Omfg Wtf Wtf Wtf....

[Aluscia]

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/loadNews/3160

Read it... Cry... Maybe read it again... How can Sony continue to make money by beating the already decayed and decrepid corpse of what was a good game?

[Ghryphen]

hehe

[Gambit]

Because people keep buying it.

Y'know, Computer Gaming World is running a series of articles about the darker side of MMORPGs. This month's is on "farming." These folks get organized and have people in sweatshops in India, etc. play the game 24/7 and accumulate loot, which they then launder and eventually sell for real money. WoW, EQ, all the MMORPGs have people like this.
One of these guys in the US, when he finds out about an exploit like a dupe bug, will take off work and he and his sweatshops will take full advantage of it until it gets fixed.

[Aluscia]

yes. It's interesting seeing the different games fight this problem.
FFXI completely ignored the problem, creating such a massive inflation that items I bought/sold a year ago have tripled/quadrupled in cost, while drop rate remains the same.
Lineage 2 did very little to address the problem, and it was compounded by the fact that dwarves were the only ones who could scavenge and Craft... so you have people with bots playing 24/7 on characters that were too tedious for real players to play. nice.
WoW wasn't terrible, given the open pvp concept... it's too difficult for people to just leave themselves farming a given area afk and expect to remain alive.
EQ2... Until recently, it was nearly impossible to solo. Money could only really be made through harvesting/crafting, which is extremely difficult to do afk. I think farming was pretty effectively shut down for that game. Plus, there is not a great enough demand for the currency, so...
City of Heroes is the *only* game I've played where there are no bots. Why? Because influence is so easy to come by. There's no reason a player should have to buy currency off the internet to be competitive in this game... the big reason being that up until May 25th, there was no PvP in the game.
Interesting Concept of the future - Roma Victor is proposing no monthly fees. Instead, they will be selling in game currency through their official site, limited for each player account of course... I'm interested to see how this works. If they set a low enough threshold on money, it will be extremely difficult for players to sell the money elsewhere.

[Gambit]

Oh, BTW, they have a review of Guild Wars, too, that I forgot to mention. They gave it 4.5/5, docking it mainly for lack of free-roaming content and crafting. They really liked the skill-combo strategizing that is necessary.

[Stang]

Oh my gosh I didn't think they took farming that far! Now that is bad.

[Aluscia]

Umm... yah... anything that makes money becomes a "job"