G4TechTV's Screen Savers advocate character-sellingFollow

Screensavers –

I have been an avid player of the MMORPG Final Fantasy XI for over a year now. In the last several months, the game has experienced a major problem: certain players completely monopolizing monsters that drop valuable items, preventing anyone who needs these items from being able to get them by any other means than by paying exorbitantly inflated prices for them. Or, there are the players who utilize bot programs to run scripts that allow them to hunt these monsters or fish, both very lucrative pursuits, without actually having to be at their keyboard controlling their character. These players, more often than not, are in the employ of virtual property-selling sites such as IGE. They artificially inflate prices, making it next to impossible for the legitimate player to compete without having a lot of cash to drop on virtual currency. Then there are the people who buy their high-level characters online, enter the game at a high level, and make life miserable for those at their level that they encounter – most of whom have gotten far in the game by working for it, not by grabbing Daddy’s credit card and buying their character. This behavior is strictly against the TOS of FFXI and most other MMORPGs, which is exactly why eBay stops those auctions when they come up.

I bring this to your attention because in tonight’s Screen Savers episode, you suggest making playing MMORPGs a career. I find this to be completely irresponsible of you, as one of the few media outlets that are publicly servicing and publicizing the gaming industry. That you are spending your screen time telling people about how they can OMGZMAKETEHCASH!!!111one by playing MMORPGs does your audience a huge disservice. I for one would much rather see you address the issue of those who ruin these games through their real-world transactions of virtual items. MMORPGs experience attrition in part because so many players get so frustrated with the people who can spend real money for virtual accomplishments, thus destroying the legitimacy of those who worked to get where they are in the game. As a high-level player myself I can’t even begin to tell you how irritating it is to lose my hard-earned experience, money, and time because I end up in a party with some brat who was lazy and just picked up his character on IGE.

I am a member of the community that you are trying to reach, and as such I urge you to please, as a counterpoint to tonight’s episode, consider doing an item on the damage that people who buy and sell MMORPG characters and items do to those games. It’s hard enough to deal with the people who participate in this to begin with without a TV show such as yours publicizing it.

Thank you for your time.

I also e-mailed Greg from Real Life Comics and Tycho and Gabe from Penny Arcade. Greg's done a few comics about IGE and their ilk and PA hates G4, so maybe they'll give this some space in their news posts.

Dan Huard: Life as a G4/TechTV Employee (Google cached, as he was no doubt pressured to remove this after it went up on Slashdot)

In San Francisco, we produced for geeks. In Los Angeles, they wanted us to produce for a gamer/geek lifestyle and culture.

This is where The Screen Savers as you once knew them changed completely. I was ordered by Paul Block and Joshua Brentano to generate questions for live callers. But these weren’t any live callers. They wanted me to use G4 employees, friends, family, whomever. Basically, I would think of a question and give that question to a designated caller. So now, the A block callers were manufactured questions and callers. I used TSS producer’s friends and family, Peter Green’s assistant (Sr. VP of Programming & Production - this was done with his OK, btw), my girlfriend, and countless other people to create the ruse that these were genuine questions coming from our viewing audience.

I never intended to make this article a scathing expose on the inner-workings of G4. If it appears that way, please accept my sincerest apologies. I tried to balance the G4 and TechTV information as much as possible. Like I mentioned in a previous blog post, I’m genuinely appreciative of all my experiences at TechTV and G4. Each job brought its own positives and negatives, and both made me a better person because of them.