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Jorev
 Novice Member
Joined: 11/15/04
If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem. |
 Best post ever!
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12/07/06 8:34:22 AM#162
So so true Member of the Dancing Asgard Guild on the Stargate Worlds Forum |
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12/19/06 5:42:23 AM#163
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Jorev
Novice Member
Joined: 11/15/04
If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem. |
Yes it is about having a spine, and the admin has none. His interest is money over game integrity.
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12/19/06 4:11:43 PM#165
Managed to find any evidence to support your claims of virtual trading ruining games yet ? I think that considering WoW is over 2 years old now and is rife with virtual trading yet continues to grow and succeed pretty much cans that argument completely. Your dwelling in a fantasy realm where people are on level playing fields. Nothing in life is like that, not sport, not education, not work, nothing. Yet you expect it in a game..... odd +-+-+-+-+-+ |
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12/19/06 11:07:44 PM#166
I agree with people that are opposed to the goldselling adds.
I risk repeating someones thoughts (couldnt read all 4 pages of posts), but enforcing one rule that goes against EULA (NDA breakers) and ignoring another rule (virtual item trading) is indeed hypocrisy. Yes its not against federal or state law, but it is against the in-game law. I love MMORPG.COM, it has been a home for me and my rants for the last few years. These goldselling adds and neutral support from the part of MMORPG.COM sadden my heart. its wrong to enforce one rule while turning a blind eye on the other. Yeah no1 will ever sue no1 else becuase of this. Its not worth it, even if it was possible. Thats when ethics kick in. Doesnt matter if gold selling ruins communities or not, it is against the rule in most games. MMORPG.COM should stopadvertising companies that deal in gold selling activites in games where it is against their rules to do so. This is a wish of a hardcore MMORPG.COM fan. I hope you guys make the right decision. Peace. I am the type of player where I like to do everything and anything from time to time. |
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12/20/06 3:57:59 AM#167
Anyone who has read right through this knows I am against gold selling and why. However I am also against rampant speculation posing as fact. In the abscence of evidence supporting the notion that virtual trade ruins in game economies..... its like asking the Government to pass a law against Aliens walking the streets. It might make some people feel better but considering we dont know if aliens are actually walking the streets or not..... whats the point exactly ?? Brad Mquaid saying hes against it, doesnt make it factually accurate any more than anyone else saying it. 18 pages and no evidence..... what can I say..... +-+-+-+-+-+ |
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12/20/06 7:29:39 AM#168
My point was not whether this hurts in-game economies (I personaly think it does, but as far as I know there were no scientific studies conducted regarding this matter to prove one way or the other) but rather if it is against the rules of that specific game company to do it or not. MMORPG.COM enforces game's rules by deleting posts which are breaking their NDA statements, but not enforcing posts ( I consider advertising just like any other post ) that relate to breaking EULA by selling gold and items.
From a guy-who-knows-nothing-about-law perspective, EULA and NDA is the same thing, they make u sign a bunch of rules by which they expect you to comply to and act according to those rules and regulations. My question: does breaking EULA a lesser crime (not a federal or state crime, but "in-game" crime) then breaking NDA? I am the type of player where I like to do everything and anything from time to time. |
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12/20/06 3:11:44 PM#169
Evidence anyone ??
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12/20/06 11:34:50 PM#170
If by evidence you mean making my time playing mmorpgs less enjoyable? Then sure. I play WoW for now. Sometimes I get 'mail'. Most times its something I bought or sold in the auction house. Other times stuff from guildmates. And others its an advirtisement from gold sellers. Some times I get whispers from them. Annoying as hell. Would like to literally punch them in the nose. Mr editor how can you be objective in the debate when you have your hands in the pockets of the goldfarmers? or is it the other way around. Answer you can't.
