It would be really hard to make an accurate comparison between a subscription rpg and free to play+premium content rpg.
What's wrong with average simultaneous players?
It depends on what you're trying to measure. A game with 100,000 hard-core fanatics may have the same number of average simultaneous players as a game with a million far more casual players. The revenue stream and "popularity" of the latter game is of greater magnitude, but the cost to operate is probably lower for the first case, and the playerbase is likely to be more loyal and have lower turnover.
That's really the problem with looking at statistics: what question are you trying to answer? Do you want to know what's the best way to make money off an MMOG? Or what's the most fun/popular? Or what's going to have the greatest longevity? Or other questions I can't think of off the top of my head?
The "most successful" MMOG from a financial standpoint would be the one that has the highest profit, and actually, one way to maximize profit is to get people to subscribe, but not actually play. If you can make a subscription a must-have accessory for a largish demographic, but have not *quite* enough to do in the game that people are actually consuming your resources in quantity, you're going to make money hand over fist.
In some ways, class and level systems can have a similar flexibility: talent resets, skill resets, etc. The key distinction between the two is that in any class/level system that I have played, you could not fundamentally change the class of a character, just the level of variation provided within that class.
You could (can, I guess) in Star Wars Galaxies. However, since that game was really just a giant economic simulator with computer-generated content, it wasn't any fun to *play*, at least not after I managed to arrange all the colors of cloaks I could make perfectly on the stairway of my house. At that point, the game was over for me.
10 years ago there were 250 million people with internet access, there are now 1.5 billion.
The potential market has increased massively, and yet there are still no more than around 16 million people playing MMOs worldwide out of around 250 million gamers.
So, in the time that the number of people with internet access has increased by a factor of six, the number of people playing MMOGs has increased by a factor of 10 or more.
Bananas today are different than the ones from a few decades ago. The new ones aren't as high in potassium. Much of the early nutrition info came from studies during the great depression and was based on having reasonable meals a few times a week and going hungry at least once a week. Modern farming also has managed to strip some nutrients out of the end products and one example I read about showed that farmed iceberg lettuce now contains significantly less nutrients than it used to (even though it never had much).
Interesting, especially since plantains (both raw and cooked) are way higher in potassium than sweet bananas. I expect they've not been hybridized as much, either.
See above for citations. There's a TON of literature about this, actually; I've done more thorough searches before when arguing about whether there were risks to stevia use as a sugar substitute... but on this forum, I think folks can find their way around Google themselves now that I've got the ball rolling.
Psych 110 (Fundamentals of Learning and Behavior) lecture, UCLA, circa 1994.
Interestingly, I had noticed this effect anecdotally, and asked about it in Physiological Sciences 5 (Human Diet and Exercise), where the professors had never heard of it. It was known to those studying operant conditioning, however.
Here's the first hit on Google Scholar for a search on [insulin artificial sweetener]. There have been human studies of this effect as well.
Not sure how bananas got the rep for being potassium-rich. I guess they've got more potassium than anything else in the nutrient department, but they're really not that high in potassium.
I'm not sure what a "showel" is, but: There is no convincing evidence that moderate consumption of aspartame causes harm. The evidence was all from "accelerated failure studies", where they gave mice extreme doses and extrapolated back to normal consumption. Well, that's not bad for a first approximation, and diet drinks had a cancer warning label for a while. However, the studies were refuted early on and now time has borne out that the studies were incorrect. There's apparently a threshold effect, and under a certain dosage (which is quite high), it's perfectly safe.
For very small values of "perfect."
Artificial sweeteners may not be the certain cancer death they were once thought to be. However, there's still a few issues with them:
* Asparatame breaks down into asparatase and methyl alcohol at higher temperatures, such as those used in baking, and during certain chemical processes, such as the digestive process. Methyl alcohol is toxic to humans.
* Sucralose interacts badly with certain medications, including those taken by cancer patients to prevent recurrences.
