Quote Originally Posted by nimaimouto View Post
hhehe nyaaa this isnt nima's face silly! it's a mask ^_^ durrr. but yea people are too greedy about their precious "money" .-. money doesn't make the game, combat, adventuring and crafting make the game cant buy supplies? gather them :3 cant buy new armor? make it with gathered materials ;p
Please bear with me as I stroll off-topic with this post.

This remark reminds me of a time, long ago (I was 12), when we were playing Sim City with my two best friends.
  • For one of us, the "goal" was to have as much money as possible. He felt that he was "winning" when he had the most cash possible, and cherished the most profitable cities he made.
  • Another wanted to have "the most beautiful", "most functional", "most efficient city" possible. Traffic jam, pollution, criminality and uncontrolled fires felt like "losing" to him. His key "goal" was "citizen satisfaction", he just couldn't get enough of it.
  • To me, it was population. I wanted the biggest bad-ass metropolis I could make. If I had zero cash available and less than half the people happy, I didn't really care as long as they were millions of people and huge buildings and factories.
We were playing the same game, yet we aimed for very different goals. So in a way, the three of us were indeed playing "different games". Comparing all our cities, we just didn't have the same favourites. At all. We never argued about it either, as in Sim City if felt natural that different people would have different tastes, different goals. To this day, this is why I love sandboxes and horizontal progression: it allows for far more diversity than vertical progression (tier-based progression, as often termed in many theme parks MMO), and thus caters more to human nature, subjective by essence.

Which is why your dismissing the importance of "money" is objectively wrong, while at the same time perfectly valid, subjectively. It's "your game". But keep in mind that to each his game… especially for MMO's that don't have a definitive "end" —even "endgame" as a goal (raiding, gearing) is questionable to some extent.