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12/21/06 12:54:37 AM#171
By evidence I mean a single hard factoid to support the assertion that RMT ruins in game economies. That phrase is so bandied about it has been accepted as fact when in reality the evidence is overwhelmingly the opposite. No MMO current or former has closed down, changed its economy in a major way or otherwise been affected so badly that anyone could argue "RMT ruined the economy". Indeed almost every popular MMO you want to name continues to run with no discernable effect on the economy despite RMT's being rife. It is simply an assertion that has no basis in fact that I have yet to see. So Im saying if you could show me a graph or a set of numbers that supported the notion that an in game economy was being adversely affected by RMT's, I would be the first one to say "well there ya go I was wrong". However the simple FACT is I have been MMO gaming since well before UO and have played every game on the list at one time or another, plus some others and I have yet to see anything that makes me believe RMT's ruin economies. I have seen lots of evidence that the prices of basic goods in some games are affected by the amount of gold held by a percentage of players. But as I have pointed out many many times (in this thread), it is impossible to separate the effects of maxed out mains twinking thier alts and a number of other factors from RMT's, that is just a FACT! If you dont think it is then prove me wrong by showing us something that supports your argument. The burden of proof is on the person making the assertion Im sorry. I play WoW and I get the same mails. Im pretty certain I would still get them whether this site ran ads or not. The fact that WoW has an economy that lends itself to RMT's is down to Blizzard. They could fix it in a heartbeat (I have already said how in this thread) but they choose not to. By Mr Editor I assume your refering to me.... I am not the editor of this site however and I am also a volunteer. I gain no percentage benefit from the ads that run on this site. My remuneration would be the same in the presence or abscence of these ads. I am against gold farming (for the 400th time) on the basis that it ruins my suspension of disbelief. But I cannot be against it on the basis that it ruins economies, because as far as I have seen in my 10 years in this biz..... that simply isnt true. Also I think you need to understand that people are capable of holding an opinion despite thier situation. Im sure there are things you disagree with your workplace about and your opinion is not affected by your wages. Please give me and others the benefit of the same doubt. You can see by the disclaimer at the bottom of my sig and by the fact that my posts arnt deleted that I am able to disagree with this site's policies without being edited. I wont say anymore because I dont want to be seen as "monstering" anyone into agreeing with me. But I encourage any of you to PM me if you wish to continue the debate with me. Im ALWAYS HAPPY to get PM's from members on anything. But remember, this is page 19 and as yet no one has been able to put forward anything that conclusively proves the assertion that RMT's ruin in game economies.... that says more than I could ever say if I sat here till doomsday.
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12/21/06 4:17:33 AM#172
I don't think it ruins games, au contraire, it provides capitalistic opportunities for entrepreneurs and a means to keep Chinese and Mexicans employed. But forgive me if I don't part with one groat to buy anything off one of these entrepreneurs.
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Michke
 Novice Member
Joined: 2/07/05
- We need to bring numbers up, we are below quota. |
1/05/07 10:32:45 AM#173
Goldselling doesn't hurt economies, it promotes player behavior that hurts game economies. An exploit/hack, a farmer or a bot are damaging to the game-economy in my opinion. That is in the sense that the farmed item or gold will be harder to obtain by the player who doesn't go into those practices. Ideally the difficulty to obtain an item needed for quests or pvp would be set by the gm team of a game, not by the free market economy of the game. The free market can alter the difficulty and if it's through the aforementionned ways, it's my opinion that the limit gets pushed too far. I think we're free to assume that if there were no out of game transactions, the farming phenomenon would be far less important and thus the difficulty of participating in an economy for a casual player would diminue. I'm very much against the principle of gold trading because I consider it cheating the "competition". Before I go on I would like to point out that someone convinced me that mmos are not games but that they are toys. I'm certain that most people who buy gold don't view it as a "game" or a "toy" even, they view it as a competition without rules, because there are no punishments with sufficient impact for getting caught. I came back to this topic because last night I was told again that we should just deal with the fact that there is trading going on that makes it unfair if you're looking at an mmo as a competition. I think we would be far better off if those buying realized there's no way to "win" an mmorpg. It's much like renting a movie, you don't hit fast-forward because your neighbour already watched it. Once you realize that you can realize that it's a bit stupid to pay extra for enjoying the game less and those jealous of goldbuyers can just because they "lost" should go have a good laugh. We shouldn't deal with it, the gaming companies should deal with it instead of considering how to take that profit into their own pockets. It all comes down to ethical business and customers deciding if they care about that when it doesn't affect them personally - |
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1/05/07 12:10:15 PM#174
Gold is gold and I think the same the gold doest destroy games
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1/07/07 6:49:42 AM#175
Originally posted by Szczep I am Pro of everything that can help game industry overall. I think game ads make game companies rich and help them make better games so there is no problem with them. |
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1/07/07 1:37:45 PM#176