* ALL sweeteners, regardless of their source or chemical composition, trigger insulin production in the same way that sugar does. This is a reflexive response, where the body ramps up insulin production in response to the *taste* of sweet, not waiting until blood sugar actually goes up. This results in lower blood sugar levels in response to non-nutritive sweeteners, which induces hunger and sugar/carb cravings. This is why switching to diet soda from regular causes weight *gain* rather than loss in often-replicated studies.
What about RTFA? Yes, it is much more convenient to have a GIANT SECURITY HOLE. Like having a man-sized doggy door. You can't make it easy without making it easy to compromise.
So, Schnier proposes, you *should* make it so that you have to contact the company to reset your password. And they *should* have to jump through hoops to validate that you are who you say you are. Just like you *should* have to call a locksmith if you lose your housekeys.
So now we need studies to show that "secret questions" are insecure.
No, "we" don't need studies to show that secret questions are insecure. "We" need studies to print out and drop on the desks of our CEOs and COOs, so that we can explain why we want two-factor identification, or at the very least, we need to take the time to teach everyone in the company how to come up with a halfway-secure password that won't end up on a post-it on their monitor.
("We" would just email the story, but there's over 1500 unread messages in the CEO's box, and the COO's Blackberry buzzes constantly so she doesn't pay much attention anymore. Back to paper it is.)
MS has used and abused their vertical monopoly to control pricing and market competition, and that has harmed the market. This gets the DOJ's attention, and is illegal.
I was with you until this point.
And that's because, as you yourself said - "An OS without applications is as useful as raw cotton. That doesn't mean it's not a product, though. It's just not a complete consumer product."
i.e. it's not that browsers aren't a seperate product - they are. But they are still a feature required to complete the OS. Without the browser, the OS is incomplete.
That is not what I said.
What I said was, an OS, alone, is not a complete consumer-ready product. That's because consumers require applications. A browser is an application. It is in no way incumbent upon anyone that applications be manufactured by or bundled with the OS, any more than that the OS be bundled with the hardware (even though the hardware is even MORE required for complete OS usefulness).
Requisite car anology:
(1) A car without a stereo is not feature-complete. A consumer OS without a browser is not feature-complete
Bad analogy. Cars fulfill their basic function (getting people around) just fine without stereos. Cars can be purchased without stereos. Cars can also be purchased with a variety of stereos. Car manufacturers don't make stereos; they buy them from people who do, and offer them rebranded.
(2) That doesn't mean the stereo isn't a seperate product and can't be sold seperately. Nor does it mean that a browser isn't a seperate product and can't be sold seperately.
But it does mean that, unless people REALLY care, they're unlikely to buy an additional stereo. However, it also means that Kenwood, Alpine, Sony, et al. work to sell their stereos to the car manufacturers.
If Honda decided it was going to build its own stereos, and include them in all their cars for free, and not use anyone else's stereos, while also making it difficult to install a non-Honda stereo into their car (well, you can plug it in, but the sound will only come out of one speaker at a time unless you pop the hood and swap the spark plugs around), and had already engaged in industrial espionage, breach of contract, and product sabotage to lock Ford, Toyota, and Volkswagen out of the passenger sedan market... then that would be more analogous, and would be antitrust.
(4) At no point, is there anything restricting the dealer from offering the car for sale with a different stereo, or on the customer from installing a different stereo. At no point is there a restriction on the OEM from installing a different browser, or on the customer from installing a different browser.
Except for the many years when Microsoft used their market dominance to prevent computer hardware sellers from offering other browsers on computers.
So when it's all been distilled, the only difference left is MS's market share. And that's not enough to force them to strip the browser. You have to have market share + abuse. There's no abuse in this case.
Except for all the abuse that's happened, that gave them their market share. They're leveraging ill-gotten gains, which is STILL having a negative effect on the market. It's not enough that they're not, right this minute, continuing the same practices; after all, what more damage could they do? There's no other DOS for PC-style computers anymore. There's no other OS platform with more than a niche market. There's no one making a living selling web browsers. They already destroyed the market. What happens from here on out is predicated on a manipulated, anti-competitive situation.
