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ok drm may suck, online activation might suck, but what doesn't suck is a one place authentication for all blizzard games and the ability to add a security device:

http://www.wowwiki.com/Battle....

that makes it impossible for your account to be stolen or abused, and at the same time allows for unlimited installs (like the steam platform) over the life of the product no matter how many hard drives or mainboards you run through.

i don't like the prices for games, i feel a lot of them are way overpriced, but for the value of never losing a cd key/scratched disc, needing a disc, worrying that your account is hacked, it brings it more in line with what i'm willing to pay.

i've just always been very satisfied with blizz stuff even though WoW now is completely lame (no no NOW it is, it wasnt before)

Worst... Trap.... Evar.

Like Molten Core, without a lewtbomb and the end.

Capt. Ragnaros yells: TOO SOON! YOU HAVE AWAKENED ME TOO SOON, SGT. EXECUTUS! WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THIS INTRUSION?
Sergeant Executus yells: These mortal infidels, my lord! They have invaded your sanctum and seek to steal your secrets!
Capt. Ragnaros yells: FOOL! YOU ALLOWED THESE INSECTS TO RUN RAMPANT THROUGH THE HALLOW COMMAND CENTER? AND NOW YOU LEAD THEM TO MY VERY LAIR? YOU HAVE FAILED ME, EXECUTUS! JUSTICE SHALL BE MET, INDEED! [pulls out pistol and shoots hapless Sergeant]

WoW was great when the dungeons were relevant. Getting the paladin's epic mount was a pain in the ass once TBC came out and no one ran the required dungeons any more. Had to buy runs and work my ass off but I finally earned it. Then they made it a summon spell so now you get the horse at level 40 for free and it's speed scales with your riding rank. This killed all enthusiasm I had for the game and canceled my subscription same day. Shit that I worked hard for and earned was now just being handed out for free. Instead of fixing the dungeons and giving high level people a reason to go there other than just to help low levels they removed all reason for anyone to ever go to said dungeons.

All the work you had to do And a retelling of the events

And now today you get effectively both the slow and fast mount for free and all you have to do is buy training.

This is a good chunk of why WoW sucks today and why so many people leave with each patch.

It's a progression MMO. The timeline changes each time a new expansion comes out. Prior content becomes obselete much like any game on the market.

WoW was great when the dungeons were relevant. Getting the paladin's epic mount was a pain in the ass once TBC came out and no one ran the required dungeons any more. Had to buy runs and work my ass off but I finally earned it. Then they made it a summon spell so now you get the horse at level 40 for free and it's speed scales with your riding rank. This killed all enthusiasm I had for the game and canceled my subscription same day. Shit that I worked hard for and earned was now just being handed out for free. Instead of fixing the dungeons and giving high level people a reason to go there other than just to help low levels they removed all reason for anyone to ever go to said dungeons.

All the work you had to do
And a retelling of the events

And now today you get effectively both the slow and fast mount for free and all you have to do is buy training.

This is a good chunk of why WoW sucks today and why so many people leave with each patch.

That's because you only played for 2 years. I'm going to assume it was either Vanilla or The Burning Crusade that you played? Those were good times! The story was interesting, the encounters challenging, the end-game exclusive.

Don't ever, ever go back. End-game is faceroll easy, level progression is so fast you miss all of the awesome content (Duskwood is empty, as is the entirety of Outland), and good story telling has been exchanged for lame puns and double-entendre. You will be disappointed.

You've obviously never heard of the Blizzard definition of Soon TM.

I don't recall the classic Wacraft Pandaren being bouncy food-lovers.

http://www.wowwiki.com/Pandaren_Xpress

Three years before Kung-Fu Panda.

Ok, so what about games like World of Warcraft which use a P2P system to distribute legit patches? I wonder if any P2P type traffic will be potential victim of this, or if they're specifically looking just at BitTorrent users?

Oh waitaminute!!! According to WowWiki http://www.wowwiki.com/Blizzard_Downloader , the original Warcraft updater used BitTorrent code.

So, will this system be able to distinquish between legitimate uses of BitTorrent and pirate uses? Am I in danger of being flagged when one or all of the three four computers in my house with the World of Warcraft client gets an update?

Basically, I've never used a pirate BitTorrent... but I do have perfectly legal/allowed by the content holder BitTorrent traffic, so what are my chances of getting caught up in this (overly wide) dragnet?

Nah, this is what a pig farm looks like from orbit.

Ah. Thanks for the clarification!

