The Funeral of WoW Gold

Game-makers build up revenue with in-game cash economies–which sometimes slip outside, too.
Melissa J. Perenson, PC World
LOS ANGELES — Second Life has its own economy. So do big-ticket games like World of WarCraft ( Buy wow gold ) , EverQuest, and E.V.E. However, in-game economies are not just limited to the big names anymore; two such games were on display at the E for All expo here this weekend.
One such game, online first-person shooter Combat Arms, was released by Nexon during the summer. The game’s economy is based on NX Cash, where 1 million NX= $100. Combat Arms is the latest game released by the American publishing arm of South Korea-based Nexon.
Nexon’s revenue model relies solely on in-game microtransactions, as opposed to ads or subscription fees. The company’s games, which include Maple Story and Mabinogi (both MMORPGs), are free to play, and marketing manager Meghan Myskowski says the microtransactions don’t affect gameplay, but rather “provide customization and personalization of your character. It enhances the experience for the user.” And in the game, she adds, everything is assigned value.
The company sells prepaid cards in $10 and $25 increments; they’re available at several online and brick-and-mortar retailers. The cash can be used to buy items in the game; the typical item value is $1. However, you can’t cash out of the game, unlike some other in-game economies.
Virtual Economy Strengthens
Myskowski declines to give details about how usage patterns have evolved over the years since Maple Story was introduced in the
United States in 2005. But she says the U.S. market had to get used to the concept of micropayments.
“Now, people are used to paying for virtual items,” she adds. “Virtual life has changed substantially.” Myskowski also credits games like world of warcraft and sites like Facebook with growing awareness and use of microtransactions.
The other game on display at E for All that uses a cash economy: MindArk’s Entropia Universe. The online MMORPG game launched four years ago (originally as Project Entropia), and counts nearly 800,000 registered users; only about 40 percent of those users are in the U.S. Entropia is free to play, just as Nexon’s games are. But here, you’ll want to add bucks into the economy, in order to gain skills, possessions, and objects from other players in the game.
A spokesperson for the Swedish-based company said that over $400 million in U.S. funds have changed hands in this virtual world. The exchange rate is 10 PED equals $1; however, objects are not valued as they would be in the outside world. For example, a coat could cost $1700 in the game; one player sold a rare gun in an in-game auction for $17,000.
The company says it expects to be the first MMO to integrate the CryEngine 2, which will enable more photorealistic and immersive game play. The CryEngine update is due in the first quarter of 2009. New planets built using the Entropia Universe platform are also expected next year.
Mutual Benefit
Joseph Olin, president of the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, notes that in-game economies have appeal to both users and game makers. “Most people playing in these persistent world environments are building their character. In E.V.E., third party brokers trade currencies in virtual worlds. Nexon has shown across all of their games that if you have the right balance of in-game economies and real world value, consumers are happy to spend some money there.”
Is some of the crossover between online and offline barter on the up-and-up? The translation isn’t cut-and-dried–as the case of Blizzard’s world of warcraft showed. There, the company successfully blocked people who were cheating by paying someone money in the real world to up their character’s level for them in the virtual world.
In another sense, relative values have changed–and so have what people are willing to pay for in small doses. “Who would have thought ringtones, wallpaper screensavers, and non-game mobile entertainment would be a $250 million business?” muses Olin on the success of mobile carriers promoting such services.
The bottom line in the trend towards micropayments is less about the user experience and more about the game makers’ bottom line, though. Olin says, “Interactive entertainment companies are looking for ways to monetize their investment. The changing nature of PC entertainment software distribution, and the advent of console entertainment systems, has changed what software entertainment companies can do. You can’t sell boxed entertainment anymore. And people who are playing games aren’t always playing them on PCs anymore.
“Downloadable content and microtransactions for console based games are on the rise–look at Guitar Hero and Rock Band, where people anticipate downloadable Tuesdays, and you see huge numbers, half-a-million people downloading a song.” Aerosmith’s download album for Guitar Hero has outsold the band’s albums on CDs over the years.
Microtransactions and in-game economy are among many ways of adding to and growing a game after its initial release. “It’s code,” Olin says. “Code lives. I went into code lock, but I didn’t stop development. Why shouldn’t give the benefit of my continued development to my consumers?”