It's like saying that a home run should count, because after the ball hit the bat, the steroids the batter took weren't affecting it anymore. The current market position of IE is a product of anti-compet
A vertical monopoly is when a single producer controls all steps of a process. For example, if a company grows cotton, processes it into textiles, operates a garment factory, and sells clothing, that is a vertical monopoly. Cotton, raw from the field, is of no use to a consumer market. That doesn't mean that the same entity that grows the cotton must turn it into clothing, though.
A vertical monopoly is not, however, subject to antitrust legislation unless it hampers competition. If Gap buys up some cotton fields in Egypt and some garment factories in Taiwan, they can control their costs and supply line better, but they probably can't use this to lock Abercrombie & Fitch out of the apparel market. DOJ yawns and keeps reading the newspaper.
An OS without applications is as useful as raw cotton. That doesn't mean it's not a product, though. It's just not a complete consumer product. There is absolutely NOTHING about the nature of a web browser that requires it to be produced by the same company as an OS; if there were, Firefox, Opera, and Chrome wouldn't exist.
MS has used and abused their vertical monopoly to control pricing and market competition, and that has harmed the market. This gets the DOJ's attention, and is illegal.
I like Firefox, I think IE sucks. But this whole "market share" thing is silly and fueled by nothing more than people obsessed with hating Microsoft. Guess what. If everyone dumps IE and switches to another browser, Microsoft's loss of revenue is exactly zero.
Not necessarily...
Today, if you want to apply for grants using the Health Resources Services Administration (HRSA)'s Electronic Handbooks, you need to use IE. That means that any Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) needs to have Windows PCs available to their staff who need to submit, update, or report on applications. (*Most* of the process works in Chrome, but there's bits here and there that just stop you in your tracks... and switching to a different browser means you lose the last several steps completed, so you better just do the WHOLE THING in IE from the start.)
So I asked when they expected to begin supporting standards compliant browsers, because (1) I deal with HIPAA-protected PHI on my computer, and want to minimize security risks; and (2) I sometimes work from home, where I run Linux and IE isn't available to me. I was told that that "is a very good question and something we always bring up to our developers," but they don't have a time frame for Firefox compatibility. It's good to know, though, that SOMEONE thinks it's a good idea.
When sites like HRSA's EHB support standards-compliant browsers, there will be one less reason to run Windows.
If we were talking about a company that simply created a superior product, marketed it effectively, and became the natural monopoly provider through these efforts, you might have a point.
But you're talking about a company that violated contracts, law, and basic ethics to position an inferior product as the market leader, then leveraged that position to position other, unrelated products as market leaders too. This isn't good for engineers, consumers, corporations using the products, or ANYONE except for those whose personal earnings are influenced by the earnings of one particular company.
It is time to make MS start over again, and give other companies a chance to compete on a more event playing field. Sure, maybe MS Office will continue to be the market leader, and maybe Windows will too... but if Dell finds it no easier to bundle IE than to bundle Firefox with new PCs, if it's suddenly a line-item cost to equip all your workstations with MS Office instead of Open Office... then decisions may be made differently. It may not change the shape of the market a whole lot, but it at least makes it *possible* for the market to change.
Slashdot Mirror
Since no MMO can have less than 0 players...
I have considered asking SOE to pay me for the time I spent playing SWG. It felt a lot more like work than fun.
It would be really hard to make an accurate comparison between a subscription rpg and free to play+premium content rpg.
What's wrong with average simultaneous players?
It depends on what you're trying to measure. A game with 100,000 hard-core fanatics may have the same number of average simultaneous players as a game with a million far more casual players. The revenue stream and "popularity" of the latter game is of greater magnitude, but the cost to operate is probably lower for the first case, and the playerbase is likely to be more loyal and have lower turnover.
