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I made a thread asking Blizzard do this forever ago and everyone laughed at me. Guess who's laughing now.

I don't see the point.

If destruction exists, we must destroy everything.
Shuruppak Yuratuhl
Slaad Shrpk Breizh

There's a big faq on mmo-champion, but I'll save you the reading. It's a scam to make even more money off the diablo 3 cash auction house. Sell an item for cash? Blizz takes a portion off the top. Want that as actual cash? Blizz takes a fee and sends it to your paypal. Didn't set up preferences? Those winnings go straight to your blizz account and you can't ever get it out, you can only buy blizz things with it.

Dvergar /
Quisling

I'm guessing, if it's going to work anything like I wanted it to, that it will be alot like Microsoft Points.

Point is, I can buy single months of gametime at a time and/or buy two and save the 2nd for when I need it and/or buy pets!

I guess it's not entirely terrible to pay for a WoW sub through the D3 AH.

But yeah, I don't think anyone's blind enough to not realize this is a scam. Add layers of transactions to the real-life conversion, in order to skim more off the top!

If destruction exists, we must destroy everything.
Shuruppak Yuratuhl
Slaad Shrpk Breizh

how is that legal

Why wouldn't it be?

It's a lousy deal but it's definitely legal. The part about the law "requiring" them to wipe accounts every three months is total garbage, though.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

3 years; inactive accounts only. Probably still total garbage, but let's not lie about an unpleasant situation.

If destruction exists, we must destroy everything.
Shuruppak Yuratuhl
Slaad Shrpk Breizh

I see the real issue as being much more ominous and long term.

What we have is corporations usurping the role of government. It says right on our money, "Legal Tender For All Debts, Public And Private".

But wait! Now Blizzard (and a bunch of other corps) have their own currency. Sure you can pay with dollars. But they'll go out of their way to make it as difficult and costly for you as possible, with fees and general inconvenience. All so they can hold onto your dollars - where the value really lies - longer so they can collect interest, making a profit for doing literally nothing.

The other day, I redeemed a rebate on a PC component and was told I could get a check, cashable for USD, in "8-10 weeks", or an AMEX debit card in 2-3 weeks. As if it's as cheap or easy to cash out an AMEX debit card. The incentive, from their point of view, is that they can keep more money. So it begins.

Imagine the mess we'll be in, in about 20-30 years, when every major corporation, from Wal-Mart to FedEx, has their own internal currency. It will be just like the Middle Ages, or the early days of America, before the emergence of national currency: popular weakness, economic torpor and oligarchy. After all, why should the winners invest in better products and services when they can just leverage their dominance to extort more money out of consumers?

Blizzard also made another troubling statement, saying that they plan on "growing talent internally", rather than recruiting from the outside. The long-term implication is that they can create a totally loyal cadre, educated with corporate indoctrination, limited horizons outside the organization, and bound by restrictive contracts. Don't like that? Then what options do you have, when all the corps that control the playing field are doing the same thing? It's modern feudalism, plain and simple: peasants, squires and lords.

I don't begrudge Blizzard for "growing talent internally" but I do think it's a dangerous harbinger of things to come.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

I actually was thinking more along the lines of "what are these profits considered?"

Taxable?

Like Blizzard pays any taxes to begin with.

RETIRED.
[armory loc="US,Bleeding Hollow"]Mayonaise[/armory]
[armory loc="US,Bleeding Hollow"]Jerkonaise[/armory]

was refering to players making money playing a game.

This is already how the USA works, minus the internal currency. You really think it'll survive another 30 years?

If destruction exists, we must destroy everything.
Shuruppak Yuratuhl
Slaad Shrpk Breizh

It can and almost certainly will get a lot worse, believe me.

Technology will give rise to a vicious and very tenacious sort of corporate feudalism, propped up by mind control, drugs, barriers to access, surveillance and identity management. The Chinese will be a major aggravating factor should they try to leverage their holdings to reshape America in their image to exploit it as they do their own people (provided, of course, China doesn't implode first, which is quite possible).

When I say "mind control", what I'm referring to is the power of modern technology to overwhelm human senses and psychology and reshape human psychodynamics in ways that were previously unthinkable via groupthink and vivid imagery. People being fanatically loyal to a corporate family, or to narrow institutional ideas that make no sense, would have been unthinkable and impossible until the development of advanced marketing tools. If you doubt this go look at people like Kaldoreii who willingly pay to be told what to think, and adopt the most ludicrous of ideas on the basis of pure spectacle and groupthink. It's cultlike behavior previously associated exclusively with religion or political movements that now lies within the grasp of corps.

It is this conflation of economic and intellectual power that makes feudalism such a degenerate and tenacious system and so hard to undo once it metasizes.

"Survive another 30 years". If the DPRK embargo has taught us anything, it's that however small the pie gets, there's always enough for those at the top to go on as they have. And, as in the DPRK, the party line is that the ideology will save the nation even as it leads it down the tubes.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

Walmart*