I was in a car going 95 mph, and I didn't get a ticket! It must be legal!Depending on where your hypothetical situation happened, yes it was legal. But I'll play along with you, and assume you're implying USA public roads where all speed limits are less than 95MPH. So with that assumption, driving 95MPH is neither more nor less legal than driving.0000001 MPH over the speed limit. But you've never done that either, have you? However, the one might actually get you thrown in jail while the other they'll just ignore. But if you did in fact drive your vehicle at 95MPH past many on-duty officers many times, you can safely assume that they most likely don't care about your infraction, whether or not it's legal. The same can be said about ROMs sites. No one's trying to hide them. Look at the way they're going after bit torrent sites that don't even host the actual files, and then look at the way they ignore the ROM sites. Yeah, I'd say it's safe to assume they probably don't care - and that's even regarding all the people downloading ROMs who don't own the original cartridge where you know it's not legal. The law only carries any weight as far as those responsible for enforcing it can and do enforce it.
Hope your brain hasn't exploded. I know there's actual logic here, which might be too much for you.
Actually, the AC is right (though I admit his language is more trollish than needed). How big the overall installed player base is has absolutely nothing to do with how well a dedicated server performs. The only number of players that matters here is how many the server can handle. If MS really is having trouble running servers with just 8 players connected, they seriously need to rework their system.
Frankly, this somewhat baffles me. I really don't see how this will affect Photojournalists/professional photographers much, if at all. So now we'll have more photos showing up in the news from 'regular' people using digicams and cellphone cams... because they just happened to be there when the photojournalist wasn't. But... for all those times when the photojournalists are there, won't we still be using their photos?? Like so many others have pointed out, real photographers do a much better job, and as a result these impromptu photos get used only because nothing better could be obtained. And in my experience, generally about the same amount of TV time and magazine/newspaper space is given to the high priority news stories, whether or not there happens to be an impromptu photo taken by a digicam to accompany it.
Maybe I'm missing something that someone could point out?
However in all the hundreds of CDs and DVDs (both -r and +r) that I've burned I've never had reliability issues, with any type or brand. Of course I'm sure this is partly due to the fact that none of my data burnt to optical discs is 'archival', and generally only sticks around for a few months, or a few years at most. So for my purposes, I tend to just watch for those rebate deals that leave me with just the sales tax to fork over.
Good points (record labels are masters of funny accounting to avoid paying their artists) but keep in mind that the 2% net margin number I mentioned is what they reported to the street. There's absolutely no benefit to under-reporting your profitability when you're a publicly traded company. Your company's valuation is fundamental to your business. But isn't a company's valuation primarily dependent on the actual net profit they report, rather than the margin that profit is based on? So if they fudge the numbers to make the margin percentage look smaller than it actually is and in so doing obtain a better margin, their profits (and valuation) go up.
I really hate to say this, as I have no liking for MS. And if I had an xBox, it would probably be modded. But all the same, I have to say it: if you mod your xBox, all bets are off. A manufacturer cannot be liable for after-market parts added on by the user. Whether their updates are mandatory or not is irrelevant. So if it were ONLY modded xBoxes being affected, I would have to say MS should not be held liable for the damages. But that doesn't seem to be the case here, which is also not surprising in the least given MS's history with Windows patches and such.
Um... I'm right there with you about the in-game ads. But for the ads before a movie... just wait to walk in until the movie's ready to start? I mean really, if they bother you THAT much, no one's forcing you to show up early. To me they're just something to watch while I wait for the movie to start.
Unfortunately I don't have mod points, but fortunately someone else did. You're absolutely right about EA and I couldn't agree more. I've played their games from every genre they publish games in, and virtually every game they've released in the last 10 years. To me this is quite sad, and EA wasn't always this way. They used to be pretty good. But in the late '90s it seems they got derailed, and have continuously gotten worse since.
Is it such a stretch that if someone paid X linden dollars to have their real-world financial ass raped, there should also be a "here's your sign" event?
"If you haven't misspent hours battling an Arctic Ogre Lord near an Ice Dungeon or been equally profligate spending time reading the published works of the Internal Revenue Service," Dibbell's article began, "you probably haven't wondered whether the United States government will someday tax your virtual winnings from games played over the Internet. The real question is: Why hasn't it happened already?" Actually I think the real question is: WTF are they high on? Whatever it is, it sounds pretty darn good.
This is as ridiculous as having to pay the IRS fifty cents every time you win a game of checkers.
