Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/04/28/financial-times-animal-crossi.html
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Now players will never escape benevolent Japanese debt peonage.
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Yes, how dare people “cheat” on a game they paid $60 for, and for which there are no in-game purchases they can spend their ill-gotten gains on. The absolute nerve. Video games should be about rigid rules, not fun.
(not playing this game, btw. This kind of thing just irks me)
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Brilliant. I hope the next stimulus package has a rider for a bailout of The Bank of Nook, because if they are slashing interest rates so deeply they are obviously in trouble. But they are also just too big to let fail. An entire island economy is dependent on them.
How can we get “The Bank of Nook desperately needs a bailout before it’s too late,” past Trump’s eyeballs before his next rally?
Also, I must say this news doesn’t make me any more interested in starting that game back up.
ETA with further thought it just wouldn’t work. At best he would think, “Wait. A bank I haven’t borrowed from?”
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I was wondering why they changed the interest rate. But I assumed it was a “somebody figured out how to game the system in some sort of weird way” kind of thing.
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I video game to escape my life, why would I ever want to go perform the same RL activities and stresses in a game? Animal Crossing Pandemic Expansion sounds like a blast.
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It’s so easy to pick a dozen pears, why is this even of interest to people who play the game (instead of finding obscure workarounds to its logic)?
I’m loving ACNH. Rotten turnips can be used to attract ants. Me, I’m too much of a late nighter, especially on Saturday nights, to get up early enough on Sunday to catch the turnip sales. Ah well. Someday. 
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I would agree that the plummet in interest rates would be an indicator of the health of the Nook banking system but I would be more inclined to interrogate the decision making of Treasury of Nook or the Reserve Bank of Nook.
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On the other hand, isn’t it more fun to solve a Rubik’s Cube by actually solving it and not by peeling off the stickers and reapplying them? I mean, yes, it’s your cube, but is that really what you want to do?
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The villagers already get colds, so it’s the next logical thing!
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The root vegetables rot and their value drops to zero after a week.
So they have reimplented the Wörgl Experiment. Excellent. Somebody please tell me that there is a Land Value Tax as well.
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Of course not.
Modern Rubik’s Cubes don’t have stickers. I would take it apart and reassemble it.
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It’s just Nooks, all the way down…
HAHAHA! I was wearing the doctor’s mask around the first week or so in ACNH, and now I have given them out to all my islanders. They don’t seem to like wearing them, though. 
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It wasn’t even cheating. Changing the clock to speed up the game (i.e. not have to wait 11 months if you missed something seasonal) has a long history of being part of the game design:
The .5% interest rate was the norm for the previous game. It may even have been for the original and all games in between (not sure, can’t remember).
What’s changed? It mentions buying bells online, but that’s not direct from Nintendo, that’s just online resellers.
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I’m not going to lie, when the article said something about a million plus bells being like a dollar, I got a little curious about this whole buying bells thing. But no no, I don’t even time travel, so no, I won’t be buying bells… not yet anyway heheh
The interest rate has now been changed to 0.05%. You used to be able to time travel a few years with like 50,000 bells to get to a million. It’s harder now. Not impossible, but again, why? It’s not like they’re stealing anything from Nintendo. They also reduced the spawn rate for the most valuable bugs. I don’t know why Nintendo seems to want the game to be harder.
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Animal Crossing isn’t a “hard game” by any definition. Why did Nintendo decide to make it work like they wanted to? Because they’re a game designer and they made it and they get to make it in the way they want.
I don’t remember seeing Jenga - The Easy Edition on sale in the toy aisle next to the regular edition. 
Yes, I understand it’s an easygoing game. I also understand Nintendo gets to make any changes they want to their game. But they made it significantly harder to earn money in the game, and didn’t make the things in the game you need the money for any cheaper. I’m just trying to understand why they want people to have to grind more. The game experience has been made demonstrably worse for everyone, and it seems to have been done just because certain people choose to play the game in a particular way that doesn’t affect anyone else. If someone changes the way they play Jenga, to make it easier for them to get pieces off the stack, it directly affects the other players.
