Something to salivate over

So, apparently there's this other on-line game called The Sims Online. Some of you may have heard of it

The currency in that games is Simoleans. Now, if you go on ebay, you can see that people are trading Simoleans for _real_money_. The exchange rate is pretty low right now.

Do you realize what this means? If SL blows up big, there is the small but non-zero chance that you could make a living playing Second Life.

Now get back to your jobs.

people have been doing that on everquest for years now. *cough* i mean.. i wouldnt know anything about that.. *slips her groucho glasses on and slinks away*

Hmmm thats just wrong.
Sorry my $0.02

But if someone can come up with a valid arguement to this I may listen.

I'm not sure what side you want me to argue, so I'll do the one I believe

The cost of something in a reasonably free market is the price that people are willing to pay for it (put down your pens and Adam Smith books, we're keeping this simple).

If people think SL$ are valuable, they will pay for them, and someone will supply them.

Now, is this good for SL? I say no, it allows someone to shortcut their way to lots of SL$ using real $.

But it's going to happen.

I'm not so sure it will happen on that large of a scale. There are multitudes of ways to earn money ingame compared to games such as everquest or daoc. A large percent of the games out there follow the same spreadsheet - newbie begins, newbie starts with minimal money, newbie spends money, newbie grows and wants more money, newbie must fight to aquire more money. It's nothing but a never ending cycle. Where as in THIS game, newbie begins, newbie starts with a healthy amount to get started, newbie spends money, newbie thinks of creative and inventive ways to make more money (because it's easier than fighting mobs for 10 hours a day in hopes that an uber item will drop and sell for 50kpp sort of deal). Not to mention our stipends.

There is another online game running along the same theme as second life, its called There. (www.there.com) I was accepted into their beta first and thought 'hey neat, this should be really cool!' Well after playing for 2 days I of course was broke, and researched ways to earn money. With no job system implemented as of yet, and no way for money to enter the economy, There is going to die very quickly. The idea behind it is 'people can buy money in game via real world dollars'. Which to some seems like a dream come true, to finally and legally be able to buy money quickly with real dollars. However their exchange rate is found to be highly lacking in common sense. It runs around 1$ US for every 1700-ish therebucks. So in curbing the need to buy money out of game illegally, they have in a sense completely gridlocked their economy and locked the doors on everyone and anyone who can't afford to play the 'i feel like buying money today' scheme. For gods sakes, the cheapest shirt in that game (totally NON customizeable) runs 200$ therebucks. The most expensive is about $12k. A shirt. For 12k dollars. You can buy a hoverboard for 5k. How totally rediculous is that? And they want.. no.. expect people to pay for this. Well lets see. A shirt at 12k would cost me 6$ real world money. For 6$ real world money I could go to the movies. I could buy groceries. I could even have 6 bucks more gas in my car than I do now. It isn't going to fly. Only the people with real world money will play the game because thats all that CAN play the game. Therefor I don't really feel that the underground market of SL money swapping will really be that large, simply because it is so easily aquired.

Sorry this was so long

hehehe Wednesday you pretty much summed up why I don't like it. Basically for the same reasons Philip and Linden Labs is so far against people paying an additional amount to Linden Labs for more money. I would rather not see this turn into a wealthy IRL person's game and leave the poor or struggling , or just plain common sence people (you know the ones who buy groceries instead of pluggin 100's of dollars into games) type of people out.

LOL that's just sad for the person who buys it! I've seen an EQ account go for 1000$ US. The char was 9 months old!

There is yet another "game" in beta called "There". In "There" you start with T$10k that doesnt buy much (I couldnt afford both hair and pants).
There is no way to earn T$ but rather you have to whip out your RL credit card to buy more T$.
Guess they are cashing in on the idea that ebayers knew all along. Personally I can't see paying real US$ to buy vitual pants for a virtual being. But hey, thats just me.

wow, that's really interesting. I didn't realize that about this other game...hmmm.

I'm sure it will be very appealing to some people...but i genuinely like building my own stuff and hanging around other people doing the same thing.

But it's nice to know there will be all kinds if niches filled within this area of online "gaming".

From what I've read and heard about "There" (not much), doing _anything_ costs you actual money. Selling objects, creating objects, auctioning objects, etc.

To paraphrase Stein, there is no There there.