Two Headed Snakes

There's only a couple things at the heart of these MMO Game Economies that are really fun.

When yer forced to kill thousands and thousands of the same boring ass monsters over and over again to level, they better cough up some randomly generated kewlie treasure to keep things interesting, y'know, 'cause if they just kept giving you 2 Lizard Scales over and over again, you'd feel like you were trapped in a Run Lola Time Loop or something, the only thing changing on your screen is the count on the stack of Lizard Scales you got in your inventory.

That's about as fun as singing Four Thousand Bottles of the Beer On the Wall heh.

The occasional Hot Pink Blouse of Camouflage (+1) is worth more than the 1 silver 34 copper listed on its how-much-is-this-worth-to-a-vendor price tag, y'know, even if its totally useless to you as an item, and a waste of inventory space, it gives you something interesting to put your tired-ass eyes on and laugh about or something.

"Oh man, check out this Purple Pope Hat!"

Randomly generated treasure is fun, no doubt, just like pulling a lever on a slot machine.

And then there's the Auction Houses, which are the same kinda fun folks have with Ebay and Auction Houses in real life.

Y'know, the Auction House is just another gambling thingie, really, yer kinda playing Blackjack against the other players on the Auction House, making sure you don't price shit too high or buy resources for too much while still undercutting your competition enough to win or something heh.

Its a PvP thing.

Where pulling the lever on monsters for kewlie randomly generated lewts is a PvE type of gambling heh.

Not that there ain't "friendly" crafter folks that try to buck the system, making junk to help out the newbs at a loss and stuff, and that's fun too, y'know, 'cause it makes ya feel good and all that.

But that's also actually the nastiest kinda pvp that you can do to the newbie crafter guys that you are competing with, making it so that they can't make a profit off their hard work, that's the kinda shit Big Companies do to Little Companies to snuff 'em out where its cheapest to snuff 'em out and keep 'em from growing into Big Companies that would start costing you some real cash to compete with heh.

Anyways everybody's goal in these Game Ecomony things is to get totally rich and twinked out with items that are super rare and stuff, 'cause then you get to strut around and be all "look at me! my pants are made out of solid gold! nobody has solid gold pants like this!" and you get to take pity on all the poor peasants who can't afford Solid Gold Pants like you and all that, and that's fun too.

"Oh. Well, at least you have Gold Plated Pants, those are pretty good."

Oh don't you even try to tell me that its not fun to be the Richie Rich Cock of the Walk Bastard in Solid Gold Pants who can afford to be generous to less fortunate folks and stuff, you can't lie to me, man, I'm at least as evil as you are heh.

Heck, I got the Solid Gold Boots to go with my Solid Gold Pants.

Oh. Well, at least you have Gold Plated Boots, those are pretty good.

Anyways, in order to make the Solid Gold Pants seem great to have, they gotta be rare and hard to get and all that.

And thus the nightmare is born.

Some people will group to get a chance at the Solid Gold Pants, and that's good, 'cause the game wants you to be in debt to some other players in the game for helping you out, that's the Mafia Circus of Owing Retention Mechanism right there, you can't quit until you pay folks back for helping you, even if you hate the game heh.

And other people will hunt hides and craft and use the money they make to just buy the Solid Gold Pants off the auction house, and that's good for the game, too.

But down at the bottom, its just fun to pull the lever on the slot machine and get some randomly generated goodies, and play some Blackjack against people.

And some people love-to-hate to PvP on the Auction House heh.

"That bastard just undercut me!"

See, odds are that you just got sucked into a circus of vengeance against that guy now, looking for a chance to punch him back will prolly keep you playing for a couple more days heh.

You know how that works, like, you check the auction house, and you notice nobody is selling 10th level leather armor pants, and you got the stuff to make some so ya make a pair of 10th level armor pants and put it up there.

And you come back in an hour or so and there's still nobody selling any other kind of armor but suddenly there's three other guys selling 10th level leather armor pants for less than you are!

They coulda made a 10th level leather armor shirt or a 10th level leather armor pair of gloves, or a 12th level piece of armor, or a 8th level one, with the same raw materials, but for some reason they just weren't interested in doing any of that heh.

"WTF!"

"I stab at thee!"

"Paybacks a bitchbastard buddy!"

And I know there's other kinds of games we could play, if we were a "more enlightened crowd" and shit like that, but this is what we got, y'know.

Monkeys pulling levers for items and getting nasty about it heh.

When you look at it from that perspective, the people who just wanna PvP straight-up without all the two-faced economic bullshit and backstabbing are actually the friendlier and more enlightened and less materialistic crowd!

But you can't tell devs that or they'll give us "PvP" instead of "content," where content = more rare item slot machines, and PvP = nothing heh.

This is so messed up man ahaha.