Agreed, nothing worse than a PC game where the tutorial tells you to press the blue X button on your controller to continue and you have to hammer around the keyboard trying to find it. Half assed console ports have done far more damage to PC gaming than piracy ever could.
What I was trying to say about micropayments though, is that it seems the choice is between allowing players to buy gold and other services from the game makers or else end up buying them from criminals.
It seems every MMO is turning towards micropayments in some form or other. Newer games seem to be allowing players to buy from the developers more where as the older games can't risk changing their policies so instead have set up their system to ensure the free trial accounts that gold farmers so dearly love generating by the millions have to at some point pay money in order to be able to transfer in-game funds on their farmbot avatars to real players. This second option is a good situation as they get the money from the illegal micropayments via a sort of taxation system while maintaining the illusion of retaining the integrity of their game and it makes their bi weekly player count look higher than the population of some European countries.
Of course the problem is then that huge numbers of the gold farming accounts are created using stolen credit card details and credit card companies have been threatning to block the companies ability to pay with various cards if they don't sort out their massive fraudulent payment rates and also end up loosing a lot of money through chargebacks and fines. This second reason is why they tend to lean newer games towards official micropayments in ratio to taxation of the gold farmers.
Also the problem is that every MMO has a micro transactions payment method already. Its just that if the developers don't offer it then an unofficial black market will.
If it was just ornaments I wouldn't ever have objected. I do find it offensive that they do affect the game dynamics, its enough that one can feel compelled to use them for the extra edge.
MMO owners have little choice in the matter. They can either charge monthly subscriptions or offer a free to play but pay for gear/gold/features and possibly supplement revenue further with advertising. But as for being allowed to purchase items that give you an unfair advantage over free to pay players, this is rather unavoidable and is already available in every MMO out there. The problem is that if the developers do not offer this service then Chinese old farmers and professional account hijackers will. Runescape, which I believe is still the worlds largest free to play MMO tried to fight real world trading instead by enforcing crippling trade restrictions and kneecapping PVP looting but it lost so many players the game nearly went under.
If someone can come up with a better model that retains both company profit and doesnt kill off the playerbase on a free to play MMO that prevents players buying in game items or services with real money I'm sure the MMO developers would be very interested to hear it.
A famous politician tried something like this, forcing the unemployed into newly created jobs in construction, farming and building his countries infrastructure, though he also stipulated that those still refusing or unable to find work would end up drafted into the army. Unsurprisingly most of them found jobs. I'm trying to remember the name of this politician again, what was it? Oh yes Adolf Hitler.
I have trouble grasping the hatred I see here for differing cultures. Too much of it smacks of hypocrisy. Were OK with our western governments carpet bombing poor nations infrastructure into the stoneage so we can seize their valuable natural resources but heaven forbid a foreign agency censors their search engines. We whine and cry when the businesses that invite us to use their online services free of charge, get uncomfortable when we trumpet our right of freedom to offend, er of speech.
The UK went to war in Iraq and contributed towards the estimated total 665 thousand deaths since the 2003 conflict began, based largely upon a war dossier that has been proven to be a complete fabrication. In America they still don't know who murdered their president 47 years ago and despite the fact an alleged 80% of Americans seem to think the official line was bullshit, there doesn't seem to have been any reliable inquests.
Sure the majority of us in the west don't throwing around death threats because someone drew cartoons but we are still very happy to murder someone because of their sexuality, dress sense or because of what football team they support.
I know its a difficult concept to grasp, but how about we shovel the shit out of our own gardens before we roll the bulldozers over other peoples.
If you are going to damn every religion because of fanatics, you can choose to damn every human endeavor, no matter how good, for those who would pervert it. You have no depth of perception, and in fact, are no better than the those who you would damn.
But that is already how things work.
Video games and rock music and many other forms of media often come under heavy fire due to tenuous links between them and acts of their consumers, interestingly enough almost always from religious groups. Why should superstition be immune to such scrutiny?
People continue to murder others in the name of superstition all over the globe. If any other book, film or game incited people to murder and they actually started doing it, they would be ripped off the shelves and the distributors would likely end up in jail. Religions enjoy judging, but demand immunity from being likewise judged.
That's not true. You can't disprove the existence of God, but there's a lot of religious beliefs that you can prove wrong. You can prove astrology and fortune-telling wrong, or parts of the Book of Genesis, for instance.
But why should that ever be an issue? Why should the existence of an invisible magical being by the default argument in any absence of a complete picture? Why should it be up to science to disprove the existence of something that refuses to prove its own existence.
There is a very simple way of proving (at least to me) the existence of God. Every day brings in claims of miraculous healings, just once I would love to see someone miraculously healed who was not sick with something misdiagnosable. The day that prayer power heals an amputee is the day I will believe in the supernatural. Until that day comes along, there is no God.