Ultimately, he adds, “consumers have so many different paths and choices to make, that the traditional business model of the consumer buying from a store, those walls are crumbling because everything is in real-time, and everything is connected.”
The experiment isn’t over, of course. “This is unchartered territory,” Olin adds. “Publishers will figure out the fair way of what people are willing to pay. The more choices, the more people benefit.”
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We’ve covered Fusion-io extensively in the past. Last month, company reps showed us their new io-SAN card which combines a RAID controller with a flash drive and today Fusion-io announced its ioextreme card for gamers. This card will have 80 GB of flash memory and will be priced at under $1000 dollars.
But that’s all in the past, today we’re here at the E for All expo in the
Los Angeles Convention Center. Fusion-io finally has a beta 64-bit Windows driver and promises a 32-bit version for the ioextreme card. For the first test, we were shown Photoshop CS3 loading a huge 750 megabyte file from a traditional hard drive. Company reps explained that the file was for a 50-foot banner and that it’s not uncommon for print shops and ad agencies to work with such large files. “It sucks, you just have to sit here and wait,” they said and wait we did. After 3 minutes and 30 seconds of disk churning, the file popped up into the Photoshop window.The rep then copied the file to the Fusion-io drive. He also moved both the Photoshop and Windows swap files from the hard drive to the SSD. To make sure there wasn’t any funny business, the machine was rebooted to flush out any latent memory in system cache. This time the file took 28 seconds to load, a full seven-fold improvement from before. With this drive, you could conceivably open, edit and save this document in the same time that it takes to for a hard drive-equipped computer to just open the file.We were also shown another demo of four big screen television sets that were streaming eight season’s worth of Stargate at the same time – that’s 256 DVD-quality video streams at once. The files all resided on a Fusion-io card and we were told that the card wasn’t the limiting factor. All the streams were displayed with VLC inside of Linux X-Windows. “X can’t handle it and some windows keep crashing,” we were told.So Photoshop and videos are all well and good, but E for All is a gaming convention and people want to see games. So why not max out the computer and load dozens of World of Warcraft ( Currency: wow gold ) screens at once? Interestingly enough, they hadn’t done this before and this would be an interesting “trial by fire”.Fortunately, we brought along our Western Digital Passport USB hard drive with our World of Warcraft folder. The great thing about WoW is that you can just copy the folder to another computer and it’s ready to play – no messing around with weird registry settings are going through a lengthy install process. It took approximately 6 minutes to copy the 8.5 GB folder from the portable drive to the Fusion-io SSD.The desktop computer was powered by a 2.5 GHz quad-core AMD Phenom, 4 GB of RAM and an Nvidia 8800 series graphics card. After the folder copy, we doubled-clicked on WoW and it took two to three seconds to open. Impressive, but opening just one window of WoW is just so boring.Ever since the glorious days of text-based MUDs and Everquest, extreme gamers have been multi-boxing, that is playing multiple characters at the same time. Usually this takes multiple machines and several hard drives, but could a solid state drive change all that? You bet.To prevent any file locking problems, we made four more copies (total of five) of the World of Warcraft folder on the Fusion-io card. Since this was an SSD, the rep said, “screw it” and ran all four copies at once. That’s approximately 34 GB of copying from a single source folder back onto the same drive – and it all finished in less than two minutes.Since I multi-box five characters at once on my Skulltrail system, I was now placed in the driver seat to finish the set up. I downloaded a $20 program called Keyclone that would broadcast keystrokes to all the WoW windows. I also installed the Maximizer add-on which eliminates all the window borders from each WoW screen. After a few minutes, I clicked connect on Keyclone and logged into all five of my characters at once. It took less than 10 seconds to load all the windows and just a few more seconds to log in. Things could have gone a bit faster, but we were severely limited by the broadband wireless connection being pumped through a USB dongle. Don’t laugh, we’re told that the Los Angeles Convention Center wanted to charge $1500 for a wired Ethernet connection.A quick peek at the task manager showed that the desktop wasn’t maxed out on memory or processing power (was hovering at around 15% with 5 WoW windows open). So, we did the unthinkable and configured Keyclone to open up 13 windows at once. Furthermore, we didn’t bother making 13 WoW folders and pointed those extra instances back to the five original WoW folders we copied a few minutes earlier. Essentially, all of our WoW folders were being simultaneously accessed by two or three instances.Ah the moment of truth, I fire up Keyclone, click connect and stare in awe as each world