http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2005/04/cornering_the_m.html
Very, very indepth discussion of general game economy. Spurred by an incident where two players bought out EVERYTHING in the ironforge auction house and resold all at higher prices.
http://overanalyzed.com/portal.php?topic_id=19
This is someone who plays MMOs to make money IN REAL LIFE by selling items in-game to other people (via ebay and other sites designed specifically for the purpose) for real money. I hope that Blizzard does all it can to stop this (and not go the way of some other MMO that’s going to have a company-sponsored store where players sell in-game things to other players for real money and the company takes a cut. Ryan told me about this one. Was it Sony? I can’t remember, and I’m checking everquest and eq2’s sites and can’t find anything about it.) This guy who wrote this article makes arguments that it is not, in fact, illegal (much less immoral), and not “blizzard’s property” like blizzard claims, becuase it is his own “work” that is selling. My gut reaction is “no, no, no!” to this, becuase this is a GAME. I don’t want it to be like in REAL LIFE where people with more money have advantages that I don’t have. I personally find solace in WoW becuase I can accomplish goals in it just by playing it and putting in the time and effort. That makes me feel happy and… well, accomplished.
It’s true, WoW has forced me to examine my choices and where my reasoning stems from, as well as reviewing changes in my outlook toward other people.
For example, the following is on How I Am Slowly Turning Into A Huge Bitch. Months ago, this would happen to me all the time and I’d feel sad… People would ask in the trade channel for an enchanter. I would reply with a friendly “what do you need enchanted?” They would ask for prices, and I would gladly supply them with a price list and ask them where they’d like to meet. Immediately, they’d spam the trade channel with prices undercutting mine. I’d feel really insulted and embarrassed because I couldn’t then immediately say that I would offer even lower prices, because it would undermine my credibility (my own sense of my own credibility)… and angry most of all because people would trick me into telling them my prices by pretending they wanted enchants. Since then, I have always been careful to tell other enchanters that I was an enchanter before asking for a price check from them, just to be courteous. However, just the other day I was in Ironforge spamming “enchanting demonslaying 4g.” There were two or three other enchanters spamming their macro text, which included demonslaying for 8 or 9g. I let these slip a few times, and tried to put up my ad at a respectful distance from theirs, but couldn’t take it anymore and when one said “enchanting demonslaying 9g” I put up a “I’m enchanting demonslaying for 4g” the line after theirs. That prompted him to say “Harsh” and a bunch of people in IF to laugh. It got me publicity and I sold four demonslaying enchants within the minute, but I’m sure the other person trying to make money saw that as a slap in the face. Not like it matters, though, and hopefully that person has a thicker skin than me, and hey in the long run he probably made more money than me once I left and he could resume trying to sell it at 9g.
Yes, this change is happening slowly, but I’m becoming less afraid of being aggressive. I’m becoming less worried about what other people think of me and more bold, not to mention greedy. Maybe I am approaching “normal” now with allowing myself to succumb to my greed (or maybe this statement is merely a reflection on how I my view of other people sink lower and lower). The other day I saw a “Book: Gift of the Wild” (rank 1, I already have rank 2 waiting for me when my druid turns 60 thanks to my brother!!) on the auction house for 10g bid and 15g buyout. I could definitely afford it–I had 50g at the time. Instead of bidding, though, I send a mail to the seller saying that I could COD it for 6g if nobody bought it. Of course, it never happened, and the next day when I checked again, I saw two of the same book for 20g start bid and 25g buyout. I should have just bought it then, but I got greedy and tried to get it for less, and now no gift of the wild for me becuase I didn’t do sufficient research on market prices before making a bid decision. I am very sad.
I’m greedy, but very very noncompetitive. I hate competition. This makes me very, very nervous about selling/buying things. I love to try to sell things for the lowest price possible becuase I feel happy when I’m able to buy something for a low price that I’ve been wanting for a long time.
It was funny, once a long time ago directdk came in my room. I was running around in Ironforge inspecting all the level 60s who at that time were just beginning to collect their first blue sets. “See this guy, he has a really good weapon,” I’d say. “And this character has 5/8 of her Magister’s set.” “Wow,” D said, “I didn’t know that it was all about… <i>collecting</i>… and showing off how good your stuff is to other people… now I’m so much more interested in this game.” He also asked if there was a kill log to show the number of times you killed x player and rankings of players and such, and now that the honor system is in he’d be even more interested. Hahaha. But yeah, that conversation made me realize… well… duh… WoW is all about showing yourself off and getting the best gear. Like… duh… this is why I’m obsessed with instances… duh…
I have won the Has Most Computer Problems Out Of Anyone stephentyrone Knows Award. Hooray! Right now I can’t be logged in to WoW for more than 5 minutes before my computer emits two clicks and freezes. My first guess was that it was an overheating issue–when I’m not running WoW my computer is quite cool; when I am, within minutes the upper back where the power supply is gets rather warm. Not so hot that it burns, but … rather warm. However, it might actually be a hard drive issue. Clicks, you know. And there’s definitely file corruption going on in there somewhere. I probably have a major system error 1 out of every 20 times I have to poweroff my computer in the middle of WoW because it froze (yes, it’s been crashing that much, and weird files get messed up when I do. Once it caused my computer to forget how to connect to the internet; the only thing that worked was reinstalling windows, which I could do without a reformat; two days ago though, I had to reformat because it got so corrupted that it couldn’t load windows at all and the windows setup CD couldn’t even tell what file system I had on my hard drive anymore). So yes. I reformatted my cmoputer two days ago. And now I have more problems than before. This makes me very sad.