Now Mindark and Project Entropia take virtual economy to next level - Online Bank Charters to be auctioned off

Now that MindArk and Project Entropia have a real-cash economy there was one thing they were missing! An online virtual bank; now you can participate in their public auction forum to bid and win one of five, two-year virtual banking licenses.

That means you can open up your virtual bank and hand out loans, collect interest, advertising revenue, etc. Your bank will run 365 24/7 for two years.

You also can direct the design and name of your banking institution.

Another ground floor opportunity within Project Entropia, however, since recent VU's (version upgrades) I have talked with several long-term players and they claim the game has really slowed down. It seems a major upgrade around the end of November 2006 really took away a lot of the game's appeal. Mostly now people are complaining about the lack of "loot" (resources acquired while hunting, mining, etc) within the game.

It seems MindArk has decided to change the rules and algorithms used to determine loot allotments and needless to say hordes of users are complaining about the new upgrade.

Several societies have disbanded and rumors afloat as to the reasons everything from MindArk is getting greedy to they wanted to cull players to make room for their Asian expansion.

Will the virtual bank be enough to bring people back? There are several MMORPG's in the works (and in beta) that support a real-cash economy; it will be interesting to see what competition will do to improve the virtual online space.

Anybody interested in teaming up to buy a banking license?

'Project Entropia' real estate sale fetches $179,000

Boy the times are a changing! Virtual real estate auction in an online game nets a total of $179,000 for three make believe virtual digital malls! The individual parcels didn't top the highest single price to date - that would be Neverdie's virtual space station he bought for a healthy $100,000.

Project Entropia can be a lot fun but after their November upgrade they seem to be losing a lot of players. It seems the VU (version upgrade) has made the playing space a lot more expensive.