Zam.com Q&AFollow

Let me get this straight? The guys that own Alla just got a major boost to their income and people are mad? What would you have had them do.

"nah, keep your money. I like ramen noodles every night, and struggling to pay my bills and not having nice things"

Thats insane. How could any of us not have taken the money? The quote said a deal worth millions. The all owner's got a portion of that. Even if it was only 1 million, its still a million.

I know some of the kids out there can't graps that, but the adults have to. $1M dollars for some ads on your site. To not do it, would have been fiscally irresponsible to anyone that depends on the owners of this site for support. Children, parents, grand parents, brothers and sisters in college, etc.

Getting upset, leaving, ranting about how bad this decision is okay, but it doesn't make sense to do so. I mean, I want anyone out there who has 2 mortgages, , 2 car notes, medical bills, student loans, light bills, gas bills, water bills, phone bills, insurance payments, real estate taxes, etc to pay tell me that wouldn't have done this.

This whole thing reminds me of an EMO kid who gets mad when his favorite indy band suddenly has a hit album.

omg they sold out. Duh do you think they wanted to be a rock and roll band to save the Emo kids from cutting themselves?

Welcome to reality. When your parents quit supporting you, or when you get tired of playing a cool poor ramen noodle eating beat kid in your early 20's you will get it.

Pity it's come to this.

Allakhazham has always been my favorite reference site. This is the community that my entire linkshell depends on to do their research, express their opinions, and compare their strategies to other players.

Before missions start, we meet and discuss what we've read on allakh and how we think the advice given here can be tweaked to fit out job layout and playstyle. People are constantly going afk to check allakh and we're always discussing and laughing over the current flame wars, the funny posts, and the stupid Friday jokes.

When someone says, "let me check alla." someone else almost always responds with "PRAISE ALLAH!" and then another person lets out a Xena warcry ('yiyiyi'). It really has been a forum that my group of friends have truly enjoyed.

Reasons I perfered alla to other sites:

1) the navigation is straight forward and simple. maybe it's just because it's the site I learned the game on, but it's easy for me to find where the information I'm looking for is located.

2) the background color is subtle and easy on the eyes. The white backgrounds of the other sites give me a headache for some reason, especially late at night.

3) people respond quickly, even if they're just flaming.

4) and most importantly: I come to a forum to read stuff, not to look at banners. On the other sites people's image sigs are often 3 times bigger than anything they ever post. This, personally, distracts me and makes me skim over people's post more often then it should. PRAISE ALLA for not allowing that.

But now you guys are running under IGE.

Parent site or sister site of minorally affilated site, your still a child of IGE and it's companys like IGE that adds to the corruption of the game that all of us love.

I support the people who are deleting their guides and asking for their image pictures to be removed. I think that's the most intelligent way to protest the decision that has been made.

Already it seems apparent that some of the allah admins are stressed out and pissed off with the user response, and that's a good thing. Allah will probably never leave the shadow of IGE now that it's captured under it, but at least the people loyal to the site didn't spread their legs, bend over, and accept what's happened.

Hope to find a new forum soon. Gotta condition my brain to stop glossing over sites that are spammed with signature banners.

holy s.h.i.t o.O omfg man i dont post a lot, but im on this even when i dont play ffxi, god damn i would have taken the money but not sell it to some bs company. GOD DAMN U GUYS ARE SELL OUT, AT LEAST SELL IT SOMEONE WHO CARES ABOUT THE DAMN GAME!! F.U.C.K ZAM.COM WTF IS THAT SOUNDS LIKE A STUPID *** DRINK MADE BY PEPSI WHO EVER SUPPORTS THIS BS ARE SELL OUTS TO THE GAME 2.

I think most of the people supporting Alla in this thread completely miss the point.

No one is questioning the financial sense of Alla making this move.

People who are upset at what Alla has done are pointing out that ever since its inception, Alla has violently opposed one thing - RMT. One of the few things you could get banned for on this site was indulging in RMT activities. Alla was known throughout the entire FFXI community as the only 'big' FFXI site not to support RMT.

Indeed Alla supposedly hated IGE so much they fixed their system so you couldn't even type their address in a post.

Based on this hatred of RMT in general and IGE in particular, Alla attracted much of its fan base.

When your very existence is defined by your dedicated opposition to one practice and its main practitioner, to sell yourself to that very company makes a mockery of you and everything you ever claimed to stand for.

It's like waking up and finding out Fred Phelps has announced to the world he's gay and proud of it.

If you really don't get that, you're completely missing the point...

Actually all the information and pictures were submitted by the player base here...hence one reason I think they feel betrayed.

ummmm, I live on my own, I have two jobs, and I attend college full-time, but NEVER have I ever sold my soul to the devil for money.

Thats wonderful and inspirational. You fit the profile I am refering to exactly lmao. I remember what an idealist I was in college too. Give it a few more years, but save the whales first.

This is the first time I've posted here, although I've been reading since I started playing FFXI in February. Reign, thank you for putting this perfectly. I know this forum is about a game, but the attitudes on here carry over to the way people do things in real life. It frankly scares me that so many people have the attitude that "it's okay, everyone does it."
And, yes, viewing ads on a page will generate income. It is not only the click-through rate. A web-site sells ads based on both click-through rate and number of page views the web site gets. That's how Google did so well so quickly. Their search was the best, so web sites knew their ads would get seen the most and therefore were more likely to be clicked on.
Therefore, I, although I'm only one person, will continue to use this site until I see exactly what happens to the site. Allakhazam has been too useful for me to ignore it this quickly. But, as someone else said, as soon as I see one single ad for gilselling or anything similar, that will be it. I won't support it. Thanks to those who posted alternate sites; they are bookmarked in case I need them.

You realize that 90% of the value of this site comes from free market post contributions of posters?

I've said before that that is the market. So IGE profits by stealing our time in the form of it taking longer to make up for the cheater gil buyers saving time? And Allah profits by stealing our contributions, our guides, our info, our comments? Where's our cut? Newspapers nor sites don't write themselves.

The players who are screwed over in game don't have bills, mortgages etc.? It's ok to manipulate and steal their time for one's personal profit?

And what a farce the defenders present. If this wasn't a bad move why the secrecy for 6 months?! Why did an independent investigator have to dig up this information? Care to explain? You're full of **** and you know it. So why bother making excuses?

This is free information that can be easily presented anywhere. This is as dumb as major league baseball pushing steroids advertisements on their web pages. RMT represents CHEATING PERIOD. There is no game when it's ruined by cheating.

We've been over this before, plenty of times. This is nothing like an "indie band". This is like Monopoly offering its purchasers secret extra stacks of Monopoly money to secretly use to beat their friends. It breaks the rules and breaks the game. Eventually there comes a time where it's no longer worth using Monopoly money and no longer worth playing the game of Monopoly. If you like playing mmorpgs why would you want to destroy them? RMT can and will destroy mmorpgs if the players let it. The games will become pointless pissing contests of who is willing to put down the most money to wear the shiniest data. That's at best a short term reality show hit which would sacrifice billions of potential profit down the road. That's the DEMAND market. We want first and foremost a *GAME*.

Alla had plenty of profit potential without getting involved with RMT. It's a huge failure of a decision which will long term cause the principle actors to lose money. Sure, they get a short term payoff. But that payoff far pales in comparison to what they could have made staying legit. This ain't 50 cent going Will Smith. It's a horrible business decision. Not that I didn't warn before. The posters could have cared less whether Alla got business from all types of corporations. But sell out to steroids, sell out to RMT, and you lose all credibility of caring about the game or the players.