There’s not much difference (to me, anyway) between using Thott to find out how to finish a quest, and looking on your class forum for the best expertise setup for your style of playing. In both cases, someone had to figure it out from trial and error. I just have a bit too much going on to spend a ton of “trial and error” time these days, I’m afraid.

Notpron reminds me a bit of The Stone, which used to occupy lots of my free time. I was playing around there before Google was the premier search engine, so I remember keeping 3-4 different search engines open, hoping one of them would give me the right clue to proceed with the puzzle. I remember getting so frustrated with a couple of the puzzles that I just wanted them done so I could move on to others, and it was nearly impossible to find the answers posted anywhere. I’ll bet they’re much easier to find now.

Everyone seems to have different opinions about what is cheating. Tabbing out to find maps, using add-ons, passing gear from character to character… We define what is acceptable and what is cheating by what we’re looking for in the game, I suppose, and what parts of it we find satisfying. I do like exploring, but I don’t want to spend an hour of my limited playtime wandering around the entire zone to find the little man with the wagon who needs my help, so I do go looking for more clues. I also share wealth and equipment between my different characters. I’m building up a family of them with different professions and so forth, just like a small guild, really. To me, that’s not cheating because it’s how I like to play, but I suppose some could interpret it otherwise.

Interesting to think about…

Of course, the existence of RMT COULD mean that certain parts of the game are indeed fun for nobody at all. I was blown away when I read a post by a LOTRO developer who actually admitted that one of the requirements for high level characters to get their final powers was to “make it grindy”. I guess I should not be surprised, but I actually thought when people said games were deliberately made grindy to keep you around they were just being bitter, but then someone who works for a game went and said “oh no that was one of the requirements”.

You know I think Jezebeau has a good point. The pricing model drives companies to make games that way. I wonder if Guild Wars has a better model. I haven’t played it so I don’t know but it would seem a game without subscription fees, where you buy expansions each year, would mean there’s no encouragement to create grinds to keep people online. Instead the incentive is to create content that will attract people to buy the next expansion.

Though I agree on cheating or skipping, once I entered a cheat code even once, I couldn’t finish the game. I felt like I was wasting time doing it the hard way and it wasn’t fun. So I stay away from buying gold for MMOs for the same reason. I know it will ruin it for me, even though some parts are not fun. (but there’s always parts of a game that are not fun which is why I would use the cheat code).

One possible subtle anti-RMT measure is an “achievement” for characters of “Untwinked” or “has never received any cash” or similar, that was visible to other players.

“I got my first character to 50 in 3 weeks. How much faster can I do it farming?” then “Ok, how fast can we do it with full guild powerleveling support?”

They’re defining the game with their own rules, defining their own winning conditions just as much as the person that says “I’m going to take this character up to 50 solo- no twinking, no powerleveling, no RMT. The difference is that ONE of these strategies more closely matched what the developers prepared for.

Personally I feel no matter what nice things you do, there will be people who will try to shortcut them.

For example, suppose you’d like to control endless inflation a bit (endless inflation is caused by huge amount of money dropped by mobs and comparatively tiny amounts of money being taken out via repairs and such). So you could add something like an ability to spend N amount of money to get like +1 damage to your weapon. That ought to be a good thing — some use for all those [otherwise useless] money people are accumulating. But I bet there will be people who will RMT the required money and complain about in-game money sinks — no matter how cosmetic in the grand scheme of things that +1 damage is.

When I hit mid-level ranges in games that no longer have a sizable poplation outside the end-game, I get high-level friends to help me with unsoloable quests (but not before I spend up to an hour determining whether or not it’s soloable with the right tactics). If I’m just getting early level attunements for the hell of it, I’ll take any shortcut I can get. When I decided I wanted the MC attunement on my 70 druid, I hopped into the lava and outhealed it on my way to the clickable.

When I want to play with fluff systems like housing, I engage in RMT rather than level-capping a character in a game I could, for the most part, do better without just to be capable of affording such luxuries. Shortly thereafter I usually lose interest and unsubscribe.

When I’m playing a hard-to-level class like a dedicated tank or healer, I will do absolutely anything possible to lighten the load.

When quest directions don’t tell me exactly what I need to do, or where I can find that out, I look it up. If I’m not getting the expected result for a quest, I look it up. Infrequently, but too often, there are long-forgotten glitches (read: just about anything not fixed in a few months after the content is launched) which I wouldn’t otherwise know about.

I understand why developers draw everything out. If I could level my villains in short order, I’d only subscribe for a few months at a time. I know this because I’ve never held my CoX subscription for longer than it took me to hit the mid-to-late 30’s. I get to play with the big powers and then I get bored of the near complete lack of engaging content and decide to that fifteen hour of one, universally apt strategy is enough.

[tangent]
So… I’m not wholly convinced anymore that number of subscribers is necessarily a remotely good indicator of a good game. I think developers and publishers who have some good multiplayer content that won’t last hundreds of hours should consider embracing short-term MMO’s. I can’t really find an ideal short phrase to describe it, but I have this romantic idea of MMO-style setting and play that is designed to be exhausted within less than 200 hours, but is an absolute blast for that time. That’s the kind of game that can justify a full-scale box price before a subscription, and that’s the kind of game I’m convince more of my friends to play. It would a pretty brilliant way of drawing subscribers away from other games, if only for a few months at a time.[/tangent]