What is it with the recent phenomenon on Slashdot to have titles ending in question marks. It's crap journalism, stop it! Editors please give the news story some kind of meaning through the title, not degrade it to an internet forum-esque post.
By the time WoW was in the works, they had already started to think globally. They identified North America, Europe, and South Korea as the three areas they wanted to target directly for WoW's launch. To do that, they established a full control center, with customer support, server infrastructure, marketing, sales, and administrative control in each area.
If you played WoW from the start as I do (atleast in Europe) you might find this particularly hard to believe. The servers at the start were absolutely terrible with 30-60 minute queues, very bad latency and frequently the scheduled maintenance went on for 2 days. I think the more truthful version is "We didn't realise how successful it would be, scrambled to get the infrastructure in place while at the same time made a mess of our customer support" (which is still terrible in Europe in terms of getting the actual truth, maybe this isn't the case in Europe - the chairman of Blizzard had to actually apologise to the EU market for the service).
Re:We already have this in the UK
on
Manhattan 1984
·
· Score: 1
I have to agree. You can run a car in London and be poor, you just can't use it for commuting as it's faster to walk through central London and the car parking charges (unless your company has parking) making it infeasibly expensive.
The Congestion charge in London records your number plate and then you pay your charge online. I don't even think to wear my tin-foil hat when I'm driving through. Maybe some camera supervisor from Dagenham will steal my identity through my number plate, and I will be put in prison for 20 years! Or maybe nobody actually gives a crap about the number plates going through unless there is a security threat.
Not sure if this has been mentioned, but one of the main things I wouldn't feel comfortable with if the guy was 11 (or any age up to 18) is I wouldn't socialise with this player outside of the game, so why do it inside?
Generally I like online games when you're playing with people of the same demographic, or close. Or people who have roughly the same interests. So playing with an 11 year old, or playing with a 50 year old woman is personally something I don't find comfortable doing. Infact it kind of makes you open your eyes to what you are actually doing - stamp collecting but online and anonymously.
You're absolutely right, there should be no reason for spam in the game.
WoW allows you to send lots of mail to multiple recipients via its API that Mod users can use - for what reason I'm not quite sure.
It also allows people to type things in the chat channels (which are basically like IRC channels) repeatedly without any kind of throttling until this recent change. Look at IRC networks: you get disconnected for doing this pretty quickly. It's been like this for over 2 years and they only just figured it out now, which kind of points to a company sitting on its dollars until the community gets annoyed enough that they are forced to put some developer man hours into the problem. Similar things happened with their looking for group solutions, which they have made a huge mess of.
It's a shame as the game has so many strong points, but it feels that in the past year Blizzard has got very apathetic about making any kind of innovation with the game. This maybe the fault of the developers being used for SC2, or the Burning Crusade sapping their time. Looking back to 2005 there were lots of new innovations happening and now its stagnant. End of anti-Blizzard rant!
I reinstalled the game to try out the amazing new patch they've just released (which incidently contains very *new* content except for raids). The 'spammers' now just use the general, trade, guild recruitment chat channels to advertise.
I can't see adverts happening in-game for RPGs. Although WoW does have a lot of gold advertisments going on ingame (some conspiracy theories suggest Blizzard are linked to these companies).
Valve I could doing this, they sell their soul for any form of revenue.
We have plenty of potential "WoW killers" due for release at the end of this year: Team Fortress 2, Crysis, Warhammer Online, Unreal Tournament 2007. They may not steal all of the player base (the hardcore people who play relentlessly for minor equipment upgrades), but I would bet a few dollars to say these games will make a serious dent on the population of WoW. That is unless Blizzard are crafty and manage to get another expansion out by then, which is doubtful.
Although the upcoming patch for World of Warcraft is pretty much offering more of the same and has been 5 months in the making, and WoW players seem to be particularly apathetic about what Blizzard provide them with in the way of content - Blizzard say they prefer fixing bugs rather than producing more content - seems to keep the majority of the wow addicts happy.
You can joke, but I'm pretty certain the announcement is going to be about the next WoW expansion. A Blizzard respresentative said they were planning on releasing an expansion every year for the next 5 years. I wish I could find the link, it's on a video game website somewhere.
Sorry but your reply looks like so many other World of Warcraft player's lingo: excessive use of the word "whine" and refusal to have anyone criticising the game.
