games i played currently

Rearranged from facebook.

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Interesting, but it's too long so I didn't read it carefully. In my mind
(a half-core gamer's aspect), virtual items are ok to have some
price in reality, but it should never really affect the balance in the
game.

For now, I am playing two games. One is the card game I've
mentioned many times: estiah. I spent money on item storage,
which is the most valuable spending in this game, and it is only for
convenience (easier to manage items) and won't affect any balance.

The other one is a more commercial game, called Guild Wars.
The creator ArenaNet is composed with Blizzard's ex-staffs. Rumor
has that they don't like where World of WarCraft is being led to, so
they just left Blizzard and founded ArenaNet. There is another
group of people left Blizzard founded Flagship Studios, creating
Hellgate: London. But I think Flagship is considered dead now (and
the founder, Bill Roper got a really bad fame for now...), while
ArenaNet is considered very successful. People are waiting for
Guild Wars 2 for a long, long time already, a few years, and it is still
under development.

Back to paying users, there's no monthly fee to play Guild Wars. It's
very rare on the time when Guild Wars was born (2005). Actually
they don't have any shop in the game, too. It worked like a
traditional software that once you bought it, it's yours forever.
Today, they don't have much thing in the shop, too. There's nothing
can affect the balance of the game, too. Costumes, bonus mission
pack (extra game content, some extra storyline), characters
renaming, characters remaking, some convenience virtual items (it's
convenient but not powerful), etc.

And, they have 4 products using the same engine. Each priced at
$30, and the last expansion is priced at $20. Of course, I have all of
them, and more... (collector's edition, etc.)

In my mind, this game is really very very well designed, and it's
pretty balanced for most of the parts of the game. Virtual items'
prices (for in game currency) are based on player's supply and
demand. Some useful items are extremely expensive, "sometimes".
Inflation problem in most of online games is not serious in Guild
Wars. Players are growing more powerful over time, too, but slowly.
Characters level is caped at 20, and player would reach this limit at
the very beginning, just about after the tutorial in the game.

Umm... etc, etc...