IGE On Why Power-Leveling Is Like Day Care 86
simoniker writes "In a rare interview with the COO of MMO item-selling giant IGE at Gamasutra, topics discussed include the ownership of in-game items, why gold selling can be a "great business opportunity" for Chinese suppliers, and why power-leveling (paying other players to increase your character stats) is something IGE will be moving into." From the article: "Clarke also noted that, in pure economic terms, paying people to level your character is 'a market which tends toward commoditization.' Of course, those handing over their character have 'a high degree of sensitivity' to what's happening to their virtual avatar — the COO quipped: 'It's almost like day care... you'd be amazed how much they check in.'"
Just enjoy the ride (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Just enjoy the ride (Score:4, Interesting)
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I didn't rush to 60 by any stretch, and if I rip to 60 on a new char, I won't be missing much. (unless I switch factions)
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Experienced players mostly get to 60 in about 7 days of playtime (w
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If the game means enough to you to want to get a high level, then it should mean enough to earn that level. Otherwise, why are you playing? If the game play sucks at the low-levels, then why bother continuing?
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There's no entertainment in killing slightly different colored sprites for 50-60 levels. It's a treadmill, and god awful boring.
Re:Just enjoy the ride (Score:4, Insightful)
I play an MMO that is notorious for it's lack of end-game (City of Heroes). I play it because I enjoy it (a concept apparently foreign to many-a-player), not to prove anything to anyone, gloat about my uber-high level characters, or make money in some zany e-bay scheme. The entire concept of games being fun is lost on a large portion of the MMO community because they're too competitive to realise they aren't having any fun (or even playing the game, I guess).
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Re:Just enjoy the ride (Score:4, Interesting)
I do droks runs in guild wars for a few reasons. I've not only been the runner, but been ran by others myself. In guild wars the lvl cap is 20. You are free to change your secondary class as much as you want. But you cannot change your primary class. This means there are several other builds you could try out. However, before Factions, it took a very long time to get where the good stuff was. Droks armor is highest in stats (not best skin/but AC rating), plus the skills trader has more advanced skills.
If you've already played the game through say 4-5 times then doing it again and again for each new character type is boring and painful.
And before factions, we were limited to 4 characters per account. Which meant you had to delete your old ones before trying out different classes. Guild wars isn't a level grinder like most other RPG games. After you hit 20, that's it. You just focus on better skill combos and different areas. Why make the players go through the entire noob areas again?
If you look at factions, this is what the game devs did. They made it so you can level up to 20 in two days with 3000+ XP quests. In GW1 it took week(s) at 250-500XP per quest.
And finally, running is a quick, not always easy, way to make some money. They have nerfed all the good farming areas and made it so money is much harder to aquire. Granted green/gold drops help, it's a pain trying to do player-player trades. In one droks run I make 10-15k in 35 minutes. When a full suite of nice looking (15k) armor cost me 150k it's still hard work.
And if you're wondering, playing with skills and builds is what it's all about. I just got my ele to do 2,672 damage in one spell hit. (4x-668 damage to lvl 5 guys). =)
http://www.linuxlogin.com/public/2672damage.jpg [linuxlogin.com]
BTW, that's wine 0.9.19 running a test this morning. Why health bars overlap.
look, I'm not that old... (Score:5, Funny)
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My opinion on why they designed factions that way though was because there were a ton of level 20s, they were selling it as a separate game, and they wanted the vast majority of the content in factions to be applicable to th
Better alternatives in game design (Score:2)
-Neocron has "LOM pills" you can use to delete some skills and then re-spend the skill points. You will have to re-level a small part of the skill points, and LOMing it takes time. But it is way easier than starting a new character.
-In Tabula Rasa, a backup of your character will be saved at each major fork in the skill tree. You can then replay from that point.
I think this solves much of the problem.
Re:Just enjoy the ride (Score:4, Insightful)
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I think part of it is the same reason I eat an entire cheescake even knowing it will make me sick.
However, part of it is that levelling is still boring. It's fun for awhile, but at a certain point it gets old.
I'm waiting for the day that you can level up in "battlegrounds" (keeping that vauge) until you reach high-level. All advancement do
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The two MMOs I've played (FFXI and EverC) I would have paid decent money to skip certain segments of wandering through the same places, fighting the same monsters, over and over...
Depends on the MMO... (Score:2)
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They suck the life out of PvP
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The major point is not the "level" semantics in and of itself, it's that grind (or camp)-for-mo-power is almost the solely existing paradigm. Planetside has two major
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Okay, you're making a pedantic semantical argument. Yeah, you can shoehorn the level terminology into any game. But the entire point of my example was that the ultimate system is one in which you gain skills in a non-linear manner, where one is only situationally better than the other. There is no Sword Tech
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Why do you think people buy accounts on eBay?
Heck, folks call anyone that can't seen to play their class worth eBayers. We just assume they either bought the account, or their friends played the toon to top level.
You see them in every game. In other words...
Keep moving, people. Nothing to see here!
