I will note that that is a drastic oversimplification of the argument.

There are a whole host of other elements that contribute to the religion of money, including the absolutely insane way we continue to entertain debts while entire nations crash under its weight, or the way we shape our entire value system around the notion of our fiat currencies (hmm, this is starting to sound like a religion…) instead of the other way around, among other things.

Let’s not even mention the mental block many people have when it comes to even questioning the monetary system itself – instead, all problems have to be solved in relation to the monetary system, with everything else a secondary concern…

Cute.

But seriously, not the time or the place. And your attempts to antagonize me just put a smile on my face.

Continue.

Well, you [i]are[/i] a dick, I’ll grant you that much.

It’s funny, because I [i]do[/i] agree that MMOs aren’t really MMOs without some form of grinding, but I put it in there specifically because the stigma of Korean MMOs is that the grind is far more obvious than in other games (even though this only REALLY applies to the Lineage series).

sgtmango said:
@Zyrusticae
I tl;dr your wall of faggotry, and I’m just posting to defuse your situation.
You view point is unpopular. Nobody thinks money is a religion, because it’s fucking impossible. To say “money = a religion”, would be like saying “4+1 = 14″. These examples simply cannot be true- no matter how you rationalize them.
Maybe taking an English class would help, though I doubt it.

Right back at ya, buddy.

Money, as it currently exists, is fiat currency. In other words, it has no intrinsic value. In other words, it is powered by the power of FAITH.

Hence money = faith = religion.

Anyways, I would love to make another lengthy spiel about alternatives to the monetary system, but this is obviously not the place for that, and the wall of text I already put in here seems wildly out-of-place as it is, so I shall spare you the agony.

Team Ninja had never made a story-heavy character-centered game before, so it’s not exactly like they really had the proper credentials for it.

kudichan said:

Unless you're much older than your posts imply you are, or you're from an American red state, I doubt you'd turn any heads IRL if you said something like "hurr money is a religion".

The fact that it's normal amongst your demographic *does* matter. The social consequences of an angsty high-school or undergraduate student expressing a silly left-wing political view are much less severe than the consequences for an older person doing the same thing. We expect younger people to experiment with stupidity, and any friends you may have are more likely to sympathise with you.

Of course, this is supposing that you were merely being sensationalistic when talking about money as a "religion". If you honestly believe that, then your view is unpopular because it's so retarded that even the dimmest members of our species can see what's wrong with it.

First of all, yes, I DO live in an American red state – that is, Texas – and I work regularly with some rather conservative individuals. So, yes, saying such WOULD turn heads, as nice as a world where such a thing isn’t true would be.

Secondly, your condescending attitude is unnecessary and unbecoming. If you really want to speak with any level of authority, back up your views and don’t try to characterize anything you don’t agree with as “silly”, “stupidity” and “retarded”.

Thirdly, your assumption that I cannot back my view up with anything other than empty bluster is a really, really poor assumption to make.

Here, let me list a few (of many) of my reasons for my denouncement of money:

1. Most, if not nearly all, crimes are motivated and/or perpetuated by money and property. Burglary, larceny, and theft are the most common crimes committed anywhere in the world.
2. A small contingent of people live by essentially playing with money on the stock market, contributing literally nothing to society but making incredible monetary gains doing so. That alone should be reason enough to turn heads.
3. The system itself perpetuates societal stratification – when the majority of the money is held by an elite few, an oligarchy is literally inevitable, no matter what political system is in place. As long as people have financial incentives to work against the good of everyone else, they will do so.
4. Speaking of said societal stratification, many of the world’s ills can be sourced from economic inequality. [url=http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/why/evidence]The Equality Trust[/url] lists many of them, and it’s a real doozy.
5. Money can only be made when there are problems. Without problems, there is no money to be made. This means that money can be made [i]through the creation of problems[/i]. If there were no diseases or sickness or disabled in the world, for example, there would be no medical industry – and thus, a huge selection of jobs would simply not exist.
6. Speaking of said problems, money necessitates the need for people to find SOMETHING to work at just to survive, even when the resources are otherwise available. This is going to be extremely problematic when a huge number of jobs are replaced by automated services due to the cost-efficiency of machination as opposed to employing live human beings. Goods will be cheaper to produce and more abundant than ever, yet a large contingent of the population will remain jobless and homeless just because they cannot get work.

That’s just a few. If anything is “retarded” here, it’s how some folks believe so thoroughly in the power of money that they absolutely refuse to see just how many problems can literally be sourced from the money system itself. I really hope you don’t do that.

It turned the mystique of the strong, quiet Samus into something else entirely.

And that “something else” is far from a “strong female character”…

A life of virginity, at least, sure is nicer than a life of venereal diseases or unwanted pregnancy.

Or a life getting ass-raped in prison, in the case of the more deviant among us.

That doesn’t even make any sense. You can make any claim as “extremely popular” among a demographic group (with no evidence to back it up, even) and that would immediately disqualify it in this particular thread. Congratulations?

The fact of the matter is that the wider population buys into the religion of money and that it IS an unpopular viewpoint among the wider population. It being a view espoused by people within my “demographic” is completely irrelevant.