Well, here's one gamer who got everything you meant by "Westwood. 'nuff said." And I couldn't agree more. I'm still waiting for a successor to RA2. Sadly, I doubt I'll ever see one.
Perhaps you didn't quite read what I wrote. I know lots of people use the term "all you can think about" very loosely, but I actually meant it exactly the way it sounds. When something is all you can think about, you literally can't focus your thoughts on anything else. You also missed the point rest of my statement as well it seems. For most people work, social activities and sleep make up most of their life. So basically what I was saying is if you can't think about anything but the game and you become irritable any time you can't play it, you're most likely addicted. Sure doesn't sound like "just obsession" to me anyhow.
But regardless of whether or not they can be defined as "addictive" I think people are finally starting to realize just how many problems they bring on themselves with MMOs. And I think they find themselves affected a great deal more than they ever thought possible.
Oh, I'm sure you could spend that much time in it, just like you could in any other video game. But I highly doubt most people will, as there's very little incentive. I'm guessing you could probably do every quest and see pretty much all there is to see in 500 hours or less. But anyhow, show me your XFire profile (as well as those of at least three friends) with 1,500+ hours of Oblivion and then maybe I'll believe that people actually spend enough time at it to become addicted.
>So what would this study say about me? That I was super addicted one day, and not the next? Addiction doesn't WORK that way.
You're right. Addiction doesn't work that way. You're not one of the "1 in 9" that the study found addicted to MMOs. People who get addicted to MMOs will actually experience withdrawal symptoms if they do quit cold turkey. Perhaps one of the best ways to tell if you're addicted yourself is to consider what you think about when you're NOT playing. If the game is all you can think about, and you find yourself irritated that you're unable to play because you're "tied down" by things like social functions, work, sleeping, etc you're probably addicted.
Yes I've played Oblivion. Maybe it could become addictive if it were an online game with no clear end. But I seriously doubt Oblivion will ever incite players to spend thousands of hours (and up to 100+ hours a week for weeks on end) playing at the expense of family, work, sleep, and other essential things. That's the kind of behavior brought on by MMOs such as EQ and WoW that causes people to call them addictive. I myself just quit WoW after spending about 2000 hours in the game over the last 15 months - and that's not much compared to what a lot of people have racked up in the same time span.
Exactly the same for me. Right down to the quitting WoW and all. So since Mythic sold out to EA, the game I'm waiting for is Darkfall. http://www.darkfallonline.com/ Take a look at it, maybe it will interest you as well.
I have to disagree. Either Sony's QA has gotten noticeably worse since the 80s or their products were just never pushed hard enough back then. Either way, these days many Sony products do not hold up to the competition. One huge example is a lack of quality in optical drives over the last decade. The failure rate of their drives is currently bad enough that I would buy the cheapest generic no-name brand over a Sony.
And I'm one of those guys who actually likes Sony.
This just heavily underscores why the duration of patents needs to be drastically shortened, with no option for extension. Ten years or less would be sufficient.
Actually it's not nearly that complicated. If I break into your house and run off with your new HD TV, that's theft. I'm now depriving you of actual property. You no longer have your TV and you can no longer use it. But let's say you also have a computer in your house, on which you're coding a piece of software. Instead of running off with your TV, I decide your software is probably worth more, so I just pop a flash-drive in your PC, copy the code on my disk, and run off with that instead. You still have your code. I have not deprived you the use of anything. At worst, I have possibly deprived you of potential profits.
That's a pretty big difference right there. The one is covered under the first amendment, the other is only covered by copyright law. Our constitution holds that all people have the right to own personal property, but nowhere does it imply that we have the right to profit from IP we hold the copy-right to. The purpose of copyright law is to stimulate creativity and innovation, not establish innate rights.
The reason the article calls them "independents" is because they're hosting their own servers, independent of NCSoft. Not really that difficult to grasp.
That's not theft. It's copyright infringement. Illegal yes, but not theft. Theft is depriving someone of property they own. IP is not property that can be owned; you can only hold the rights to distribute it.
If you own a widget shop and I steal some of your widgets to re-sell, that's theft. If I copy your plans to make the widgets and make identical widgets of my own to re-sell, that merely cuts into your potential profits. If you hold copyright on the widget plans, it's illegal for me to copy the plans and make widgets to sell but it holds less of a penalty than outright stealing widgets you made.
>A: No. Goldfarmers resort to using a program to make money for them, and sell that money. Very few players do.