of warcraft screen pops up. After 36 seconds, all 13 are up and I log into five of them. Unfortunately, we didn’t have enough accounts to actually log into every window, but we might actually solve that problem later by calling up attendees to log into their accounts.While we were definitely maxing out the poor broadband wireless connection, I think the desktop hardware itself can handle several more WoW instances. With 13 windows open, the processor was pegged at 40 to 45 percent and the memory had begun swapping to the Fusion drive. But in this case, swapping isn’t that bad because it’s going to flash memory instead of god awful slow hard drives.In my brief time working with the drive and seeing it in action, I can honestly say that the drivers seem quite stable and the speed is phenomenal. In fact, computers should behave this way natively – no disk churning, no thumb twiddling, things should just freakin load quickly. While the price may be high for the average consumer, I can see how professionals like video editors and photographers would snap these drives up. For these folks time is money and when most real world tasks are done five to seven times faster, that’s a lot of time … and a bucketful of money

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It’s not unusual for video game players to speak of a routine that involves ordering pizza, getting a sugar jolt, and then playing “World of Warcraft” (Buy wow gold ) for hours.
But the person talking in this case is Constance Steinkuehler, an educational researcher who organized an afterschool group for boys to play, for educational purposes, the massively multiplayer online role-playing game.
Some of the eighth graders and high school freshmen who signed up for the group couldn’t have cared less about writing or reading in school.
Yet those students have gone from barely stringing together two sentences to writing lengthy posts in their group’s Web site forum, where they discuss detailed strategies for gearing up their virtual characters and figuring out tough quests.
“It has worked ridiculously well,” Steinkuehler said. “It shouldn’t be working as well as it is.”
• Click here to visit FOXNews.com’s Video Gaming Center.
Video games are also being embraced by some advocates of “unschooling,” a type of home schooling that puts kids more in charge of the curricula.
Guess what — the kids want to play video games. But they also learn everything from math skills to social skills along the way.
The unschoolers’ experiences, along with the early success of Steinkuehler’s program, suggest that playing a video game set in a virtual online world can encourage students to learn valuable real-world skills.
Steinkuehler’s goal is to figure out when and how learning takes place in online games, and how popular games made for entertainment might become educational tools.
An online reeducation
“World of Warcraft,” ( Currency: wow gold ) known to its players as “WoW,” provides something of a ready-made experiment for researchers to see how games can affect players.
The game, published by Blizzard Entertainment, boasts a bigger population of players than most
U.S. cities, with more than 10 million subscribers worldwide paying a monthly fee to run around the virtual land of Azeroth.
Players get more powerful as they gain experience and levels by killing monsters and performing quests together, eventually working their way up to level 70 with the latest game expansion.
Unlike many games that have an online component, massively multiplayer online games such as “WoW” require players to invest much more time in creating a character and participating in an online community.
Gameplay revolves around social activities, such as groups of players cooperating on a quest or forming large “raid” groups to tackle the toughest game bosses.
Web sites and forums have sprung up around “WoW,” where players trade strategies, share stories and debate the finer points of gameplay.
Online fantasy worlds may seem too disconnected from real life to have educational value, but Steinkuehler, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Sean Duncan, her colleague there, have found otherwise.
Their earlier work analyzed forum postings on the official “WoW” Web site, and found that 85 percent of the conversations showed that players had decent levels of scientific literacy.
Players used reasoned arguments, backed up hypotheses and even brought statistics to bear on issues that they faced near the higher levels of the game.
Numbers like that “shock even the gamers,” although Steinkuehler points out that gamers who post in forums do not represent the average “world of warcraft” player. A majority of players probably just read the forums and don’t participate in the more sophisticated online discussions.
However, the high level of thinking represented in the forums still confounds expectations that most online chatter represents lowbrow mom jokes and gossip.
The question for researchers becomes how to translate observations about online worlds into real-world results that impact the lives of students.
“What I’m deeply invested in is reinvigorating their intellectual life,” Steinkuehler told LiveScience. “I want kids to understand that games are intellectual and about problem solving, not that different from what scientists are doing in the real world.”
