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MMOG Sites Under IGE Merging? 52

Posted by Zonk from the dirty-pool dept.
CTD writes "Grimwell Online notes that IGE has announced a merger of networks involving: Thottbott, Allakhazam, OGaming, and L2Orphus. There is a thread in the Allakhazam forums that brings all the release data together - but still leaves some questions about what is to come. Grimwell raises one in his post about this: 'Even more fun for our friends who work PR for gaming companies. IGE = RMT, which is not the Devil - but is not exactly welcomed at most companies. Will this move help push things past the tipping point and force developers to deal with the new, larger network?'"
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MMOG Sites Under IGE Merging? More

MMOG Sites Under IGE Merging?

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  • Sellout? (Score:2, Informative)

    by Hossicle ( 945360 )
    from the Alakazam admin: "We are now owned by a company that owns a bunch of stuff, including IGE. They bought both of us (and several other sites as well) and then split us into separate divisions so that there is no interaction between them. You know my stand on gold selling. Before agreeing to anything like this, I wanted to make sure that there would be no interaction between those divisions and that I would have complete control over the new network, including the sites that used to be part of ogaming.
    • If he honestly believes that he's whacked... remember when Hotmail sold? Ya MS did'nt mess around with Hotmail at all....

  • Very thourough detail on IGE, this purchase & (Score:5, Informative)

    by CTD ( 615278 ) on Wednesday May 03, 2006 @09:58PM (#15259302) Homepage
    This was put where I could find it, and is a very interesting read. Lots of great detail about IGE/Allakhazam if you want to learn more.

    http://wow.azzor.com/445/truth_about_IGE.php [azzor.com]

  • The Devil is in the Details... (Score:3, Informative)

    by iCEBaLM ( 34905 ) on Wednesday May 03, 2006 @10:39PM (#15259489)
    IGE = RMT, which is not the Devil

    I wish he would speak for himself! RMT has almost destroyed the economy of FFXI to the point where you have to buy in game currency (gil) in order to afford anything of even moderate worth. This was due to the RMT gil sellers dominance and monopoly over entire mines, harvesting and logging areas, notorious monsters, etc. Only recently that SE has banned 700 accounts and seized over 300 billion gil [playonline.com] have things been normalizing. This was done in early Feb and prices are still dropping, slowly but surely, on most commodity items.

    RMT has real effects on MMORPGs, some games more than others depending on how the economy works.
    • RMT has many negative effects, but the assertation that you have to buy gil to progress is just flat out wrong. Anyone who believes it is just looking for an excuse for their cheating.

      SE doesn't make big announcements when they ban people to placate the masses like WoW does so you never know how many people have been banned over the course of the game. That announcement was made because things had gotten so out of hand so quickly this past christmas that they had to let their players know they did somethin
      • RMT has many negative effects, but the assertation that you have to buy gil to progress is just flat out wrong. Anyone who believes it is just looking for an excuse for their cheating.

        If you are insinuating that I buy gil then I expect you to retract your statement.

        I am a level 70 black mage on the Unicorn server. I have never bought gil. I did not say you have to buy gil to *progress*. I did say however that you have to buy gil to be able to afford items of moderate worth. I currently have around 1.4 milli
        • In the current FFXI economy 5 million gil isn't really a huge amount of money. At level 70 you really should be able to make 5 million in under a day's play. OK, so that is still quite a long time, but not compared to the time it will have taken you to get to 70. Grab some other black mages and mana-burn some burning circles. You should be able to make millions without too much trouble.

          The economy seems fairly sane at the moment. Elite end game gear takes a significant amount of effort to acquire, but is ce
          • In the current FFXI economy 5 million gil isn't really a huge amount of money. At level 70 you really should be able to make 5 million in under a day's play.

            5 million gil is a huge amount of money. You can make it in a day if you are *lucky* doing BC/KSNM (which I have never been), otherwise it will take months of farming/crafting/HELM.

            I have no idea what server you play on where you can make 5 mil a day guaranteed but I sure hope they open migrations to it.
    • Define normalizing? Falling prices cut both ways, and you get less of a profit on the things you sell to earn gil towards that now-cheaper thing you want to buy.

      This is complicated by the fact that it is basically impossible to make a profit by selling things to NPCs, so gil is streaming out of the econemy (NPCs still sell useful goods and services) faster than it is coming in.

      The only question that really matters is how much playtime a player has to spend farming/crafting/etc to get a particular item, and
    • It wasn't true that you had to buy gil in FFXI. Yes, there was a period of hyperinflation, but that didn't really make a huge amount of difference as the price of farmed items went up as well, as did the profit from crafting. I never bought gil, and never had a problem with affording high-end gear.

      Prices seem to have largely stabilised now.

      People keep complaining about the economy in FFXI, but they are usually missing the point. The FFXI economy is much more player driven than, for instance, WoW. This means
      • The econemy in FFXI really isn't very player controlled. Lets look at some of the hard limits on player control of the econemy in FFXI. Many goods and services can only be obtained from NPCs, many goods can only be 'produced' once per character, many cannot be traded and NPC buy prices, quest rewards, and mob drops are almost all inflexible.