That's really the problem with looking at statistics: what question are you trying to answer? Do you want to know what's the best way to make money off an MMOG? Or what's the most fun/popular? Or what's going to have the greatest longevity? Or other questions I can't think of off the top of my head?
The "most successful" MMOG from a financial standpoint would be the one that has the highest profit, and actually, one way to maximize profit is to get people to subscribe, but not actually play. If you can make a subscription a must-have accessory for a largish demographic, but have not *quite* enough to do in the game that people are actually consuming your resources in quantity, you're going to make money hand over fist.
In some ways, class and level systems can have a similar flexibility: talent resets, skill resets, etc. The key distinction between the two is that in any class/level system that I have played, you could not fundamentally change the class of a character, just the level of variation provided within that class.
You could (can, I guess) in Star Wars Galaxies. However, since that game was really just a giant economic simulator with computer-generated content, it wasn't any fun to *play*, at least not after I managed to arrange all the colors of cloaks I could make perfectly on the stairway of my house. At that point, the game was over for me.
10 years ago there were 250 million people with internet access, there are now 1.5 billion.
The potential market has increased massively, and yet there are still no more than around 16 million people playing MMOs worldwide out of around 250 million gamers.
So, in the time that the number of people with internet access has increased by a factor of six, the number of people playing MMOGs has increased by a factor of 10 or more.
What was your point again?
What if the girl plays WoW also? There are a few of us, you know...
Bananas today are different than the ones from a few decades ago. The new ones aren't as high in potassium. Much of the early nutrition info came from studies during the great depression and was based on having reasonable meals a few times a week and going hungry at least once a week. Modern farming also has managed to strip some nutrients out of the end products and one example I read about showed that farmed iceberg lettuce now contains significantly less nutrients than it used to (even though it never had much).
Interesting, especially since plantains (both raw and cooked) are way higher in potassium than sweet bananas. I expect they've not been hybridized as much, either.
See response to first request.
See above for citations. There's a TON of literature about this, actually; I've done more thorough searches before when arguing about whether there were risks to stevia use as a sugar substitute... but on this forum, I think folks can find their way around Google themselves now that I've got the ball rolling.
Psych 110 (Fundamentals of Learning and Behavior) lecture, UCLA, circa 1994.
Interestingly, I had noticed this effect anecdotally, and asked about it in Physiological Sciences 5 (Human Diet and Exercise), where the professors had never heard of it. It was known to those studying operant conditioning, however.
Here's the first hit on Google Scholar for a search on [insulin artificial sweetener]. There have been human studies of this effect as well.
Bananas contain lots of potassium.
There's about 422 mg potassium in a medium banana. The RDA is 3500 mg. There are a whole lot of foods with a whole lot more potassium than bananas.
Not sure how bananas got the rep for being potassium-rich. I guess they've got more potassium than anything else in the nutrient department, but they're really not that high in potassium.
Yes, a very very slow bullet.
I'm not sure what a "showel" is, but: There is no convincing evidence that moderate consumption of aspartame causes harm. The evidence was all from "accelerated failure studies", where they gave mice extreme doses and extrapolated back to normal consumption. Well, that's not bad for a first approximation, and diet drinks had a cancer warning label for a while. However, the studies were refuted early on and now time has borne out that the studies were incorrect. There's apparently a threshold effect, and under a certain dosage (which is quite high), it's perfectly safe.
For very small values of "perfect."
Artificial sweeteners may not be the certain cancer death they were once thought to be. However, there's still a few issues with them:
* Asparatame breaks down into asparatase and methyl alcohol at higher temperatures, such as those used in baking, and during certain chemical processes, such as the digestive process. Methyl alcohol is toxic to humans.
* Sucralose interacts badly with certain medications, including those taken by cancer patients to prevent recurrences.
