Ah, so are you saying they use the "pay real money for virtual money" scheme going on? I played a MMORPG called Project Entropia, but they should have named it Project Entropy, seeing as how your money always seems to be decaying down to zero while you play it
They make games basically a lottery using this system, not skill. The only way you have a chance of being any good is by paying thousands of dollars to shoot monsters to increase your skills so you can shoot monsters better... Meanwhile, each bullet costs you something like a tenth of a penny, which adds up quickly when you're playing a shooting game. Getting "loot" to pay back for killing monsters is usually a gamble... because most often than not you don't find anything... Therefore you have to keep paying to play.
Oh it's a great model for a business, since you gain so much more by people paying $100 a month for virtual clothes, armor, guns, and bullets rather than having people pay a flat $9.99-$14.99 a month who don't have to worry as much about it. A+ for that.
I played the Matrix Online for about 3 months or so, and I had more fun during that time than I ever did with Project Entropia. The game itself is just built better. Better graphics. You get cooler clothes for next to nothing, which is nice. Special effects were awesome, and there was way more character customization in terms of what you could do with it.... If you didn't like Kung Fu, you could specialize in hand guns, rifles, etc. if you didn't like fighting, you could specialize in coding that would heal friends or hurt enemies. Fun stuff. Unfortunately, the game itself was rather repetitive. Run into a building, kill everyone, run to another building, repeat. Eventually I just left in pursuit of new and exciting games.
Getting off this tangent ha, I'm definitely going to at least check out this Gaia Online. Sounds interesting anyway.
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