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Originally Posted by Erasmus
In the real world, it's called Wall Street and venture capital. High risks/high rewards that some people are willing/calculating the risks on. When they loose, we usually hear "they deserved it". When they win, we usually hear "opportunistic" ... or worse.
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I'm sorry, but i don't quite see why your post cites mine. I might have an overdeveloped sense of "fair" and an unnatural abhorrence of the underhanded, but i assure you i am not "seeing" all sorts of evil manipulations that aren't, erm, "evil manipulations". Belittling the viewpoint of those that don't like unethical behavior or battering down strawperson generalizations of their viewpoint isn't a sound counterstatement of what i was voicing.
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For the life of me, I cannot figure out why some people have so much anger toward high risk investors and see all sorts of evil manipulation. But see nothing wrong with commodities and options markets in the real world. Many real world markets are controlled and manipulated, and not always for the worse. The oldest example still in effect today is the diamond market, the biggest is the oil market controlled by a cartel of producing countries. Others includes odd things like ... trading cards!
I don't hear these people whine when they make a nice profit on their loot 
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Investing on the market can be a way to allow new and wonderful technologies and services to get to market, to show a vote of confidence in the methods of a company; it can also be a way to make money without regards to the externalities of the company's behavior. While i
do invest in companies that bring useful and productive things to light, i don't buy diamonds, i consume as little petroleum as is practicable (and am active in promoting and developing alternatives), and i never, ever... trade cards(?
); i voted yes as a representative in a student government motion to divest from Sudan; i investigate the politicians i vote for to make sure they're at least the "lesser of two evils"; and yes, i would and do vote with my money against any company convicted of unethical opportunism by not holding stock in (or patronizing) that company.
I'm not sure in what way or by what stretch of the imagination that disqualifies me from being happy when i am successful in playing a game/existing in a universe (that by its very nature is a competition) by ways that don't involve manipulating the market, exploiting limitations and defects, or doing anything else that would be considered unethical IRL.
Getting back to the subject at hand, if you'll read the Wikipedia discussion of the tactics and business practices of the Anshe Chung company, you'll see
alleged behaviors that are not only unsportsmanlike and exploitative of limitations or defects (AKA bugs) of virtual universes, but border very closely on illegal were similar things done IRL. To be fair, their own public face (their webpage) presents a different philosophy that does sound like just the kind of investor we need in
EU: it sparkles better than any glossy bit of PR
MA has whipped up over the years. My point in the previous post was not very well stated; we've had enough high-publicity events (from trapping to botting to auction exploits) this year without the participation of a team that may specialize in finding and using just such exploits to make a fortune at the expense of other virtual citizens. For my feelings on that possibility, i refer you to the quote in my sig.