Slashdot Mirror
Real Money Inside in MMORPGs?
Cranial writes "Sony Interactive expressly forbids the selling of Everqest or Everquest II ingame items or characters for money, but why? Imagine Massively Multiplayer Games where you can actually cash out your loot in the real world.
What if that jewel in the dragon hoard was actually a digital title for the Hope Diamond or a real ancient artifact?
This article on Programmers Heaven proposes a new economic model for MM games allowing free exchange of game money and items in the real world. Essentially it is a hybridization between online gaming (casino) and MM roleplaying games. Fascinating concept."
Ah ha! I can trade in all my equipment for a used coffee cup!
So this is like the Hacker Court at Black Hat last Wednesday?
Has any MMORGP gone totally without duping problems? Not to my knowledge. Star Wars has only been out a month, and already had some (small) dupe bugs.
When that happens....maybe.
A modern day witchhunt.
There.com has a somewhat similar concept. While not strictly an MMORPG, they do allow for the conversion of Dollars into ThereBucks.
Or at least they used to when I played the beta months ago before they started spamming my inbox.
But when Blizzard first came out with Diablo 2 Expansion, I was one of those ppl that exploited an easy level-up opportunity..
which allowed me to get to level 95 in 4 days.. after that, I went all-item hunting, and just picking up tons of stuff, muling and all...
and.. sold most of it immediately on ebay.. since it was the only way to do it before cheating/duping and all those things happen, while items were actually worth money, I made about 500$, more than my money back!
ya.. supply and demand is cool, too bad Sony's soo against it..
I'm not the devil.. just his advocate.
relation real monkey directly to game money is currently done in project entropia, www.projectentropia.org
you can put money in the system to get game money, or take game money out of the system as real money. Its been around for a while. think it was mentioned in a story some time ago.
Because this is what roleplaying is all about. Loot.
There (www.there.com) is already kinda doing this. You can use your credit card to buy ThereBucks at like $1.00 == ~$T1030.00. In addition to this you can create products - clothing, cars ect that you can sell and make more ThereBucks.
With ThereBucks you can buy transportation things (buggys, hoverboards) and all sorts of clothing - Some of which is created by There and a lot is created by There users. Theres even an auction system.
Its pretty sweet.
/* Lobster Stick To Magnet!*/
Although this seems like a "new-economy" idea, I can't say I'm a big fan. Firstly, gambling is 21+ and restricted to certain zones. Secondly, this promotes very anti-social behavior--people crouching away at their computers, beating wombat after wombat to get the extra gold and items. It takes the *fun* out of the game, as well as the *realism*. RPG stand for role-playing-game, and if all you're doing is leaching off of this world to try and make the most bucks you can as your primary form of employment, you may be compromising the fun of the game for other casual gamers.
stops becomming a game, and become employment. And all that implies.
You will also lose in revenue from people who want to play for fun. because they will never get an opportunity to get 'valauable items'
what happens when you spen 20 hourse getting a real valuable item, then the company decided to put 1000 od them in the game the next day? How valauble is something that can be created infinite times?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
A dupe bug would bring the economics of such a system crashing down.
The advantage to a system where in-game objects don't have (recognized) real value is that bugs aren't lethal to the parent company, and the game can be revised and the game database directly edited with impunity.
Make money in the game real, and suddenly the parent company has to be a lot more careful, and is a lot more liable if things go wrong (as actual damage has provably occurred to the players).
...would never let me play this one. Then again, who needs a wife when your living digitally...
One of the biggest reasons that SOE forbids these transfers is that they cannot take on the responsibilities of making the transactions secure. What about duping bugs? Or an 'accidental' deletion? Fraud? Fraud is a really major problem in SWG right now.
It just isn't worth the headache for them. Maybe some other games can solve this.
Project Entropia already do this.
As is people don't already have enough of an excuse to hack characters and grief other players anyway. Now they want to add additional incentives to do so.
I don't think I'd want to play in a game world that activly encouraged that.
This is a great idea but it brings up a host of new problems. Who owns online items? What legal recourse is there if someone cheats? Who is liable for your money. etc.
People spend so much time and effort on MMORPGs that they should allow people to actually make a little money.
