Legends
Elite
- Joined
- Dec 31, 2006
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- 3,235
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- Inherent Marxus Legends
When I started this game 14 years ago, it was a player vs. player money game.
And that's why I loved it.
Entropia was built on speculation. When Neverdie bought the Asteroid (and Deathifier bought TI), there were no promises and no guarantees, stated or implied by MindArk. It was a total leap of faith. In the end, the whole thing paid off tenfold for MindArk. Most people only talk about the profit that Neverdie made off of it, and they forget that this whole Asteroid venture was crucial in inciting many more players to make those larger deposits and making those big purchases. It was done, really, with the intention of creating customer confidence.
When the Shopping Malls came, it was again, same thing, sight unseen. No way to know exactly what you were getting, another leap of faith. I believe there was just a 3D rendering of a mall to show what it looked like, but you really didn't know how many shops you were getting, how many item points they would have, didn't know they had terminals inside, auctioneer and so on, it was a complete unknown what you were getting and therefore pure speculation.
According to Google:
Speculation:
1. the forming of a theory or conjecture without firm evidence.
2. investment in stocks, property, or other ventures in the hope of gain but with the risk of loss.
The Asteroid, Treasure Island, Crystal Palace, the Shopping Malls, the 5 Banks, these all fit the definition. These are the things that brought the money in to even build the game that you loved. So I have a hard time understanding how you can argue against the investors.
But it's interesting to see how 2 people (you and me) who started playing Entropia right around the same time can have 2 very different views of what the whole game is about...
Today it's become a player versus investor game.
And this is mainly (not only) because of the Deeds.
That's why, when I saw someone again answering a "player" saying that we could make money, and explaining that it's mostly because of the CLD, I thought "here we go again", and I jumped in.
And I don't want to get into a political discussion, but just saying the sad thing is that it replicates exactly what happens in real life with capitalism.
The richest people win.
The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.
Who wants to play a game that reproduces exactly the same shit that happens in real life?
Besides people who know they're on the winning side ?
That is generally true, I guess, but there are exceptions to this. I met someone in the game who has never deposited any money into it, and who, according to him, had an account worth close to 20k. He had been playing for about 5-6 years when I met him and most of that money came from healing services.
Another example of something you could get into and make some free money was pets and taming. Granted MindArk is kind of ruining that profession now by neglecting it and by forcing people to kill mobs in order to spawn the tamable one.
I can't blame anyone directly for that.
Neither MA who created the deeds to "save" the game (they should have stopped at CLD), nor the people who can afford hundreds of them and buy them.
But it's a fact that players always lose in the long run, and investors always win.
It's just a bitter observation, concerning a game that I liked a lot, and that I think deserves a lot better.
I have lost money as an investor in this game, so it's not true that "investors always win". I have speculated on certain things that did not work out for me and ended up selling at a loss (or was very lucky to break even in some cases). And every time I buy something, I have to wonder if MindArk is going to change something tomorrow that's going to cause this item's value to evaporate, it does happen. And the opposite happens too, but it's very hard to try and predict what will go up in value, and most desirable items today will only go down in value as time goes by. There are only a few things, maybe a handful of things that actually went up in value over time. And it would have been impossible to know what they were at the time so investing money in Entropia is not as easy as you make it out to be.
As an investor, I'm constantly exposing myself to scammers, one old scheme that I think is well know by now is land owners that pay people or use bots to hunt on their land to inflate the revenues while they are trying to sell it so they can get more money for it (very few have been known to actually do that so I don't mean to paint all land owners as scammers here, just an example).
Also, investors often don't use the items that they buy, so they don't actually 'get their money's worth' from them. An example is a highly desirable unlimited gun. The benefit of owning one is in the savings you make from not having to hunt using limited guns. All that markup you save adds up to a lot over time. A good unlimited gun can easily pay for itself in 3-6 years of hunting. The investor that speculates on one isn't availing himself of these savings. The hunter will often see the gun pay for itself before they sell it for a nice markup, while the investor sells it at a loss due to depreciation.
That's probably also why I like PvP, and idea of lootable PvP in this game, cause here we come back closer to a player vs player game.
Money is still involved alot since good gear is expensive but for sure it is alot closer to something fair, that is Player Versus Player (what PvP stand for)
I hate PvP, that's why I quit EVE Online. As far as I'm concerned, PvP is heavily reliant on pay-to-win model, and I'm not interested in fighting other peoples' bank accounts with my bank account, I think that's dumb.
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We are obviously 2 very different people with very different experience in life. I will respect your opinion, I hope you can see and respect mine.
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