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Comment by pluma | Hacker News Reader

Surprised to see so many positive comments considering her behaviour in the game seems eerily similar to that of the kind of startups HN likes to hate on. Her success was mostly based on exploiting the naïvity of other players, draining their money by selling excessive amounts of overpriced goods. She even brags that "scrubs" complained about her behaviour. The traders she bankrupted are the "moms and pops", the handful she eventually allied with formed a literal cartel (and she even describes it as such).

Sure, it's "just" a game but she was clearly playing a very different game from the one the majority of players were playing and it sounds like she was adversely affecting their experience.

The account sounds more like a cautionary tale than something worthy of praise.

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Why? To me this is no different than a person who is against mass murder being okay with multiplayer first person shooters.

The consequences don't impact real life, you can leave at any time, and in most cases it is very simple to recover, even if not fully.

I think the real interesting morality starts happening when it does impact real life. For example, someone in a poor country farming items to sell on the black market as a way to make real life currency they need to live. I've read about (though am not really sure about the authenticity) of gold farmers in places like Venezuela doing this to survive.

What happens when killing and looting someone in a game actually costs them a meal in real life (even if the real money trading is banned, a rule is only as good as it is enforced)?

"Why? To me this is no different than a person who is against mass murder being okay with multiplayer first person shooters."

I'm not sure it's an apple's to apple's comparison. Multiplayer first person shooting games are designed for mass killing. Minecraft players are playing a game to gather resources to build things. Alice is playing a economic simulation. Obviously she is going to win.

The equivalent analogy would be that Alice gets on to a Counter Strike server, and somehow manipulates the economy where she gets the best guns and all the other players get a knife. IMO, the game will not be fun for the vast majority of the players.

Obviously, the consequence is minimal compared to losing a meal. The only real consequence is that the perpetrator is a big bully and an ass. In real life, we (as a society) would look down on an adult who went to the playground and kicked out all the kids. There are no real consequences for kids to not play in one particular playground, but that's not the society we want.

>Minecraft players are playing a game to gather resources to build things. Alice is playing a economic simulation. Obviously she is going to win.

What is missing is that people were still able to play minecraft without the market, even on the given server. Did like the price? Then go mine your own, with the same chance of getting it as you would in the vanilla version.

The only person who did anything bad (which I think may still be arguable, but lets just say the only one who did anything bannable) was the one duping the items.

If anything, the tax they implemented in the 1.7 server was worse than the market takeover of the 1.6 server because it wasn't something a person could opt out of and forced an effective black market.

But CS isn't about shopping for guns; the Minecraft server was explicitly very much about the economy. I think a better analogy would be being so good, with such good twitch reflexes and understanding of the map, that she could single-handedly win most rounds.

But the whole point of an "economy" modded minecraft server IS for the economic simulation. Thats why people play it! For the markets, and trading, and everything else.

I haven't read it but apparently Cory Doctorow wrote a YA novel about this kind of scenario.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_the_Win

You seem to be moralizing about how an economic game was played to maximize pretend profits. Do you have the same complaints about how winning at Monopoly "adversely affects" the losing players' experience?

Monopoly is a very bad game, and you are a bad person for forcing it upon people.

Also, most people on the server where playing Minecraft with some buy and sell mods, not the sociopatic trading simulator the author describes.

I can’t decide what’s worse: you telling people how to play or you telling people they are bad for playing something you don’t like.

Either way your moralizing is ironic.

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