MMOG Sites Under IGE Merging? 52
CTD writes "Grimwell Online notes that IGE has announced a merger of networks involving: Thottbott, Allakhazam, OGaming, and L2Orphus. There is a thread in the Allakhazam forums that brings all the release data together - but still leaves some questions about what is to come. Grimwell raises one in his post about this: 'Even more fun for our friends who work PR for gaming companies. IGE = RMT, which is not the Devil - but is not exactly welcomed at most companies. Will this move help push things past the tipping point and force developers to deal with the new, larger network?'"
Sellout? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Sellout? (Score:2)
Re:wtf? (Score:2)
Very thourough detail on IGE, this purchase & (Score:5, Informative)
http://wow.azzor.com/445/truth_about_IGE.php [azzor.com]
Re:Very thourough detail on IGE, this purchase &am (Score:2)
Re:Very thourough detail on IGE, this purchase &am (Score:2)
Um...wow. Well, there goes any future Allakhazam subscriptions. IGE is the devil!
The Devil is in the Details... (Score:3, Informative)
I wish he would speak for himself! RMT has almost destroyed the economy of FFXI to the point where you have to buy in game currency (gil) in order to afford anything of even moderate worth. This was due to the RMT gil sellers dominance and monopoly over entire mines, harvesting and logging areas, notorious monsters, etc. Only recently that SE has banned 700 accounts and seized over 300 billion gil [playonline.com] have things been normalizing. This was done in early Feb and prices are still dropping, slowly but surely, on most commodity items.
RMT has real effects on MMORPGs, some games more than others depending on how the economy works.
Right, who could blame IGE? (Score:5, Insightful)
I see. So, because these companies only destroy half the games they infiltrate, that makes it ok. The games that do get ruined were asking for it. Pick a different reason for every game, but it's the game designer's fault for not being able to handle these cartels when they try to take over. Because after all, this has only happened to FFXI.
Cartels like IGE ruin games for profit. They work full time, either exploiting bugs or taking what they want by brute force. They're larger than the largest guilds. They have the financial means, and the manpower, to get what they want in any of a hundred ways.
Blaming the gamers or the game designers for the fact that these guys exist is like blaming someone for getting mugged. Yes, you had a lock on your front door, but was it a titanium lock with 53 bolts? Because these guys just designed a way to pick the old 52-bolt locks last week. Go ahead and upgrade, but just remember, there are a thousand guys in your hallway with hundreds of millions of dollars of resources, and they'll be working on that lock 24/7, and every time they get in, it's your fault. Also, you can't tackle the problem like a normal security expert does, because what these guys do is apparently not illegal. They have nothing to lose, in fact everything to gain, by trying again, and again, and again.
Online games obviously need to defend against it better, but blaming them because this huge, sustained effort against them exists is just insane.
Re:The Devil is in the Details... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The Devil is in the Details... (Score:2)
Right, just yesterday my friend at work bought WoW gold. Another friend told me if he traded in his truck for a car which would be better on gas then he could afford to buy 1000 gold every two weeks. Yet another friend offered to give me items purchased through bought gold. WoW has huge RMT problems, it's just not as evident because it is a lot
Re:The Devil is in the Details... (Score:3, Insightful)
The game is more than bearable if you actually do things other than farm and level jobs (hint: HELM AND CRAFTING).
It's not supposed to be a race to 75 - the game is the journey. Good fucking god...I keep forgetting that most of the end-game people now are still not much better than the noobs they were in the dunes.
Re:The Devil is in the Details... (Score:4, Interesting)
I've played FFXI since the NA release. I've never bought gil. I've never farmed excessively, I have one job at 75, and my highest craft skill is 60. And that's in cooking, hardly the best profit maker in the game. And I've always been able to buy what I needed. You don't NEED the best gear, you can get along fine without it, and decent gear for your level is very easy to obtain. The best of the best gear is SUPPOSED to be hard to get, that's what makes it valuable.
SE didn't make things expensive. Players supply almost all the high-end gear. Players set the prices, players pay the prices. Why go and blame SE for something that we did to ourselves?
To the grandparent post, and to anyone else who thinks that you need to zip through this game as fast as possible, and feel the need to buy gil so you never have to be without the best equipment... Maybe this is not the game for you. SE set the rules to the game, and instead of playing by those rules, you cheat. Nobody forces you to cheat or to play this game. Go elsewhere if you can't hack it. And anyone who buys gil/gold/platinum can go straight to hell.
Re:The Devil is in the Details... (Score:1)
At the release of the CoP expansion there was an NPC that would buy back items for more gil than it sold that item for. Players who realized this maxed their gil. SE did not correct this for almost a week, but by that time the players had long since laundered the gil to other accounts.
