I'm sure most have read this already: http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/239 ... Life-Money!
I can very easily see WoW do something similar down the road. Fuckers...
Diablo 3 news
Re: Diablo 3 news
It's worth noting that the main reason they did this is because everyone did it Diablo 2 except for the hardcore. I assume that everyone in the guild is like me and they didn't cheat or buy weapons/equipment.
I launched up Diablo 2 about 3-4 years ago because a friend of my ex-wife's played it. So I get in with my mega badass toon that I spent countless dungeon crawls on with my brother... I take one glance at their toons and I just want to puke. They've got all of the best of the best. Shit that I didn't get after playing for months and months. I asked if they were duping or what the hell and they scoffed... of course, how silly of me to assume someone wanted to PLAY the game instead of buy your way through it.
I remember that after they left (this was before RealID) I was sneaking around to every game I could find. I probably joined 5 different games and people weren't even playing in the damn things... no it was much more lucrative to host a game and spam advertisements for the equipment you could buy at their website.
I must say that I really dislike this trend for several reasons one of which is that to remain competitive now I have to spend real world money to keep up with some gaybird who didn't enjoy the game enough to sink the time into it. If you want to do this FINE, just don't allow some dude to PK me with his Archanchel Staff of Hellfire. It pisses me off just thinking about it! RAAAAAAAAAAAAA
I launched up Diablo 2 about 3-4 years ago because a friend of my ex-wife's played it. So I get in with my mega badass toon that I spent countless dungeon crawls on with my brother... I take one glance at their toons and I just want to puke. They've got all of the best of the best. Shit that I didn't get after playing for months and months. I asked if they were duping or what the hell and they scoffed... of course, how silly of me to assume someone wanted to PLAY the game instead of buy your way through it.
I remember that after they left (this was before RealID) I was sneaking around to every game I could find. I probably joined 5 different games and people weren't even playing in the damn things... no it was much more lucrative to host a game and spam advertisements for the equipment you could buy at their website.
I must say that I really dislike this trend for several reasons one of which is that to remain competitive now I have to spend real world money to keep up with some gaybird who didn't enjoy the game enough to sink the time into it. If you want to do this FINE, just don't allow some dude to PK me with his Archanchel Staff of Hellfire. It pisses me off just thinking about it! RAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Re: Diablo 3 news
Since they cannot control farmers on WoW, I don't think they'll allow it here. Not to mention the fact that it would send realm economies into tail spins, and I honestly don't think they'd want to do that. They'll get enough supplemental income from D3. And with D3 and the supposed work they've been doing with b.net2, they might actually get a hand on the farmers. *fingers crossed*
I was initially annoyed at the prospect but the more I thought about it... if I luck out and find a great item, that I can sell to someone for real money.. which I can turn around and apply to my WoW account? Gaming for free? Love it. You get a few free postings a week, so you're not losing anything. Seems absolutely win/win.
I was initially annoyed at the prospect but the more I thought about it... if I luck out and find a great item, that I can sell to someone for real money.. which I can turn around and apply to my WoW account? Gaming for free? Love it. You get a few free postings a week, so you're not losing anything. Seems absolutely win/win.
Re: Diablo 3 news
This real currency for stuff has been going on for quite a while for CCP. Sadly, since they're now private, there's no idea how much they're making on doing the real currency for in-game thing, but if they spend time doing stuff like this:
http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=687
There must be a good income stream going on there (Note that 6200 accounts would represent ~2% of paying customers for CCP in 2009) if you go through that much effort. You can argue that due to the decreased server load (see graph), you can put off that hardware upgrade down the road, banking your extra cask just before the REAL ISK economy blew up!
Have to give them credit, they're driving the operating cost of the farmers up, so they essentially price their "competition" out of the market...
(You also have an argument here about the differences in economies, sources/sinks, but I think this is a good example of what you need to do if you hare going to have real currency entering a competitive gaming environment, and how you, the game owner, get filthy rich off of it)
http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=687
There must be a good income stream going on there (Note that 6200 accounts would represent ~2% of paying customers for CCP in 2009) if you go through that much effort. You can argue that due to the decreased server load (see graph), you can put off that hardware upgrade down the road, banking your extra cask just before the REAL ISK economy blew up!
Have to give them credit, they're driving the operating cost of the farmers up, so they essentially price their "competition" out of the market...
(You also have an argument here about the differences in economies, sources/sinks, but I think this is a good example of what you need to do if you hare going to have real currency entering a competitive gaming environment, and how you, the game owner, get filthy rich off of it)