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Old 04-10-2009, 05:24 PM   #4
Jazuela
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Join Date: Apr 2002
Location: New England
Posts: 849
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Re: Question about Gemstone and need a home

In order to understand the attraction/success of Gemstone you'd have to go back to its roots. It was one of the very first muds offered on GEnie, and then AOL, Prodigy Online, and CompuServe. At one point, AOL's pricing structure was for unlimited access, and Prodigy followed suit, and this caused a HUGE influx of players to the game because they no longer had to pay hourly to play it. Yes - hourly. Some folks were wracking up several -hundred- dollar's worth of play time every month.

Eventually, the online services and Simutronics (which owns Gemstone) stopped doing business, and Simu "went internet" and became available without having to have a subscription to those online services. For the first time, you could access the game using its proprietary game client, and any ISP. By now, GEnie and CompuServe were distant memories in the history of the internet.

At this point, they continued to maintain prices competitive to AOL's monthly fees, and then Prodigy went out of business. That's when multi-accounting became pretty popular, and buying/selling game coins and characters for cash became more prevalent than ever. Apparently buying/selling for cash wasn't new, but with the advent of players being able to create their own websites and very simple HTM programs (Hotdog was awesome), it was just a lot easier for a lot more people to do.

What you're seeing now, is the result of all that, and the spiraling, profitable business enterprise that ensued. Those thousands of accounts, aren't all individual, unique players. A substantial portion of them are multis...in fact there are people who have several multis who exist only to "spell each other up" and skill-grind until they are maxed and available for sale on the internet. Coins are sold by the million, on e-bay.

Basically, Gemstone is a trading card game, where roleplay is allowed, but if you actually attempt to do so you might get strange looks and be told to "chill out tis a game noob."
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