http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6592335.stm

I found this article intriguing.

I've never played WOW, so I don't know to what extent this is old news. But it's interesting to read of the horror with which their playerbase regards a mechanism that is essentially analagous to our credits system.

I wonder how different Lusternia would be if we couldn't buy credits externally. Who would be the best combatants? The world and their dog would be angling for credit-paid jobs as guides and builders....

WoW always had a real-money-to-credits market - Chinese gold farmers.

I am afraid that you are wrong, Aiakon. The gold market of WoW is NOTHING like the credits market of Lusternia. Gold in World of Warcraft is obtainable through in-character means - finding items and selling them, looting monsters, quests. While in Lusternia, credits are obtainable mostly through OOC means - buying them from the in-game market still counts as OOC, because the credit from the market are bought OOCly by some other player.

Moreover, while credits are rather difficult to get in Lusternia, gold in WoW is not. I am a casual WoW player, I play the game next to nothing on average, and I have NO problems with gold. The newest expansion makes the situation even better for casuals, because the new quests offer really good rewards while being as difficult (comparing them to the character's level) as the old ones. If someone tells you gold is hard to get in World of Warcraft, then, BELIEVE ME, it means they are one or more of the following:
-lazy
-inept
-gold farmer propagandist (is that even a word?)


EDIT: Because I am feeling tidy, here's some comparison:

Lusternia, credits:
-must be bought by RL money, or:
-traded from other players for in-game currency, which is LEGAL by the game's rules
-relatively hard to get

World of Warcraft, gold:
-must be earned by in-game effort, or:
-traded from other players (gold farmers) for out-of-game currency, which is ILLEGAL by the game's rules
-relatively easy to get

I don't understand what the article is trying to get at. It looks like it's just informing us that such a thing exists. Seems a bit pointless if so.

The article is unprofessional, IMHO.



I do not play a lot, yet I generate my own cash. Where do I fit here?

As I've written in the post above, people who find gold in WoW hard to get are either ignorant or lazy.

Short version: NOOBZ!

Cuber, do look up unprofessional. By any stretch of the imagination, that word isn't applicable in that context.

Anyway, I made it quite clear that I have never played (nor will ever) WOW. I am therefore wholly uninterested in the rights or wrongs of the article.

What I find interesing a view of 'in game work / externally paid for benefits' which is wholly contrary to our own.

If I so wished, I could play Lusternia with a view to gathering gold, buying in game credits, and building up my character entirely through my own in game labour. As I have a job,and a great many other RL preoccupations, I prefer to buy credits OOC. In terms of opportunity cost, it makes far more sense.

Were I 16, at school, and poor as a church mouse.. it might make more sense for me to Guide, bash Gorgogs/Merians + Catacombs incessantly, and trans up my skills like Aesyra did.

What I found intriguing was the idea of a Lusternia in which you -had- to do that, rather than (from a WOW viewpoint) cheating your way to skills. Obviously, I don't find this a particularly engaging idea in theory - but when directly applied to Lusternia, it is amusing to consider who would be the best fighters, and where the balance of power would lie.



Yes. It's informative. That is an end in itself.



Yes... that's what the article says.

I think those are the main problems people have with goldsellers/bots/goldspammers. Of course the article doesn't ever mention all of this

If you had lusternia plagged by them, with people regularly boting to kill all the killeable spawns of any gold giving NPC while at the same time sending you whispers of qweiuqweu tells you " Extra ubber offer 1000g 20$ instaqnt delibery plix buiy" (the mispelling is intentional). About 1 times a minute. In an RP server wich as much contempt as you can have for WoW, has some RP rules and atmosphere.

Then you have the totally 100% unskilled people that bought their char in ebay and now are in your dungeon group making stuff difficult or making you having to boot them, but that means finding somebody else and a loss of time.

That and the fact that the possibility of making money causes people to create trojans to steal passwords and disenchant all the gear in the stolen characters just to sell the gold for money, most of those trojans can be found in banners for goldsellers sites. Or the semi-slavist mafia conditions people are kept in china to farm gold 12h a day (wich in my eyes is a lesser evil compared to dieing of hunger or working on a mine, but it's no good anyway).

Thank god that's not something that will happen ever in lusternia.

Presumably all this would disappear if they offered gold for sale in the same way as IRE sells credits.

I gave up on actually reading articles when I joined Slashdot.

The article is unprofessional because the author simply included a more-or-less popular opinion, stating it as a fact, instead of verifying it. This opinion being that the player of WoW is faced before a horrid dilemma, between spending countless hours, toiling for mere in-character pennies, or employing the services of gold farmers, who are presented almost as the noble rebels who break rules to free the people from evil Blizzard's oppression.

