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MMOG Sites Under IGE Merging?

Posted by Zonk on Wed May 03, 2006 08:22 PM
from the dirty-pool dept.
The Almighty Buck Role Playing (Games)
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?'"
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  • Sellout? (Score:2, Informative)

    by Hossicle (945360)
    from the Alakazam admin: "We are now owned by a company that owns a bunch of stuff, including IGE. They bought both of us (and several other sites as well) and then split us into separate divisions so that there is no interaction between them. You know my stand on gold selling. Before agreeing to anything like this, I wanted to make sure that there would be no interaction between those divisions and that I would have complete control over the new network, including the sites that used to be part of ogaming.

  • Very thourough detail on IGE, this purchase & (Score:5, Informative)

    by CTD (615278) on Wednesday May 03 2006, @08:58PM (#15259302) Homepage
    This was put where I could find it, and is a very interesting read. Lots of great detail about IGE/Allakhazam if you want to learn more.

    http://wow.azzor.com/445/truth_about_IGE.php [azzor.com]

  • The Devil is in the Details... (Score:3, Informative)

    by iCEBaLM (34905) <icebalm@ice b a l m . c om> on Wednesday May 03 2006, @09:39PM (#15259489)
    IGE = RMT, which is not the Devil

    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)

        by Somatic (888514) on Thursday May 04 2006, @01:26AM (#15260368) Journal
        Yeah, blame the sellers for meeting demand. Except they didn't create the demand, Square-Enix did. It's Square-Enix's game design that causes the demand that the gold sellers exploit. [...] It's hardly IGE's fault that Square-Enix misdesigned their game.

        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)

        by GundamFan (848341) on Thursday May 04 2006, @06:13AM (#15260994)
        You know... I am tired of hearing "World of Warcraft is the best MMO ever" every time somone mentions another MMO. I won't get into details about why I take issue with WoW... but I will say this, perhaps the reason WoW is so sucessfull has to do with its population rather than specifics of content... if you take any MMO and fill the servers up it will be more fun (for those who can get in) because if you compare WoW to most other MMOs feature to feature it is a very simple game. ...Forgive my rant, have fun in WoW or any other game you deside to play... but please don't try to make everyone who doesn't play guilty about it.
      • World of Warcraft hasn't been having anywhere near as large problem with goldsellers than FFXI has. The reason is that WoW was designed well, and FFXI - well, wasn't.

        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
      • Fuck you.

        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)

          by Psmylie (169236) * on Thursday May 04 2006, @12:52PM (#15264070) Homepage
          I never have mod points when I need them. Maybe IGE could get into the "instant rate-up" biz.

          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.

          • Why go and blame SE for something that we did to ourselves?

            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
    • RMT has many negative effects, but the assertation that you have to buy gil to progress is just flat out wrong. Anyone who believes it is just looking for an excuse for their cheating.

      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
      • RMT has many negative effects, but the assertation that you have to buy gil to progress is just flat out wrong. Anyone who believes it is just looking for an excuse for their cheating.

        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
        • In the current FFXI economy 5 million gil isn't really a huge amount of money. At level 70 you really should be able to make 5 million in under a day's play. OK, so that is still quite a long time, but not compared to the time it will have taken you to get to 70. Grab some other black mages and mana-burn some burning circles. You should be able to make millions without too much trouble.

          The economy seems fairly sane at the moment. Elite end game gear takes a significant amount of effort to acquire, but is ce
          • In the current FFXI economy 5 million gil isn't really a huge amount of money. At level 70 you really should be able to make 5 million in under a day's play.

            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.
    • Define normalizing? Falling prices cut both ways, and you get less of a profit on the things you sell to earn gil towards that now-cheaper thing you want to buy.

      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
    • It wasn't true that you had to buy gil in FFXI. Yes, there was a period of hyperinflation, but that didn't really make a huge amount of difference as the price of farmed items went up as well, as did the profit from crafting. I never bought gil, and never had a problem with affording high-end gear.

