Pay to Play II - Project Entropia

Gonzago writes: "God knows how many hours I spent mining or chopping down trees while playing Ultima Online. The dedication (spelled a-d-d-i-c-t-i-o-n) I had to that game would have made me some serious cash if I applied it to a real life job. Now I can have my cake and eat it too! At least that's what the people behind Project Entropia would have me believe. Not only does the premise behind the game look cool, but players will trade amongst one another with real money. Anyone want to buy some armor?" There's an article on CNN which briefly covers the game's premise: pay the company for all the equipment you need in-game, and it all slowly degrades - Entropia, get it?

Comments

Oops

[sllort]

A redundant article, so I get to make a redundant post.

Selling virtual items in-game was pioneered by this text based MUD, which is financed entirely by sales of virtual items to players.

And since we're talking about "virtual addiction", take a look at their MUD Addiction Page. Now substitute the word "play" for the words "get high", and read it again. Scary, isn't it?

Re:Oops

[alansz]

And by so doing, Medievia has been accused of violating the license of the Dikumud source code on which it is (by admission of its creator as well as by inspection of source code) drived, which prohibits any commercial use.

Of course, this new Entropia project gets to write their own license, assuming they're not basing their code on one of the many fine free mud codebases (where your equipment might degrade through use, but not due to economic externalities!)

Re:Oops

[nomadic]

Selling virtual items in-game was pioneered by this text based MUD [medievia.com], which is financed entirely by sales of virtual items to players.

They've been criticized for years for that policy; they're based on DikuMUD code, which is a pretty open license. You're just not supposed to remove the original authors credits from the login screen, or charge money for playing the MUD. Medievia did both.

The whole thing is sort of like the Magic card game in my mind; rather than give everyone an equal playing field, they let those with more money buy their way to success.

Who wants to bet the frequency of good equipment appearing in the game naturally will be reduced if their profits slip...

Alms for an ex-leper?

[TotallyUseless]

the article mentions that people who dont wish to give money to the game will still be able to play. I wonder if this means there will be a whole society of non paying gamers wandering the streets of the game, begging for handouts, thieving gold when they can to save up for a tunic...

I've been following this for some time

[xX_sticky_Xx]

I signed up for beta testing many months ago in hopes of trying it out. I wasn't accepted into any of the pools but still held out hope of a public beta.

A couple of months back I received an email from the beta mailing list stating that they were going public with a "commercial beta test". This test would entail everyone paying in $10 to help test the ability of their servers to handle the financial transactions. This sounded quite contrary to their statements that there would be no need to put any money into the system. Here's a copy of the email:

Dear Sir/ Madam You have previously registered your interest to be a Beta tester for Project Entropia. MindArk is now preparing to start the commercial trial phase. An expanded panel of users will be selected to participate in the trials. Those are in the addition to the users that are already in the Beta phase II.

The commercial trial phase will include many of the planned features of the finished product. One of which is the financial system that has been creating ripple effects far beyond the MMORPG market. This financial system will be designed around real money exchanged into a virtual currency. Giving users a chance of actually make real money while inside the Project Entropia Virtual Universe.

Project Entropia will be free to obtain and use, only your connection fee to the Internet will cost you anything, there will be no monthly fees payable to MindArk. The fact that real money will be an issue in Project Entropia requires us to test this system to its full extent. This is why we are searching for users who are willing to insert small amounts of money in exchange for the chance to make much more.

In addition to the funds inserted into Project Entropia, MindArk will add funds to the Virtual World; an excess of 100.000 USD will be available for users to claim inside Project Entropia. This is a first in history; you can actually make a small fortune and at the same time be one of the first to explore Project Entropia.

The transfers are necessary for testing mass transaction flows through the system servers. And will help us track funds through the entire system, this is necessary to ensure that the system is fully functional when we head into the open phase. To achieve this, we elect to create a system where an avid user stands a fairly good chance of making a small fortune by testing this product.

Note that the transfer requirements does not constitute a change of the original specifications, Project Entropia will be free to obtain and use, according to everything that has been stated previously, nothing has changed on that point. This fee is only imposed to test the systems handling real money transactions. Without these tests we would have no chance of providing the service of real money transfers safely.

If you are interested in participating in these trials, you have to follow the link below. You will not be required to pay anything at this point. You only have to agree to the rules stated for a commercial trial participation. http://www.project-entropia.com/phase3/firstpage.a sp

Kind Regards.

Erik Johnels Mindark AB

Note that they state in the email that they aren't going back on their word; this deposit is merely part of a test to see if their servers can handle the transactions.

After getting my hopes dashed by another MMORPG in the making (DAWN, which turned out to be complete vaporware) I was sceptical about the reality of Project Entropia...more so after they asked for money to participate in a beta. I went to their IRC channel to see if I could find anything out about previous betas, but all beta testers must abide by a strict non-disclosure policy which even prohibits them from saying they're in the beta (sounds a little too convenient). A lot of the talk in IRC was people planning their Project Entropia pyramid schemes.

Something tells me that this is simply a petty scam.