In WoW players do have _some_ choices where to level as this chart shows:
http://www.wowwiki.com/Zones_by_level
and
http://mapwow.com/northrend/

I would love to see the EQ "equivalent" table & map.

Funneling everyone to the same zone has both pros/cons
+ it builds community as you start to see "familiar" faces
- it increases server load
- it promotes ninja-looting (Guild Wars 2 solved this problem 100% by sharing XP for kills, and every player gets their own "instanced" resources such as ore, trees, etc.)

Promoting zone diversion also has both pros/con
+ solo players don't have to "contest" for kills or resources
+ more variety when leveling alts, or subs
- lack of community

Feel free to add your comments as I am most definitely interested in seeing a EQ pre-WoW perspective.

> In EQ, I can level anywhere in the world I find blue cons.

Are you saying that you can navigate every EQ zone and find blue without aggroing yellow / reds?

- - - 8< - - -
http://eqplayers.station.sony.com/game_updates.vm?date=9/19/2006

"We have introduced a new con color, dark blue, which represents a range of blue con NPCs that give a bonus to their experience due to being very close to your level, generally within 5 levels. The concept of a dark blue con NPC has existed in EQ for a while now, but we've decided to change the con system to visually include this range so you can visually see when an NPC falls into this "sweet spot". To properly display a different shade of blue, we've had to reorder the cons a little bit. From trivial to highest con, the colors are now:

- Gray - This creature is trivial to you and will give you no experience for killing it.
- Green - This creature is not much of a threat, but will still give you some experience.
- Blue - This creature is below your level, but high enough level to give you experience.
- Dark Blue - This creature is below your level, but close enough to provide a solid challenge and gives you more experience than normal blue cons.
- White - This creature is the same level as you
- Yellow - This creature is slightly above your level.
- Red - This creature is well above your level."
- - - 8< - - -

WoW pretty much copied the same system:
http://www.wowwiki.com/Mob_difficulty_colorsa

It -is- a joke, Blizzard's joke in fact. Back in the early days of WoW they did an April Fools joke, saying that you'd be able to order food from Panderan Express (a play on the real company Panda Express) in game with the /panda command. More info: http://www.wowwiki.com/Pandaren_Xpress.

It was a joke at the expense of Sony, who really had implemented a /pizza command in Everquest 2 that would call up Pizza Hut's web page so you could order pizza.

However apparently Blizzard is completely fucking out of ideas, and forgot it was a joke, and so now kung-fu pandas are part of WoW.

Yes, the launcher does that. You have to disable peer-to-peer to get the download crap to work. That said, it's sunday so I've got time to confirm if it's still the case.

Make sure you use Wine 1.4.1 (The stable version.) The Wine versions in 1.5.x have messed up install scripting.

Make absolutely sure your Video cards are Nvidia, and make absolutely sure you use the Closed source Nvidia driver. Intel GMA Won't work. ATI MAY work depending on the card. But the best way to get the best results, is Nvidia.

As for your problem with the servers, you have to modify the realmlist.wtf files (yes they really are called that) in your WoW directory to point to the Euro-Zone servers. Then WoW will work.

http://www.wowwiki.com/World_of_Warcraft_functionality_on_Wine

Lord knows what they would have made of that.

God hates Twinks. Twinks burn in hell!

Or
She couldn't even reach the level cap?

I'd give them a computer with Linux; then send them out to the mines to get the ore...

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/north_south_korea

I'd give them a computer with Linux; then send them out to the mines to get the ore...

Litigation isn't like football. It is rarely suddenly over.

Witness the neverliving, undying horror which is SCO v. Novell. Still, there are moments that you can persuasively say "Ok, it's over", even if the vanquished is still struggling. Like:

20-Nov-2008: Final Judgment in favor of Novell, Inc., SCO Group and also against Novell, Inc., SCO Group. Case Closed. Magistrate Judge Brooke C. Wells no longer assigned to case. See Judgment for details. Signed by Judge Dale A. Kimball on 20-Nov-2008.

This particular setback* for B&N is pretty harsh, and I (though not a lawyer) don't know of any way to undo the damage.

Mueller has a tendency to go all "end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it" in his pronouncements, but the (accurate) retelling of this news is still interesting and useful (once you dig out the mere facts).

It would have been nice if Groklaw could have covered this development in and of itself, rather than as a pointless rebuttal to Mueller. Really, do we have to concede initiative to this guy? Can't we just report the facts and ignore him?

*Ok, maybe I play World of Warcraft too much, but I think I just read that in the voice of Kael'thas. "Merely a setback", indeed.