B: The majority of people doesn't cheat. ----------
I've no facts or figures, just in game experience: I've only once seen a bot that was also a regular player. Usually bots are always bots, and players are always players. Bots are used by IGE and other web companies to make real-life money. As long as there are people buying the gold, this negatively affects people that enjoy playing the game (economy-wise). The game isn't boring if you play it normally. If you play it all-the-time.. learn to stop things when they are becoming boring, and switch to doing something else:)
A. Wrong. Most gold farmers farm instances. That's where the best money is. Chinese gold farmers work in China, not the US. Wages in China are not very good, and gold farmers actually make better money than other laborers. From the employers' perspective, the farmers ARE bots, and they can farm money far more efficiently than a wowglider type of program.
B. The majority of people who used wowglider don't make it public knowledge that they did so. And if you look at my post, I didn't say that the majority of people cheat. I said Blizzard couldn't stop the majority of people from cheating. Meaning they did such a poor job coding their software that if the majority of people wanted to cheat, they couldn't stop them, short of banning their accounts after the fact. Wouldn't it be nice if we could all just go to the courts and complain about someone being able to take advantage of our incompetence, and get awarded money for it? That's exactly what Blizzard is doing.
All of the characters I've seen botting were just regular players who were doing it to avoid the tedium of leveling or farming money.
Man, I am getting so damn sick of seeing yet another BS lawsuit based on the DMCA.
So let me get this straight:
A. They make the game so damn boring and tedious that people resort to using a program to play the game for them. B. And then on top of that, they can't even code their software good enough to keep the majority of people from cheating. C. And then, on top of THAT yet, they sue the coder of the cheat program because of their own incompetence?
Congratulations Blizzard, I'm now an ex-WoW player. Canceled both my accounts.
And no, I don't cheat in multiplayer games. For the most part, I despise people who cheat. But this lawsuit is beyond ridiculous. Fix your own damn software instead of wimping out and trying to get the courts to award you for sucking at coding.
Except in this case that doesn't apply, because nothing particularly bad has happened. Instead what we have here is a simple case of nothing worthwhile happening. Yes, people will put up with a lot of 'bad' things and keep playing, while they piss and moan about how bad the thing was - as long as there's fun things to do. But when there's not enough fun things to do and people get bored of what's there, eventually they start leaving. Don't be surprised if WoW subscription numbers start falling in the middle of next year.
I've never played EQ, but the way you describe is EXACTLY what WoW is at level 60. There's nothing 'rich' about it. Wow offers at best a few months of quality gameplay, and after that quickly degenerates into nothing more than a grand EQ-style grind fest, just dressed up in cartoony graphics. 'WoW the game' definitely ends at 60. At that point, if you still keep playing, it becomes 'WoW the part-time job' with no real gaming involved.
For the most part, everything the writer of TFA says is on the money. He just has nothing to say that hasn't already been said a billion times before. But despite that, Blizzard doesn't listen. And lots of people are getting tired of it. I think WoW is a lot closer to a free-fall than many people realize. From what I can tell, lots of people playing right now are just hanging around to have a shot at the exp pack. And don't kid yourself, it won't take them more than a couple months to plow through that. Then they'll be done. For good. It's going to be way too little, much too late.
Actually, all it shows is the inherent flaws in the whole DRM system to begin with. The simple fact is, no matter how hard you try, no matter what method you use, the only way you will make sure no one can mimic your idea is if you keep it to yourself. If your idea is of any real value and you use it in public, eventually someone will copy it. Whether it's "legal" or not won't stop it from happening.
How your post got modded "insightful" is beyond me... you show a pretty hefty lack of insight.
Slashdot Mirror
Hope your brain hasn't exploded. I know there's actual logic here, which might be too much for you.
Actually, the AC is right (though I admit his language is more trollish than needed). How big the overall installed player base is has absolutely nothing to do with how well a dedicated server performs. The only number of players that matters here is how many the server can handle. If MS really is having trouble running servers with just 8 players connected, they seriously need to rework their system.
Maybe I'm missing something that someone could point out?
However in all the hundreds of CDs and DVDs (both -r and +r) that I've burned I've never had reliability issues, with any type or brand. Of course I'm sure this is partly due to the fact that none of my data burnt to optical discs is 'archival', and generally only sticks around for a few months, or a few years at most. So for my purposes, I tend to just watch for those rebate deals that leave me with just the sales tax to fork over.
Just a thought...