My sources are the official forums, which have almost daily posts about players quitting and all their friends quitting, and also from in game friends on 3 different servers. Infact there was a forum post that was 25 pages long post about this not too long ago. This might be the old timers who are now bored of it, but I'm sure that represents a hefty chunk of the pie. The Blizzard statistics also seem to contradict themselves, give their account numbers as totaling 7 million, while their headline proclaims 8.5 million play the game. If you want me to quote official figures, sorry I don't work for Blizzard and I doubt Blizzard will ever post a PR with "WoW account subscribers down by 1 million since March!".
Coming this year: Crysis, Unreal 2007, Team Fortress 2, Warhammer Online plus a whole variety of other games. I think only the most optimistic World of Warcraft diehard fan would not see that the game is due to lose players to these big titles coming out.
That isn't an "anti-WoW fantasy" as you call it, the game served me well for a few years and is a quality game. I do however like to play more than 1 game, and hope that other games besides recycled EA WW2 shooters will be able to remain profitable for the PC market.
I wonder if they have factored in World of Warcraft in these figures, or its imminent demise in the next 9 months. The game is like swarm of locusts on the PC games market at the moment (still after 2 years). More people play WoW than people who have PS3s, XBox 360s and WIIs (according to the Times Online). This is stifling all competition in the PC games market making it stagnant. It appears with the new expansion, the playerbase is slowly dying away though, which could actually be beneficial for other games producers.
Of course you could argue a lot of people who play WoW simply wouldn't play games on their PC otherwise.
Can someone explain how Doubleclick is worth $3.1 billion? Are they hoping to receive this amount of money back in revenue off Doubleclick, I'm confused as to how they can price Doubleclick at that amount.
From my limited knowledge of banner ads, the click through rate is typically 1%, and anything from 10c to 50c per click through.
Youtube obviously has massive potential, but Doubleclick?
Or alternatively (to 3), they would have just given up and quit a long time ago, the bot has increased the amount of time they've kept playing.
Personally I think if Blizzard invested some more of its developer's time thinking up new AI or ways of interacting with monsters they might avoid this. Instead the world is one large copy+paste job and so the fact another piece of software can play the game is testament to how simplistic the game actually is. If you played the recent expansion you can see this in full effect with the new dungeons and the quest content. The graphics are nice but no innovation has actually taken place.
I can tell you the most unimpressive AI: World of Warcraft. It's so stupid another computer (wowglider) can play it with minimal configuration from a human.
Your character would age (regardless of whether you play or not), so eventually his abilities and reactions would slow down. You would then have to pro-create and train up a younger apprentice who would be playable by yourself too. I'm not sure how it would translate into gameplay but it would make the game feel a lot my dynamic in my view.
I also feel that the whole class idea, atleast in WoW, could be disposed of. Make the richness come from customising your character, and then he is able to combine skills from different classes from one very large talent tree. This would need some very intense play testing to get right, but would allow you to change your role in the game without going through the 2 weeks of getting to level 60.
Huxley looks good if their promise to keep quests dynamic is true. One of the many bland aspects of WoW is the fact the quests are the same whatever character you play. You get a few class-based ones but that doesn't compensate. The majority of the quests are also repetitive brain-dead tasks; when you get a good quest it's quite rare as you realise you are actually enjoying it.
The formula has made Blizzard extremely rich however. I would argue this has come from an extremely good game engine (no loading screens, great UI) rather than the content itself. If someone can build a world that is so emersive and large then they are 90% there.
The content is all that amazing in World of Warcraft, but the game engine is second to none. Make a game engine as good as WoW's, with the character animation, UI and scripting support and you've got a WoW-killer. Until then they are just bad immitations.
Linux and Mac's have a similar approach to this problem, but their solution (sudo) is not annoying, so it actually works.
So why not just these Operating systems then? And stop moaning about Microsoft doing it wrong? The inncessant childish complaining about Windows on slashdot, via "news stories" really does lower the site. Constructively suggest how it could change yes. All the comments here are just "my dad's car is better than you're dad's".
You can even turn the damn thing off - UAC is not aimed at a bunch of techies after all, it's aimed at joe public who really don't know what they've downloaded and probably should be warned before clicking about.
Slashdot Mirror
What is it with the recent phenomenon on Slashdot to have titles ending in question marks. It's crap journalism, stop it! Editors please give the news story some kind of meaning through the title, not degrade it to an internet forum-esque post.
By the time WoW was in the works, they had already started to think globally. They identified North America, Europe, and South Korea as the three areas they wanted to target directly for WoW's launch. To do that, they established a full control center, with customer support, server infrastructure, marketing, sales, and administrative control in each area.
If you played WoW from the start as I do (atleast in Europe) you might find this particularly hard to believe. The servers at the start were absolutely terrible with 30-60 minute queues, very bad latency and frequently the scheduled maintenance went on for 2 days. I think the more truthful version is "We didn't realise how successful it would be, scrambled to get the infrastructure in place while at the same time made a mess of our customer support" (which is still terrible in Europe in terms of getting the actual truth, maybe this isn't the case in Europe - the chairman of Blizzard had to actually apologise to the EU market for the service).
I have to agree. You can run a car in London and be poor, you just can't use it for commuting as it's faster to walk through central London and the car parking charges (unless your company has parking) making it infeasibly expensive.
The Congestion charge in London records your number plate and then you pay your charge online. I don't even think to wear my tin-foil hat when I'm driving through. Maybe some camera supervisor from Dagenham will steal my identity through my number plate, and I will be put in prison for 20 years! Or maybe nobody actually gives a crap about the number plates going through unless there is a security threat.
What you're really admitting to is having a 4 x 320gb porno store
Not sure if this has been mentioned, but one of the main things I wouldn't feel comfortable with if the guy was 11 (or any age up to 18) is I wouldn't socialise with this player outside of the game, so why do it inside?
Generally I like online games when you're playing with people of the same demographic, or close. Or people who have roughly the same interests. So playing with an 11 year old, or playing with a 50 year old woman is personally something I don't find comfortable doing. Infact it kind of makes you open your eyes to what you are actually doing - stamp collecting but online and anonymously.
You have never played WoW, but know that 25g is not much. I've never been to Italy but I know that 1000 lira isn't much.
You're absolutely right, there should be no reason for spam in the game.
WoW allows you to send lots of mail to multiple recipients via its API that Mod users can use - for what reason I'm not quite sure.
It also allows people to type things in the chat channels (which are basically like IRC channels) repeatedly without any kind of throttling until this recent change. Look at IRC networks: you get disconnected for doing this pretty quickly. It's been like this for over 2 years and they only just figured it out now, which kind of points to a company sitting on its dollars until the community gets annoyed enough that they are forced to put some developer man hours into the problem. Similar things happened with their looking for group solutions, which they have made a huge mess of.
It's a shame as the game has so many strong points, but it feels that in the past year Blizzard has got very apathetic about making any kind of innovation with the game. This maybe the fault of the developers being used for SC2, or the Burning Crusade sapping their time. Looking back to 2005 there were lots of new innovations happening and now its stagnant. End of anti-Blizzard rant!
I reinstalled the game to try out the amazing new patch they've just released (which incidently contains very *new* content except for raids). The 'spammers' now just use the general, trade, guild recruitment chat channels to advertise.
That's a myth, lemmings don't really jump off cliffs
I can't see adverts happening in-game for RPGs. Although WoW does have a lot of gold advertisments going on ingame (some conspiracy theories suggest Blizzard are linked to these companies).
Valve I could doing this, they sell their soul for any form of revenue.
transcode 360 does this, although the project hasn't been updated for sometime.
http://runtime360.com/projects/transcode-360/
The problem is rewind/forwarding doesn't work too well.
We have plenty of potential "WoW killers" due for release at the end of this year: Team Fortress 2, Crysis, Warhammer Online, Unreal Tournament 2007. They may not steal all of the player base (the hardcore people who play relentlessly for minor equipment upgrades), but I would bet a few dollars to say these games will make a serious dent on the population of WoW. That is unless Blizzard are crafty and manage to get another expansion out by then, which is doubtful.
Although the upcoming patch for World of Warcraft is pretty much offering more of the same and has been 5 months in the making, and WoW players seem to be particularly apathetic about what Blizzard provide them with in the way of content - Blizzard say they prefer fixing bugs rather than producing more content - seems to keep the majority of the wow addicts happy.
http://www.eurogamer.net/releases.php?platform=pc
Shows all the PC games
You can joke, but I'm pretty certain the announcement is going to be about the next WoW expansion. A Blizzard respresentative said they were planning on releasing an expansion every year for the next 5 years. I wish I could find the link, it's on a video game website somewhere.
Sorry but your reply looks like so many other World of Warcraft player's lingo: excessive use of the word "whine" and refusal to have anyone criticising the game.