I'm guessing that players would game the system by forming coalitions where, through some of the player's characters doing suboptimal actions (from the individuals POV), the coalition would make money. Could make a mockery of the game.
"And this is my boy, Sherman. Speak, Sherman." "Hello." "Good boy."
I think the problem here is liability. If a software glitch caused objects to vanish, or improvements to the game shifted the balance and (inadvertedly) change the value of items, people would suddenly lose real money, and might sue.
I wonder how well an MMPORG would work as a tax shelter? Instead of getting money in the real world, you just get it dumped straight into your "Everquest IV: The IRS Has No Power Here" account. And if people would claim loss of game currency on as an itemized deduction.
Of course, sales taxes would be a pain in the ass. "Sorry, I'm not paying CA sales tax when I'm obviously performing this transaction in Midgaard." And if someone beats your character's sorry ass and takes your money, you'd have a hell of a time convincing the cops to track down one Umbrak the Barbarian, 8.7 feet tall, green skin, no hair, weight about 430 pounds, wielding a large spiked club and resistant to cold spells.
This just doesn't sound like a good idea.
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
for $2. Any takers?
word.
Until someone "creates" items though some hack, just like every other MMORPG, and sells them off for real money.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
I can see it now. 25 years into the future. The country is one big communist state. Everyone is poor and machines do all the work. But the state provides high speed internet connections and free Linux-based game machines. People spend 14 hours a day in a huge virtual world. The game is called Matrix. People dont care. Children are weaned on it. People meet each other on it. They practise their religion in the system. They form armies behind their ideologies and fight wars with various virtual technologies. Noone cares what happens outside. ...or do they!
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Let's see, you put in money, play a game, hope to get more money out than you put in... hmmm... sounds kind of familiar....
It's called GAMBLING.
I don't think it's a very good idea.
Difference though is that you have to constantly buy items in Entropia and they wear over time. The proposed method through Everquest allows for a total externalization of cashflow from the game where items are bought and sold for real money making the only required cost being the couple bucks each month for an EQ account. This way everything you have could be worth money with an actual chance for investment rather than forced degeneration of value over time by the game.
Mind you I don't like the idea either way, seems like an excuse to get some evercrack: "but I swear, this is how I make my living... yes it's from mom's basement"...
-Matt
--- Need web hosting?
man, this idea comes up over, and over, and over again..
the problem is it's virtually impossible to design a hackproof system -- nearly all modern mmorpgs have had instances of bugs where people dupe items or otherwise illegally generate money. eventually word gets out about them because everyone wants that advantage, but it's really different when $ is involved; if someone on one of these games found an exploit like that then they could embezzle practically unlimited amounts of $. and even worse, if an exploit became widespread then the whole economy could be totally screwed up, and people would be losing *real money*.
so the problem always ends up that no developer could reasonably shoulder that much liability -- it's bad enough with people bitching about losing imaginary items but if someone gets cleaned out of actual assets and $ then (ianal, but i believe) they can sue and the developer could actually be found liable.
my 2c
-fren
"Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?"
Except that NOBODY needs diablo II weapons and armor to survive. All he did was make a profit by selling to morons. Nothing wrong with that, nobody made them buy his stuff, they obviously wanted it enough to pay for it. That is how economics works.
I'm kinda assuming you wrote that post as a joke, but in case you didn't....
Finkployd
I don't understand what you mean "other people's problems".. I actually started each item at 1 dollar, and let the market decide how much it was worth, and I literally sold everything..
I might have been vague on what I meant by "exploit".. I don't mean cheating the server or anything, it's just that when the expansion just came out, anyone that plays it knows that one of the area "Bloody Hill" was insanely stupid - if you were a sorcerer, you literally can kill everything without being touched the way the level was designed - it was an design error which I think on the later patches, they made it harder..
and I just happened to ride on that design mistake - I didn't use any programs to "exploit" anything.. so maybe my choice of words weren't that accurate.. unlike the dupers and hackers and what not...
I don't take anything away from anybody - I didn't force anyone to bid on my stuff on ebay or anything.. if someone values an item at 20$, then I will sell it to them..
If you meant that as that I didn't make the game, well, I did invest tons of time on it, and I guess it's just different opinions.. then I'll just agree to disagree..
I'm not the devil.. just his advocate.