The issue is almost NEVER gear, atleast for PvE.

Er? It's been a while since I played WoW but gear is important. To overcome the hard fights you need skill and gear but there were quite a few of the early raid fights that were essentially gear checks. For example, Patchwerk was a tank and spank gear check.

For the most part, if you are the first to die, you did something wrong and while more gear might have mitigated it, it was your mistake to be in the position to die.

There is always a bit of chance in every fight and sometimes it isn't on your side. There were a few fights where the tank died because he got 3 critical strikes in a row followed by a special boss move on a boss we routinely beat. Now the rules of the fight were that it was possible but not likely but given enough fights, it was going to happen . Better gear would not have helped.

Except Pandarens predate Kung Fu Panda.

Pandarens were in WC3 Frozen Throne expansion in 2003

http://www.wowwiki.com/Pandaren_Brewmaster
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warcraft_III:_The_Frozen_Throne

"One word: plastics."

"Yes, I'm a gold digger... and copper and silver."

"If at first you don't succeed: blow it up again."

"Skip to step three: profit."

Needless to say these little annoying nats cause all sorts of environmental issues. Still, come to Darnassus for a small subscription fee.

We need to store them in huge vaults, protected by robots (golems). Perhaps some day some little guy will investigate with a band of adventurers (murderous looters, really) and they'll trip over every security measure put in place.

To be fair, it's expected - nay, highly anticipated - that Blizzard posts "soon" announcements rather than specific dates. Official dates are announced at Blizzcon (or Blizzard Invitational) and everything else is "soon". I think we'd be disappointed if they made an official date announcement outside of a Blizzcon.

http://www.wowwiki.com/Soon

Blizzard don't really postpone things. They just don't commit to releasing. And when they do announce they'll be releasing, they almost always release on date. (rarely, a few weeks later, but no long-term postponements or delays). If it was any other company I'd understand - announcing and then postponing is commonplace in the industry. Blizzard doesn't announce until they're sure they can deliver, though. They doing in-house testing now, which puts them on-track for an open (but selective) beta by Blizzcon (October), and launch just in time for Xmas. And then patched in January. ;)

If they say they're expecting to release in 2011, their track record says they'll be releasing either in 2011, or early 2012. Not 2014. They good marketers as they don't fail to deliver.

We ran 3.1x through 5 on dual processor Compaq Proliant 5000s, the screen saver had the blue and red snakes.

If you ran it on quads, what were the colors of the other snakes? Anyone know?

Deeprun Tram in WoW has screens running Netware like screen savers too, but gnomes only run dual core in Deeprun.

http://www.wowwiki.com/Deeprun_Tram#Notes

You can use your own client to download the patches via P2P. WoWWiki provides a list of mirrors, as well as the original torrent file used by the Blizzard Downloader client. You can even pull the file directly out of the game folder and add it to your client manually.

http://www.wowwiki.com/Patch_mirrors

If you want to see what an advertiser-based Wikipedia would look like, go to the Klingon-language edition of Wikipedia, now hosted on Wikia since it got kicked out of the Wikimedia project circle. It isn't completely tasteless, although Wikia has gone the rounds with some really lousy advertisers and some significant defections of some of the contributors over the years in part due to the advertising. A slightly better representative would be to look at how advertising is currently being used on the World of Warcraft Wiki, which does include some targeted advertising based upon certain content pages too.

There are some problems with advertisements, and Wikia certainly has had its problems with them too. Considering that Wikia was also set up by Jimmy Wales, the differences between these sites and Wikipedia is all that more interesting too, even more considering there is certainly a whole bunch of cross-pollination between Wikipedia and many of these Wikia websites including many common volunteers.

It seems to me that the game market has changed, if we go back to 20 years ago a lot more (popular) games were platform games, single player RPGs and the like. And as fun as those games were at the time I just can't be bothered playing them much anymore, it just seems like repetition to me.

My favorites these days are RTS games, Civilization-style "god games" and WoW but even with these I often find myself not finishing them anymore.

With the two former categories I tend to get fed up with cheating AIs and annoying scripted events (in the RTS games), I'd like an AI that's scales in "cleverness" rather than speed when I turn up the difficulty. Most RTS AIs are pretty much retarded at any difficulty setting, the only difference is that if you turn up the difficulty they do things faster and faster and the cheating becomes more obvious.