Originally posted by Razorback Are you implying that everyone has a spine. In my experience on this here planet, 99.99% of people seem to lack one. It's never easy, doesn't mean ya have to cave into the offers of unethical scum. To be quite honest I'd rather my site be popular and actually viewed as credible and respectable due to our morals than be pulling in cash from people who worship it like it's God and will do anything no matter how unseemly in order to acquire it, at the expense of player's enjoyment. You were asking for evidence I believe that goldfarming is bad mkay? Well here's a few starters for 10. Scenario - You are in a raiding guild, going to farm elemental earth for C'thun attempts. This is of course based on a true story. All of the farmable areas are absolutely covered in bots, as they are well aware that guilds at this stage of play require this particular item. They can monopolise and corner the market (this is basic economics, if you are in control of the entire supply, then you can pretty much dictate the price that the demand must pay for it), forcing prices up beyond reasonable levels. This in turn encourages the purchase of gold, because raiders (and raiding is the only worthwhile thing in WoW at this point in time, always has been, it's the thing Blizzard really did right imho) do not have the time to go and farm the cash in order to purchase said items from the auction house. If I were to go via gold/hour, it is significantly cheaper for me to buy gold to purchase said items than it is to farm it myself. Time is money friend and all that, and time is a precious commodity in the case of most. You may ask me 'Well if the bots did not exist then players would do the same thing'. Possibly, however players fatigue, players get bored, players can't do that 24/7 no matter how insane they may be and it's also a matter of who the farming benefits. Does it benefit players who pay their subscriptions to acquire ingame items for ingame gain (the mystical fourth wall perhaps?) or does it benefit large companies, at the expense of player enjoyment, for worldly gain? Which is better I ask you? And that's not even covering the sheer annoyance of it all. The constant spam and junk mail, the annoying thought that even in this so-called virtual sanctuary, someone is still going to try and take your money off your hands. Advertising bombards us everywhere these days, it would be nice to actually have a place where someone isn't trying to con me out of my wages. Let's also talk about the idea of a level playing field. You I believe said at one point that there is no such thing and that there will always be rich and poor etc. Sure, true, but there can be a level-playing field to the degree of your wallet not giving an advantage in game. Sure, time spent, to a tiny extent skill and of course luck are factors which 'unbalance' the field but I'd take that any day of the week over being owned in the face by someone who has spent X number of dollars on this amazing gear which makes him, in this game requiring little skill what-so-ever, into an unrivalled killing machine. Thankfully this will only get you so far in WoW, though I have seen players in Full Tier2.5 who have never even run MC before. The reason is quite simple, guilds are getting to the stage of being able to sell this gear to players. A guild on my server charged 5000g per set. Please do not tell me that someone would have the time to farm this amount of money and yet not to get involved in a raiding guild and actually have some fun. That money was bought, pure and simple. That's one more guy who has gear which he shouldn't. What he then does to other players because of owning this gear and thus being far more powerful than he should be has a negative effect on them to varying degrees. This would not have happened were that gold not available for purchase. Those are just a few examples of it. I'm sure I could sit down and write a paper on the subject but I'd rather just make fun of it in my movies and spend my time doing something worthwhile for the community. As regards to paying the bills for a large website, been there, done that, got the t-shirt, without the commercial backing that this site has managed to gain, and yet we're still there and succeeding where a million and one other internet radio stations have fallen flat on their arses. If you require gold-selling ads to maintain your business then I would take a long hard look at the dynamics of it, since something is glaringly wrong if a site like this cannot attract the neccessary corporate backing to pay the bills and make some money on the side as a business. TB. |
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1/14/07 4:40:06 AM#177
The questions are:
a) is there a chance that a gold advertisement appearing on a site like this will mislead people into believing that buying gold online is legal and therefore they cannot be banned from that game? The answer is: YES. b) since so far none of the mmo's has sued a gold seller site for violating intellectual property, does this mean that mmo's forfeited/waived their right to protect their intellectual property? The answer is: NO. The fact is: everything that is contained in a MMO (world objects, money, even your character) is owned by the game operator/developer. You are granted a license for your monthly subscription to use it. If the developer/game operator forbids the sale of in-game property for real money, it is entirely within their right, and they can sue you/ban you for violating this rule. If they decide for some reason that they do not sue such gold sellers (e.g. the local legislation at the place of business of the gold seller does not support enforcing such claims for damages on account of violation of intellectual property, because the issues around intellectual property rights are not regulated yet in conformance with the international standards and practices) , it does not constitute and cannot be interpreted as a waiver. Making screenshots of a DVD movie and putting them on a fan site has already lead to situations where the fan site operator received "cease and desist" letters. One might claim that such acts do not result in any harm for the movie producer, in fact they are free advertisements, and so on, and it is difficult to prove how much damage it has done to the copyright owner, but the copyright law says otherwise. You are NOT permitted to use copyrighted content without the consent of the copyright holder. Period. How does gold sale damage game economy? Inflation and easily obtainable epic items will reduce the time required for a player to reach various goals. Less time means a shorter period before the game 'burns out' and new content needs to be added to maintain interest. The companies may easily produce statistical reports that demonstrate the link between the amount of gold and in-game inflation, however, as I wrote, they do not really need to do it. The only claim they should submit to the court that their intellectual property right was violated. |
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1/18/07 5:24:33 AM#178
I am going to take the time to write a long and incredibley thought out post on this subject. Why? Because I just spent 2 hours away from developing my resume that could get me in to the swing of making all those new and awesome MMOs your all waiting for to read the first ten bleeding pages of this thread. If that doesn't just cry out for a rant I don't know what does.