The idea of linking Real World(tm) money to MMORPG ingame money is exactly what Project Entropia is all about. You start out with the bare minimum of clothes, tools and skills and are only able to upgrade and buy stuff with in game money, which you don't have yet. To get money in the game you have two options:
1) Exchange real money for ingame money
2) Make money in the game by performing services, selling items, doing stuff, trading, gambling...
The most novel aspect of the game is that it allows you to exchange ingame money back into real money too.
Some things to note about this game is that stuff deteriorates, so over time without updating your items they would lose their monetary value.
What I liked about the idea is that for a certain amount of real money you can buy yourself the skills and tools to keep you busy for a certain amount of time. Then when you want to continue playing you have to either put in an enormous effort to make money in the game, or simply add some more real money. You are paying for playing. Not sure if it is very well balanced in Project Entropia, but the idea is interesting.
Less well off geeks who spend lots of time building characters up will sell to a high bidder who has money in real life and therefore the new owner of the character/item will not know how to use it as well as the geek who spent months getting it.
The game will end up with a bunch of more wealthy less experienced people running the lives of the geeks who spent all their time aquiring the items. The FUN of these games is that ANYONE regardless of status in the REAL world can become someone great. If money from the real world gets involved, that destroys the fantasy because not everyone will be on an equal footing when they start out.
That is one of the big reasons I think these games are so much fun.
Now before I venture any further into the realm of dirty-hippie-liberal, let me say that I am completely behind the idea of economic discrimination (that is, allowing economics to determine the outcome of social order, etc.). But I relish the opportunity to have a "Fresh Start" in a game, not being hindered or helped by my real-world life.
If the gamers want this, then I say let them have it (I'm sure the game COs can levy a nice 5% tax on sales and make a killing). But I would plead with the COs to create servers that disallow such activities so those of us who relish the escapism and real-world separation of the MMORPG can continue to carve out our own paths in game, regardless of any social positions we might have gotten ourselves into.
Anyone ever had the misfortune to actually run any sort of online gaming environment?
Ever had to deal with the piles of complaints from 12 year olds upset that they lost something of no real-life value?
And you want now give them things WITH real life value they can complain about losing?
Gee, I wonder why the gaming companies aren't signing up for that.
paintball
> Not only are they going to be addicted to a new game, they'll bankrupt them too.
It must be a pathetic lifestyle, being so addicted to a game that it cuts into your Slashdot time.
Now I'm off to do something constructive - after I check to see whether any of today's stories have any new posts.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I think the subject says it all but just in case: Sure some people are getting kicks out of the idea of getting money from playing a game, others are talking about technical issues (ie duping) and still others are asking legal questions. But what about game balance? It used to be the dangerous palyer was the one who was more obsessed with the game, who invested the most time into it, and casual gamers have had issues with those players since the days of the MUD. But now you make reall world money directly affect in game resources. All of sudden the powergamers aren't necessarily the obsessed ones (who it can be argued, deserve their status since they got it purely via the game anyway) but the guy who has the most cash to throw around. A game where real money = game power will have 0 casual gamers. The rich powergamer won't even have to invest as much time as the powergamer of yore, merely throwing cash at the game. Part of the appeal of these games is that they are a fantasy, even if you aren't rich in real life you can still own an in game castle. Now all of a sudden that benefit is gone. I gurantee you if you allow un-controlled influx of real money into a game world inflation will make it impossible for someone to "just play". Why sell something for a price that is attainble in game when someone else is willing to buy it for a higher price and can bring in extra-game resources to pay for it. I don't know about you, but paying the monthly fee is pain in the ass enough, I'm not gonna spend additional monies just remain competitve in-game when I should be able to remain competitve by playing the game.
Why not fork?
The theorem used here is trying to create an entire society, not just a profitable MMORPG.
If you even begin to attempt to do something of this magnitude, the first lawsuit will be the end of it.
Or the first death. Don't think someone won't track another user and kill his punk ass because he stole his deed to some ruby in Nebraska.
Put simply, we don't have the computing capacity, or bandwidth, or security to support this system. These are the kinds of games that movies are based on, and parody. Someone could potentially spend years of their life in a game like this, doing whatever they please. Running a farm, running a shop, whatever.