Unschooling in World of Warcraft
The idea will probably prove a tougher sell for parents who tell their kids not to play video games until they finish their schoolwork.
They might want to talk with Jill Parmer. The full-time mom plays online games alongside her kids whenever they like, and helps lead a group of homeschool kids and parents in a “WoW” guild called “Horde of Unschoolers.”
Many homeschoolers still study with textbooks, but the unschooling philosophy does away with the trappings of formal education. Each unschooling household has its own twist that boils down to parents following and encouraging the interests of their kids.
Parmer first struggled to get her son Luke and daughter Addi to learn certain subjects, and watched them zone out. So she read up on the unschooling movement, despite her husband’s uncertainty about taking the kids completely out of school.
“Their interest is going to lead to learning,” Parmer said. “So I calmed down and I watched them play games, and I played with them.”
She has watched Luke, 10, make his own learning connections between “WoW” and other areas in life.
One day he became interested in the mathematical concept of exponential increases after his “WoW” character encountered a disease cloud.
“Just in his ponderings, he asked ‘Mom, what if someone got infected and he walks into a room with four people, and they leave and each walk into a room with four people?’” Parmer recalled.
She told him, yes, that could happen, and added another fact about not all people getting infected at the same rate in the real world.
Another unschooling mom, Kelli Traaseth, saw kids improve their literacy through online games such as “WoW.” The results are strikingly similar to what Steinkuehler has witnessed in her afterschool group.
“We know several kids who learned to read while playing these games,” Traaseth said. “If you want to classify some of the things we’re doing when we play ‘world of warcraft,’ the list could include math, reading, sociology, economics, creative writing and communications.”
Fighting gamer stereotypes
Unschooling’s radical approach and its extension into an online game still make many people react with disbelief or outright hostility.
When Parmer got a profile in the online gaming publication “WOW Insider,” a flood of comments appeared that included unkind words about Parmer’s family.
“No, my kids are not fat slobs. They are quite slender,” Parmer noted, remembering some of the harsher comments. “Warcraft is only one part of things that they and we do in life.”
Luke plays daily in “WoW” with other kids that the family met at a gathering of unschooling families.
Addi, 14, currently takes more interest in roller skating, but still logs into “WoW” to organize group activities. Parmer jokingly calls Addi the “creative director” of the unschooling guild.
Perhaps the key to unschooling, whether online or in the real world, is that parents willingly become full-time teachers who accompany and play with their kids.
Unschooling does not mean leaving children to watch television or play “World of Warcraft” on their own all the time — that’s called “neglect,” Parmer said.
Traaseth also suggested that parents devote particular attention to playing with their younger children when first getting into online games.
“The social skills that kids learn in a virtual world are incredible, and there is a particular type of etiquette that you have to use and to communicate with others through written text is extremely complex,” Traaseth said. “So for younger players it makes everything so much smoother if a parent is there to help.”
Kids will be kids
Online games continue to gain traction as educational tools in professional circles.
Steinkuehler’s research received positive buzz at the American Psychological Association’s annual convention this year, marking a different tone for an organization that had previously focused more on condemning video-game violence.
Even NASA has commissioned game developers to help create its own space-themed online game.
Yet turning video games into a positive force for the future still requires answering some questions from the past.
Steinkuehler has a particular interest in helping boys from working-class families who are getting left behind in schools.
“Boys are the biggest consumers of games, and it’s boys who are predominately falling out of school,” Steinkuehler said, pointing to the 65 percent graduation rate for male students nationwide. “I can’t do all these studies without asking why the biggest consuming population of games isn’t doing well in school.”
Steinkuehler can draw encouragement from the first year of her pilot afterschool program, which will run again from October 2008 through May 2009.
She did not even get a chance to recruit before she had a line of parents asking if their boys could get in. Some drove to the Madison, Wis., campus from as far as two hours away.
A mix of regular students and homeschooling kids got together to play for several hours after school each day, with a doctoral student or volunteer staff taking turns “lifeguarding” the group. Everyone also met one Saturday out of the month at the University of Wisconsin campus.
There the group collaborated on activities such as writing and designing the guild Web site, or putting together graphic novels based on “World of Warcraft” ( Buy Wow gold ) adventures.
