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President of MMOG Currency Seller Grilled
Garthilk writes "When I first saw the interviews with IGE's President on Gamespy and OGaming, I was disappointed. Where were the difficult questions? I got to thinking that an average gamer could try to ask the hard questions. I emailed the folks at IGE and to my surprise, they agreed to conduct an email Q&A. Not soon after sending off my questions I received
some replies. Unfortunately, some of the answers
were not to questions I sent, so I sent some follow up questions as well. To my even greater surprise, the follow up questions were answered as well.
Here is my interview, perhaps it's best to leave the journalism to the professionals."
Am I the only one who doesn't see a difference between paying $5 for Boardwalk and $5 for that +5 Mega Item of Doom to complete my Doom Set of Items?
I think that it's cheating, and I also think the PR person knows it. The only way this would be fair is if it was allowed only on servers where players would know going in that it was being done.
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OR when they create a game where the only ingame commodity is ingame skill. PLanetside did a good job of leveraging this against time-spent ingame. It balanced beause even if you had no twitch skill, you could still have a roll, like engineer or medic.
It seems to me that there's a difference between a Monopoly game, where a contest is carried out from start to finish with a set, small group of people, and an ongoing MMORPG where player-player interactions are discontinuous.
Buying items is much more disruptive in the former (imagine playing chess and having your opponent announce that he just bought a new rook on Ebay) than in the latter.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
As you said, "perhaps it's best to leave the journalism to the professionals."
(evil grin) Does anyone else feel that the interview read like Arthur "Two Sheds" Jackson?
To the interviewer: it's a good strategy to butter up your subject and take a gradual incline to the "hard questions." A valiant effort, but you need a little more practice on your incline; the three or so questions that PR answered were a little out there - it was clear from these questions that you had an agenda you were trying to further, and the Business wanted no part of that. I don't fault them at all for not answering. Tact - look it up.
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What bothers me more than even the article at OGaming is this connection between the two.
The whois record for OGAMING.COM reads as follows:
Quote:
Registrant:
OGAMING NETWORK
152 W. 57th Street
Carnegie Hall Tower, 25th Fl
New York, New York 10019
United States
Registered through: GoDaddy.com
Domain Name: OGAMING.COM
Created on: 31-Jan-00
Expires on: 31-Jan-09
Last Updated on: 10-Jan-05
Administrative Contact:
Broyer, Jean-Marc dns@ogaming.com
OGAMING NETWORK
152 W. 57th Street
Carnegie Hall Tower, 25th Fl
New York, New York 10019
United States
2122654900 Fax -- 2122657685
Technical Contact:
Broyer, Jean-Marc dns@ogaming.com
OGAMING NETWORK
152 W. 57th Street
Carnegie Hall Tower, 25th Fl
New York, New York 10019
United States
2122654900 Fax -- 2122657685
Domain servers in listed order:
NS1.OGAMING.COM
NS8.ENTHROPIA.COM
Looking up Mr. Broyer on Google yields http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cach...%22+ ige&hl=en, which reads, in part:
Quote:
Jean-Marc Broyer
- General Manager, Content Network
Jean-Marc Broyer joined IGE in September, 2004, bringing to the company more than seven years of experience at Ubi Soft Entertainment in production, business development and editorial management in the multiplayer gaming industry. At Ubi Soft, Jean-Marc most recently served as International Online Content Manager for Shadowbane, Uru and The Matrix Online. Prior to assuming that role, Jean-Marc was the Associate Producer for Shadowbane.
Taken together, these demonstrate that OGaming--and, by inclusion, TGH--was an IGE subsidiary as of the update date for the whois record: 10-Jan-05.
If the PR group were smart, they would have had their legal department coach Mr. Salyer against saying certain things that had legal ramifications -- rather than inserting obvious PR crud. Steve could have just said "There's serious legal implications to that, and I think I'm going to have to skip that one." This is a common thing to do. Quite sad when they can't even be professional enough to speak with one company voice.
I was a fairly dominant Q3 player. I hadn't played an FPS before that since Duke Nukem. I moved on after that to NWN, and played on a RP-oriented server.
Now I'm playing CoH and WoW.
