I'm officially smart

Just graduated, well actually about a month ago. I am now a "Diplom-Kaufmann", the German equivalent to the Master of Business Administration.

The topic of my thesis: "The Development of a Price Control Mechanism for MMORPGs", which you can download at db-thueringen (click on "[Dateien anzeigen]" to view the .pdf file).

Designers don't like farmers

I told you so. :-)

Having worked with designers, I know they hate farmers more than a lot of players do, because the farmers are finding and exploiting design weaknesses in products they've worked on for years. Some people would say, "Hey, tough luck. If your design is weak, it's your own fault."

Source

Btw: interesting Escapist issue this time.

WoW - anti-spam

With the new WoW patch, Blizzard introduced a feature to report spamming for gold farming services. Players are already complaining about the largely increasing number of random (raid) group invites. The spam report feature only works with mails and public chat, spam in consensual and private chats can't be reported.

As I said: if you want to prevent gold farming, don't implement the mechanics that support this... „feature“. To kill the Hydra, don't cut of its head, tear out its heart.

$econd Life

"Your World. Your Imagination."?

Something is missing... Let's see... 144,510 players had a positive monthly Linden dollar flow, 302,665 spent money ingame (April 2007). Thus, at least 158,155 players lost money within the last month playing Second Life.

"Your world. Your Imagination. Your Moneys."

Thank you. $incerely your$, 
Linden Re$earch, Inc.