Roleplaying games

Everyone who plays MMORPG knows about it. The gold sellers. You can spot ads everywhere talking about “EQ Gold” or “WOW gold” and so on. For the few people on earth that don’t know what is this about, is very simple. They are true companies selling in-game gold (or whatever currency the game uses) in exchange of real world currency (dollars). There’s a real pricewars about this, various sites trying to offer the best “currency rates“, and so on.
They also generally offer other “services” like powerleveling (getting your character to high level at faster pace), or in the worst cases they even sell complete character or accounts.
Of course, people who play honestly those games knows exactly how hard and time consuming is to get your character to high levels, or to gain lot of in-game gold. Often indeed people, when they want to offend someone playing, they use to say “did you buy your character”? or even “is another powerleveled guy”.
Is all this business good or bad for the general roleplaying genre ?
Personally I think is neither good, nor bad.
Isn’t good of course, for the reasons stated above. Isn’t too bad either because people like me who don’t have lot of time available to play everyday are able to compete head to head against those teenagers guys that play 10h a day to raise their characters to super powerful levels…
In any case the real problem is that even if wasn’t good at all, and even if the big companies that produce such games forbid these practices, is practically impossible to track them all down, so be sure that they will be never able to stop them completely…

People just 30-40 years old like me will remember with lot of nostalgy the glorious times of the C64, Amiga, and the first years of PC games. Why? because was still possible to play good single player CRPG. Nowadays, this is quite impossible. Just think at the games released in the last year. I can count very few good single player CRPG. Vampire:Bloodlines comes to mind, but Troika is defunct now, so no hopes for a sequel. Yes there is NWN2, but what else? don’t name Oblivion, that is surely not a true CRPG!
What I’m talking about are the glorious series like the SSI rpg games based on AD&D modules (Champions of Krynn, Secret of silver blades, etc). Or the Might & Magic series. Or Fallout if we want also to include the sci-fi themed rpg.

Nowadays all is simplified: all arcade, few statistics/skills, less plot, and lastly, no turn-based combat ! ah, don’t even name it… I recently resumed playing Fantasy General (a fantasy wargame) with DOSBOX… it is superb… why the hell they don’t make anymore turn based games ?! except Heroes of Might and Magic 5, I see not many other turn based games. Now everything is realtime, with the result that you don’t even realize if you’re winning or losing, if your tactics works or not, how much damage does that new weapon, etc etc.

Bah, I’m very disappointed. The only hope comes from the small independent shareware developers. Yes, only they can come up with something like that, in memory of the lost times…!