Gold Buying - Time Saver or Cheating? 543
Sunday's online version of The Wichita Eagle has a piece on buying gold in a MMOG. The author of the piece examines what's involved, and ponders whether such an action is cheating, or just a shortcut. From the article: "Getting my gold was a snap. The smallest quantity for sale by IGE was 500 pieces for $60, about twice what I wanted to spend. I decided to go for it, however, as I simply could not abide the prospect of skinning even one more level-10 boar. Within 20 minutes, the gold appeared in my WoW character's mailbox." From a Cathode Tan post. What is your opinion: Cheating or Shortcut?
Re:There is a third option (Score:5, Informative)
I have to agree.
I bought "gold" for City of Heroes twice, both times spending like 20 or 30 USD. This was while I was in my fullblown addiction phase. I've since kicked the habit entirely.
Anyway, my reasons were mostly to correct pas mistakes. I would normally play characters I'd created since the game came out a while ago, and eventually wanted to fix a bunch of my newbie mistakes. Ie, designing a costume that didnt suck nd re-outfitting him with the correct enhancements.
Looking back at it, I can't believe how stupid it was. It wasn't a lot of money and did make things a little easier/nicer for a while. But it was stupid.
As for cheating... there's not a whole lot to get in CoH. I mean, if someone from WoW used bought gold to buy a rare mount or something I could sort of see it as cheating. But in CoH, where you're limited to costumes and enhancements, there's not much benefit.
Re:There is a third option (Score:2, Informative)
In CoH:
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there is no gold farming, just rewards for missions or helping NPCs. Or by selling enhancements
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there are no "drops" in the normal sense. gold/influence and enhancements are automatically distributed to people in the group by the server, so you can't really steal.
The main methods of hoarding gold/influence in CoH is by herding large amount of mobs, or going on Task Forces (usually 4-6 hour quests that can't be "paused").If you have an upper level character, the gold/influence pours in like rain in the Amazon, unfortunately enhancements cost a lot too. So if you can get a character up there you can gain a lot of influence quickly and sell it. The lower and mid level characters have a hard time getting it, so them buying it isn't unheard of.
The last method is costume contests, where upper level characters/supergroups have a costume contest and give the top x contestants some of their ungodly amounts of money. It sounds lame, but if you have some time to kill and have a good costume it's worth a shot (and 10 minutes of your life).
Re:Fairness vs. pragmatism (Score:3, Informative)
Well, EVE has it's own problem...that those who started when it went live are so far ahead of someone starting today that it's not even competitive.
Not entirely true. They have a lot more options available to them when they go to play, but after two months you can be an effective, hard-hitting player. You'll be limited to one race's ships, and you probably won't be flying any of the specialized craft, but you can make a difference in PvP as well as tackle the high-end NPC content.
Re:Real-world tax implications? (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, it does, but both are taxed. If you claim "hobby income" you can deduct "hobby losses", but "hobby losses" can never exceed "hobby income", unlike business losses which can exceed income and reduce your tax bill.
Because of this, very few people use the hobby income rules, instead opting to just treat their hobby as a business if it is enough income that they are afraid the IRS might catch on.
IANATL (tax advisor), but I've been doing my own business taxes for years.
Re:Don't Enforce. Co-Opt! (Work Smarter not Harder (Score:3, Informative)
While that is pretty neat, it's actually a heck of a lot easier
void create()
{
call_out("death",30);
}
death()
{
remove();
}
Re:Fairness vs. pragmatism (Score:3, Informative)
Umm, what? For those who know what' they are doing they can make cash without grinding so what's the problem?
Which to me doesn't appear to do much beyond give those who have been playing the game longer (real time instead of play time) an insurmountable lead and exclusive access to certain abilities (or at least, exclusive access to a variety of abilities). Someone who opens a subscription today can never hope to achieve an avatar as skillful as someone who's been playing from day one, no matter how clever and skilled they might be as a player (correct me if I'm wrong here though, my EVE playtime was also very limited).
I can kill people that have been playing much longer than I have. RL skills > In game cash > In game skills. What few players understand is that only a small subset of skills are useful at any one time. There are 3 types of guns but it's best to only use one type at a time. There are 4 sizes of guns skills in the wrong size are worthless. There are 4 racial ship types but you only fly one ship at a time. There are ~10 ship types but points in one ship type does not help when your not flying that ship ect.
If you pick what you want to do you can quickly have "maxed skills" in a single area. You might not have the same amount of cash but in 4 months of casual game play you can easily kill payers with years worth of skill points if you focus on the right things and avoid wasting time in the wrong areas.
The only way I can see to reward skill over time is to make it easy to lose progress you've made as a result of your failures.
You mean like eve where the loss of a ship means you lose all gear on it? Death penalties sting but a nitch game like ever ~2% WOW numbers / ~106,000 players add a level of intensity that's hard to pass up. WoW's grind was somewhat interesting for a while but it's like candy it stops being tasty when that's all your eating.
PS: There is a lot about eve that I don't like but I had more excitement from a 30 min PVP battle in eve than I got from 3 months of WoW because god dammit I did not want to lose that ship!