Now here's the fact: World of Warcraft is, especially after the Burning Crusade expansion, EXTREMELY casual-friendly. So casual-friendly, you'd be hard-pressed to make it more casual-friendly without making it ridiculously easy and no challenge at all.

Besides, most items you can buy with gold is crap anyway, barely (if even) better than the ones you get for finishing simple quests. Most good items are bind-on-pickup - means you can't trade them to other players (only sell for cash in shops - and other people can't rebuy them) after you pick them up, more often than not from a dead boss's corpse.

lol hello journalism?

Their bussiness model is subscription.

That includes a lot of timesinks so people stay subscribed. Obtaining gold to get more shinny gear and epic birds and that stuff is a form of timesink.

There's also the fact that with gold being sold "out of the game" economy would be screwed (people who buy gold OOG would pay much more for items, so people who don't would be out of the game unless they became farmers and farming means no playing for fun) and many people who cannot buy gold OOG would just stop playing. Not a smart move for Blizz who already gets 13E a month per player with minimal trouble as a stable input.

It's all different bussines models. Probably if you sold gold unless it was at a ridiculous price you'd have chinese farmers selling it cheaper anyway, and if it's at a ridiculous price then gold in game has no value. Given that unlike credits gold is the main currency of the game that would be ugly for plain subscribers.

Selling level 70 chars would be a possibility, if only if they made sure a person who buys a level 70 has a tag marking it as bought, given that ebayed characters tend to be clueless about playing their class (just imagine an IRE char put into PvP with all the skills transed and 5 minutes gameplay) and I personally prefer to avoid having to die 4 times to decide the guy is clueless. WoW is pretty much a team game, so the actions of a player influence a lot the rest of the group. Not that there's not enough crappy players who leveled to 70 though.

What W.O.W and every other game out there should do, is the IRE business model.. its just awesome.

Stop substrictions, and just have cool things you can buy with $$ (Especially if you are allready spending $60 just to install the game)

This one nice mud that I wish I had time to play, Evarayn(sp?), is a free mud, and for every hour you 3 minutes you spend online, you get some percentage to your next skill point(aka lessons). What they have, is if you donate money, those 3 minutes get multipliers added to them, so for every 3 minutes you are on, its as if you were on for 9 minutes. To me, this is a very good balance between not having time to waste and paying money.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/27/news/eu.php

Curious about the European's view of this article.

Sounds about right to me, to be honest. Europe is an unwieldy beast. But I liked the little volta, on which the article ended.

Still, some Americans, more often Democrats, say that finger-pointing cannot simply be directed one way, toward Europe. For all of Europe's structural problems, Holbrooke said, there is another political issue: Europe's "lack of confidence in American leadership at the highest level."

That's a pretty important point, in my view, and it's spot on.

I don't understand that point however.

American leadership at the top level changes every 8 years (maximum), while from my understanding, the article is talking about long term issues. (thing that will last 20 to 50 years if not more) ... unless politics does actually move at the pace that the news media tries to make it move at... hmmm ... ok, I guess I understand that point now. However, that "spot on" point, now thoroughly scares me....

Europe isn't (Yet) a monolithic state like the US. Americans fail to understand that it's vastly more fragmented, and getting twenty-seven member states with twenty-three different languages to agree on something is still extraordinarily difficult, even though the EU parliament succeeds at it routinely.

Getting them to trust American leadership right now is impossible; nobody trusts them, specially not on long-term issues - the Bush administration has repeatedly trampled on international organisations and their consensus, which is a poor track record. I'm afraid Americans will have to wait two years.

Off-topic. This isn't about Europe VS US, it's about WoW.




Crappy idea. A subscription system makes the situation fair for everyone, pay-for-perks means you don't need to put any effort or skill into game as long as you have a stuffed wallet. This is not the case for IRE games, where the overcomplicated battle system means you still need a lot of practice to be good at PvPing (and such, mischeviously turning this disadvantage into an advantage), but where the systems are more reasonable (simpler), it would be horrible.

Simple comparison: it would be like if every (or most of) player at level 60/70 would be like an e-bay character. Which is horrible, as per Iridiel's post. Non-WoW players have no right to comment, never experiencing such a situation themselves.

Spending 100 hours hitting your f1 macro, doesn't equate skill.

The aspects of the game that require skill, will still require skill, regardless of how much money or time is pumped into it.

Where's that thread/post on the EQ syndrome of "achievment = time"?