For almost 2 years, SE did nothing effective to deter the literally hundreds of fishing bots in certain areas of the game, most notably around the Port Windurst fish
Re:The Devil is in the Details... (Score:3, Interesting)
SE doesn't make big announcements when they ban people to placate the masses like WoW does so you never know how many people have been banned over the course of the game. That announcement was made because things had gotten so out of hand so quickly this past christmas that they had to let their players know they did somethin
Re:The Devil is in the Details... (Score:2)
If you are insinuating that I buy gil then I expect you to retract your statement.
I am a level 70 black mage on the Unicorn server. I have never bought gil. I did not say you have to buy gil to *progress*. I did say however that you have to buy gil to be able to afford items of moderate worth. I currently have around 1.4 milli
Re:The Devil is in the Details... (Score:1)
The economy seems fairly sane at the moment. Elite end game gear takes a significant amount of effort to acquire, but is ce
Re:The Devil is in the Details... (Score:2)
5 million gil is a huge amount of money. You can make it in a day if you are *lucky* doing BC/KSNM (which I have never been), otherwise it will take months of farming/crafting/HELM.
I have no idea what server you play on where you can make 5 mil a day guaranteed but I sure hope they open migrations to it.
Re:The Devil is in the Details... (Score:2, Insightful)
This is complicated by the fact that it is basically impossible to make a profit by selling things to NPCs, so gil is streaming out of the econemy (NPCs still sell useful goods and services) faster than it is coming in.
The only question that really matters is how much playtime a player has to spend farming/crafting/etc to get a particular item, and
Re:The Devil is in the Details... (Score:2, Informative)
Prices seem to have largely stabilised now.
People keep complaining about the economy in FFXI, but they are usually missing the point. The FFXI economy is much more player driven than, for instance, WoW. This means
Re:The Devil is in the Details... (Score:1)
Now how about some things that you could technically do but that the game doesn't support? Such as comission something or in any other way illustrate the demand for so
Re:The Devil is in the Details... (Score:1)
It's true that there are constraints on pricing of items, but even that can add to the complexity. During the recent hyperinflation a number of crafting recipes becam
a sad day (Score:2)
Re:a sad day (Score:1)
Game DBs defeating the purpose of playing? (Score:1, Interesting)
I hate "grinding" as much as most people, but isn't part of the coolness factor of having a level 60 whatever with a complete set of epic armor the simple fact that they've done a lot? It seems that if you know exactly where everything is, and exactly what is required for X quest, and that the fastest way to get item Y is to kill monster Z bec
Re:Game DBs defeating the purpose of playing? (Score:3, Interesting)
As a noob, sometimes the directions the NPC gives are misleading. "Go take this to some guy north of here" is a perfect example. That happens in WoW all the time. The guy might actually be NorthEast or NW. You just can't tell. Sometimes, they change the locations of mobs in a patch but don't update the quest text. You could spend an hour looking for evil spiders in the North while the actual spiders have moved to the East.
As an experienced player,
Re:Game DBs defeating the purpose of playing? (Score:3, Insightful)
Most of the time, what I want to do is find out where some obscure mob is to be found, or find out what their idiotic spawn rate is.
Forgive me for having a family, but I don't find the idea to sit in a zone/area for hours/days on end waiting for a freakin' mob to spawn so I can kill him to advance some quest. And since the damn thing spawns so infrequently, I want to know WHERE he spawns, so I have a chance to find it.
In WoW, at worst, most of the quest mobs spawned right away, or
Re:Game DBs defeating the purpose of playing? (Score:1)
It's a cover for poorly designed game mechanincs.
Of course WoW is a prime example of Cut-And-Paste developement at it's finest.
Re:Game DBs defeating the purpose of playing? (Score:2)
On the other hand... one of the things I hate most about MMORPGs (and I actually kind of like them, mind you) is that in a group, you're never experiencing anything new. Everyone else is just rushing ahead because they've done it a dozen times, and you have to jus
Dick comparison maybe (Score:2)
They don't care how they got it. If money is no issue, simply buy it. If it is, the fastest way to get that is by grinding with the help of a game DB. Because the people to show off won't know how you got it, that you actually didn'T "work" for your items, that you didn't solve the quests and that you bought the money.
For me, I play these games to show off to myself. Her
Re:Game DBs defeating the purpose of playing? (Score:2)
Re:Game DBs defeating the purpose of playing? (Score:2)
Secondly, bugs happen quite frequently in MMOs. Whenever there's a possibility of hundreds
WoW :( (Score:1)
Re:WoW :( (Score:1)
This is old for L2Orphus (Score:1)
Re:This is old for L2Orphus (Score:1)
Re:This is old for L2Orphus (Score:1)
Where IGE and i
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:BS (Score:1)