As for WoW, there isn't really an attainable "end" to it (I suppose technically there is an "end boss" and levels of completeness like "getting all achievements"), it's a lot more fun to just quest with your friends, play a dungeon or two, maybe do some world PvP but you're not really working towards "beating" the game (yes, there are those that look at it that way but most people I interact with don't seem to play it that way and it's really annoying when you get one of those guys in a PUG dungeon group).

So at least for me it's a combination of the changing game market, stale games and the fact that I'm just not putting that much value into "beating" games anymore (it was more important in 4th grade when you could brag to your friends). I suspect this is true for a lot of people.

You obviously haven't seen some of WoW's headgear. And I didn't even look that hard for these; I'm sure there's sillier.

WoWWiki Patch Mirror list

I downloaded 4.0.1 using Transmission (play through WINE) using the Blizzard tracker with all of the control I needed to prevent my connection being saturated.

Alternatively, you can open the WoW/Cache folder and take the .torrent file out of there. I found this a lot slower, for some reason.

As a small addendum I forgot to mention: In the beta the XP gains worked differently. Beta was a long time ago and gamers don't generally consider discussions of Beta stages to be relevant to the game at-and-post-launch. TBH your description is similar to how things worked in Beta, but it's not like there was widespread outrage because WoW didn't exactly have a huge public beta test (Or any public beta test that I can remember).

See this for more details on the situation how it was in Beta, and then scroll up to see how it's been ever since..

This is Slashdot, speak in terms we will understand: Lua is used in WoW. http://www.wowwiki.com/Lua.

I was talking about internet multiplayer.

This page claims that some versions of WC2 supported IP play, though in many cases this was over an IPX-over-IP VPN. Besides, at the time, home broadband didn't exist and dial-up was a luxury, so direct connection play was used almost like Internet play is now.

In fact, some got their start at Blizzard after making a name for themselves with what would be considered excessive EverQuest play: Furor & Tigole

If putting lots of hours into an MMO makes you happy, why not keep playing? Maybe you'll become a game designer some day.

In fact, some got their start at Blizzard after making a name for themselves with what would be considered excessive EverQuest play: Furor & Tigole

If putting lots of hours into an MMO makes you happy, why not keep playing? Maybe you'll become a game designer some day.

Easy

cried in the first Mass Effect when one of my team mates had to die (go ahead and get the lols out of the way).

lol

No, actually, not lol. Anyone World of Warcraft player who actually bothered to play out the entire Battle of Darrowshire quest chain, and didn't get misty-eyed at the ending, is a soulless undead thing.

It's a game. But it tells an affecting story. If that isn't, to the slightest degree, art, then nothing is.

Rogue Brown Dwarf Lurks In Our Cosmic Neighborhood

Fortunately, we Humans have Perception, so he's not that big of a threat.

/cast Defensive Stance

Pffft - nobody uses Thorium anymore.

/duck

As someone else said, BitTorrent is a protocol. You can actually extract the .torrent file from the Blizzard updater and use your favorite BitTorrent client to download the patch.

Offspec (Apologies for the rubbish link quality, but it gets the point across).

You can't make classes "jack of all trades." It doesn't work. Someone misses their cue to fire off a spell because they're in the middle of doing something else, and it's all gone to pot. This fictional game from Gamasutra would be great if many MMO gamers (that I've encountered) could keep track of more than one thing at a time. However, having seen healers run backwards into a new mob, tanks which run around between enemies trying to take aggro from other characters who don't need it, and damage dealers who have no concept of aggro mitigation, I'm susprised a lot of MMO players can cross the road without assistance.

Paraphrasing someone's very famous words: "If it ain't bust, don't fix it."

Schembari "Uncle Sal" Shearbolt, the arena battlemaster, is a NPC in the sewers of Dalaran and made for my dentist, Shembari Family Dentistry. There are plenty of references based on people outside the game, some famous, some not so famous. In the case of "Uncle Sal", his nephew is a developer for Blizzard and made the character based on his uncle.

As for GW going after a fan site, GW does need to protect their IP. They also need to balance allowing fans some degree of freedom without losing their IP. Unfortunately some lawyers and business executives miss the balance.

Don't blame him, he voted for Kodos!

What do big lumbering World of Warcraft Kodo mounts have to do with this?

No, 68 for IT operations across multiple datacenters sounds about right. 2 shifts during the week, 2 during the weekend (at least), and a minimum of 2 operators per shift makes for 8 operators needed for a 24/7 environment. Looking around online, it looks like they have 4 US datacenters, 1 Latin America datacenter, 1 European datacenter, 1 Korean datacenter, 4 Chinese datacenters, and 1 Taiwanese datacenter. With a support staff of 68 and 12 DCs, they have an average of 5 and 2/3s operators per DC. They actually seem understaffed to me.