        Now how about some things that you could technically do but that the game doesn't support? Such as comission something or in any other way illustrate the demand for so
        • The econemy in FFXI really isn't very player controlled. Lets look at some of the hard limits on player control of the econemy in FFXI. Many goods and services can only be obtained from NPCs, many goods can only be 'produced' once per character, many cannot be traded and NPC buy prices, quest rewards, and mob drops are almost all inflexible.

          It's true that there are constraints on pricing of items, but even that can add to the complexity. During the recent hyperinflation a number of crafting recipes becam

  • one gold farming group to rule them all ..
  • Ignoring all the gold-farming issues, am I the only one who finds the idea of having a massive database of where everything can be found to be sort of self-defeating?

    I hate "grinding" as much as most people, but isn't part of the coolness factor of having a level 60 whatever with a complete set of epic armor the simple fact that they've done a lot? It seems that if you know exactly where everything is, and exactly what is required for X quest, and that the fastest way to get item Y is to kill monster Z bec
    • There are a lot of reasons to use something like this.

      As a noob, sometimes the directions the NPC gives are misleading. "Go take this to some guy north of here" is a perfect example. That happens in WoW all the time. The guy might actually be NorthEast or NW. You just can't tell. Sometimes, they change the locations of mobs in a patch but don't update the quest text. You could spend an hour looking for evil spiders in the North while the actual spiders have moved to the East.

      As an experienced player,
      • I have to agree with you.

        Most of the time, what I want to do is find out where some obscure mob is to be found, or find out what their idiotic spawn rate is.

        Forgive me for having a family, but I don't find the idea to sit in a zone/area for hours/days on end waiting for a freakin' mob to spawn so I can kill him to advance some quest. And since the damn thing spawns so infrequently, I want to know WHERE he spawns, so I have a chance to find it.

        In WoW, at worst, most of the quest mobs spawned right away, or
      • The fact that you need to create a new character in the first place is one of the fundamental problems with many MMO's out now.

        It's a cover for poorly designed game mechanincs.

        Of course WoW is a prime example of Cut-And-Paste developement at it's finest.
      • Your first point is true. Although I agree with the grandparent that going and looking everything up online and acquiring it kind of defeats the point, sometimes it's nice to have a resource when you don't want to run around in circles for 4 hours.

        On the other hand... one of the things I hate most about MMORPGs (and I actually kind of like them, mind you) is that in a group, you're never experiencing anything new. Everyone else is just rushing ahead because they've done it a dozen times, and you have to jus
    • There are people playing those games to show off. "Look, I got a level $maxlevel char, with $rareitem and $rank, and $insaneamount money!".

      They don't care how they got it. If money is no issue, simply buy it. If it is, the fastest way to get that is by grinding with the help of a game DB. Because the people to show off won't know how you got it, that you actually didn'T "work" for your items, that you didn't solve the quests and that you bought the money.

      For me, I play these games to show off to myself. Her
    • I played the style you mention in Ultima Online back in the day, never looked up information, considered it cheating. End result? Never maxed, never best gear etc etc... if it takes some people MONTHS to get that epic gear WHEN THEY KNOW EXACTLLY WHAT TO DO... how long do you think it'll take when you don't know how to get it? Or even if it exists? I know play FFXI and use databse sites all the time... and honestly have way more fun because I'm not spending all my time wandering around in circles.
    • Not exactly. First off, quests are meant to be solved communally. Maybe not on exactly that level, but there's a quest in EQ2 that, for example, requires you to traverse the globe searching for 20-some-odd dragon runes. These things are tiny and hidden in relatively random locations across the entire world. There aren't really any clues as to where they are. If you didn't have some sort of resource pooling... *shrug*

      Secondly, bugs happen quite frequently in MMOs. Whenever there's a possibility of hundreds
  • It's a sad day for MMO fans. I'm a WoW addict myself, thinking about switching to Goblin Workshop. I don't mind the google gold ads, but anyone know if they have a shady parent company?
  • L2Orphus was purchased by IGE almost a year ago now, and they've had a massive banner ad for IGE for 2 years now. RMT ruined Lineage II. And while it looks like Square is doing something about it for FFXI, there's no action on NCSoft's part on L2. It's bad when dealing with L2 because NC already doesn't give half a rat's shit about their american customers, it's all focused on Korea. When I can't go XP in Enchanted Valley because there's 20 different bot trains on L2Walker or L2Wind, there's nothing I c
    • It's an inevitability. Companies exist to fill a demand. IGE came into being approximately 4 years after RMT started happening on eBay. If you want a non-RMT-able game, the only solution is completely different game design. It may not even be possible.
      • I agree that it may not be possible, but it is possible to minimize the impact of RMTs. This is probably been best showin in WoW, from the games I've played. Money is easily made, and the best of the best gear is mostly only available via Bind on pickup items from instances and raid instances (a few exceptions, but for the most part that's the way WoW is designed). But this really was designed into the game. Blizzard saw the issues and took serious pre-emptive steps to have this not happen.

        Where IGE and i

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday May 04, 2006 @07:43AM (#15261081)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

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