This is just not possible at the moment. The graphics aren't good enough, the bandwidth isn't there (think of a New York sized metropolitan area--and the massive lag associated with it).
Of course it's a good idea. A virtual society with real money and real consequences, hell, before you know it you'll have mini-governments out there, plus the added intrigue of bounty hunters who go find the bastard that killed your cousin's character and stole all his loot.
You'll vote on the president of a virtual world or continent or server or however you want to specify it. Of course, for this truly to work, it would be game-wide, and that kind of operation would require millions of people to use it to create a revenue stream good enough to make it viable.
Yes, that gold site isn't a "currency" but you damn well better believe the first time a 10 year old earns $10k off of something there would be law quicker than you can say Cease and Decist.
There are too many variables, too much shit that goes along with this kind of idea to make it never get beyond what it already is: a child's perfect dream world, with no corruption or inflation, with no abuse or discourse.
Keep hope alive, but don't even imagine this coming into existence in the next 10 years.
It reminds me of Molyneux's new game, The Movies. He pontificates on the viability of creating all of the "main parts" of your favorite movies with the game. Including Star Wars or Terminator or Fried Green Tomatoes. And you just know it's going to be a lame console game with a PC version that is probably above average. He dreams big, but he hasn't hit the mark in a long time. Black and White's UI-less UI was limp, but he tried.
And its ideas like this that are required for a true cyberspace to come into being.
Good luck.
I suppose that money laundering would be a huge problem. The company running the game would be required to log all transactions between players and to verify their identity. Plus, what happens when the database server with the financial information gets hacked?
where's all that Karma?
1) Taxation on profits. If people were making a living in this virtual world, the tax collectors would want their take. Just like casinos, the game companies would end up with some responsibility for collecting witholding for states, federal, and maybe even foreign countries. And just like casinos, they would probably need to somehow allow players to track losses as well for tax purposes. This is complicated by the fact that most of what is going on can easily be disguised with "gifts", "barter" transactions, with cash being exchanged on the side.
2) If a bug "poofs" a valuable item, and they support the idea that the item can have a real cash value, then they just became liable for the loss. Same with dupe bugs as has already been mentioned. The same idea would apply to "fraudulent" trades made by players, making the game company potentially liable for the players' loss.
3) Suspending or banning a player could potentially lead to a lawsuit based on loss of income, and the game company might have to prove to a court that the suspension/banning was justified, almost like an employment related lawsuit.
4) Can you say money laundering? Think a game company wants their name on that?
5) Any change to the game that affected the economy (which would probably be most of them) could end up screwing certain players. If you thought of the items and virtual money as stocks and real cash, the game company basically has the power to screw prices however they want. If they're officially supporting these cash equivalents, they would most likely be accused of corruption on a daily basis.
The list could go on, I think you get the idea. I'm sure companies will continue to try this idea, but as someone already mentioned, the other effect is that if a significant number of people are in it for the money, it will basically suck most of the fun out of the game for the people who are "just playing", and the whole model would likely collapse because no one would play so the economy would never get off the ground (basically you'd have a big lack of consumers).
By *not* supporting it officially and at least discouraging the idea if not strictly policing it, I think it actually can "work" better, because the company shifts all the liability to the players, and minimizes the effect of it on the game so that players don't feel like they're surrounded by ripoff artists.
As usual for a /. poster, IANAL, but I thought the US had laws stating the federal government is the sole issuer of legal tender within its borders. Naturally, people can barter whatever they want (which is really all currency is a proxy for), but whoever is running the exchange could run into some legal issues. For example, would the company running the MMORPG be considered a bank under US law and have to follow all the accompanying restrictions? Basically, by insisting that nothing in the game has any equivalent to real property, game operators avoid a massive list of potential legal issues. This proposal would seem to wade -- hell, belly-flop -- into those issues headfirst.
it was a text-only mud my freshman year of college: ..
you are in room with a dirt floor. you see:
life
> get life
Connection closed by foreign host.
%
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
I say, bring it on. I'd rather get money out of a game of skill (besides poker) than with a game of luck (fuck blackjack.)
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
Deja Vu. Back in the May 1985 issue of Dragon Magazine, I published a story Catacomb where the main character was trying to raise cash by playing a mulit-user dungeon crawling game. I often wondered why on-line gambling went with casino games instead of following the D&D model.
