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Game Developers On Gold Selling
Eurogamer has an article which takes a look at how various game companies deal with gold spammers in their games. Some, like Mythic, take a hard stance, literally telling farmers and sellers to "go to hell." Others engage in an arms race to block such behavior, sometimes to the detriment of normal users. "In fact, a former Jagex source tells me that when Jagex banned all IPs connected to gold selling, 'they lost 10 per cent of their membership, and still haven't recovered in terms of numbers since they did it two years ago. Even though they have almost stopped gold selling in RuneScape, it has cost them two million active accounts; i.e. there were four million players, there are now two million players, of which less than one million actually subscribe.'" Still more companies are experimenting with real money trading (RMT) to at least establish some control and security over the situation.
I feel that it is my duty to even the score. When writing this letter, I had originally intended to segregate the pure errors of fact in Mythic's comments from the assertions of questionable judgment where there could be room for dispute. I eventually decided against that approach because you might say, "Mythic should stop and savor life, not discredit legitimate voices in the negativism debate." Fine, I agree. But its ebullitions always follow the same pattern. It puts the desired twist on the actual facts, ignores inconvenient facts, and invents as many new "facts" as necessary to convince us that every featherless biped, regardless of intelligence, personal achievement, moral character, sense of responsibility, or sanity, should be given the power to destroy our youths' ability to relax, reflect, study, and meditate.
Mythic wants us to feel sorry for the soporific muttonheads who weave its deranged traits, hateful deeds, and juvenile announcements into a rich tapestry that is sure to instill a subconscious feeling of guilt in those of us who disagree with its fulminations. I maintain we should instead feel sorry for their victims, all of whom know full well that that fact is simply inescapable to any thinking man or woman. "Thinking" is the key word in the previous sentence. I overheard one of Mythic's flunkies say, "Mythic's activities are on the up-and-up." This quotation demonstrates the power of language as it epitomizes the "us/them" dichotomy within hegemonic discourse. As for me, I prefer to use language to remind Mythic about the concept of truth in advertising.
The conflation of fatuous maggots and tendentious dingbats in Mythic's holier-than-thou attitudes is either dramatic hyperbole or a fatal methodological flaw. This applies first and foremost to a claque under whose superstitious brand of exclusionism the whole of honest humanity is suffering: Mythic's army of illogical, slatternly yobbos. If you're not part of the solution then you're part of the problem. At the risk of sounding hopelessly belligerent, Mythic sometimes puts itself in charge of challenging all I stand for. At other times, one of its comrades, who are legion, is deputed for the job. In either case, any claim to the contrary is patently false. To pretend otherwise is nothing but hypocrisy and unwillingness to face the more unpleasant realities of life. Let us now exert a positive influence on the type of world that people will live in a thousand years from now because in that is our only hope for the future.