It's probably not the whole story, though. Someone else posted in this story that at least some of their DCs are not ran by Blizzard, but rather by local telcos and ISPs, so the number of 68 operators may not actually include all of their support staff. It's also possible that they're running on 1 operator per shift at some or all locations. It's not recommended, but if the DC is small enough and management doesn't care if Server Foo doesn't get looked at for 2 hours because their lone operator is working on Server Bar instead (or sleeping, because it's night shift and he doesn't have anyone to smack him if he falls asleep), then it'll work out just fine for them.

No, 68 for IT operations across multiple datacenters sounds about right. 2 shifts during the week, 2 during the weekend (at least), and a minimum of 2 operators per shift makes for 8 operators needed for a 24/7 environment. Looking around online, it looks like they have 4 US datacenters, 1 Latin America datacenter, 1 European datacenter, 1 Korean datacenter, 4 Chinese datacenters, and 1 Taiwanese datacenter. With a support staff of 68 and 12 DCs, they have an average of 5 and 2/3s operators per DC. They actually seem understaffed to me.

It's probably not the whole story, though. Someone else posted in this story that at least some of their DCs are not ran by Blizzard, but rather by local telcos and ISPs, so the number of 68 operators may not actually include all of their support staff. It's also possible that they're running on 1 operator per shift at some or all locations. It's not recommended, but if the DC is small enough and management doesn't care if Server Foo doesn't get looked at for 2 hours because their lone operator is working on Server Bar instead (or sleeping, because it's night shift and he doesn't have anyone to smack him if he falls asleep), then it'll work out just fine for them.

No, 68 for IT operations across multiple datacenters sounds about right. 2 shifts during the week, 2 during the weekend (at least), and a minimum of 2 operators per shift makes for 8 operators needed for a 24/7 environment. Looking around online, it looks like they have 4 US datacenters, 1 Latin America datacenter, 1 European datacenter, 1 Korean datacenter, 4 Chinese datacenters, and 1 Taiwanese datacenter. With a support staff of 68 and 12 DCs, they have an average of 5 and 2/3s operators per DC. They actually seem understaffed to me.

It's probably not the whole story, though. Someone else posted in this story that at least some of their DCs are not ran by Blizzard, but rather by local telcos and ISPs, so the number of 68 operators may not actually include all of their support staff. It's also possible that they're running on 1 operator per shift at some or all locations. It's not recommended, but if the DC is small enough and management doesn't care if Server Foo doesn't get looked at for 2 hours because their lone operator is working on Server Bar instead (or sleeping, because it's night shift and he doesn't have anyone to smack him if he falls asleep), then it'll work out just fine for them.

No, 68 for IT operations across multiple datacenters sounds about right. 2 shifts during the week, 2 during the weekend (at least), and a minimum of 2 operators per shift makes for 8 operators needed for a 24/7 environment. Looking around online, it looks like they have 4 US datacenters, 1 Latin America datacenter, 1 European datacenter, 1 Korean datacenter, 4 Chinese datacenters, and 1 Taiwanese datacenter. With a support staff of 68 and 12 DCs, they have an average of 5 and 2/3s operators per DC. They actually seem understaffed to me.

It's probably not the whole story, though. Someone else posted in this story that at least some of their DCs are not ran by Blizzard, but rather by local telcos and ISPs, so the number of 68 operators may not actually include all of their support staff. It's also possible that they're running on 1 operator per shift at some or all locations. It's not recommended, but if the DC is small enough and management doesn't care if Server Foo doesn't get looked at for 2 hours because their lone operator is working on Server Bar instead (or sleeping, because it's night shift and he doesn't have anyone to smack him if he falls asleep), then it'll work out just fine for them.

No, 68 for IT operations across multiple datacenters sounds about right. 2 shifts during the week, 2 during the weekend (at least), and a minimum of 2 operators per shift makes for 8 operators needed for a 24/7 environment. Looking around online, it looks like they have 4 US datacenters, 1 Latin America datacenter, 1 European datacenter, 1 Korean datacenter, 4 Chinese datacenters, and 1 Taiwanese datacenter. With a support staff of 68 and 12 DCs, they have an average of 5 and 2/3s operators per DC. They actually seem understaffed to me.

