Thursday October 5, 2006

Gamers clear the air

LATELY there has been attention on young gamers who are accused of spending too much time on online games.

As gamers, we would like to give some practical suggestions and to clear some misunderstandings.

First, we disagree with the labelling of online indoor games as ‘unhealthy’ and outdoor sports as ‘healthy’ games.

Some of the online games, e.g. Ragnarok Online, foster team spirit, make us care for the weaker members, help us learn English in a fun way, and promote friendship.

We can even learn about other cultures and traditions in the game as we are interacting with thousands of players around Malaysia who are from different backgrounds.

We even have formal and informal gatherings after the games to let us know each other better.

Besides, it really helps us to think hard on solving problems, mapping strategies and stretching our creative minds.

In comparison, we doubt whether any outdoor activities have such a scale of promoting healthy interaction between participants.

In more advanced Asian countries like South Korea, Japan and China, online games have evolved into grand annual events where players have the opportunity to know each other from all over the world.

As for the ‘farming,’ this is the necessary nuisance of the game.

Often gamers have to spend much time to grow their characters because when a character reaches a higher level, it needs much more experience in order to grow any further.

Without achieving higher level, the character is considered weak in core activities like war, pvp (players versus players), mvp (monsters versus players) and quests.

But in order to move to another level after the character has reached peak levels, players need to spend hundreds if not thousands of hours killing monsters (gaining experience). This is how ‘farming’ of the character comes into picture as it will be a waste of our money and time if we do ‘farming’ ourselves.

Hence my suggestion is to let us use legitimate third-party programmes (so called ‘bot’, to do farming on our behalf).

By doing this, we can save a lot of money and much time to do other activities while the character gains experience on its own.

And no gambling is involved, as we don’t bet on anything.

Moreover, we usually don’t trade items in RM. It happens occasionally only when items that we need are the rarest of the rare and are of much use in the game. Even this seldom leads to any dispute as reported if we handle it in a fair manner.

Therefore, we strongly urge the game providers and the authorities to consider these view points before they come out with any ad-hoc idea.

Please don’t kill our spirit of gaming. And unity.

All4One,
Penang.

News Poll

Latest Jobs from Star-Jobs

Latest from StarProperty