You make a good point. If buying films was even twice as much effort as downloading them they sure would sell an awful lot more and ripping off their customers a lot less would certainly help too like if they stopped charging people repeatedly for the same film. The theatre release, the DVD release, the extended edition, the alternative ending edition, digitally remastered edition, the gold edition and so on.
Sure blame the internet and ignore the fact that most news papers are biased, wildly inaccurate, over sensationalised and often printed flat out lies just in an attempt to improve ratings.
I very possibly am wrong, it is just something I had heard a lot on the ethers and seen myself a number of times in my misspent youth. As far as I am aware there has been no formal documented proof and as such I tried to keep my post in a purely speculative tone.
I posted this partly hoping someone who was far wiser than I could point out something much closer to the truth of the matter.
Given just how much work can go into creating a mod, doing so in order to distribute a virus or trojan to a relatively small market seems a very unlikely waste of time. Most mods are created out of love after all.
On a side note in mentioning pirate software as a means to distrubute these infections. Apparently a lot of free Virus checkers deliberately give false positives on pirated software, particularly keygens. I wonder if companies pay free virus checkers to falsely mark as positive keygens that pirate their software.
The principle of the matter is that it is a very unbalanced extradition treaty the UK has with the US. A fast track extradition policy that allows the USA to force the extradition of a British citizen without offering any evidence and also removes a British citizens right to even appeal this decision. This by the way is strictly a one way process as all US citizens are fully protected by the US constitution. Of course they even get to choose what state to extradite them to where they can take advantage of varying laws and sentencing. I believe this was an errata added in 2006 but don't quote me on that.
This is what happened to the NatWest Three, a UK based offence against a UK bank. Of course they were extradited to Texas where it was felt they could hit them with more offences for longer sentencing and with an easier conviction (of course there is a huge tinfoil hat conspiracy regarding using these as fall guys in a forced plea bargain to cover up Bush administration involvement in the Enron scandal but that is an argument for another day)
Oh no! Imagine the idea of someone being slapped in the face and not wanting to come back for seconds. I'm sure this really offends your capitalist sensibilities but some of us actually care about what we by beyond the media hype.
The article says that the son was convicted only of the thoughtcrime. I would've thought that if he was actually involved with making the poison, both could've been convicted for that.
The police sometimes need small over reaching laws. For example in the UK its illegal to walk your dog in an unban environment off the lead. Now its a law that is almost never enforced but its a handy tool to have, for example it was recently enforced on a guy who lives down the road from me. He staggers drunkenly down the road with a snarling doberman off its lead and frightens local people. Suddenly the police have a handy tool for stopping this. They don't want to abuse their over reaching laws because then there is inevitably a public outcry and they loose a useful tool.
I've got to say that I really like Steam. CDs do not live very long in my untidy flat where as games I've bought on steam I can play on anyones computer thats connected to the internet and dont need boxes, leaflets and cd's lying around the place. Before Steam I used to pirate a lot of games (even ones I had legitimately bought) because I absolutely hate having to look out a CD and hope it still works.
I can understand some peoples materialistic need to physically hold something they have purchased but I don't subscribe to the argument that they will take your games back off you for no reason and with no recourse. That would be a great way to loose all your customers. The only people who have to worry are those who use or create 3rd party software to give themselves an unfair advantage in competative online environments and thank God somebody is finally doing something about these arsefountains.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed, nothing worse than a PC game where the tutorial tells you to press the blue X button on your controller to continue and you have to hammer around the keyboard trying to find it. Half assed console ports have done far more damage to PC gaming than piracy ever could.
What I was trying to say about micropayments though, is that it seems the choice is between allowing players to buy gold and other services from the game makers or else end up buying them from criminals.
It seems every MMO is turning towards micropayments in some form or other. Newer games seem to be allowing players to buy from the developers more where as the older games can't risk changing their policies so instead have set up their system to ensure the free trial accounts that gold farmers so dearly love generating by the millions have to at some point pay money in order to be able to transfer in-game funds on their farmbot avatars to real players. This second option is a good situation as they get the money from the illegal micropayments via a sort of taxation system while maintaining the illusion of retaining the integrity of their game and it makes their bi weekly player count look higher than the population of some European countries.
Of course the problem is then that huge numbers of the gold farming accounts are created using stolen credit card details and credit card companies have been threatning to block the companies ability to pay with various cards if they don't sort out their massive fraudulent payment rates and also end up loosing a lot of money through chargebacks and fines. This second reason is why they tend to lean newer games towards official micropayments in ratio to taxation of the gold farmers.