I really hate to say this, as I have no liking for MS. And if I had an xBox, it would probably be modded. But all the same, I have to say it: if you mod your xBox, all bets are off. A manufacturer cannot be liable for after-market parts added on by the user. Whether their updates are mandatory or not is irrelevant. So if it were ONLY modded xBoxes being affected, I would have to say MS should not be held liable for the damages. But that doesn't seem to be the case here, which is also not surprising in the least given MS's history with Windows patches and such.
Um... I'm right there with you about the in-game ads. But for the ads before a movie... just wait to walk in until the movie's ready to start? I mean really, if they bother you THAT much, no one's forcing you to show up early. To me they're just something to watch while I wait for the movie to start.
Unfortunately I don't have mod points, but fortunately someone else did. You're absolutely right about EA and I couldn't agree more. I've played their games from every genre they publish games in, and virtually every game they've released in the last 10 years. To me this is quite sad, and EA wasn't always this way. They used to be pretty good. But in the late '90s it seems they got derailed, and have continuously gotten worse since.
Is it such a stretch that if someone paid X linden dollars to have their real-world financial ass raped, there should also be a "here's your sign" event?
Well, here's one gamer who got everything you meant by "Westwood. 'nuff said." And I couldn't agree more. I'm still waiting for a successor to RA2. Sadly, I doubt I'll ever see one.
Perhaps you didn't quite read what I wrote. I know lots of people use the term "all you can think about" very loosely, but I actually meant it exactly the way it sounds. When something is all you can think about, you literally can't focus your thoughts on anything else. You also missed the point rest of my statement as well it seems. For most people work, social activities and sleep make up most of their life. So basically what I was saying is if you can't think about anything but the game and you become irritable any time you can't play it, you're most likely addicted. Sure doesn't sound like "just obsession" to me anyhow.
But regardless of whether or not they can be defined as "addictive" I think people are finally starting to realize just how many problems they bring on themselves with MMOs. And I think they find themselves affected a great deal more than they ever thought possible.
Oh, I'm sure you could spend that much time in it, just like you could in any other video game. But I highly doubt most people will, as there's very little incentive. I'm guessing you could probably do every quest and see pretty much all there is to see in 500 hours or less. But anyhow, show me your XFire profile (as well as those of at least three friends) with 1,500+ hours of Oblivion and then maybe I'll believe that people actually spend enough time at it to become addicted.
>So what would this study say about me? That I was super addicted one day, and not the next? Addiction doesn't WORK that way.
You're right. Addiction doesn't work that way. You're not one of the "1 in 9" that the study found addicted to MMOs. People who get addicted to MMOs will actually experience withdrawal symptoms if they do quit cold turkey. Perhaps one of the best ways to tell if you're addicted yourself is to consider what you think about when you're NOT playing. If the game is all you can think about, and you find yourself irritated that you're unable to play because you're "tied down" by things like social functions, work, sleeping, etc you're probably addicted.
Yes I've played Oblivion. Maybe it could become addictive if it were an online game with no clear end. But I seriously doubt Oblivion will ever incite players to spend thousands of hours (and up to 100+ hours a week for weeks on end) playing at the expense of family, work, sleep, and other essential things. That's the kind of behavior brought on by MMOs such as EQ and WoW that causes people to call them addictive. I myself just quit WoW after spending about 2000 hours in the game over the last 15 months - and that's not much compared to what a lot of people have racked up in the same time span.
Exactly the same for me. Right down to the quitting WoW and all. So since Mythic sold out to EA, the game I'm waiting for is Darkfall. http://www.darkfallonline.com/ Take a look at it, maybe it will interest you as well.
I have to disagree. Either Sony's QA has gotten noticeably worse since the 80s or their products were just never pushed hard enough back then. Either way, these days many Sony products do not hold up to the competition. One huge example is a lack of quality in optical drives over the last decade. The failure rate of their drives is currently bad enough that I would buy the cheapest generic no-name brand over a Sony.
And I'm one of those guys who actually likes Sony.
This just heavily underscores why the duration of patents needs to be drastically shortened, with no option for extension. Ten years or less would be sufficient.
Actually it's not nearly that complicated. If I break into your house and run off with your new HD TV, that's theft. I'm now depriving you of actual property. You no longer have your TV and you can no longer use it. But let's say you also have a computer in your house, on which you're coding a piece of software. Instead of running off with your TV, I decide your software is probably worth more, so I just pop a flash-drive in your PC, copy the code on my disk, and run off with that instead. You still have your code. I have not deprived you the use of anything. At worst, I have possibly deprived you of potential profits.
