vanity-name

Smoking gun (IMO) - looks like pressure from the top.
Look at the list of CCP owners:

CCP is a public company, majority owned by two venture capital firms, Novator Partners and General Catalyst Partners, each of which own diverse industrial portfolios. So you can expect a typical VC mentality here.

Unfortunately, VCs tend to overmanage companies. I recently spoke to Dave Anderson, founder of Famous Dave's restaurants, and he said something that really caught me by surprise. He said the biggest mistake he ever made was talking his company public, because public investors will literally tell you how to run your own company. Nevermind that you are the founder and know your business inside and out. Public money comes with some serious strings attached.

Now picture this - Novator and General Catalyst see the sky-high $15-20 billion pre-IPO valuation of Zynga (FarmVille makers) and the natural investor instinct is to think "shit, we should have bought them two years ago at $1mm" followed closely by "what can we do to get revenue numbers like that?"... and I think you can see where this is going.

Long story short - it's very hard to believe this decision came from anything but investor pressure.

@SgtBaker

You're right - but much like faking your resume, or influencing/rigging the votes of an election, you always know it's going to happen to some degree, but to do it so brazenly indicates a character problem ("this guy will steal everything he can") or a judgment problem ("does he really think noone will notice?"), neither of which is a good thing.

Seriously? I thought you had to buy some kind of in-game mount, and it would just auto-replace it with the celestial steed, picking up it stats. If indeed this completely obviates the need to buy in-game mounts...then I'd have to say, from a gameplay perspective, this is WoW's "Jumping the Shark" moment.

Not making the formulas available shows ignorance of MMO gameplay.

That's one big difference between console RPGs and MMOs - since they're tested by millions of players each day, MMOs are naturally held to a higher balancing standard, so players taking deep interest in stat optimization is the rule, not the exception. And in order to have any success optimizing your character, you need concrete figures, simple as that.

If these prove to be successful, I imagine some creative game devs will implement routine game currency donation drives as a significant anti-inflation measure. Plus the company gets the PR value of saying "we donated $X".

I'm exactly the same. I tried EVE, it's just not a good fit for me. I like open-ended stuff, but my MO is Machiavelli-style conflict avoidance (why fight if you don't have to?), you really have to have the mindset of a conflict-seeker to get into the metagaming in EVE. That said, I love all these crazy stories, including The Mittani's column "Sins of a Solar Spymaster".

I think Eliot posted the article as a social experiment - to see what kind of reaction he would get, and how many people would actually understand a libertarian argument on market forces.

Wow, way to overreact, nobody said it was the absolute, 100% truth.

I couldn't help but look at Mitch's other posts. There are many others, but they clearly illustrate an abrasive, self-centered attitude toward other people. Just because it's the internet and you're anonymous doesn't automatically make it the place to express your frustration with life. Kids, think with your brain, not with your ego.

This is a well-known social phenomenon, I first heard about it in one of Malcolm Gladwell's books:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

which basically claims that the optimal size of a social group is about 150.

This is a well-known social phenomenon, I first heard about it in one of Malcolm Gladwell's books:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

which basically claims that the optimal size of a social group is about 150.