Unless, of course, you’re suggesting that this thread ONLY stick to viewpoints that are unpopular on Sankaku, which seems rather pointless to me, especially as the OP meant for views that we would avoid stating IRL.

1. No, I don’t want to play incomplete betas because I’ve played pleeenty of incomplete betas in the past and see no reason to bother with something that’s both going to be an obviously unfinished product and a markedly inferior experience to the actual thing (and considering this is an MMORPG, playing it solo is kind of missing the point).

2. Huh? I don’t even know how you went from here to there. Really, I don’t.

For the record, you are [i]absolutely wrong[/i]. I’ve played Everquest (and been turned off by its draconian death penalty), played World of Warcraft (and been turned off by its horrendous visuals), and skipped Warhammer Online (thanks to word of mouth AND it aping the visuals of the aforementioned WoW).

3. I really don’t know why you’re coming to the conclusion that better games are coming out sooner. That is both a matter of opinion and an unsubstantiated claim (especially given that Guild Wars 2 is just recently going into a F&F beta, The Secret World’s developer has a really poor track record, and that Tera is effectively going to be dead in the water due to a combination of bad marketing and poor release timing).

That, and Blade & Soul, at this rate, is [i]never[/i] going to be standard due to its focus on eastern oriental fantasy and martial arts, of which none of the other big-name MMOs are even approaching.

I’m not sure how you went from here to there, but okay.

Here’s an unpopular one for you:

Money is the biggest religion in the world.

I see no reason to bother with an incomplete emulated beta.

I really like the direction Team Bloodlust is going with this game – they said they’re focusing on the minute-to-minute gameplay and trying to avoid the grindy and monotonous feeling you get from other (Korean) MMOs, and they’re even going to try to one-up Aion on the character customization (bold claim, still waiting to see if they actually manage this)!

I am just sad that I am probably going to have to wait another year, possibly more, for the game to come on over to western shores.

I prefer my lolis to be completely, blatantly, and utterly unrealistic. As in fully sexually-aware, completely shameless lolis who fuck things because they want to and not because they were forced to. (Rustle is totally awesome for that.)

Hence why I take great pleasure from the Oblivion and Fallout 3 loli + sex mods. But that aside…

antika said:
Tomoyo from SCC was my first crush <3
But Integra is more like my ex-girlfriend (*hides from Yoko while writing this*).

She's seriously awesome, but since she's the kind of woman that would rather shoot you than wear a dress for you, it kinda killed it for me. I like feminine women, a lot.

But though there's that… I still admire her a lot. <3

I was kinda wondering when someone would mention her.

No thread about strong women is complete without her.

Char said:

Capitalism is indeed a horribly flawed system but it is still better then everything else we have tried.
Communism in theory could be a great system but every implementation has been a disaster.
There probably will never be a utopia as human nature and greed prevents that.

Responding to this first because I’m pressed for time atm.

Communism didn’t work because it was a philosophical agenda, not a practical one. And it also continued to use the monetary system, which obviously makes no sense in a world where everyone’s supposed to share everything. But of course, dropping the monetary system doesn’t work if everyone else is still using the monetary system – it has to be a planetwide event. Not only that, but trying to get people to perform mundane work with no incentive obviously doesn’t work.

Communism CAN work, in a practical sense, assuming current technological trends continue and we [i]drop the monetary system entirely[/i] for something that’s actually based in tangible reality as opposed to made-up nonsense (which is what legal tender essentially is). The automation of all mundane tasks means incentive is no longer so much of an issue, and if resources are distributed in a realistic and technical fashion as opposed to a nonsense monetary fashion (I mean, seriously, why do millionaires need that much money, and what exactly did they contribute to society to deserve so much more than everyone else?), equality is ensured.

Either way, we HAVE to move away from the monetary system because we cannot continue the infinite growth perpetuated by the system itself. We live on a planet with finite resources, and until we move from a growth economy to a steady-state economy, we are doomed to inevitable extinction from slowly dwindling natural resources.

kudichan said:

Corporatocracy =/= capitalism. I wish you people would learn the difference.

Haha!

Ha…

Oh, wait, you’re serious?

Okay, then. Humor me. How do you create a capitalistic system that does not inevitably, in some way, end up with the biggest monetary powers ALSO having all the political power, through direct or indirect means?

Does such a state even exist?

Mind you, there’s a shatload of other potential problems that are pretty much essential to the monetary system that I could go into…

The release of Skyrim and Saints Row The Third are poorly timed.

You see, because they utterly destroyed my productivity. Utterly DESTROYED.

Well.

What I hate about my country is also what I hate about most of the civilized world: It’s a (thinly veiled) corporatocracy.

It’s sad how people will defend capitalism to death, even knowing full well the horrors and injustices it has wrought to the human race. Sigh.

So DC outright admits they were going for softcore porn?

HAH! That’s rich. I’d be considerably more interested if their character designs weren’t utter shit.

Though I can’t blame them too much, they’re re-using established characters after all… but that’s all the more reason to actually drop them and do something different instead of rehashing the same shit over and over and over and over again. Meh!