I had a few round table discussions with the interesting points that came up. I must say some interesting things came to light.

First off something unrelated to S.MG:

You bring up this point in one of your "legacy" posts as well in relation to starting a "Bitcoin business". I let this swirl around for a good bit and after speaking with one of my buddies in the film industry about a project we are producing for Mr. Popescu, I recognized a pattern I hadn't recognized before. It goes back to your quote:


You always find those naturally intuitive in this field. That one uneducated fellow who happens to make a small fortune "running the streets". He starts with $20 dollars, turns it to $100. Soon that turns into $1000 dollars, and before you know it, a new kingpin is born.

However I started thinking about the failures in this field, every burnt out weed dealer who can barely manage to keep his operation running. They always seem to be running incredibly late, never giving an accurate time estimate. When they take out product on credit they always come up short. But these are symptoms of a deeper problem Mr. Popescu alludes to in his Trilema article titled aptly:  http://polimedia.us/trilema/2013/youre-the-guy-who-wasnt-good-enough-to-sling-dope/

You have the burnt out high school dropout, who can't deal drugs, calling himself a drug dealer. On top of this, not only do they believe they are a drug dealer, they wholeheartedly have faith in their abilities despite the contrary evidence to their obvious failures. They reek of undue arrogance. Subsequently like Kayne West, you "can't tell [them] nothing".

But more importantly, these are the type of people in any industry who will bring down the team. They wish to be the ones with fans without truly earning it. I recall an IRC chat log:

More importantly those who understand their limitations and strengths intuitively find a way to sling dope. They are the street urchin who one day pops up as the new kingpin. Many will claim Popescu fits the category of arrogance, but even he follows the old saying, "Know Thyself", in regards to his limitations:



Onto the good stuff:

So I did a little reading, a little round table discussing, and a lot of researching.

What I discover also answers:

Definitely. But the most likely reason grinding has become so deeply ingrained in the video game based RPG is due to the limitations of the classic consoles such as the NES. Anyone who has programmed on one of these understands these limitations are pretty extreme in comparison to modern day computers. The designers of Dragon Warrior, one of the first non-text based video game RPG's, is iconic for the slime monster kicking your ass at the start of the game. This immediately forces the player to grind. The designers intention was to create a feeling of "training" or forcing the player to train in response to strong creatures. In a DND campaign where one isn't limited by computational power, an elegant storyline of the party going to a dojo can exist, and levels are disbursed through a scenario where grinding needn't exist.

Saying grinding is "bad by design" is a little blanketing. In FFXI, a notorious game, grinding was the main feature of the game. A lot of people hated it, but just as many people loved it. Grinding came second to the storyline and "quests", making it a game of training, and subsequently discovery once strength was developed. Grinding wasn't mindless, but required skill, it required a party to work together in a harmony not seen in many other games. Each person played their role.

If a healer healed to fast while fighting a mob, he ran out of MP, the tank died, and mob went on to attack the rest of the party, and everyone died.
If the tank didn't maintain the aggression of the mob, the creature went after the healer (since healing aggravates mobs), who died, and subsequently everyone died.

The examples can go on and on and on. I wasn't trying to say grinding must exist for a game to be called an RPG, but merely it has become a part of "tradition" for a lack of a better word. Moreover there are ways to design grinding so it's done well. And when I say grinding I mean the act of killing mobs for no other reason than to gather drops or experience.

Rote and repetitive gameplay is the problem which is generally what grinding amounts to. In the case of Final Fantasy, your role (as whatever job you decided to be), changed depending on the structure of your party. This created a more dynamic feeling to the act of grinding and made it not tedious for the more experience player due to the rewarding nature, rather than it being a rote repetitive task. One quote that sums it up is: "Every battle is like a boss fight." When grinding in FFXI the slightest fuck-up resulted in cataclysmic failure.

Again I'm not saying grinding is necessary. That's definitely not the case, I'm just saying it shouldn't be written off as "bad design".

I think this circles back to the strength of the finite ability of bitcoin. Finite being the keyword. How the cash flows within a game from player to player is a different beast entirely, but games have been very successful in making usable resources finite within the game system.

Star Wars Galaxies, many years back (in the 2004 era), had a system where every "usable" item in the game (weapons, clothes, armor, everything really), was crafted by another player in game. As well, all the resources items were created from, were very limited. This created a very profound emergent effect on the gameplay. Like people digging for oil, various resources on planets would start to deplete over time as people mined them. This created an economy where a lot of people bartered with resources rather than the in game currency.

SWG is a terrible example, for a multitude of other reasons, but for the sake of example I used it. I would think that a system where everything is finite would completely change the mindset of players from trying to "rape the planet" via farming, to becoming efficient hunters as you spoke of earlier. Perhaps I'm simplifying the solution, but I'm trying to understand your mentality on this one.

As scandalous as it was, the China-farmers were breaking the ToA by selling Gil. The management took an active approach to the ever inflating economy by deleting accounts which were selling Gil "illegally", in term deleting their Gil. This in turn did work, very well in fact, deflating the prices in the auction houses by nearly 100%.

Was this a good solution? Probably not, it's like putting a band-aid on a wound that requires stitching. As you stated previous the China-farmer is exploiting something that is already broken. The designer is to blame, not the farmer.