fun because the "fun" you had getting that reward was based on your class/template. The reward just makes you better at it.

You answered the question. Being 'better' at something / improving your abilities is generally the point behind trying to get certain drops. That in turn makes you more capable, which extends your ability to achieve certain goals. Hopefully going after / acheiving those goals is 'fun' for you. PvP is one area where such things matter. Alts are another area where you might want to try some things out, but don't want to have to grind through the low lvl areas yet again to get to the 'fun'.

I'm a big proponent of full internal RMT. As a casual player, I don't have the time to grind out missions on the chance I'll get the drop I want or to grind out 40 million in-game currency so I can afford to buy something off an auction house. I certainly think drops should still be in the game, but I'd like the option of being able to put some RL cash into getting past the grind and into actually playing the MMO, where I should be having fun.

I keep reading arguments from MMO players that I apparently need to 'earn' the right to get to the fun parts through lvling and passing huge time sinks. Why is that? If I want to be the equivalent of an 17 yo learner driver in a Ferrari within the MMO context, where's the problem? I may crash into a wall and kill myself, but that's not a problem within MMOs.

Because then you turn the game from a time escalation to a money escalation. You've shifted the symptom over, but left the core problem intact. Now Richie Rich gets to see the end content along with Catass Man, but Joe Gamer is still stuck in the same rut.

I Googled "Cat ass man" because I thought that would be an awesome superhero and Richie Rich should be his sidekick. I discovered "The Cat's Ass (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cat's+ass)" used to be a term for really cool. Other than that, I got deja vu about halfway through Darniaq's last post.

It was probably deja vu about getting deja vu. Someone make more games because these ones are already old!

If you go by pvpers in WoW, and by what they do rather than what they say, it would appear so.