That's a pretty big difference right there. The one is covered under the first amendment, the other is only covered by copyright law. Our constitution holds that all people have the right to own personal property, but nowhere does it imply that we have the right to profit from IP we hold the copy-right to. The purpose of copyright law is to stimulate creativity and innovation, not establish innate rights.
The reason the article calls them "independents" is because they're hosting their own servers, independent of NCSoft. Not really that difficult to grasp.
That's not theft. It's copyright infringement. Illegal yes, but not theft. Theft is depriving someone of property they own. IP is not property that can be owned; you can only hold the rights to distribute it.
If you own a widget shop and I steal some of your widgets to re-sell, that's theft. If I copy your plans to make the widgets and make identical widgets of my own to re-sell, that merely cuts into your potential profits. If you hold copyright on the widget plans, it's illegal for me to copy the plans and make widgets to sell but it holds less of a penalty than outright stealing widgets you made.
>A: No. Goldfarmers resort to using a program to make money for them, and sell that money. Very few players do.
:)
B: The majority of people doesn't cheat.
----------
I've no facts or figures, just in game experience: I've only once seen a bot that was also a regular player. Usually bots are always bots, and players are always players. Bots are used by IGE and other web companies to make real-life money. As long as there are people buying the gold, this negatively affects people that enjoy playing the game (economy-wise). The game isn't boring if you play it normally. If you play it all-the-time.. learn to stop things when they are becoming boring, and switch to doing something else
A. Wrong. Most gold farmers farm instances. That's where the best money is. Chinese gold farmers work in China, not the US. Wages in China are not very good, and gold farmers actually make better money than other laborers. From the employers' perspective, the farmers ARE bots, and they can farm money far more efficiently than a wowglider type of program.
B. The majority of people who used wowglider don't make it public knowledge that they did so. And if you look at my post, I didn't say that the majority of people cheat. I said Blizzard couldn't stop the majority of people from cheating. Meaning they did such a poor job coding their software that if the majority of people wanted to cheat, they couldn't stop them, short of banning their accounts after the fact. Wouldn't it be nice if we could all just go to the courts and complain about someone being able to take advantage of our incompetence, and get awarded money for it? That's exactly what Blizzard is doing.
All of the characters I've seen botting were just regular players who were doing it to avoid the tedium of leveling or farming money.
Man, I am getting so damn sick of seeing yet another BS lawsuit based on the DMCA.
So let me get this straight:
A. They make the game so damn boring and tedious that people resort to using a program to play the game for them.
B. And then on top of that, they can't even code their software good enough to keep the majority of people from cheating.
C. And then, on top of THAT yet, they sue the coder of the cheat program because of their own incompetence?
Congratulations Blizzard, I'm now an ex-WoW player. Canceled both my accounts.
And no, I don't cheat in multiplayer games. For the most part, I despise people who cheat. But this lawsuit is beyond ridiculous. Fix your own damn software instead of wimping out and trying to get the courts to award you for sucking at coding.
Except in this case that doesn't apply, because nothing particularly bad has happened. Instead what we have here is a simple case of nothing worthwhile happening. Yes, people will put up with a lot of 'bad' things and keep playing, while they piss and moan about how bad the thing was - as long as there's fun things to do. But when there's not enough fun things to do and people get bored of what's there, eventually they start leaving. Don't be surprised if WoW subscription numbers start falling in the middle of next year.
I've never played EQ, but the way you describe is EXACTLY what WoW is at level 60. There's nothing 'rich' about it. Wow offers at best a few months of quality gameplay, and after that quickly degenerates into nothing more than a grand EQ-style grind fest, just dressed up in cartoony graphics. 'WoW the game' definitely ends at 60. At that point, if you still keep playing, it becomes 'WoW the part-time job' with no real gaming involved.
For the most part, everything the writer of TFA says is on the money. He just has nothing to say that hasn't already been said a billion times before. But despite that, Blizzard doesn't listen. And lots of people are getting tired of it. I think WoW is a lot closer to a free-fall than many people realize. From what I can tell, lots of people playing right now are just hanging around to have a shot at the exp pack. And don't kid yourself, it won't take them more than a couple months to plow through that. Then they'll be done. For good. It's going to be way too little, much too late.
Actually, all it shows is the inherent flaws in the whole DRM system to begin with. The simple fact is, no matter how hard you try, no matter what method you use, the only way you will make sure no one can mimic your idea is if you keep it to yourself. If your idea is of any real value and you use it in public, eventually someone will copy it. Whether it's "legal" or not won't stop it from happening. How your post got modded "insightful" is beyond me... you show a pretty hefty lack of insight.