I don't get the goon hate. I really don't. I wonder how many people know where Goons came from, what the whole Lowtax thing is? I'm no Goon but the history of internet culture is actually pretty interesting and they've got their place in it.
Lowtax was a scrawny, bird-like little nerd (who you can see getting pummeled by Uwe Boll on youtube) who made a website called Something Awful in the glorious early days of the Interwebs when there were still underpaid minorities working hard, night and day laying all those series of tubes down. This was so long ago that you actually had to know what you were doing to find free **** and in fact pay sites were considered profitable. THAT is how long ago we're talking about.
Something Awful was unusual because it was a forum you had to pay $10 to join. This kept the few consistent trolls on the interweb at the time at bay (who remembers Mad Hatter?) and it started a lot of the internet etiquette you see today. It had some cool concepts. For example, before bitching about your problems you had to compare your situation to a Darfur war orphan, before you talked about yourself you had to post pictures of what you looked like. Simple stuff but it had a purpose. A lot of those folks cross pollenated with 4chan, Encyclopedia Dramatica (before either was as bad as they got) and a few other cool sites (Portal of Evil! Oh, how I miss thee...).
Some people blame them for 'ruining EVE Online' - which they didn't. All they did was take it to its inevitable conclusion. CCP created an environment that rewarded griefing and finding ways to avoid the otherwise stiff consequences it had. All the Goonswarm did was make it clear what that meant and CCP was happy to take their money and cater to them. They certainly pay for a lot of accounts, probably several.
Which brings us to MWO - Goons, as a given rule, pay. They expect to pay. They follow the rules wherever they're at. They get away with absolutely anything and everything that is not banned - because if you're not banning it you're saying it's perfectly legit. They were ironically griefing people in games before being ironic was cool just to point out that not only was there an easy method of griefing people but clearly the game developers had no issue with it - or they'd do something about it. They'll exploit whatever is exploitable (oh, exploitable!) because if the devs didn't want people to.... they'd fix it.
If they want a bird bobble and want to pay PGI for it that's awesome. If you think PGI wouldn't make 10 or 100x what it costs them to make in sales for it you're mistaken. Some will probably buy more than one. MWO is a F2P game - that means you need people to pay money so others don't have to. This is a group of people who will pay and pay repeatedly for a deco object so that nobody else has to pay for crap they do want.
Where is the problem with that? Goons are just a nerd sub-sect with their own little culture and etiquette - but they pay. End of the day that's exactly what you want. I don't get the issue here.
Edited by MischiefSC, 28 June 2013 - 11:39 PM.
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Tice Daurus, on 25 June 2013 - 09:48 PM, said:
