I've noticed this as well.
Having been a retail manager for years and done other work in retail, I'll say that me and my workers called it Black Friday for a few reasons. We had to open the store up at some ungodly hour (3-4 hours early), and the sheer amount of people who came in on Friday.
I was a manager for one of the countries largest book chains, and as asinine as it sounds, many of our stores did nearly half the yearly business from mid November to late December. Something clicks in a lot of peoples brains that "oh crap, xmas is how many days off, time to shop." My regional manager once told me that as a region we did as much business those 4-6 weeks as we did most of the rest of the year. Judging by my stores daily amounts he wasn't off by much.
1) They can and do restore equipment
2) That runs the risk of making the game unrewarding for standard play or just making it annoying.
3) As mentioned before, when you have a zone with a few hundred people in it you can't count on the server keeping track of all that, once latency starts to rise you have everyone just kinda standing there taking a few steps at a time.
Of course, these problems have existed in online games for ages. Even so, we can't count on a fix because you can't expect everyone to be on high quality machines thats 100% secure with a line directly into the local internet backbone.
Slashdot Mirror
I've noticed this as well. Having been a retail manager for years and done other work in retail, I'll say that me and my workers called it Black Friday for a few reasons. We had to open the store up at some ungodly hour (3-4 hours early), and the sheer amount of people who came in on Friday. I was a manager for one of the countries largest book chains, and as asinine as it sounds, many of our stores did nearly half the yearly business from mid November to late December. Something clicks in a lot of peoples brains that "oh crap, xmas is how many days off, time to shop." My regional manager once told me that as a region we did as much business those 4-6 weeks as we did most of the rest of the year. Judging by my stores daily amounts he wasn't off by much.
1) They can and do restore equipment 2) That runs the risk of making the game unrewarding for standard play or just making it annoying. 3) As mentioned before, when you have a zone with a few hundred people in it you can't count on the server keeping track of all that, once latency starts to rise you have everyone just kinda standing there taking a few steps at a time. Of course, these problems have existed in online games for ages. Even so, we can't count on a fix because you can't expect everyone to be on high quality machines thats 100% secure with a line directly into the local internet backbone.