After David's answers, are you convinced that EU is non-gambling *skill based* game?
First of all, if you are at the hand of a politician to get your clear answer, for anything, you are in a very bad position. If you have no way to verify, test, find some answer from other parties, you're screwed.
How you answer to this question, be it from this "journalist's" documentary, or from looking at the information you have, tells a lot about yourself.
If your answer is YES, this game is pure gambling, then you too are a gambler too and you will probably be a forever donor, I'm sorry for you, but you just greatly underestimated your brain's capacity to analyze and judge using the scientific method.
If you also put yourself at the hand of the loosing side to get information from, you're not going to learn much from their experiences. At least don't do what they do...
If you understand EU is a platform in which you can do a lot of things (including gambling but not only) then you're off to a good start.
There are many examples of successful avatars - by success I mean people achieving their goals and being overall satisfied with the outcome of their actions. These examples you should be looking at and analyze. As in life, there's no perfect recipe to achieving great results, as the goals are different and the approach varies from individual to individual. This is what sets people apart in this game as well, the approach. There's the student approach, which makes one curious and willing to gather information n order to form an educated opinion and there's the common lazy approach, that makes one repeating what others lazy people are saying, this is a casino, CBA to think for myself, fuck it.
There are many examples of non depositors that got very far in the game, either still playing or left. There are many examples of people with vision that found ways to use RL funds to purchase items, lands or deeds to make their money bring even more money. These are called investors. Why are these two types of people often called liars and exploiters? Didn't we all joined this game in hoping to make real cash for ourselves? Why aren't people looking at the positive examples and tend to look at the HOFs on EP in hoping to make a buck?? Then dismissing the potential of EU as being pure casino game...
Easy money often go easy I guess, and only when it's hard work involved those money mean something and are well spent...
As for the interview, funny, it started with "OK, all we want to do in this video is to explain to you a video game called Entropia Universe". I believed that, for about a minute. They didn't really wanted that, but they wanted something different
I don't need Simmons to tell me if this is a skill based game or not, I can look at my achievements as a non depositor with hundreds of thousands of PEDs worth of markup made over the last few years. I can look at a few people where I know what they did in the game, how far they got by being smart and skilled (both IRL and ingame).
And I also don't need Timewarpman to fix for me a problem he has. Because with all the great tutorials and the resources available on tis forum, his favorite mob is atrox and his favorite crafting item is EP. See the toxicity source? Coz you see, there are many people with a toxic approach to the game, people that somehow failed or have issues with complex inferiority or just very low self esteem and they don't think of themselves capable of good things for their lives and think that people who play the game are doing a grave mistake because in their opinion this game should die because reasons.... A person's actions in life should be towards their own goals and work for what they think it will make them better and happier. Saying this game is trash but spending so much time trying to convince others to not play is worst than being a gambler. They trap themselves in a toxic relation they can't get out of and I don't understand why. Ok you don't like this, you hate that, you despise Simmonds and the MA crew, remove it from your life and move on. Why coming back over and over to something you don't like to tell me I have a problem doing something I like? Why are you setting me your goals? Make your own and pursue them.
I also don't understand the AA group on cancerforum that preach the ending of the game and at the same time bragging about being a very old forum. Forum of what.. is there really nothing left in their lifes worth spending their time on but just coming back over and over and hating on this? Does EU meet your criteria to make you spend your time here? If yes, awesome, if no, why not gtfo and finding that other game that pleases you?