2fps

Wait, people are actually upset that you can buy stuff with money? What stuff, a vanity pet? How much money, 10 bucks?

Clearly I’m simply coming from a different background. To me this is barely a blip on the radar as I’ve played games in the past that cost significant amounts of money for all manner of game-changing products.

I refer to Achaea, a text-based MUD.

Achaea is free to play and allows the purchase of credits that can be used to purchase items in game. In fact, you can sell credits to other players for in-game gold currency meaning that essentially, you can buy gold. The horror!

The catalog of items you can buy with credits, and only with credits mind you, in Achaea is quite expansive. You can buy items that boost experience gain (very handy as any death carries a steep experience cost and few players ever even reach level cap, let alone stay there), boost statistics, increase damage and make you invisible. There are other items that serve a less direct purpose like the flowerpot that grows a small handful of flowers every 24 hours.

So what does it all cost? Here’s a link to Achaea’s credit-purchasing page. You’ll note that you can buy credits in variously sized bundles from 15 to 2000. You can of course buy more but you’ll need to get in touch with the administration to work out the details.

Now look at the cost.

I know right!?

Nearly 600 US dollars for 2000 credits. Ok but surely that will buy a whole hell of a lot of stuff right? Let’s look at some of the items for sale.

Robes of the Magi: 1000 credits
   – Cuts your mana usage by 1/3. This does not apply to every case
     where you use mana, but almost all. Draining of mana by demons
     or runes is not affected. Transmutation is also not affected.

Staff of Illusion: 500 credits
   – Cast an illusion in your room. Takes a 2 second equilibrium.

Bracelets: (increase max health & mana. Only one bracelet works at a time.)
   Mayan bracelet:      350 credits (increases by  5%)
   Ceylonese bracelet:  700 credits (increases by 10%)
   Logosian bracelet:  1400 credits (increases by 15%)

Veil of the Sphinx OR Hood of the Sphinx: 2000 credits
   – Hides you from many mortal abilities that can pinpoint your location…

Sashes: (to increase intelligence)
   Epicurean Sash:           500 credits (+1 intelligence)
   Sash of Wisdom:          1250 credits (+2 intelligence)
   Sash of Caymus:          2500 credits (+3 intelligence)

There’s a lot more you can buy but this gives you an idea of the value of credits. See that Staff of Illusion up there? That allows you to generate a few lines of text visible to anyone in your same room. Its not really able to be used in combat because it uses your equilibrium which essentially locks you out of using other abilities until your equilibrium comes back a few seconds later. There is of course, an item that reduces the time it takes to recover equilibrium but you’ll need more than a few hundred credits to get it.

Make no mistake, people buy a lot of credits. If you want to be competitive at all in pvp, you’re going to need to pony up some cash. I’ve known several individuals who have spent tens of thousands of dollars on credits, loads more who have spent thousands and yet more people who have spent hundreds.

That flowerpot I mentioned that serves no purpose other than growing five flowers that have no particular function? It costs 200 credits. The flowers can be sold for about 50g and a single credit can be sold for anywhere between 6000 and 9000g.

I think I’ve not only made my point but also beaten it senseless and buried it in a shallow grave in the public park but yeah, after playing games like Achaea I just can’t see what the fuss is all about with $10 vanity pets.

I just recently ordered the DVD’s of a TV show that literally changed my life six years ago.

You see, way back in February of 2003 I saw a show on Adult Swim called .hack//sign (pronounced dot hack sign).

.hack//sign is a very attractive looking anime with some downright gorgeous music by Yuki Kajiura. Its a story about people from all over the world playing an online roleplaying game set in a virtual reality. In 2003 this was a brand new concept to me and I was instantly enthralled.

Imagine being a connected part of a community made up of people from all over the world. A community where your physical location was irrelevant. Imagine a world where you didn’t hunger, where you could run non-stop for hours and not be tired. A world where you could meet people from anywhere around the globe and stand on common ground.

The concept had a distinctly utopian, paradisiacal appeal to it that I couldn’t stop thinking about. Four or five hours after I finished watching the show I was sitting in front of a computer screen searching for all the information I could find about online worlds.

My first question was whether such a thing even existed. Did the technology exist to bring people together in a dreamworld? I discovered that the technology did indeed exist. I also discovered that my basic dial-up connection was not going to be best friends forever with online worlds of the graphical variety. Sad times but really, not a tremendous loss. Graphics are not nearly at the top of the list of things I need in a game.

My search for alternatives to the graphical worlds led me to textual worlds. I discovered MUDs. Reading up on a few of the more prominent titles, these games seemed to have much of what I was hoping for when I began my search. Since everything was in text, the world was almost infinitely changeable. The potential impact an individual player could have on the gaming environment was enormous.

I turned off the computer about an hour before sunrise. By that time I had created the seed of a new life in Achaea. Angaril the Priest had been born and had reached level five.

The people I met in Achaea had a profound impact on my life. I believe I’d be a very different person today were it not for the things I learned from those people. I certainly wouldn’t have started a guild in WoW had it not been for the things I learned from an Occultist character named Das. I learned all kinds of things about economics from listening to Garth and Mulkerrin. I learned how to hurt unjustly someone I cared about and how I can be an insensitive short-sighted ass from Sylvia. I learned things about relationships and what I wanted from relationships from Sequona and Tawny and Alpine that I had somehow missed completely in my past relationships. There’s a lot I could say about my time playing Achaea and someday I’ll probably make a much larger post about it but that’ll have to sit on the back burner for a while.

So to make a long story fractionally shorter, I left Achaea after Angaril married Tawny in a spontaneous ceremony in the Basilican Gardens with at least six former Priest guild leaders present. I know, the significance of that is lost entirely if you aren’t familiar with the game or the politics of a guild long dead and gone but humor me, you’ve read this far!

I should mention that Angaril is also partially responsible for Silas. Sorry to all of you who may still be playing Achaea, I always encouraged him to take over the world but the kid took that idea and ran with it farther than I expected. Enjoy the tyranny!

From Achaea I migrated to Lusternia, another MUD made by the same company. I did much better in Lusternia. I was slightly less of an ass and I managed to not completely foul up interpersonally like I did so frequently in Achaea. I got into politics, became a GM, ran (but withdrew) for leader of one of the four major nations and all kinds of other things.

Then on one fateful early July evening one of the people I was friends with in Lusternia said I should play WoW. I interrogated him about the available classes and for a few minutes there I was very seriously convinced that the Hunter class was the obviously smart choice for any rational person. Then he told me I would need to carry around bags of food for my pet or it would run away. That didn’t sound very fun at all so Hunters were right out. I’m a sucker for the “religious-esque” character types when it comes down to it so I pretty quickly decided that the paladin life was for me. A day or two later my WoW career officially started.

Two years later, here I am. Its been an absolutely crazy ride these past few years as I’ve explored these virtual communities and its even crazier to think that it was all sparked by catching a glance at a television show that only aired for a month on cable TV.

I’m very much looking forward to getting these DVD’s.