It's probably not the whole story, though. Someone else posted in this story that at least some of their DCs are not ran by Blizzard, but rather by local telcos and ISPs, so the number of 68 operators may not actually include all of their support staff. It's also possible that they're running on 1 operator per shift at some or all locations. It's not recommended, but if the DC is small enough and management doesn't care if Server Foo doesn't get looked at for 2 hours because their lone operator is working on Server Bar instead (or sleeping, because it's night shift and he doesn't have anyone to smack him if he falls asleep), then it'll work out just fine for them.

No, 68 for IT operations across multiple datacenters sounds about right. 2 shifts during the week, 2 during the weekend (at least), and a minimum of 2 operators per shift makes for 8 operators needed for a 24/7 environment. Looking around online, it looks like they have 4 US datacenters, 1 Latin America datacenter, 1 European datacenter, 1 Korean datacenter, 4 Chinese datacenters, and 1 Taiwanese datacenter. With a support staff of 68 and 12 DCs, they have an average of 5 and 2/3s operators per DC. They actually seem understaffed to me.

It's probably not the whole story, though. Someone else posted in this story that at least some of their DCs are not ran by Blizzard, but rather by local telcos and ISPs, so the number of 68 operators may not actually include all of their support staff. It's also possible that they're running on 1 operator per shift at some or all locations. It's not recommended, but if the DC is small enough and management doesn't care if Server Foo doesn't get looked at for 2 hours because their lone operator is working on Server Bar instead (or sleeping, because it's night shift and he doesn't have anyone to smack him if he falls asleep), then it'll work out just fine for them.

already in-game: http://www.wowwiki.com/Argent_Pony_Bridle

>I think that's probably a sensible answer to my question, but I'm not terribly sure.
"Mana"?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mana_point

>"Karma" (something different to what I've got on SlashDot, whatever that is?)?

In the context of games, karma could be the same as mana, but with the implication that it was divine in origin.

>"Shallow power curve" (it's hard to stall your car, but it doesn't accelerate terribly fast?) ?

Words and phrases have different meanings in various contexts. In the case of RPGs and video game RPGs (and other types of games), power curve refers to how powerful characters become over time. In D&D and the games inspired by it, there is a steep power curve. Meaning that a 10th level character is vastly more powerful than a 1st level character. PlanetSide has a shallow power curve. A first level character and a maxed out character have access to the same abilities and weapons. The high level character is more flexible.

>"Ganking" (is it legal, in private, between consenting adults? Or doe it require too many consenting adults to be private?)

Go go gadget google!
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=gank
http://www.wowwiki.com/Gank
http://justfuckinggoogleit.com/bart.gif

It generally means for a high powered character to kill a low powered character. Or for a group to kill a lone player. The problem lies in that the victim has no chance to win, survive or escape. It's a by product of steep power curves.

>Is that English, some arcane dialect of Albanian, or mispronounced Klingon?

Go fuck yourself. :)

> Sounds workable at a first glance, but unless you have dictats in the game code that only certain "[game]company code" can generate new currency, then you're going to end up back in the same problem of random players generating "money" (= fuel, or bread, or beer, or whatever you're token of value is). And you'll end up back into having 3rd-world geeks wage-slaving for first-world real currency to produce in-game value. Gold farming, again.

And thus my objection to player trade driven by scarcity. In PlanetSide there is no scarcity, there's no point in trading or hording. There's nothing worth buying with real world money, aside from saving some time by purchasing a high level character.

i'd like to see emergent behaviors if consumable resources were the defacto currency.

>Problem is ... if you want to have credibly real in-game physics, then you're going to have to have some things like mineable resources, or orbital hydroponics stations that take in raw material like water-CO2-ice and trace elements and sell higher value rocket fuel and food, only taking in-game effort and sunlight to do it. Which is territory for gold farming and such like evils again.

A higher level of abstraction might do it. Instead of have a hydroponics segment producing X units of food per Y unit of time, just say "You need to build another HP segment before you can add to this station." i build a mine on an asteroid and as long as the mine exists i can build unit types A, B and C. If i have 5 mines i can build units D, E and F.

Or just prevent the quantities of stuff extracted from being traded. My mine generates 500 Iron units per hour, but i can't trade them.

The former is more RTS, the latter would be EVE - player trade. While that would appeal to me, it might not appeal to power hungry nerds who just want to live out some sociopathic fantasy. Maybe the solution is for people to just decide what kind of game they want to play. If you play EVE, expect people to destroy your days of work, expect people to run off with your money. If not, play something else. *shrugs*

Do you need me to explain what it means to put a verb between asterisks, or can you look for it yourself?