A Gaming God For Dollars A Day

Wired is reporting on the new "Gamepal" service, which offers up the chance to MMOG players of renting a character in an online world for only a few dollars a day. From the article: "GamePal customers pay a $300 deposit, $150 for the first month and $130 for each subsequent month for access to their choice of 50 accounts (available initially) for 14 popular MMOs, including EverQuest, Star Wars Galaxies, City of Heroes and Ultima Online. Newcomers to these games who aren't sure where they want to devote their time are in luck: GamePal allows them to try out what they want."

Comments

This is new?

[Crimson Dragon]

I always get a kick out of people being shocked over the financial gain in MMORPG commodities. The sale of in-game gold, powerleveling, and now character renting are more common then they ever were. This is a disaster for the MMORPG community.

I am an MMORPG vet. I spent many good hours of my youth, and now my adulthood, on UO, DAOC, EQ, EQ2, WoW, and the like. While the gaming experiences were different, a common element arises in this form of gameplay. You can ALWAYS tell the difference between a player at the maximum level who earned it, and a player who just picked up the account the other day on Ebay or through other forms of sale. You can always tell the difference between the person who quested for their items long and hard at the expense potentially of his/her sanity and the person who doesn't. It is that simple.

I could proceed to flame here. These players are less skilled, they decentralize the community attachment at the higher echelons of the game. They have no right to do this.

But they do.

Most of these account sales, sadly, come with the original product CDs. They are legal sales. Most of them carry the disclaimers the EULAs make them ("we own the account, not you. You are paying for the usage, not the ownership"). There is no law broken in the sales if done properly.

Do they eviscerate a previously elite community where you knew that every person earned their keep? Oh yes. Do they have a right to? Oh yes. People who don't know how to play have a right to play alongside the most skilled of players. We don't give people an IQ test to vote in democratic governments, do we?

If we can't apply it to the most basic of principles, we cannot apply it to an MMORPG.

I don't like it, you don't like it, but they have a right.