Lets start out with a concept. All people are in some way responsible for problems of the world. Why? As big as the world is, it's really very small. Each and every person to post to this thread has in some way contributed to the state of bad things in the world, including this second market, (if you so define it as bad.) This presents us with a far more interesting platform. You see now how much you bemoan the unethical nature of the beast, you are not inherently higher in ethical standing than the person who does do it. So it doesn't matter if it is ethical, all that matters is what it does, and wether we want our gaming to go that direction. I'll start out with a statement somebody made earlier. "Games are where we go to forget about our current poverty in life and be equal despite it." Although I'm horrifically paraphrasing I know. How is encouraging the creation of games that cost more to play for one month than a family in indonesia can make in a month helping people forget their poverty? How is making the prerequisite to play a game the owner having invested in a computer costing $500-$1200 going to make someone forget theri poverty when thats 2.5-6 weeks of work a starting wage for a highschool gradute and thats straight up money, not counting taxes, bills, and food required in that time period. How is playing a game for 3 hours a night because you have the luxury of not having a second or third job evening the playing field so that poverty doesn't matter. You have in so many ways brought your financial standing into the game that it is rediculous to site real world economics as breaking a game. I went through this entire conversation with my sister today, what makes you so mad about rich people spending their money, you are guilty of doing exactly the same thing when seen from the point of view of someone more impoverished than you. Second there is a belief that the mixing of gaming and real life is some sort of sin. And you play and praise games based on the exchange of man hours, far more expensive than any monthly fee, for in-game benefits. You then scream and moan and pout when someone breaks that system and does the intelligent thing. You make it against the rules to be creative and think outside the box, you build your games so strictly around a box that you are somehow intelletually damaged when people say, "hey look there is another way to do it." This is the self same system that keeps millions of people poor and undertrodden. This is why you 'are' impoverished to begin with. You are trained from preschool to college to think as critically as you want so long as you remain "inside the box". Never look at a situation and ask, "how can I make this work for me?" for that way lies exploitation of the masses. The masses who then ahve the gaul to approach the rich and say, "can I exchange my work for your money" and then turn around and say, "how dare he make a profit off my work!" Did you yourself not ask to be used? Do you yourself not keep playing the silly game that you rail against so? As to why I'm going so far off-topic with this, I'm not going off-topic at all. You see the problem comes back to the same basic problem of pirated music. In the case of music some look at it and say, "you are hurting the industry." To which the others respond, "The industry is hurting the Industry". Is it a bad idea that everyone should have access to free music, that everyone should have their cahnce in the spotlight? Why does an artistic pursuit have to be a business? My view in two words, "stupid artists." The artist and developers refuse to learn financial literacy and thereby take control of their own finances and liberate themselves from the NEED to deal with corporations. Through the building of assets through investments a game could be funded and distributed for free while maintaining higher quality than WoW. And there need not be one or two, but as many as there are developers who wish to undertake to make such games. And if the players were to be financially literate and have no need to worry about doing anything besides what they loved, where would be the point in a "second market". Lets recap that in a nutshell shall we.  People live inside the box. People refuse to take a risk and move outside the box. This requires that people place monetary value on their time. This allows others to set up a monetary trade of money for time. This causes games that have spent far too long creating a time=reward system to have through their own design attached a real monetary value to the reward. Which causes people to exploit that. Which causes the games to panic as they have no other reward system in place. Which causes the exploit to be made unethical by their standards. Which causes a forum debate about the ethics of advertising for those illicite services. My solution? Shut up, take some personal responsibility and fix the actions you are doing that facilitate the problem. Yes it's hard, yes it requires you actually DO something besides sit on a forum whining.  The likelihood of anyone listening, understanding and acting upon what I just said? Very small. If you haven't acknowledged the message that life has spent the better part of 2-4 decades beating into you, why would acknowledge my voicing it?  And on a more personal note, there are wys of rewarding players besides the standard time=reward formula. You can use community activity, kindness to other players, ingenuity in accomplishing tasks, ability to effectively organize a group, ability to suck up to the admins, skill in fighitng other players, skill in performing the tasks with which they have been assigned, and skill in the management of their in-game assets. Oh and I almost forget, skill in staying IN CHARACTER. In short, there are so many other systems to use, why are you all so dead set on making and playing grind-fests anyway? |
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1/25/07 8:10:39 PM#179
Most of us that discuss design in the developers corner do not want any grind fests. Many are for getting away from stats and levels and uber loot. You should join in the discussions there. Alternate ways to reward and acheive in the game are great topics we are always willing to discuss.
IronOre - Forging the Future |
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2/02/07 5:49:22 AM#180
Even eBay has stopped the selling of virtual items.
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. I'm not going to come back on the add running on the site, I think I backed my point up sufficiently in that regard.
