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General: Live Gamer Update
Stradden
Managing EditorMember CommonPosts: 6,696
About a month ago, at the Game Developer's Conference, a technical glitch meant that we couldn't bring you our interview with the guys from Live Gamer. This week, Community Manager Laura Genender brings us this interview meant to replace the one that the technical gremlins stole in the first place.
While a significant portion of gamers use gold sellers, the process of gold farming/selling is often regarded as annoying, frustrating, and disheartening. From random, badly worded tells of “sorry to disturb, platsellsite.com fast cheap safe lift your enjoyment of game” to groups of characters named Iiilili farming the same lucrative camp for hours on end, the secondary market is slowly joining the ranks of the most despised, abhorrent internet communication: spam mails.
Publishers and developers are being punished by this black secondary market as well: unknowing gamers angrily blame Sony, NCSoft, and other game developers for undelivered gold or credit card theft; players quit at the seemingly inaction of these companies in removing gold sellers; and innocent players are swept up in mass bans, losing developers real customers as they try to get rid of the farmers and bots.
And thus was created Live Gamer.
Read the whole thing here.
Cheers,
Jon Wood
Managing Editor
MMORPG.com
Comments
I've never liked the selling of straight gold or game-affecting items (aside from costumes and cosmetics), regardless of whether the company is the one running the service or not. At least if people did want to cheat, they did so at a price (their credit cards/accounts/etc would likely get abused and stolen). But when a company actively says they support the insane inflation of their game's economy in order to make it safer for player who want to shell out money, it makes me not want to be involved.
Also, it's complete bs saying that people have a choice to involve themselves in the secondary market or not. If you're on a server where people can pay cash to buy money legally, you will very quickly be forced to either buy gold yourself to keep up with those who do, give up your life to farm it, or quit. Every player is affected by a secondary market, whether they engage in it or not.
Regardless of how incredible a game is, if real money gives you in-game advantages, I won't spend my time on it. I play MMOs to have fun and relax and compete with others who have put only time and energy into the game. Not to cheat and be handed things on a silver platter because I have a good job.
I just want to state that I completely agree with the above poster. It doesn't matter to ME if the gaming company supports cheating or not, essentially in a game, buying gold and items (yes, even legitimately) constitutes cheating.
Personally, I feel if you don't want to invest the time it takes to play and improve your bank account and character attributes and items in an MMOrpg.....gee.....perhaps you shouldn't PLAY an MMOrpg. Go to Pogo, BigFish, or some other sort of game site, or play single player games where your actions don't affect thousands of people. OR....go play Second Life or something, not a traditional MMOrpg.
This is just another example of catering to the rich. I'm sorry, but the real world already caters to those that have the "big money" to spend. Do we REALLY have to make the gaming world cow down to that standard too?
I think if you don't have the time and energy to have a particular hobby, you should choose a different hobby. Maybe these folks that want to throw their pocketbook into MY hobby should go play golf, or some OTHER hobby that is better suited to the needs of THEIR lifestyle.
I mean, can you imagine if I showed up on a golf course and said, "Gee....I don't have the money to play this game, but I really want to.....can I just get one of you to play it for me, for 15 bucks a month?" Those people would just point and laugh at me. Basically, this is just as ludicrous. Part of the entire MMOrpg genre itself, is the challenge of building and improving your character. If they want to SKIP the effort that that process requires, then why did they choose gaming as a hobby? They''ve just effectively destroyed the entire GAME of the game. When you play ANY sort of game, you're expected to play by the rules of THAT game.
Pick a different hobby people. Pick a hobby that is suited to your lifestyle.
President of The Marvelously Meowhead Fan Club
Personally I think it is really sad it has come to this. Too many players want instant gratification these days, hence they don't want to work for anything, easier to buy it.
Personally I will BOYCOTT any game the live gamer is involved with. Legalizing cheating, does not change what it is, it is still cheating in my book. You want the label of being a cheater, go ahead and buy stuff.
One thing the industry will note, gamers that tend to cheat, err buy, their way through the game tend to be short term players, they soon get bored as they don't have to work at anything.
I am disappointed in SOE stooping to this nonsense, but at least they limited it to specific servers, I know the EQ2 servers that allowed buying and selling have the lowest populations of all the servers.
So Live Gamer, I hope you find the industry unaccomodating and die a quick death. You are probably the most detested service in this industry for many of us.
I understand the posters saying what they say. That is perfectly acceptable to me but I enjoy being on the EQ2 Bazaar server. I don't have a lot of the issues that I normally find in the games with the farmers. I am one to sell and not buy so I have made a little money. EQ2 only has 2 servers for this and that is what I like. If I don't want to deal with that being allowed then play on a server that doesn't allow for selling of stuff from the game. I think that is the main thing that needs to be done though with such services is that they are limited servers providing such use. If all servers are that way then it takes away from reaching milestones that others just buy.
Here is another player that will boycott any and all games using the Live Gamer garbage. I just pray that Funcom won't f*** up AoC with this...