* ALL sweeteners, regardless of their source or chemical composition, trigger insulin production in the same way that sugar does. This is a reflexive response, where the body ramps up insulin production in response to the *taste* of sweet, not waiting until blood sugar actually goes up. This results in lower blood sugar levels in response to non-nutritive sweeteners, which induces hunger and sugar/carb cravings. This is why switching to diet soda from regular causes weight *gain* rather than loss in often-replicated studies.
What about RTFA? Yes, it is much more convenient to have a GIANT SECURITY HOLE. Like having a man-sized doggy door. You can't make it easy without making it easy to compromise.
So, Schnier proposes, you *should* make it so that you have to contact the company to reset your password. And they *should* have to jump through hoops to validate that you are who you say you are. Just like you *should* have to call a locksmith if you lose your housekeys.
So now we need studies to show that "secret questions" are insecure.
No, "we" don't need studies to show that secret questions are insecure. "We" need studies to print out and drop on the desks of our CEOs and COOs, so that we can explain why we want two-factor identification, or at the very least, we need to take the time to teach everyone in the company how to come up with a halfway-secure password that won't end up on a post-it on their monitor.
("We" would just email the story, but there's over 1500 unread messages in the CEO's box, and the COO's Blackberry buzzes constantly so she doesn't pay much attention anymore. Back to paper it is.)
Yeah, nobody would guess Natalie Portman...
Ah, but you don't use her *real* name... you type "hot grits" instead! Now you're secure.
Mine isn't.
No these are far too easy. Want we want are SECRET QUESTIONS, not answers.
Mine is, "The answer is 42. What is the question?".
What do you get if you multiply six by nine in base 13?
Bravo. Lately the oblig xkcd references have been getting sloppy. That one was well played.
many email accounts allow web-based pw recovery through the same secret question setup.
No, it's like requiring you to plan out where you're going to put the doggie door, without actually requiring you to build one.
Just because they ask for your first pet's name doesn't mean you type "Fido."
That question doesn't work so well when it's your email account you can't remember how to log into...
MS has used and abused their vertical monopoly to control pricing and market competition, and that has harmed the market. This gets the DOJ's attention, and is illegal.
I was with you until this point.
And that's because, as you yourself said - "An OS without applications is as useful as raw cotton. That doesn't mean it's not a product, though. It's just not a complete consumer product."
i.e. it's not that browsers aren't a seperate product - they are. But they are still a feature required to complete the OS. Without the browser, the OS is incomplete.
That is not what I said.
What I said was, an OS, alone, is not a complete consumer-ready product. That's because consumers require applications. A browser is an application. It is in no way incumbent upon anyone that applications be manufactured by or bundled with the OS, any more than that the OS be bundled with the hardware (even though the hardware is even MORE required for complete OS usefulness).
Requisite car anology:
(1) A car without a stereo is not feature-complete. A consumer OS without a browser is not feature-complete
Bad analogy. Cars fulfill their basic function (getting people around) just fine without stereos. Cars can be purchased without stereos. Cars can also be purchased with a variety of stereos. Car manufacturers don't make stereos; they buy them from people who do, and offer them rebranded.
(2) That doesn't mean the stereo isn't a seperate product and can't be sold seperately. Nor does it mean that a browser isn't a seperate product and can't be sold seperately.
But it does mean that, unless people REALLY care, they're unlikely to buy an additional stereo. However, it also means that Kenwood, Alpine, Sony, et al. work to sell their stereos to the car manufacturers.
If Honda decided it was going to build its own stereos, and include them in all their cars for free, and not use anyone else's stereos, while also making it difficult to install a non-Honda stereo into their car (well, you can plug it in, but the sound will only come out of one speaker at a time unless you pop the hood and swap the spark plugs around), and had already engaged in industrial espionage, breach of contract, and product sabotage to lock Ford, Toyota, and Volkswagen out of the passenger sedan market... then that would be more analogous, and would be antitrust.
(4) At no point, is there anything restricting the dealer from offering the car for sale with a different stereo, or on the customer from installing a different stereo. At no point is there a restriction on the OEM from installing a different browser, or on the customer from installing a different browser.
