I recently made a somewhat monetary trade with regards to Team Fortress 2. I am a member of a forum associated with my favorite TF2 servers. One of the members offered to design post signatures for people in exchange for some hats. Hats are rare items in TF2 (used to be rarer) and it seemed like a fair trade since I have no skills for photo shop. I traded one hat and a set of shoes for the design, which I should have tomorrow. It was a beneficial trade for me, but it got me thinking about how other people trade things in games.
I haven't played a lot MMORPGs, but I know how the Real Money Trading thing works. High level players have so much money and so many rare items that they trade them for actual dollars. The idea is that the value of fun you get from these items is so much that they are worth roughly the value of some games, in the range of 50-60 dollars. I can only chalk this up to laziness on the part of some players.
Of course, I could be wrong. Purchasing that rare Bone spear may bring just as much enjoyment as spending the same money on Halo3. I just can't understand how that works. Its a sweet deal for the people who get the money, I just kind of wish they wouldn't. It reflects poorly on the human condition in general.
I am rather disappointed with this post in comparison to the rest of your blog. Firstly, games such as WoW involve large amounts of repetitive tasks in order to gain levels and in game items which offer little value to players. Such situations are padding that allows developers to cheaply increase gameplay time with little added value to the game. Oddly, in your other post you talk about animal crossing interactions as though they were real life experiences. You talk of money/etc as if you really earned it and characters visiting you as if they are friends. Do you consider this “cheating” a crime?
ReplyDeleteAlso, your comment “Its a sweet deal for the people who get the money, I just kind of wish they wouldn't. It reflects poorly on the human condition in general” is unjustified and is just hanging. Why do you care if they sell in game items? Does it devalue your effort to “earn” these items by wasting incredible amounts of time grinding for them? If so, I would say that people viewing virtual items as status symbols a greater lament as they are using they have lowered their fulfillment in life to success as defined by a video game.
Ouch, another critical post. Thanks for reading though, as it is nice to know some people care.
ReplyDeleteAs for the Animal Crossing, I recently dropped it but yes I do place value on the things I collect in the game. Its not necessarily easy to do and I enjoyed doing it. I would not, however, pay actual money for those things. My main point was that actually earning the game objects comes with its own sense of accomplishment, but purchasing them from other players for actual money just seems so incredibly lazy and beside the point. You get no sense of accomplishment when you buy them. And the benefits of your new weapon are most certainly not worth the actual money you spend. But this was not my best post. Thanks for the criticism.
You are ignoring that obtaining items costs time and such time clearly comes at an opportunity cost. In TF2 you could spend 20 hours playing to get a $10 of items or just buy them.
ReplyDeleteLikewise, you traded items that took many hours to get for probably less than 15 minutes of photoshop work.
Achieving items in TF2 comes with no real fulfillment as they are rewarded based on how long you play the game. The game gets items on its own if you just idle during a match.
Yes there is an associated opportunity cost with getting those items, but I was going to be playing the game anyway. The items are just a nice bonus. The main point of this article was MMORPG like Runescape and WOW. The TF2 thing was just an aside.
ReplyDelete