S
Sculli
Guest
Eni said:but it is also interesting to know that, in some other countries, these practices are quite common and a person or a group of people play MMORPG to make money
there is an establishment of a Virtual E-Bay, an auction site dedicated for vitual stuff and it actually runs well
i have heard that those may actually be coming over to the US
Eni, where have you been? Yantis (http://www.playerauctions.com) (now IGE owned), and IGE (http://www.ige.com), have been in business for years, and they are all US based.
Much of the ability of people to profit from games is that there are items in short supply. Originally this was a valuable concept to be able to differentiate between players who have the ability and aptitude to accomplish something incredibly difficult in game. Their reward would be an item of high value.
Soon thereafter publishers realized that they need the "average" player as well, because the majority of the players is average, but if exceptional items would only be accessible to exceptional players, then the average player would lose interest, and stop paying. Thus methods were created to reward average players as well, by means of making some exceptional items tradable.
As soon as that happened, the demand for the actual item, or for currency to purchase such item went through the roof.
Online games will always be that way, because it is in the best interest of the company who runs the place to keep players from obtaining exceptional items too quickly, and thus prevent them from "winning the game".
A good example of this is City of Hero's. In CoH it is easy to obtain the best enhancements, all you need is some time, but you don't have to compete with anyone over spawns or camps or whatnot. The result is a fun filled time in game, but also the fact that you can have the game beat after just some 8 weeks of moderate game play. Meaning you only pay two months of subscriptions (of which one month is free trial), and they you technically do not need to play the game ever again, because you have already done it all.
Of course you can make another alt and play it through again as someone completely different, but it's nothing like in EQ where it took years to properly develop a character when EQ first came out, I have some 259 days played on my first EQ toon by the time Luclin came out, and he was far from perfect (full set of Kael quest armor though, for those to whom this means anything, I shed a tear the day I looted the BP, there simply aren't that kind of accomplishments in these games anymore, good old days).