Except for the many years when Microsoft used their market dominance to prevent computer hardware sellers from offering other browsers on computers.
So when it's all been distilled, the only difference left is MS's market share. And that's not enough to force them to strip the browser. You have to have market share + abuse. There's no abuse in this case.
Except for all the abuse that's happened, that gave them their market share. They're leveraging ill-gotten gains, which is STILL having a negative effect on the market. It's not enough that they're not, right this minute, continuing the same practices; after all, what more damage could they do? There's no other DOS for PC-style computers anymore. There's no other OS platform with more than a niche market. There's no one making a living selling web browsers. They already destroyed the market. What happens from here on out is predicated on a manipulated, anti-competitive situation.
It's like saying that a home run should count, because after the ball hit the bat, the steroids the batter took weren't affecting it anymore. The current market position of IE is a product of anti-compet
A vertical monopoly is when a single producer controls all steps of a process. For example, if a company grows cotton, processes it into textiles, operates a garment factory, and sells clothing, that is a vertical monopoly. Cotton, raw from the field, is of no use to a consumer market. That doesn't mean that the same entity that grows the cotton must turn it into clothing, though.
A vertical monopoly is not, however, subject to antitrust legislation unless it hampers competition. If Gap buys up some cotton fields in Egypt and some garment factories in Taiwan, they can control their costs and supply line better, but they probably can't use this to lock Abercrombie & Fitch out of the apparel market. DOJ yawns and keeps reading the newspaper.
An OS without applications is as useful as raw cotton. That doesn't mean it's not a product, though. It's just not a complete consumer product. There is absolutely NOTHING about the nature of a web browser that requires it to be produced by the same company as an OS; if there were, Firefox, Opera, and Chrome wouldn't exist.
MS has used and abused their vertical monopoly to control pricing and market competition, and that has harmed the market. This gets the DOJ's attention, and is illegal.
I like Firefox, I think IE sucks. But this whole "market share" thing is silly and fueled by nothing more than people obsessed with hating Microsoft. Guess what. If everyone dumps IE and switches to another browser, Microsoft's loss of revenue is exactly zero.
Not necessarily...
Today, if you want to apply for grants using the Health Resources Services Administration (HRSA)'s Electronic Handbooks, you need to use IE. That means that any Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) needs to have Windows PCs available to their staff who need to submit, update, or report on applications. (*Most* of the process works in Chrome, but there's bits here and there that just stop you in your tracks... and switching to a different browser means you lose the last several steps completed, so you better just do the WHOLE THING in IE from the start.)
So I asked when they expected to begin supporting standards compliant browsers, because (1) I deal with HIPAA-protected PHI on my computer, and want to minimize security risks; and (2) I sometimes work from home, where I run Linux and IE isn't available to me. I was told that that "is a very good question and something we always bring up to our developers," but they don't have a time frame for Firefox compatibility. It's good to know, though, that SOMEONE thinks it's a good idea.
When sites like HRSA's EHB support standards-compliant browsers, there will be one less reason to run Windows.
Interesting that it was the assistant's sister, rather than brother, who was giving the advice.
Why?
If we were talking about a company that simply created a superior product, marketed it effectively, and became the natural monopoly provider through these efforts, you might have a point.
But you're talking about a company that violated contracts, law, and basic ethics to position an inferior product as the market leader, then leveraged that position to position other, unrelated products as market leaders too. This isn't good for engineers, consumers, corporations using the products, or ANYONE except for those whose personal earnings are influenced by the earnings of one particular company.
It is time to make MS start over again, and give other companies a chance to compete on a more event playing field. Sure, maybe MS Office will continue to be the market leader, and maybe Windows will too... but if Dell finds it no easier to bundle IE than to bundle Firefox with new PCs, if it's suddenly a line-item cost to equip all your workstations with MS Office instead of Open Office... then decisions may be made differently. It may not change the shape of the market a whole lot, but it at least makes it *possible* for the market to change.