The Saturday event gave Steinkuehler an opportunity to talk individually with the students and get feedback for their research funded by the MacArthur Foundation.
Her next research proposals may tackle online games played by younger kids, such as “Runescape,” where she suspects the learning curve is different from that of teenagers.
Solid numbers on student progress will have to wait until the research project runs its course, but one early lesson is clear.
Like the unschooling parents, Steinkuehler has found the greatest success in following the interests of her students, rather than forcing educational content on them.
“I don’t want to turn a play space into work place,” Steinkuehler said. “Frankly that would rather suck for everyone, including me.”
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PMS.h2o is a relatively new team to the tournament scene, so GotFrag decided to take some time to interview aNNa and get her opinion on a few things. Her team faced an extremely difficult group stage yesterday, having to playing x6tence from
Spain, and both Team EG and Pandemic Blue from the United States. Where did you meet your two team mates who’re competing with you here today?2GD the shout caster, he recommended our Druid/Priest. The other player was already in our guild and we had just been playing with him for a while already. You faced some very experienced and difficult teams in your group today, including Team EG and Pandemic Blue. Even though you lost all three games, how do you feel you actually played against them. Was the luck not in your favor, or were you just not well prepared for this event?First of all, we’re pretty inexperienced as a team, particularly when referencing LAN play. Secondly, we only played our main setup about 2 out of 9 rounds. Versus Pandemic, we didn’t play our main setup at all, same for x6tence. Versus EG, we played our main setup twice, but I think they’re just an overall better RLD team. It wasn’t about bad luck. In the second game versus EG, our Druids computer just tabbed out, but I don’t think we would have won that game anyways.Everyone knows hindsight is 20/20. If you could go back and replay any of the matches you played today, what would you do differently?We would have played Pandemic a bit differently. The first two games were not good at all, but I’m not too sure what else we could have done. We did do our best, but I think the inexperience really showed through today. With regards to world of warcraft (Currency wow gold ) competitions and tournaments, how do you feel competing in a coed event? I know you played CS quite a bit, and 1.6 has a few female only tournaments, so what’s your opinion on that?It’s definitely more fun to play versus guys. In all honesty though, it’s pretty much the same. When I play CS, especially at the once a year event in Sweden, there are a lot more guys but they’re usually better, so you get a lot more experience. PMS.h2o is a relatively new team here, anything planned for your future? Any events that you’re looking forward to?I really don’t know. The expansion is coming out, so we’ll have to figure that out. There aren’t really any close events that I know about, besides Montreal, so we’ll just see. Thank you very much for your time. Any shout outs or thank yous?Yeah, I’d love to say thank you to PMS and all of our sponsors and InferoOnline as well.
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Just when you thought that Blizzard’s World of Warcraft ( Buy world of warcraft gold ) could not get any more immersive, along comes more good news - TN Games’ 3RD Space Vest is now compatible with World of Warcraft, offering gamers a trio of dimensionally accurate tactile sensory stimuli that are coordinated directly with the game action. You can see it in action at the E For All Expo that is held in
Los Angeles from this October 3rd till the 5th.
The driver offers players fantastic contact effects as well as a physical sensory experience linking a new meaning and signature to magic spells and powers, while enhancing the intensity and fun of game play. The 3RD Space Driver Version 2.0 includes the entire functionality for all supported FPS and RPG titles within the single free download. Any 3RD Space Vest works with all supported titles and for those gamers who have already downloaded previous versions of the 3RD Space Driver, these new functions are automatically added with the driver’s auto-update function.
Just in case world of warcraft is not your thing, you can still duke it out with bruises to your body with over 20 other titles including Bioshock, Blacksite Area 51, Call Of Duty 4, Clive Barker’s Jericho, Crysis, Doom 3, Enemy Territory Quake Wars, Fable, F.E.A.R, Frontlines - Fuel of War, Rainbow Six Vegas 2, Halflife 2 - Episode 1, Halflife 2 - Episode 2, Mass Effect, Medal Of Honor Airborne, Prey, Quake 4, TimeShift, Turok, Turning Point - Fall Of Liberty, Unreal Tournament 3; You Are Empty, and World of Warcraft.
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