05-15-2003, 02:15 AM
Hi,
Of necessity all the opinions on this matter are just that: opinions. So my statements, like those of everyone else, are strictly based on my attitudes on gaming (and to a lessor extent life in general). This is a topic where the expression of the ideas is at least as important as the ideas themselves, for solid arguments in support of a viewpoint would help to establish the reasonableness of that viewpoint.
I don't necessarily associate skill or ability with finding items in D2. I see it more as some combination of repetitious hours of item farming and/or plain ol' dumb luck.
Valid point, and it does negate much of the force of my examples. More telling, though, and I'm surprised you didn't catch it, is that there is no "win" or "lose" in a game like Diablo. I realized after I had posted that comparing Diablo to a game like chess or to an athletic event is an incorrect comparison. A better comparison would be a group of actors putting on a play (or, perhaps more fitting considering the state of b.net, a mob putting on a demonstration). The event exists for itself. How this relates to the subject at hand, however, I do not really see.
I think a better analogy for buying items in D2 would be collecting baseball cards. If I don't want to go though a potentially unlimited number of packs to get the last few cards I want, and don't want to (or don't have much opportunity to) trade, then how much integrity do I lose by going out and buying them?
I'm old enough to remember when those cards had no (monetary) value. We traded them, we flipped for them, and we bought thousands of packs of bubble gum for them. But no one *paid* for them. And at the end of the year, they'd go into a shoe box at the back of the closet. If my family hadn't moved around so much, leaving those shoe boxes behind, I'm sure that nearly complete sets from '54 through '59 would be worth something now. Although the cards would be in nowhere near pristine condition :)
So, I agree with you completely about the fitness of the analogy. In both cases I have a smirking admiration for the sellers and their ability to keep the spirit of Barnum alive. And I think the buyers are fools for spending money on things of no intrinsic worth. And the fact that there are enough of those fools to drive that worth into fairly large numbers does not make me consider them any less of a fool. While I feel somewhat the same about stamp and coin collecting, at least those have some artistic and historical merit. Whatever branch of vertebrates I descended from, it apparently has no pack rats in it ;)
Let's say I agreed that buying items instead of finding them brought a sense of shame and loss of integrity. Given that, how about saving up chips or perfect gems and then trading a whole slew of them for some impressive item? If I'd gotten a Lightsabre that way, with a character who was not yet playing in the parts of the game where that item could drop, should I also feel shame for not "earning" it?
Valid point. However, you got those items by playing the game. You made the trade (or trades) within the game. I see no real problem there.
Let's try to set some boundaries. Take the extreme: a person who buys a level 80+ character fully decked out that has completed the game on all three levels. Buyer plays the game for a few minutes, gets bored and quits. Fool or not? Maybe we can find where we each draw the line ;)
--Pete
Of necessity all the opinions on this matter are just that: opinions. So my statements, like those of everyone else, are strictly based on my attitudes on gaming (and to a lessor extent life in general). This is a topic where the expression of the ideas is at least as important as the ideas themselves, for solid arguments in support of a viewpoint would help to establish the reasonableness of that viewpoint.
I don't necessarily associate skill or ability with finding items in D2. I see it more as some combination of repetitious hours of item farming and/or plain ol' dumb luck.
Valid point, and it does negate much of the force of my examples. More telling, though, and I'm surprised you didn't catch it, is that there is no "win" or "lose" in a game like Diablo. I realized after I had posted that comparing Diablo to a game like chess or to an athletic event is an incorrect comparison. A better comparison would be a group of actors putting on a play (or, perhaps more fitting considering the state of b.net, a mob putting on a demonstration). The event exists for itself. How this relates to the subject at hand, however, I do not really see.
I think a better analogy for buying items in D2 would be collecting baseball cards. If I don't want to go though a potentially unlimited number of packs to get the last few cards I want, and don't want to (or don't have much opportunity to) trade, then how much integrity do I lose by going out and buying them?
I'm old enough to remember when those cards had no (monetary) value. We traded them, we flipped for them, and we bought thousands of packs of bubble gum for them. But no one *paid* for them. And at the end of the year, they'd go into a shoe box at the back of the closet. If my family hadn't moved around so much, leaving those shoe boxes behind, I'm sure that nearly complete sets from '54 through '59 would be worth something now. Although the cards would be in nowhere near pristine condition :)
So, I agree with you completely about the fitness of the analogy. In both cases I have a smirking admiration for the sellers and their ability to keep the spirit of Barnum alive. And I think the buyers are fools for spending money on things of no intrinsic worth. And the fact that there are enough of those fools to drive that worth into fairly large numbers does not make me consider them any less of a fool. While I feel somewhat the same about stamp and coin collecting, at least those have some artistic and historical merit. Whatever branch of vertebrates I descended from, it apparently has no pack rats in it ;)
Let's say I agreed that buying items instead of finding them brought a sense of shame and loss of integrity. Given that, how about saving up chips or perfect gems and then trading a whole slew of them for some impressive item? If I'd gotten a Lightsabre that way, with a character who was not yet playing in the parts of the game where that item could drop, should I also feel shame for not "earning" it?
Valid point. However, you got those items by playing the game. You made the trade (or trades) within the game. I see no real problem there.
Let's try to set some boundaries. Take the extreme: a person who buys a level 80+ character fully decked out that has completed the game on all three levels. Buyer plays the game for a few minutes, gets bored and quits. Fool or not? Maybe we can find where we each draw the line ;)
--Pete
How big was the aquarium in Noah's ark?