You can't charge for game items because SCO has patented the business model of charging for fictional things.
I'd bet dollars to donuts that if /.ers could transfer their mod points, some would be for sale on eBay.
Fun with Anagarams! LADS HOST, SHALT DOS. HAS DOLTS. AD SLOTHS, HATS SOLD. ASS HO, LTD.
You'll want to check out their thoughts on tax shelters in MMORPGs and the risks involved.
Even with duping most online economies are very stable (although I haven't seen many duping problems in EQ).
The real problem is the law. If The EQ pp is given a dollar value, then "real-world" legal issues come into play. I could definitly imagine a case where an expensive item drops (EQ fungi tunic sells for about $195) and there is a law suit because someone unfairly looted the item.
There is also gambling in EQ. If I can go buy pp, gamble, and cash in my winnings (presuming I win), then EQ becomes a casino.
These are all legal issues that sony can avoid by making sales of items illegal.
. If money from the real world gets involved, that destroys the fantasy
I agree, games are a fantasy, an escape from the day to day pressures of reality. If I wanted to see people lie to get money, cheat to get money, choose profit over human compassion etc. then all I need to do is....um, go out the front door.
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
Although, it would be funny to hear Alan Greenspan talk about the effects of nerfing the Druid farm class on the US GDP.
Phemur
The reason the casino can entice people into playing an always losing game is that they offer games with slightly negative expectations (say 48c on the dollar returns), but huge variances/std. deviations
in most mmorpgs, games do have some variance built in, but it's hardly as random as a casino. If you're level 8 and the wombat is level 9, you're going to win 90% of the time with small variance.
In the economic model proposed here, the implication is that you would expend say 100 micrograms of gold worth of energy killing the wombat, in order to loot 99 from its corpse. If it always costs 100 ug to kill the wombat and you always get 99ug, that's not an interesting game, it's just "pay to play", and people already pay a monthly fee and probably aren't keen to pay more than current games' rates.
One alternative would be to make the outcomes more variable, which is inconsistent with what most people consider "fun" (at equal levels say making killing the wombat a coin toss would result in very frustrated players -- especially if death has meaningful consequences).
Another alternative would be to make the loot more variable (you expend 100ug of energy to kill a wombat that is worth 99ug with a stdev of say 20ug... a long term losing proposition but an interesting short run one). This would look so much like gambling that it would run off non-gamblers, and would do a poor job of competing against establishments that offer gamblers wagers that can be quickly resolved without all the distraction of wombats and +10 bandyclefs -- and they're called casinos.
Perhaps there's a middle ground, but to me the answer is just to allow free exchange of the digital goods for real money, and have the game provider take a small transaction fee for in-game transfers. Their advantage over eBay would be convenience, the ability to provide a highly liquid market (they have all the information regarding what items are wanted/for sale) and they could bolster reliability by running the whole transaction atomically (transferring the money and promised items simultaneously).
My analysis completely ignores the myriad possible technical glitches that would plague the proposed system (duping, hacking, whatever), and it also ignores the economic implications of them pegging their in-game currency to a real commodity (be it dollars, gold, or whatever). These companies should be running fun games, not central banks, and the author should study the history of fixed exchange rates and the gold standard to see how that can all go terribly wrong and bankrupt anyone underwriting an online game using the proposed mechanisms.
A reoccuring idea for MMORPG's is that a players online food consumption and physical activity should have an effect on their avatar's physical appearance. Even though this was not the case in Everquest, it used to be a joke that some people would go to great efforts to get exotic foods and healthy vegetables for their online personas while subsisting on ramen noodles and kraft dinner themselves!
From the above article:
"In fact, by selling in-game perishables such as food and water to the players, the monthly subscription fee can be eliminated."
Just imagine what would happen if virtual food and real food came into direct resource competition!! I can just imagine a player carefully planning his avatar's dietary intake for optimum health using high quality virtual foods he was able to afford by eating only frozen bean burrito's himself!
Unfortunately, this will never be the case in virtual worlds.