Re:Do you want to get rich, or do you want to get (Score:1)
"Day care" attitude not surprising (Score:4, Insightful)
Then there's the amount of money invested in the service, which is usually a couple hundred dollars. Combine those two and it's not surprising to hear that they check in often.
-Parallax
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If the guy levelling your character gets you a bad reputation, you're screwed.
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Enough with the analogies (Score:1)
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I'm just going to say it. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I'm just going to say it. (Score:4, Insightful)
How do you plan on fixing that?
Easy Fix (Score:3, Insightful)
The gaming company already has it, but do you really want to tell a power leveler that kind of information?
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Re: I'm just going to say it (Score:2, Interesting)
My entire skill set had to shift from dealing damage (while solo-ing) to taking massive amounts of d
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Part of the reason prices inflate like that is the glut of farmer gold in the hands of people who haven't "earned it" and don't assign any in game value to it.
Want to stop gold farming and powerleveling? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Want to stop gold farming and powerleveling? (Score:4, Insightful)
There is only one way to curtail (and that is the best you can do) gold farming/selling greatly. And that is to ban the people who BUY the gold. The gold sellers will always come back with new characters to sell gold. But if their market is too afraid to buy because they will be banned, then they can't make a profit and go find something else to do.
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= pots to farm for
just retune the encounters to make pot-mandatory encounters not pot-mandatory or, even better, just have vendors sell the pots for free: you're ridding Azeroth of dangerous monsters (theoretically), the populace should be happy to support you!
= time-based PvP grind
go for skill instead (it seems this will happen in BC)
= repairs/durability
it's just a gold sink, again, the
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No one? (Score:2)
I'm looking for a new MMORPG/FPS hybrid after I gave up on Neocron due to too many unfixed bugs (years after release). Might try Planetside...
anyway, the reason is that I find Click&Wait combat boring. Since fighting is a large part of most MMORPGs, I want combat to be fun and challenging by itself. Can only be done by requirin
I'm an Idiot. But My Character is Smart. (Score:2)
Congrats! (Score:2)
Good on you!
Dont Trust IGE and Their Offspring sites (Score:2, Interesting)
Right observation, wrong motivation (Score:5, Insightful)
He makes it sound like people are checking in because they love their characters like they love their kids. I think a more accurate assessment is that they're checking in to make sure they aren't getting ripped off.
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Uh, have you ever played an MMO before?
Many people who get freakishly into it do "love" their characters in that way - it's very scary. The "ripped off" part is just a piece of it; it all boils down for their love of "living" in a world that does not exist and mommy/daddy/girlfriend (let's
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Since 1999, and I played MUDs before that for another five years. You know, like most people on Slashdot.
Many people who get freakishly into it do "love" their characters in that way.
The people who pay for levelling services don't love their characters like children until the levelling service is done with them. Feeling parental love for your character happens because you spend such a huge time playing a character, which usually implies that you are no longer in the
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1 9 houses of magic (say 20 levels of each)
2 each casting/feat requires Scryon of X amount (+ each level of each house requires a base amount of Scryon per day with mild to major damage if you don't have it)
3 each person has a preset amount of Scryon toxicity (causes a max level of Scryon that you can have)
4 each group has a Common Scryon Pool (so you could end up with a single house level 2 character that has a massive Scryon level banking for a group of 20-30)
5 balance the spell
Clarification (Score:4, Informative)
For example, to buy a load of mana potions to be able to spam your strongest spells early on and repeatedly, at prohibitive costs for a standard character of that level.
Some people make calculations as to the exact best way to level, "normally" and by powerleveling. Knowing which mob has a good respawn rate compared to how much time it takes to kill it compared to how much exp you gain from it.
Surely sometimes the fastest way to level includes different players who party with you so you get some of their earned exp.
The point still stands that games that force you to grind are probably not that fun, but rather just addictive.
People who buy from IGE are spoiled morons. (Score:1, Informative)
You'll get a level 60 character you have no clue how to play, and you'll have trouble finding a party to go to any instances after you gain a reputation for being an idiot who wipes your party. That is, if you can find a group in the first place. Likely, people won't party with you since they've seen your character running around in a bot-like manner and an inability to speak English. Your character will likely already have a bad reputation, in other words, because people who hav
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Considering an average of 16 days /played from level 1-60, to hit 60 in three months you're looking at six hours a day, five days a week. That's pretty extreme for a normal person with a full-time job and basically impossible for anybody with a family.
It's taken me the best part of a year to hit 60, but that's ok. I like questing out in the world of
Power leveling makes for horrible players. (Score:2, Insightful)
I've played MMORPG's for years (from EverQuest, to Dark Age, to WOW these days) and it becomes very easy to tell the difference between a player who paid for power leveling services (or just had a friend power level them, as was the case in EverQuest and DAoC more often than not) and someone who actually played the game from level 1 to MaxLevel. Almost without fail, the person who was power leveled has no clue how to play their character and knows nothing of common game concepts (pulling, tanking, whatever
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heh, earlier on in WoW i remember when us warlocks were the rarest class... and there'd always be that one person, on the rare occasions that I would group, that would tell me to not ninja all the soul shards.
