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May 18, 2005
Dumb mud-dev thread
Sony recently decided to start facilitating the trade of real monetary resources for game objects on certain EverQuest servers. Now, before I go further, I'm sure there are some people who absolutely cannot fathom the motivation to spend real money on a game resource.
I haven't myself, that I can recall, but it goes a bit like this. You play a MMO game of whatever sort as much as your time permits (either a MMORPG like EverQuest, or maybe a MUD). It's a traditional sort of game, in which the point is more to level up a character, get it gear, fight battles, and explore areas (for those of you not into the scene, Diablo 2 is rather similar. Or Baldur's Gate if hundreds of others played at the same time). Now the game designers for these games don't want to have to keep creating ridiculous new levels, so they use an exponentially increasing set of experience point values required to level. Thus they have the hope, maybe, of slowing a real teenage crack-monkey playing 8 hours a day (or way, way more) down to reaching the maximum level for a character in a reasonable period, say maybe a month. Given multiple character types and player versus player gaming, and there's a chance of keeping your user base from churning massively.
There you have what's referred to as a treadmill... but it's tuned for people with large amounts of time. You enjoy the game, but you're a working professional and it's hard to get more than an hour a night to play, or a few more hours on the weekends. You start getting tired of spending a month on the same level, with the same powers, seeing largely the same area. BUT, you enjoy the game, and you become willing to trade that which you have in excess (cash) for that which you don't have but which might make your play more profitable and rewarding (gear, gold, whatever). That is the motivation behind paying for game items.
Moving along, Sony deciding to support such interactions (which have traditionally been frowned upon) is laudable and was almost inevitable. It's laudable because they are a large company, and this feature will perhaps pressure other companies to try such a setup out. It was inevitable because such trading was happening anyway. It was like sharing music except instead of suing someone, the most you could do was cancel their account... thereby depriving yourself of a customer and money.
This is a thread that developed on mud-dev from the announcement. My personal favorite message from Jaycen Rigger who is, apparently, an idiot. He shows an ignorance of the very game in question when he claims that "customers decide what cheating is." I say this because I remember quite clearly instances when EQ came out of beta where you could take advantage of the formation of a zone to kill certain mobs with impunity. EQ decided this was cheating, not the players, and punished people accordingly. Those who forget history, etc.
Posted by jeff at May 18, 2005 04:39 PM