Not only would it be radically unfair to Sony to sue them because they "nerfed your uber wizard", it also would not be fair to sue them because they did it between the time you offered your uber-wizard for sale on Ebay, and the time your customer got it. Now your customer says you didn't deliver what you promised, but you feel like you did. That is why none of the companies that run these games can *afford* to let you transact in their goods. If they nerf wizards and two hundred people see their ebay value go from $2000 to $20, it's not fair to ask Sony to stand up against the potential property-damage-or-depravation lawsuits.
But even if they *could* write a bullet-proof non-indemnity agreement, (something you can't do in America, or most "civilized" societies) then consider the flip side...
Sony will always have human people working there (coders, dbas) who could cheat, or man-in-the-middle you to death. Or maybe just grant their friend permission to eavesdrop on all your conversations, or just give them every magic item in the game.
Catch 22.
As a side note, imagine the disaster if the game did become a standard place-of-commerce. Then people would have a "right" to participate, and could sue to be let in the game. No more tossing the Griefers, since that would be discrimination. And the ACLU would be right there to make sure that the blind and deaf had access as well, since "It's not just a game anymore". Ick.
Wired magazine did a whole article about this a few months ago. But I don't recall what month. A google search turned up this article, but it's not quite what I remember.
The gist of it was, even though the Everquest license argreement prohibits selling virtual goods for real dollars, people do it anyway. And you can figure out what the exchange rates are. Turns out that the total "economy" of the Everquest world exceeds that of some third-world economies. You even get weird situations where people are clicking their people around very boring jobs, "because their clan needs the money."
Where is the line between game and work?
Magic: The Gathering has the advantage that you can "cash out" in real-world decks. So if you find that the online game goes sucky, you can play in real life with your friends. If you find that Evercrack has gone bad, you can just move on.
But if you have real money invested in a MMORPG, and you feel it goes sour (e.g. parent company start printing "money", rampant duping or other things wrecking the game experience) you don't really have no recourse, nor any way out except trying to really "sell out", which is usually at a considerable loss.
I wouldn't want to invest in virtual property that way, though I have a Magic deck (not online though) whose value is also quite "virtual" since they're really just a bunch of playing cards...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Some people were recently complaining about losing their jobs to robots. Then wouldn't this be a great opportunity to gain money out of gaming? Basicaly, "geeks" are selling their time to build powerful characters and/or to gain special artefacts, and other people are ready to pay for that time. I can't see where the problem is. We all know that cocooning is growing with the internet. New "virtual worlds/games" could be created, allowing people to live and work in 100% virtual environments. As long as their is demand, no matter how silly the product is, you can sell it.
You are more than the sum of what you consume. Desire is not an occupation.
Once the monetary link is established then there can also be civil or legal actions taken for damage of "Personal" property. I can only imagine how long it will be until a lawsuit is introduced that someone through maliciousness or negligence destroys someones Property (i.e. character or a characters stuff)
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
You all seem to be missing the point. I keep seeing over and over how you say that the rich people would have teh l33t characters. Only problem is nobody would buy the stuff these people are selling because nobody would be there to play the game, they would all just be tryin to make some money. If you suddenly made it legal and even encouraged players to sell in-game items suddenly everybody would be selling and there would be nobody to buy. Then again what do I know?
Trust Your Technolust
www.projectentropia.com They already use this model, they take 5% exchange rate each way, and they decay all of their weapons. Now if their gameplay didn't suck so bad (tons of lag etc.) it would be really fun, as it is, well..
Within the arms of tragedy, there is little comfort in being right.
Is there an economically viable idea here? Yes - see Magic the Gathering Online - people are willing to shell out real money for unreal versions of the same items sold on real cardboard.
.com MMRPG for a living.
Will MMRPG maintanance turn into suit-and-tie work with as many lawyers and and accountants protecting as technical staff? Yes - this will be like anything else in the world - where concerns over ownership and liability rise to overshadow the actual work being sold.
But would I ever want to play in such a world? No. RPGs I enjoy are a blank slate where everyone starts equal no matter what their real world background. For me, they are a frontier fantasy more than a hack-and-slash fantasy. Once the frontier is settled and the normal inequalities of the real world take over, the whole enjoyment for me in being there is gone.
I'd rather make my money in the real world doing real work. Well, except that my real work is spent on a network doing virtual grunt work for people I'll never meet. I play the
This is just a blindingly cool idea.