Zam.com Q&AFollow

Well, hopefully the performance will improve with the new servers daddy is buying for them... tried to post and managed to get it to post 3 times.

A sad, sad panda am I.
Goodbye

I'm going to wait.

I will sit upon the firm stone amongst this violent quake, and I shall watch the earth and rock leap and crash. And I will sit and wait, until things are at peace once more.

And the land may be a desolate ruin, or give birth to waterfalls and fertile soil. But I will not judge this catastrophe until all comes to rest.

I'm going to wait.


It's like poetry! But topical! Damn I'm sleepy.

Okay, I slept on it. I still feel it's a shi[/black]tty deal that's basically insulting the very people who ever made you something.

I've been advertising for Allakhazam whenever I had the chance. People would bring up Thottbot and I would flame it for being affiliated with goldsellers. Now I feel like sh[/black]it for turning people to your site when you're no different from Thottbot.

Bad excuses won't change the fact that you SOLD OUT!

You say that you'll get the boot if you don't swing this site around and create a profit. Then at the same time you say that no profit was the reason why you did this deal.

Do you expect the money to roll in now that you are in control of Thottbot and OGaming? Newsflash: They don't make money off of Thottbot or you. You said so yourself in the response to the Azzor article. You said IGE made enough money to keep Thottbot running with a leak in the money tank.

They don't care about your site, Alla. They just want your 800,000 users. This is the best site to advertise on now and you don't think they'll take advantage of that?

I'm a little surprised at what people decide to get indignant over. The truth is, if just 10% of you raising Hell and threatening to break off ties with Allakhazam over their new dubious business connections actually applied your righteous indignation to (arguably more worthy) enterprises throughout the rest of the world ... the REAL world ... well, we could get some real humanitarian changes going.



I mean honestly. How many of you continued to buy your clothing cheaply from The Gap, even after you knew full well that it was all pieced together by children in dismal sweat shops? The bad PR was enough to make them make cursory efforts to clean up their act, but it wasn't as a result of poor sales.

How many of you fellows bought engagement rings for your wives-to-be, fitted with stones that were provided to your jeweler via the diamond slave trade? Make no mistake about it ... almost every single diamond currently on the Western, English-speaking market is actually a so-called "blood diamond". There's almost a guarantee that if you've bought a diamond at any time, it came from one of these African countries: it was mined by a slave, who is kept in line by torture and sheer terror.

How many of you, knowing that, still have every intention of wearing your diamond jewelry, and buying diamond jewelry in the future?

How many of actually stopped eating at KFC because of reports of inhumane cruelty to chickens on the part of its suppliers? How many of you stopped wearing your Nikes because of human rights abuses in the sweat shops in which they were assembled? How many of you purchase items, knowing full well where and how they were made, yet somehow manage to not care "enough" on a moral level to be a bit more discretionary with your buying habits?



And yet, the moral highground you've finally chosen to "take a stand on" is when a website goes into business with people who help others cheat at your favorite video game? I don't like the virtual money trade, either, but on the scale of issues worldwide, it's faaaarr down the list. If I'm going to cut anyone off of my wallet based on principle, it's going to be one of the markets I listed above, first.


If you're still willing to buy blood diamonds, eat chicken that lived its entire life in agony, in a cage it was too big to turn around in ... if you're still willing to wear clothes sewn together by a child forced to work 15-hour days, simply because it's easier not to think about it ... then ...





SHUT.

UP.

ABOUT.

THIS.

ISSUE.






Either get REAL about your newfound "principles" when it comes to your spending, or realize yourself for what you are: an angry geek. This has nothing to do with taking the moral high ground, and refusing to associate yourself with evil. If that were the case, you'd keep your money out of a lot of fat mouths that forward the cause of "evil" worldwide.

No, your priority is with your MMORPG. You're mad at cheaters in your game. Make no mistake about it, my yuppie friends: you are very much the billionaire who gets angry at orphans living on the land that you want for your new golf course, yet stops writing checks to businesses that support a politician that they don't like. This is a disturbing reflection of skewed priorities.




Guys, the vague, barely-tangible connection to IGE is something that is complicated and distant enough for it to be argued that it is not a sin at all. This move positively PALES in comparison to the kind of horror, the kind of evil, that you feed financially (without having to) on a daily basis. Your righteous indignation is confusing, when one takes into account the general apathy towards anything else that most of us have.




This is personal, for you.

Edited, Thu May 4 06:16:12 2006 by Lazrical

So are most things still going to be free or is it all going 'premium' now them?

EDIT: So now you're all rich too you can quit it with all the forced pop ups right? Kinda sick of sponge bob square pants screen saver ads...

Edited, Thu May 4 06:11:32 2006 by BrooklyFFXI

Now that i've quoted this, let me say something about the matter.

BIG. FOCKING. DEAL. 85% OF THE POSTERS HERE FAIL FOR ******** AND JUMPING TO CONCLUSIONS. GET YOUR ASSES OUT OF YOUR HEADS BEFORE YOU RAG ON ALLA FOR "SELLING OUT." AFTER ALL, ALLA DID MENTION THE RMT BUSINESS TO THE PHILIDELPHIA LAWFIRM HE WENT TO COURT WITH, WHO AGREED THAT IGE AND ALLA SHOULD STAY SEPARATE.

for the love of god, People = Sh*t. Forgive me for using bold+italics+large letters, because some people just don't get it.

As a veteran of several acquisitions, I have to say that I'm afraid you're being naive. Ownership is ownership: while for the time being, you may be left alone, all the data and resources are now simple financial instruments, and if it is seen as necessary for the goals of the parent organization to take that data, they will, their honeyed words of promises autonomy aside. The only protections that you - and we - have, are those that are specified in the contracts that we signed with you (which I think I need to check now) and in the various privacy laws and regulations of the countries in which you operate. Fortunately for everyone, I believe you are a UK-based operation, which guarantees some privacy protection for our personal data that we might not enjoy if you were a US-based company.

Whatever happens, I think Alla might get more than he bargained for. If the site flourishes it means more work for him to moderate and eal with improvements, if it flops it means more work to fix it. If it flourishes the parent company will push for more control to implement more pay as you go schemes, if it flounders they'll push to implement gold selling ads and so forth.

TBH it reads as a lose-lose situation for Alla.

And part of my brain screams that the OP was a pre-prepared statement from the parent company. It was too... slick. It was a sales pitch, not a passing of information.

I just hope your contract is literally airtight...

Do we get a million gil with each premium membership now?

i find it amusing that most of you seem to think that selling/buying gaming currency is like replacing a childs pacifier with a lit cigarette.