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.
Probably. I might venture as far as to say that the principal value of WoW is exactly this grinding, that some people apparently like, and that the failure to implement same is the actual cause of the D3 collapse, in spite of all the numerous other defects countless web-commentators found.
And when I say grinding I mean the act of killing mobs for no other reason than to gather drops or experience.
Well in an RCE game in a sense this is somewhat obliquely present, in the sense that the player is (usually) attentive to efficiency, which means he primarily does whatever he's doing because it's productive rather than because "it's what the storyline hath ordained".
the China-farmers were breaking the ToA by selling Gil
That's okay, ToA are about as scandalous.
The problem is that you want to make money from all this.
Get a job already.
Or how he paid people to write MPEX (he didn't write it himself).
You say that as if it's a bad thing. I can't begin to contemplate what must be going on inside the skullous cavity of some dood imagining exchange executives write the code the exchange works on. Because Bitcoin, still?
I really can't wait to see what you guys are going to come up with.
Yeah, I can tell. And you're not the only one, either.
I guess this is because I don't understand PR or whatever.
and I was really surprised when MPOE bond had back to back double digit losses.
Don't remind me of that issue where you and harnett provided the losses to go with MPOE's performance last year. There's a difference between a bulwark propping up a market on one end (something nobody else has done or could conceivably do apart from MPOE) and some idiot mismanaging funds to spectacular results (something pretty much anyone can do, just like you can).