But, what difference does it make?? Can anybody please elaborate further on this? I've read bolthur's argument already as most of you have. Let's assume that Meep begins calling them purchases, what difference does that entail in the grand scheme of thing. Is anything going to change from an administrative perspective? I don’t think so. How about from the player perspective?
Here's some social philosophy, hopefully I can get my point across:
The town of Carlton, Wisconsin was an average middle class American town. The town population had exactly 1,000 people in the year 2,000. There was a nuclear engineering company that wanted to start a reactor in the town of Carlton. Now there may be possible side effects to having this reactor moved there, possible birth defects and health hazards associated with being exposed to radiation. Furthermore the nuclear plant would need to dump its waste into a landfill or purchase a body of water to dump it into.
The nuclear plant conducted a survey to see how many residents would accept having a plant in their very small town. It was sent to 500 people. They illustrated that this town was chosen because of its size, if something happens it will only happen to a maximum of 1,000 people, versus bigger towns/cities that may have up to 200,000. Surprisingly over 70% of the population had accepted the nuclear plant to move into their hometown.
The plant sent out a second survey to the other 500 people. They illustrated all of the same topics as before, but they included a cash payment to sweeten the deal. The plant said they will pay every household $15,000 a year for as long as the plant remains active. Guess how many accepted the offer? Less than 20% took the deal, identical in every way except one.
The conclusion is that the residents rejected the second deal because it was a payment. They didn’t want to hassle with dealing with payments, they viewed it as though the company was trying to negotiate a transaction with them, and they didn’t like that. The first scenario was accepted because it was a sense of duty (which doesn’t tie in 100% with this point).
I assume that as soon as Meepcraft changes the wording from donate to purchase then sales will drop. People feel more important when they ‘donate’ and like they’ve been swindled when they ‘purchase’. It may not seem like much but wording does matter, we are all social creatures and we have deep set thoughts about the connotations that come along with certain words. Therefore I vote that donation should remain, otherwise we may have an unseen consequence of ranks sells decreasing.
