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Comment by narinxas | Hacker News Reader

I had a work colleage who played games BECAUSE he made money from them...

essentially some dumb kid from a real wealthy part of the world would pay my former colleague "peanuts" to upgrade their player and gather other stats.

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Sure. There are a lot of opportunities in the developing world to remotely extract wealth (legally or otherwise) from the wealthiest part of the world in exchange for services at starvation wages there, thar are well above minimum wages at home.

Levelling up the MMORPG characters of rich western kids in exchange for money is one of them, and telling them to "try turning it off and on again" when they're adults is another.

I remember a friend buying 1000 gold coins on WoW for €20 back in the day. That was the price of 10 coffees at the time. He "spared" me 100 gold coins (I had only 1 at the time) and it made the WoW experience completely different.

And in turn harmed the experience for anyone not engaging in buying gold.

probably ruined their own experience as well.

wheb I use cheatcodes it usually ruins the game for me (what is the point playing now that i can have everything)

I guess it's safe to assume that $20 in pay to win would be pretty far from having everything. But I share the sentiment, its a huge hit to the suspension of disbelief regarding in-game achievement.

In the heyday of EverQuest, UO or other mud, things were selling for much more than a mere $20 for 1000gp ( I used to play wow and was among the first to hit 60 on my server, and most likely I had some server first, so I do know what represented at that time 1000gp), items could be worth a few hundred, if not thousands. Hell I believe it's still the case on some emulator servers (P99 for EQ)

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