Interview? what interview? (Score:2)
It's a market force to improve games. (Score:3, Insightful)
The viability of powerleveling/goldselling/etc as a business is directly proportional to how much of the game is simply not fun for players.
The real solution is not to try and enact policies and game systems to make powerleveling difficult, but instead to design the game to make it undesired. If a leveling/farming market springs up, that's your cue that this is an area of the game which needs reinventing as something that players actually _enjoy_ doing.
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As long as people continue to differ on what they enjoy, the problem cannot be solved by making a particular aspect of the game more enjoyable. 'Enjoyable', you see, is neither constant nor universal.
To put the point another way: there will always be a percentage of people who simply enjoy cruising around with an uber-powerful not-home-made character, and so a market will do its darndest to arise to fulfill that desire.
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There is no reason for any game company to go out of their way to please everybody. If there are some players that don't find the game fun any more, it is time for those players to move on to something else that is fun. Blizzard (et al) are making enough money that they don't need to cater to such people, especially when doing so could seriously harm the playing experience of everybody else.
The world does not revolve around you.
Another Analogy (Score:2, Insightful)
"Leaving your child with a felon who runs a crack lab, and if the felon gets busted you lose your child and all parenting rights forever"
Since if your character is caught hacking/botting/being power leveled it can get the account banned.
Does IGE have a garuntee in case the charcter is banned?
powerlevelling is good. (Score:2, Insightful)
I know some people don't like it, they say that people don't work to get their character to level 60 or whatever is max.
I say that's a lie, i say people choose to work at their job, instead of doing what many consider a chore (ingame) to get those stats.
If you have 3 friends playing WoW and they're all maxxed out, but because you just started in a lawfirm,
it'll take you half a year to get
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How much enjoyment could you have with what is essentially somebody else's high-level character? A good deal of the enjoyment of having such a character is remembering the effort it took.
"I say that's a lie, i say people choose to work at their job, instead of doing what many consider a chore (ingame) to get those stats."
If it is such a "chore" that you equate it with "work," then quit
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If it's made according to how you wanted the character made, You paid for it, it's yours.
"... then quit the game."
There ARE aspects of the game payers like, why not just let them play those parts?
Their subscriptions help pay improvement of the aspects you like, just as much as yours does
"[Your argument is] nothing in the g
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I can go down the street to the trophy shop and buy myself a trophy to my exact specifications. Heck, I could probably spend a little effort and get myself an exact replica of an Olympic gold medal. Does that make it the same? Does that mean it's worth as much to me as a trophy I won?
"There ARE aspects of the game payers like, why not just let them play those parts?"
If those aspects of the game were meant to be the
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Secondly, you seem to think im referring to the particular game that you're playing, which i don't even know which one is.
I admit that i might've been a bit carried away in my reply to your first post and have overlooked that you were being very specific.
Thirdly you make the mistake of assuming that spending money on something is not a commitment. You're wrong, it is!
I w
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The Power part of Power-leveling (Score:1)
In fact, I'm trying to think of things in my life that I could "outsource". Aside from coding, which I actually like to do, I don't have many opportunities to hire someone. I have no need of a gardener, or a babysitter, or even a dog walker. I take a cab sometimes, but that's differ
Gil Sellers Are Evil Incarnate (Score:3, Interesting)
Around that time wierd things started to happen in the AHs. Prices on items that players would normally put up there in order to make money were dropping rapidly. Someone was undercutting prices like crazy, and outrageous amounts of items were flooding the AH also. Take Fire Crystals for instance. Crystals are the basis of the crafting system of FFXI, without them you cannot craft at all. A stack of 12 Fire Crystals would normally sell for 8,000 gil were undercut to 1,000 to 2,000, and you'd see 60+ stacks on the AH. You'd think that a drop in price for these items would be a great thing, but for players who sell crystals on the AH to make money its a bad things. It makes it harder for players to make money needed for upgrading armor and weapons, and otherwise being able to buy other crafting materials. The overall economy suffered as a result and is just now starting to recover.
To combat gil sellers SE implimented a number of countermeasures. The servers, all 32 of them, have packet sniffers which watch for bot programs that snif packets watching for NMs to pop. Now, there is a delay between the initial packet sent from the server to the client announcing the pop of the NM so that bot programs can't claim it first before the players can.
Another countermeasure they did was to put an EX (Exclusive) flag on certain items dropped by NMs associated with popular quests. EX items cannot be sold on the AH or traded. Characters can only have one RARE flagged item in their inventory. This includes personal inventory, MogSafe, and Mog House storage. You can store then in the delivery box by sending them to yourself. Many quest items dropped by mobs and NMs have both the RARE and EX flags.
Lastly, the amount of gil that can be sent to any character via the delivery boxes is limited to 1 million gil. All of this is common knowledge.
Now that Chocobo Raising has been implimented and Chocobo Racing is just around the corner now comes the issue of rampant gambling. Gambling has been in FFXI for a long time thanks to the