      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
      • The econemy in FFXI really isn't very player controlled. Lets look at some of the hard limits on player control of the econemy in FFXI. Many goods and services can only be obtained from NPCs, many goods can only be 'produced' once per character, many cannot be traded and NPC buy prices, quest rewards, and mob drops are almost all inflexible.

        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
        • The econemy in FFXI really isn't very player controlled. Lets look at some of the hard limits on player control of the econemy in FFXI. Many goods and services can only be obtained from NPCs, many goods can only be 'produced' once per character, many cannot be traded and NPC buy prices, quest rewards, and mob drops are almost all inflexible.

          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

  • one gold farming group to rule them all ..
  • Ignoring all the gold-farming issues, am I the only one who finds the idea of having a massive database of where everything can be found to be sort of self-defeating?

    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
    • There are a lot of reasons to use something like this.

      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,
      • I have to agree with you.

        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
      • The fact that you need to create a new character in the first place is one of the fundamental problems with many MMO's out now.

        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.
      • Your first point is true. Although I agree with the grandparent that going and looking everything up online and acquiring it kind of defeats the point, sometimes it's nice to have a resource when you don't want to run around in circles for 4 hours.

        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
    • There are people playing those games to show off. "Look, I got a level $maxlevel char, with $rareitem and $rank, and $insaneamount money!".

      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
    • I played the style you mention in Ultima Online back in the day, never looked up information, considered it cheating. End result? Never maxed, never best gear etc etc... if it takes some people MONTHS to get that epic gear WHEN THEY KNOW EXACTLLY WHAT TO DO... how long do you think it'll take when you don't know how to get it? Or even if it exists? I know play FFXI and use databse sites all the time... and honestly have way more fun because I'm not spending all my time wandering around in circles.
    • Not exactly. First off, quests are meant to be solved communally. Maybe not on exactly that level, but there's a quest in EQ2 that, for example, requires you to traverse the globe searching for 20-some-odd dragon runes. These things are tiny and hidden in relatively random locations across the entire world. There aren't really any clues as to where they are. If you didn't have some sort of resource pooling... *shrug*

      Secondly, bugs happen quite frequently in MMOs. Whenever there's a possibility of hundreds
  • It's a sad day for MMO fans. I'm a WoW addict myself, thinking about switching to Goblin Workshop. I don't mind the google gold ads, but anyone know if they have a shady parent company?
  • L2Orphus was purchased by IGE almost a year ago now, and they've had a massive banner ad for IGE for 2 years now. RMT ruined Lineage II. And while it looks like Square is doing something about it for FFXI, there's no action on NCSoft's part on L2. It's bad when dealing with L2 because NC already doesn't give half a rat's shit about their american customers, it's all focused on Korea. When I can't go XP in Enchanted Valley because there's 20 different bot trains on L2Walker or L2Wind, there's nothing I c
    • It's an inevitability. Companies exist to fill a demand. IGE came into being approximately 4 years after RMT started happening on eBay. If you want a non-RMT-able game, the only solution is completely different game design. It may not even be possible.
      • I agree that it may not be possible, but it is possible to minimize the impact of RMTs. This is probably been best showin in WoW, from the games I've played. Money is easily made, and the best of the best gear is mostly only available via Bind on pickup items from instances and raid instances (a few exceptions, but for the most part that's the way WoW is designed). But this really was designed into the game. Blizzard saw the issues and took serious pre-emptive steps to have this not happen.

        Where IGE and i
  • from how the partys involved are describing it, there is a new parent company called RPGholdings who has a division that owns the gaming sites, and a division that owns IGE and their sister sites.

    The the CEO of all of them IS IGE's CEO, so in essense, they made a fake company, bought out everyone (including IGE) then said "oh btw, Brock Pierce is now your new boss"

    • Reading the posts its quite funny how the userbase is splitting. There are more than a few older posters, with high post counts and premium subscriptions, walking away out of disgust. The issue isn't just that Allakhazam was bought out by IGE/RPGholdings, it's that for the longest time Allakhazam (the guy) has been vehemenently (sp) anti-RMT for years, and now for whatever reason, caved to the very people he was against for so long. People feel betrayed, as Allakhazam was one of the few sites that tried to

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