Those games require only a modicum of skill. Yes, it is possible to be 'better' by knowing your character and capabilities, and in the more hectic group-battle situations your decision making can be amplified to the level it is at least somewhat significant. However, there is nowhere *near* the level of learned skill you get compared to a game like Q3 or Counterstrike. I've *always* had fantastic hand-eye coordination and reaction speed. I was competitive with the very best Street Fighter 2 players (back when Capcom used to give away full-sized videogames for winning big tournaments, back in the 90s). Reactions don't translate into skill. They may provide a ceiling, in the same way that physical fitness is a ceiling for competitiveness in a sport like tennis, but those underlying attributes are far less significant than the "learned skill" that goes along with the game.
MMORPGs place an artificial cap on the skill you can attain because the "margin of error" is so large that it is easy for a very quick-thinking, mentally agile and highly practiced opponent to have virtually no advantage over someone who is distinctly second rate. Both of them might trounce on a newb who can't play his character, but their differential of skill at the high level of play doesn't translate into a game significance.
Morever, if you think outplanning and out-thinking your opponent is not a significant part of an FPS, then you're talking out of your ass. Anyone who has watched professionals play a game like Q3 knows that the entire game is a chess match which revolves around control of the map and the resources it provides. Anticipation, timing, the ability to adapt quickly, understanding an opponent; those are the skills which make you good at the highest eschelon of skill in "twitch games". Newb players think it is about fast reactions or perfect aim, but it isn't, because at the top level, EVERY pro hits almost every shot. I only played as a warm-up snack for pros, but when owning one of the major open DM servers at qcon '02, I racked up something like 80 straight hits with the railgun on Q3DM17. My aim and movement was pro-level; I'd still get absolutely *owned* against a pro playing 1v1, because they do that sort of thing automatically, but they back it up with beautiful execution, perfect timing, fluent adaptation, and hard-to-crack strategies for controlling a map. Watching pros play that game was like watching chess. They'd feint, move to control resources. They'd fall back and grab secondary objectives while their opponent was busily getting a primary one they thought they couldn't effectively contest. They'd viciously press their advantage; sacrafice several points in order to get a positional or strategic advantage to put them back in the driver's seat, and so on.
It's all well and good for IGE to market their "services" as people paying for the time spent in earning the items/money involved, but this isn't exactly creating a "new market".
Sure, you can till your own field and grow your own potatoes, but not many of us have the resources to do that, and so we buy potatoes from the store. Farmers and grocers are providing a service to us.
What IGE does is akin to squatting on your farm and growing potatoes there. If you're already using the land, they'll just take your potatoes. If you aren't, then you weren't missing the land anyway. And then they proceed to sell back your own potatoes to you, under the premise that "you weren't growing them anyway".
For some people, sure, they are providing a service. But all they're really doing is effectively holding the in-game services for ransom, which deprives those whom choose not to pay IGE the opportunity to acquire said riches.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
Guess what, Steve. I voted with my wallet. I walked away from FFXI because they weren't doing shit about your "employees." And I know more people that have done the same, than haven't. They went to games like WoW where the terms of service are actually enforced, too.
We, the gamers, do not like your service. A bunch of Skr1pt Kiddiez who crow about twinking their characters with their parents' credit cards like your service, but we don't like those idiots either.
After qualifying for a spot in the competition, they then decide to sell that spot
Almost the same thing happened at the Athens Olympics. Ian Thorpe false started in the Australian qualifying, and was disqualified. Then the guy who won gave his place away to him. I reckon it was wrong, but it doesn't really relate the same way in a MMORPG because its perfectly legal to give items away to others without real money transactions.I have a suggestion, which it seems people are already following. Why don't we just let the market decide the way things should work?
I think what will happen is the publishers will eventually grant real legal rights to the objects and avatars in that world. The players seem to want this, and seem to understand that this is fair.
If I were into this sort of thing, I would begin forming enterprises that facilitate this. For example, if your avatar owns a lot of expensive things, how about you get an insurance policy that will pay our real dollars in the event the items are lost in certain situations? What about in-game escrow services - avatars who belong to particular groups who have built up a reputation for being responsible in holding items and in-game cash? How about time-share contracts, where items are loaned but only for certain times of the day? What about item rental?
