Games

RedHerring has an article
about Blizzard Entertainment shutting
down 18,000 accounts for cheating.

Basically they dropped 18,000 of their 5 million members for selling their excess, “game” gold, in the open market. Perhaps they used cheating programs to mine the gold while online.

No matter, if that’s all you have in life, you don’t have much of a life. The article says that over the last year more than $2 million dollars (real dollars) in gold sales have been conducted on ebay alone. That’s real people like you and me spending money for in-game currency because they are too lazy to play the game and earn it.

Now I realize as online games go they can be very, very addicting. I lost more than a year of my life to Tribes. But I’ll be damned if I would ever have paid ‘Cash money’ to buy things like more ammo or better weapons. Oh there were certainly cheaters, and that’s eventually what ruined that game and many others just like it. (Not to mention Dynamix and the whole Tribes 2 Blunder)

A game gets going and gets popular. If you’re late to the game, you’ll never catch up, either skill wise or resource wise in this case I’m sure.

If you’re 3 or 5 months late to the latest and greatest first person shooter you will get fragged and hard. It takes time to learn the maps, the weapons and the skills. I’m sure with World of WarCraft, there’s plenty of strategy and game play that takes time to learn and master. If you’re this late to the party, I’m sure you could easily feel pressured into buying someone else’s excess.

Games like this need to have alternate parallel universe, or certain portions of it should reset from time to time, or they need a way of handicapping the newbs, and the vets. It’s the only way to keep things rocking and rolling and fend off this kind of crap.

I applaud Blizzard for trying to keep the game clean. But if there’s a market for this stuff, people will find a way to buy and sell it. If there’s an advantage to be gained in the game, then there will always be a black market for this stuff.

It’s also reasonable that if you’ve paid your way and earned all that gold legitimately, and you are getting out of the game, legitimately, you should probably have the right to sell your stuff. After all you earned it. You paid for it, or perhaps give it back for an online credit for another online game. If it has value, it has value, right?

But come on people, mining and selling it just for pure profit, and those of you buying just to get ahead? Get a life.