Monday, September 29, 2008

Oh Boy Gold Sellers!

Man, like here’s a topic that hasn’t been done TO DEATH a million times over, yet still manages to pop up every now and then, and people get all shocked and up in arms over it, and then a week passes or so, and along comes isobelle to bring it up again. Fuck you all, I hate you, and this is your punishment for living.

Warhammer suffers from gold spam overload right now, but many people can’t seem to understand why. By the time I was level twenty, and able to purchase my new mount, I already had over thirty pieces of gold on my toon, and the mount only costs 15g. Gear in the auction house is pretty underwhelming, as public quest influence points and renown points award the best gear as it is, and they’re guaranteed drops. Hell, they aren’t even drops at all, you just go to the vendor and get it.

Trade skills could use a bit of work, and trade skill items are rare sometimes, but the end result of trade skill crafted items is lackluster at best, and are hardly worth spending real dollars on. I managed to screw up giving my orc a last name (Ixo Belle), clicking the ‘purchase’ button twice before it registered (and paying 8g in the end instead of 4g), but being out twice the cost wasn’t even a big deal since there isn’t really anything to spend gold on anyway. Gear doesn’t decay (need repairs), pots drop from mobs all day long, and there’s so much crap in my bags at the end of a play session that vendoring it all is all I need to keep gold coming in.

Here’s a funny story: I’m actually banned from the game right now on a 5 day suspension because I set my Belkin up to hit three buttons over and over and over while I slept, but not because I need the gold, but because I was after a useless trophy item for my toon, and hoped that killing 5000 dwarves would give me some sort of Tome Tactic unlock. It didn’t. I have yet to discover a single tome tactic, and it makes me crazy seeing that empty button on my UI. I found a spot in Barak Varr where ridiculous amounts of dwarves respawn over and over, and they pose no threat whatsoever to my orc. I have moves that buff my armor, decrease their weapon skill, and an aura that has a 25% chance on hit to proc +600 hp. With a pool of 5000 hp to pull from, I wasn’t going to die. I couldn’t even loot the dead bodies, but like I said, I was after an unlock, not loots. I just set the Belkin to hit N (target nearest enemy), 4 (attack #1), N (target nearest again, just in case the first one died), 6 (attack #2), N, 0 (attack #3), repeat. That ran all night long, and I hit 5000 dwarf kills, but got nothing special for doing so. I actually set it up to go again today around lunch while I ate with the 5th graders, and returned to find myself teleported to a mountaintop standing next to a GM who was /fart-ing and /lol-ing at me. Gee, you caught me, I guess. I suppose in the end, I earned about half of a level worth of XP for killing 3000+ trivial mobs… is this the WORLD FIRST SUSPENSION FOR BOTTING in Warhammer? It wasn’t even a bot, technically…

When I botted in WoW, and was subsequently banned, it was because end game raiding was too pricey, and the alternative (do the same quests every day over and over!) wasn’t fun in any sense of the word. I decided to use the time I slept in the real world to have my rogue kill spiders over and over and over in the Bone Wastes, and I’d auction the Netherweb Spidersilk on the AH at the going rate. I never “took” spawns from anyone else, as the Glider plug-ins I was using (Pogue, pather) would detect when anyone was near me, and I’d patiently wait in stealth until they left.

I also bought gold pre-BC for my epic horsey. I have a job, and if spending one hour at work enabled me to have enough gold to buy a horse that moved 60% faster than the welfare horse, then it didn’t seem like a huge deal to me to make the decision to make the purchase. I wasn’t buying gold, I was buying TIME, and I happily pay people for things that take to much time for me to do personally all the time.

Have you ever baked bread from scratch? I have. That shit takes TIME. Time for the dough to rise, then more time in the oven, then time to cool, not even counting the time mixing the flour and kneading the dough. Have you ever eaten a salad? They’re pretty easy to buy, assuming you have a job, and you don’t have to hand grow tomatoes, pick weeds out of the lettuce patch, fuck with pressing the olives for the dressing, or any of that other crap. You just buy the salad and enjoy the hard work everyone else put in. Way to go champ, you’re apparently a capitalist asshole, and deserve to die in a fire. Sure, you could sit there and GROW a fucking salad from scratch like you’re supposed to do (and everyone else does!), or you could take the (pussy) shortcut and use your (bitch-made) money you earn at your (cock sucking) job to buy a (faggot) salad from some (chinese) supermarket. God, you’re such a bitch.

Pre-BC, time was the biggest commodity (well, it still is), and I happily paid someone to do the bullshit work for me, so I could run around and do quests (woohoo! fun!) on a faster horse. Later, I realized I had free time myself (while I slept or worked, things not every MMO player does), and I could use the computer to make more efficient use of that time.

Whatever, the point is that we’re back in Warhammer now, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why someone would even want fifty gold, regardless of how CHEAP CHEAP CHEAP it is. Maybe the sellers are just hoping to grab a few sales at the launch of the game, before everyone realizes that gold isn’t really hard to come by, and you earn more than enough to keep you easily training skills and buying renown gear by just playing the game? People will complain that they have to deal with seeing the spam on their screens while they play, but you may as well get upset and break dinner plates over the 30 minutes of previews you’re forced to sit through every time you want to watch a DVD. I’m pretty sure they’re so perfectly entrenched in their demographic (HEY YOU! STANDING IN OGRIMMAR! YOU PLAY MMOS? SWEET, WE SELL MMO GOLD!), that the cost of creating throw away accounts covers it for them. Do these same people that hate gold spam get pissed off at Google every time they send a Gmail, and it offers the option to “invite bill@whoopty-whoops.net to Gmail” (HEY, YOU USE EMAIL? WE HAVE EMAIL TOO!)? Get over it, there are bigger things to be upset about.

I’m honestly more annoyed by the LOLRP messages we get every time some nub is banned, that we HAVE TO CLICK ON to get off our fucking screen:

And yeah, seriously… my bad on the 5000 dwarf thing. I wonder if everyone had to click OK about it? SWEET, I'm famous! I’ll be back in on Friday to sign autographs, lulz.

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