Comments on: Alchemy

by: nobody cares

Tue, 02 Aug 2005 07:24:02 +0000

I’m of that school that says let people have their crack, if they want it. I wouldn’t make a plea against smoking cigarettes either. Heck, maybe there’s even some money to be made in treating the addiction.

by: Dr. T

Fri, 29 Jul 2005 14:09:53 +0000

I saw the same story. I regard this as a clear sign of the impending apocalypse. Make peace with your god, if you believe in that kind of thing. If not, drink heavily.

by: Anon

Wed, 27 Jul 2005 17:25:31 +0000

Oh, and I should mention that this sort of “gold farming” wouldn’t be a problem if there weren’t consumers out there to pay for it. Same as Wal-Mart or any other big name chain that notoriously abuses their workers. If we as human beings stood up and refused to purchase the products of these known offenders… Personal responsibility for our actions as individuals is the only solution to these types of problems.

by: Anon

Wed, 27 Jul 2005 17:16:51 +0000

Ha, yeah, except they are ruining my in-game economy, damn it! I hate farmers, they are annoying, train mobs on you and kill important things you need for quests. You see them everywhere, everyone knows who they are and no one can do anything about it.

And hitting the lvl cap means nothing. The game devs put out content patches with more and more challenging things to conquer. I have several maxed out characters and I play them all the time, helping level guildie noobs or trying to get that new epic pattern to drop. It’s crack, plain and simple. When you stand up after a full weekend of not showering and sitting in the same chair withour hardly moving, your body screams that maybe you should bust out the bike again and go for a ride. But you just go to bed, roll out to work and come home and plop back down in front of it again. Anyway, you have to save up for that epic mount…

by: nobody cares

Fri, 22 Jul 2005 11:17:53 +0000

There’s really no difference in playing an MMO for a monthly fee, and paying a monthly fee for your cable bill, or your satellite radio, or paying to see a movie.

Except, of course, the MMO form of entertainment is interactive, and includes socializing with other actual people. Where TV, movies, books, and music are for the most part one-sided forms of entertainment, MMOs allow for the player to interact with the entertainment environment as well as other real people. So, I can’t see why people want to condemn another person simply for their choice of the type of entertainment they prefer to pay for with their own hard-earned fiat currency dollars.

I don’t see how paying a huge corporation like Time Warner or HBO for non-interactive content that pretty much always sucks and is filled full of advertising is any more ridiculous than someone paying monthly to play an online game.

Also, someone figuring out a way to make money within a system is not necessarily a bad thing. Especially, if as you yourself say, the working conditions are better than the typical crappy sweatshop job available in those markets. Unless, of course, you are completely against free-market capitalism. Which is a whole other discussion.

by: James

Thu, 21 Jul 2005 13:12:08 +0000

Just a quick comment on (2) above: most MMORPG characters top out around level 50 or 60 or so; after that point, your character doesn’t get any stronger and there are no challenging creatures left to battle, so the chararcter pretty much has to get retired.

Also, most MMORPGs do have stories throughout your character’s development from newbie to level 60, often with definite beginnings and endings, though overall story arcs that run through the entire development of your character are fairly uncommon.

The whole farming-for-virtual-property thing is nuts, though. I can’t remember the details, but recently someone bought the property and development rights to an island in one MMORPG world for some huge sum. Virtual real-estate.