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
I've never seen anyone complain about the drop rate on items, or the spawn rate on some of the rarer monsters. IF your mythical friend actually exists - which seems unlikely since you had to hide behind the screen of an Anonymous Coward - then he had bad luck, no more, no less.
What I *HAVE* seen, time and again, is players being PO'ed that one of your fucking camp-bots is sitting right in the zone waiting for the same monster for days on end, and then having to go to the auction house or worse yet, some shithole operation like IGE, to get the item.
Then again, I long ago signed on to a petition that Square make all the Rare monster drops a sure thing, but Rare/EX instead so that they wouldn't face the campbot problem. Did they listen? NO.
Neither did they enforce their restrictions against 'bots.
So I left.
Regarding the question about IGE trying to cut a deal with the game developers/publishers...
IGE has indeed approached one company that I know about, and has probably approached others. From what I hear IGE is always eager to cut some kind of a deal. The theory I've heard discussed is that they are in search of legitimacy from the publishers of MMOG's. Any legitimacy they can obtain from one group could be used to leverage more acceptance from others.
I suspect that the "service" that IGE and other brokers provide is actually a net boon to the game companies since it provides more total value to their game for their user population. That is, the game company gets more revenue by allowing a bit of "illegal" trading ==> thereby providing high value for some players and a little bit lower value for the rest. As long as it is officially illegal the game company reserves the right to crack down should they see the practice actually cut into their profits (more unhappy customers than happy ones instead of the other way around).
http://www.okratas.com/modules.php?op=modload&name =News&file=article&sid=58
The Monopoly analogy is spot on, AFAICS. MMORPGs provide enough factors that addicted gamers can come up with arguments to convince themselves that what they're doing isn't like buying Boardwalk.
To me it seems like Magic:The Gathering. I was addicted to that for a long time and spent far too much money on cards (can't have a Blue/Red Direct Damage/Jitsu deck without Jokalhaups, Iceberg and a bunch of other rares). You can avoid the problems, but in an open competition the guy with the most expensive deck wins. I fudged the issue for ages, justifying all the money I spent on booster packs and cards.
In a small group of friends, you can play controlled tournaments, with limits on cards or random cards so money doesn't come into it. But go out into the wider world and you can't do that any more. Eventually I realised that I was only doing it because I was addicted, and gave all my cards away (and yes, I do regret giving away my multiple tournament winning, very expensive main deck for free *now*, but at the time it made sense).
Doesn't it cheapen the game and reduce the impact of skill if any PvP or vaguely competitive aspect of the game can be decided by the fact that one player can afford to buy a sword of death+10?
Don't get me started on the fact that people play games that AFK macros can play for them, and so boring that they'd pay to have someone else play for them.
But why not a secondary market in services? Stop selling stuff because you don't own the stuff anyway (if you believe the publishers). On the other hand, nobody owns your time. There's no reason you, either as an individual or agent of a corporate entity, can't use your time to help out another player for pay. You've paid your subscription, you're following the EULA, no cheating is involved, nothing is being done that couldn't be done for free without breaking any terms of service.
Some examples:
- Corpse Retrieval- lost your soul/corpse/shard/whatever in a skeery dungeon right next to the uberunderlord? We'll dispatch a Level 99 Brawnmeister to escort you safely to it and back to the newbie yard.
- Tour Guide- Want to see all the cool sights in the game? We'll provide you with safe escort.
- Quest help - Last quest item near a mob that's just to uber for you? We'll get you help.
- Group help - Tired of fellow players who jack your groups, can't play their class, act like idiots, get your character killed? Need just one more character to round out your group? We'll send out 2,3, as many characters as needed to get the job done. You get the exp, you get the loot, we fight for you (to the "death," if that's what it takes to get your quest done and keep your character safe)
- Entertainment - Are you lonely? Need someone to "keep you company" in the Owerly Inn? We'll send a member of the race/gender/alignment of your choice to a location where you can "converse" in private.
- Match Making - Need to hook up with someone who has similar likes and dislikes both in-game and RL? Take our Xanthian Compatibility Survey and we'll find the right troll for you!
All the controversy goes away because the secondary market company becomes a broker for services, not items. No more question of who owns in-game geld/items/whatever. It's no different than paying someone to help you mow the lawn.Note: My exposure to MMORPG-ing is limited to EverQuest 2; do your own mental translation to the MOG of your choice.