Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category
Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 8 views
Creating an MMO isn't an easy job under any circumstances. Regardless of the area of gameplay -- terrain design, quests, loot tables, UI, back-end support -- all of them have a host of perils and pitfalls that can ruin the eventual player experience. Even so, no area of gameplay comes ...
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Friday, November 7th, 2008 16 views
There is a culture of players in World of Warcraft that play the game not for fun, but for profit. To the citizens of Azeroth, these players are known as Farmers. Farmers spend their time killing monsters in out of the way places for the items they drop. A farmer ...
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Friday, November 7th, 2008 14 views
Nearly 500,000 people in developing nations earn a wage making virtual goods in online games to sell to players, a study has found.
Research by Manchester University shows that the practice, known as gold-farming, is growing rapidly.
The industry, about 80% based in China, employs about 400,000 people who earn ...
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Friday, November 7th, 2008 23 views
Sony Online Entertainment announced that its upcoming titles, The Agency and Free Realms, will support real money transactions, through the company's ongoing partnership with e-commerce platform Live Gamer.
Earlier in the year, SOE and LiveGamer built a new platform for microtransactions, incorporating and ultimately replacing EverQuest II's Station Exchange. The result ...
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Friday, November 7th, 2008 9 views
I thought I should take a break from feverishly studying for my Operations Management final exam, which is a mere 22 hours away, to comment on this interesting story that Gamasutra ran today. It looks like a number of major companies are getting involved with a new start-up that seeks ...
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Friday, November 7th, 2008 9 views
I made Tobold mad… not something nice to do right before Christmas, I suppose.
It started when he made this proposal for the eradication of RMT (bolding is mine, to emphasize the key point):
I think that RMT is possible to eradicate. You just need to make gold “bind on pickup”. That ...
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Friday, November 7th, 2008 5 views
Worlds in Motion has an article up detailing a new surge in the efforts to legitimize real money transactions in MMO games. Generally, the idea is a good one, as RMT can provide the players what they want, as demonstrated through the vibrant black market, while the legitimization gives the ...
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