221–230 of 700 posts
Axie is built on Ethereum, meaning in-game assets (NFTs) are technically transferrable off-platform. Vitalik (creator of Ethereum) attributed one of his reasons for creating Ethereum to Blizzard taking away one of his in-game items in World of Warcraft in 2010: "I was born in 1994 in Russia and moved to Canada in 2000, where I went to school. I happily played World of Warcraft during 2007-2010, but one day Blizzard r…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nitpicks because this game was my childhood. I totally support your sentiment though. > It took a staggering number of real hours to achieve this skill level * 97 logs (30 minutes) * 293 oaks (1 hr) * 714 willows (2.5 hr) * 19,246 maple (very inefficient compared to willow cutting rate - 60 hour). If you did yews it would be many hundreds of hours. About 70 hours done inefficiently. > What if I wrote a macro Macros w…
> Botting in general was the wild west in this game from about 2008 - ~2014. There’s a weird, secret history around Runescape botting that I really hope gets told in full one day. Essentially, the biggest and best botting client from the 2008-2011 era was Powerbot, later rebranded RSBot. It was written and managed mostly by some CS student from the UK, who went by the handle Jacmob, and used some bytecode editing + r…
In the late 2000s, as a teenager, I was gifted a Runescape account. This account had level 80+ woodcutting, allowing one to chop magic trees - which would produce the most expensive lumber in the game. It took a staggering number of real hours to achieve this skill level, we're talking several hundred hours minimum. At some point I had realized that there were different sketchy websites that would buy and sell the in…
In my early 20s I played an MMO called Asherons Call. I discovered a vendor in one high level area that would sell bows for less than a specific vendor in a low level area would buy them, netting you a small margin per bow. Being a programmer I wrote a script that used two different teleport skills (lifestone and portal recall I think?) and a bit of movement and clicking based on pixel (Color) matching to deal with l…
Once you start allowing (or failing to prevent) real world transactions from altering the play of the game, which is really hard to do while still allowing any sort of item/money transfer between players, some subset of the player base will view their effort as devalued. Some other part of the player base will be delighted that while they don't necessarily have the time to put into the game, they can still get help progressing. There are of course the fringes of those that devote themselves to supporting this market or exploiting the market to support their power fantasies (which of course include flexing that power on other players).
There are valid uses for that market though, such as those aforementioned players that don't have time but would like to not be stuck for inordinate amounts of time at certain power levels. Basically, the same reason some games have difficulty levels. Some people want the challenge, others just want to experience the game.
> In retrospect I regret it.
It's sort of like allowing yourself to use a cheat in a game the first time through. If you take away a significant portion of the challenge when that's one of the things you're there for, the game can become much less fun. Other times, it just becomes a game within a game where you're playing market trader or whatever, which is fun while money/resources are still scarce, but then less fun after they aren't because of your wealth, and then you return to the main game to find it's less fun too.
> Gamers have a word, grinding, to describe repetitive tasks undertaken to gain some desired in-game goal, but are not fun in themselves. Is this actually true? The linked article doesn't say anything about it being fun or not. I love grinding and think it's fun in itself.
Most of my gamer friends don't like grinding and usually stay away from "grindy" games.
In the late 2000s, as a teenager, I was gifted a Runescape account. This account had level 80+ woodcutting, allowing one to chop magic trees - which would produce the most expensive lumber in the game. It took a staggering number of real hours to achieve this skill level, we're talking several hundred hours minimum. At some point I had realized that there were different sketchy websites that would buy and sell the in…
In my early 20s I played an MMO called Asherons Call. I discovered a vendor in one high level area that would sell bows for less than a specific vendor in a low level area would buy them, netting you a small margin per bow. Being a programmer I wrote a script that used two different teleport skills (lifestone and portal recall I think?) and a bit of movement and clicking based on pixel (Color) matching to deal with l…
In some cases advanced is debatable . Chinese prisoners forced to farm wow gold...
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/chinese-pr...
According to Graeber, a job is bullshit when the one who does it thinks that the job is bullshit. By this definition, chores, menial tasks don’t count as bullshit. I don’t see any quote from players who call what they are doing bullshit.
It's as legit as someone who participates in an mlm . Its not bullshit
Is this different from the phenomenon described at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_farming ? Honestly it seems like a pretty great career -- you get to spend your time indoors, probably somewhere climate controlled with electricity and restrooms. This is way better than the workhouse. Whoever is buying these things as a collector is basically donating their wealth to others, like a kind of privatized welfare. If p…
Imagine you could go to a prison and get paid to break rocks all day for money whenever you want. OK, sure, the people doing it are doing it because they need it. But would you call the person running such an establishment charitable?
It's just dirty, when you take out all the in between and just look at the ends of the process, it's basically paying poor people to waste their time because they need food because you get off on it.
According to Graeber, a job is bullshit when the one who does it thinks that the job is bullshit. By this definition, chores, menial tasks don’t count as bullshit. I don’t see any quote from players who call what they are doing bullshit.
I can’t remember exactly but this seems like a mischaracterisation. I think it was termed more like “it is a bullshit job if the world would run just as well (or even better) if the job didn’t exist”. Still relies on self-assessment but isn’t quite what you said. More based on some idea of “usefulness”. Play to earn doesn’t seem very useful.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know a lot of people have fond memories of this kind of thing, but from a designer perspective, is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it? Runescape set up a system that was so grind-heavy that players broke server rules and wrote automated scripts to grind for them, and other players gave them money to do that. Because the minute-to-minute gameplay of…
I believe this is what happens with any open world MMO. There's no storyline to finish, there's no ending, and game devs have incentives to keep players playing forever (the more hours a player plays, the more likely he will spend more money). There's only two ways to keep players playing: new content and/or grinding mechanics. Grinding mechanics are way, way easier to create. You can even reuse sprites and just chan…