My sources are the official forums, which have almost daily posts about players quitting and all their friends quitting, and also from in game friends on 3 different servers. Infact there was a forum post that was 25 pages long post about this not too long ago. This might be the old timers who are now bored of it, but I'm sure that represents a hefty chunk of the pie. The Blizzard statistics also seem to contradict themselves, give their account numbers as totaling 7 million, while their headline proclaims 8.5 million play the game. If you want me to quote official figures, sorry I don't work for Blizzard and I doubt Blizzard will ever post a PR with "WoW account subscribers down by 1 million since March!".
Coming this year: Crysis, Unreal 2007, Team Fortress 2, Warhammer Online plus a whole variety of other games. I think only the most optimistic World of Warcraft diehard fan would not see that the game is due to lose players to these big titles coming out.
That isn't an "anti-WoW fantasy" as you call it, the game served me well for a few years and is a quality game. I do however like to play more than 1 game, and hope that other games besides recycled EA WW2 shooters will be able to remain profitable for the PC market.
PC games
2006: $3.9bn
2007: $3.7bn
I wonder if they have factored in World of Warcraft in these figures, or its imminent demise in the next 9 months. The game is like swarm of locusts on the PC games market at the moment (still after 2 years). More people play WoW than people who have PS3s, XBox 360s and WIIs (according to the Times Online). This is stifling all competition in the PC games market making it stagnant. It appears with the new expansion, the playerbase is slowly dying away though, which could actually be beneficial for other games producers.
Of course you could argue a lot of people who play WoW simply wouldn't play games on their PC otherwise.
Where can I download the MP3
Can someone explain how Doubleclick is worth $3.1 billion? Are they hoping to receive this amount of money back in revenue off Doubleclick, I'm confused as to how they can price Doubleclick at that amount.
From my limited knowledge of banner ads, the click through rate is typically 1%, and anything from 10c to 50c per click through.
Youtube obviously has massive potential, but Doubleclick?
Or alternatively (to 3), they would have just given up and quit a long time ago, the bot has increased the amount of time they've kept playing.
Personally I think if Blizzard invested some more of its developer's time thinking up new AI or ways of interacting with monsters they might avoid this. Instead the world is one large copy+paste job and so the fact another piece of software can play the game is testament to how simplistic the game actually is. If you played the recent expansion you can see this in full effect with the new dungeons and the quest content. The graphics are nice but no innovation has actually taken place.
Google has released the third leg of the stool
Sounds like that's one long, painful stool
Give the key to Google, we all know they can be trusted *(waits for the +5 insightful)*
I can tell you the most unimpressive AI: World of Warcraft. It's so stupid another computer (wowglider) can play it with minimal configuration from a human.
That idea of aging is a good one.
Your character would age (regardless of whether you play or not), so eventually his abilities and reactions would slow down. You would then have to pro-create and train up a younger apprentice who would be playable by yourself too. I'm not sure how it would translate into gameplay but it would make the game feel a lot my dynamic in my view.
I also feel that the whole class idea, atleast in WoW, could be disposed of. Make the richness come from customising your character, and then he is able to combine skills from different classes from one very large talent tree. This would need some very intense play testing to get right, but would allow you to change your role in the game without going through the 2 weeks of getting to level 60.
Huxley looks good if their promise to keep quests dynamic is true. One of the many bland aspects of WoW is the fact the quests are the same whatever character you play. You get a few class-based ones but that doesn't compensate. The majority of the quests are also repetitive brain-dead tasks; when you get a good quest it's quite rare as you realise you are actually enjoying it.
The formula has made Blizzard extremely rich however. I would argue this has come from an extremely good game engine (no loading screens, great UI) rather than the content itself. If someone can build a world that is so emersive and large then they are 90% there.
That is England, Europe.
The content is all that amazing in World of Warcraft, but the game engine is second to none. Make a game engine as good as WoW's, with the character animation, UI and scripting support and you've got a WoW-killer. Until then they are just bad immitations.
Linux and Mac's have a similar approach to this problem, but their solution (sudo) is not annoying, so it actually works.
So why not just these Operating systems then? And stop moaning about Microsoft doing it wrong? The inncessant childish complaining about Windows on slashdot, via "news stories" really does lower the site. Constructively suggest how it could change yes. All the comments here are just "my dad's car is better than you're dad's".
You can even turn the damn thing off - UAC is not aimed at a bunch of techies after all, it's aimed at joe public who really don't know what they've downloaded and probably should be warned before clicking about.