Fairly receclenty, I have gotten into crafting various things, mostly sewing small bags and other items. It gives me a sence of purpous to have smally easly atanable goals in my life like that, its a sort of small gratification that last longer then just beating a game because you can see your resultes and they are useful. I mostly scrounge up good-will and the like for old sheets and curtians that I can use for my projects. One day I decided to stop in at The Sewing Basket in Plymouth, a shop that speicalised in quilting, to see what they had for scrap bags. Every bit of fabric there was outlandishly expensive, a bag of scrap that only contained 3 diffrent types of fabric and was only about an half yard total was $7. For me that is an outlandish rip off, i can get about a half yard out of an old pillow case for 0.50.-1.00$, and i can get close to two yards out of an old sheet for 3.00$. I am sure that the fabric at Sewing basket is quality fabric, but so are the old bedlinins I get from thrift shops, its allready pre-washed, pre-shrunk, pick out a few hems, do a but of ironing and your good to go. I am sure the quilters of old never would have dreamed of buying new fabric for there quilts. How did quilting, an art that rose out of thriftiness from saving old scraps of dresses and shirs and the like become such a yuppietised expensive hobby for rich old women?
I used to think that collage was only for smart people, people that are smarter for me. but now I'm coming to the realization that it isn't for smart people, its for people who jump though all the hoops that the school system and the government sets up for them, or for people who have parents who will pay for them. In high school, i worried because i didn't take school that seriously, i just did the minimal required amount of work and then went off and did my own thing. Even though I made the minimally excepted grades to get by, I still ended up helping half the class in English, history or science. I never did all that prep-work for the SATS that the media seems to propagate, I simply went and took the test, and i got a 22 on it, good enough for most 4 year schools. I ended up going to UW Sheboygan because i didn't really have the money for a big school, or the grades really. When I started here, I thought, oh, its only a 2 year local school, its understandable if people are not as serious as people in a 4 year school, and it is also understandable if people are not as smart because it is a local 2 year school. but then i went down to visit my boyfriend in UW Milwaukee, its just the same only the people there are from richer families, and there are more of them and they live in a closer proximity to campus. so there are more parties, that's the only difference, there not any smarter or more serious about school then anyone in Sheboygan
I know that it is hard to run any kind of free game site, you have the cost of the servers, the cost of the bandwidth, staff, and numerous other things out there. But that is what advertising is for, in game or on site advertising, I have seen it work out the major network sites, a quick little :30 advertisement and then back to the show. You could do this very easy while a game is loading, or have little things in the game like in Burnout Paradise, there are billboards along the city streets, adding to the realistic factor of the game as well as generating some revenue for a game.
Why hasn't the free MMO community picked up on this?
I admit, back in the day I hopped around quite a bit with MMO's MMO's are Massive Multiplayer Online game, Warcraft is a MMO. I mostly stuck to Koran MMO's, online games are incredibly popular over in Asia, in japan there have been cases where people have gone on week long benders with games and had to me hospitalized because they played for 32 hours straight.
I don't have anywhere near that kind of additive personality, I normal switched games after i got to around level 20 and went onto another game, probably because no one I knew in real life was ever playing the same game as me.
I have Played, Runescape(what early 2000's nerd kid hasn't?) Maple Story (2d) Fly for fun (was kinda cool, there was aerial combat) Perfect world (almost killed my graphic card, but it wasn't translated quite right) Silk Road( there were only 3 classes, so it got rather boring) and right now I am on Lunia, its a arcade fighting rpg, it has fighting combos and the like. it is also in 2d)
I have never played money for any of these games, I just didn't feel like I should pay if I was switching games so much, but in every game there was some "cash" items in the game. "cash" item are in game items(0's and 1's) that people pay real money for, they can be clothing or weapons, and are normaly much better then the other things in the game
I think this is rather un-fair, and a poor busnes decision. It is unfair because if I worked hard in the game, went on many raids and got lots of in game gold to buy a sword, and then someone who is only a week into the game can go and buy a sword that is much better then mine.
This is a poor a bushiness decision because it will drive players away, the old ones who know what is going on. Pretty soon the n00b to oldie ratio is going to be greatly effected, and that is no fun for the new or the old. The n00bs will stay n00bs because they will have no one to explain things to them, and the oldies are going to be annoyed and driven away from the game buy everyone asking for help. In order to get some quick cash, the greatly skew and unbalance the game driving people away.
It creates two classes of player, the ones who are willing to pay for pixels, and the ones who work for there stuff, and creating two classes is never good, it causes resentment and tensions in a type of game that is all about working together tords a common goal.
(PVP (player vs player) doesn't count to me, if you kill someone in PVP, you'll non enemies with them after the battle, you still would go on raids with them as long as they were fair in the fight)
Lunia the game I play right now I play as Deathpee and visable_panties (don't ask)
RE:Here is an interesting article done by The Guardian out of Brittan on the same subject