Also the problem is that every MMO has a micro transactions payment method already. Its just that if the developers don't offer it then an unofficial black market will.
Gah typo! Obviously Chinese 'old' farmers should have been written as Chinese gold farmers.
If it was just ornaments I wouldn't ever have objected. I do find it offensive that they do affect the game dynamics, its enough that one can feel compelled to use them for the extra edge.
MMO owners have little choice in the matter. They can either charge monthly subscriptions or offer a free to play but pay for gear/gold/features and possibly supplement revenue further with advertising. But as for being allowed to purchase items that give you an unfair advantage over free to pay players, this is rather unavoidable and is already available in every MMO out there. The problem is that if the developers do not offer this service then Chinese old farmers and professional account hijackers will. Runescape, which I believe is still the worlds largest free to play MMO tried to fight real world trading instead by enforcing crippling trade restrictions and kneecapping PVP looting but it lost so many players the game nearly went under.
If someone can come up with a better model that retains both company profit and doesnt kill off the playerbase on a free to play MMO that prevents players buying in game items or services with real money I'm sure the MMO developers would be very interested to hear it.
Who needs a pancrease anyway?
Is that who you would like to be?
The UK went to war in Iraq and contributed towards the estimated total 665 thousand deaths since the 2003 conflict began, based largely upon a war dossier that has been proven to be a complete fabrication. In America they still don't know who murdered their president 47 years ago and despite the fact an alleged 80% of Americans seem to think the official line was bullshit, there doesn't seem to have been any reliable inquests.
Sure the majority of us in the west don't throwing around death threats because someone drew cartoons but we are still very happy to murder someone because of their sexuality, dress sense or because of what football team they support.
I know its a difficult concept to grasp, but how about we shovel the shit out of our own gardens before we roll the bulldozers over other peoples.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/10/AR2006101001442.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy_assassination
If you are going to damn every religion because of fanatics, you can choose to damn every human endeavor, no matter how good, for those who would pervert it. You have no depth of perception, and in fact, are no better than the those who you would damn.
But that is already how things work.
Video games and rock music and many other forms of media often come under heavy fire due to tenuous links between them and acts of their consumers, interestingly enough almost always from religious groups. Why should superstition be immune to such scrutiny?
People continue to murder others in the name of superstition all over the globe. If any other book, film or game incited people to murder and they actually started doing it, they would be ripped off the shelves and the distributors would likely end up in jail. Religions enjoy judging, but demand immunity from being likewise judged.
That's not true. You can't disprove the existence of God, but there's a lot of religious beliefs that you can prove wrong. You can prove astrology and fortune-telling wrong, or parts of the Book of Genesis, for instance.
But why should that ever be an issue? Why should the existence of an invisible magical being by the default argument in any absence of a complete picture? Why should it be up to science to disprove the existence of something that refuses to prove its own existence.
There is a very simple way of proving (at least to me) the existence of God. Every day brings in claims of miraculous healings, just once I would love to see someone miraculously healed who was not sick with something misdiagnosable. The day that prayer power heals an amputee is the day I will believe in the supernatural. Until that day comes along, there is no God.
You make a good point. If buying films was even twice as much effort as downloading them they sure would sell an awful lot more and ripping off their customers a lot less would certainly help too like if they stopped charging people repeatedly for the same film. The theatre release, the DVD release, the extended edition, the alternative ending edition, digitally remastered edition, the gold edition and so on.
They could surely just put up a sign saying these are sold for novelty and not actual consumption.
Sure blame the internet and ignore the fact that most news papers are biased, wildly inaccurate, over sensationalised and often printed flat out lies just in an attempt to improve ratings.
I very possibly am wrong, it is just something I had heard a lot on the ethers and seen myself a number of times in my misspent youth. As far as I am aware there has been no formal documented proof and as such I tried to keep my post in a purely speculative tone.
I posted this partly hoping someone who was far wiser than I could point out something much closer to the truth of the matter.
Given just how much work can go into creating a mod, doing so in order to distribute a virus or trojan to a relatively small market seems a very unlikely waste of time. Most mods are created out of love after all.
On a side note in mentioning pirate software as a means to distrubute these infections. Apparently a lot of free Virus checkers deliberately give false positives on pirated software, particularly keygens. I wonder if companies pay free virus checkers to falsely mark as positive keygens that pirate their software.
This is what happened to the NatWest Three, a UK based offence against a UK bank. Of course they were extradited to Texas where it was felt they could hit them with more offences for longer sentencing and with an easier conviction (of course there is a huge tinfoil hat conspiracy regarding using these as fall guys in a forced plea bargain to cover up Bush administration involvement in the Enron scandal but that is an argument for another day)
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts2003/ukpga_20030041_en_1
Speed should probably also be a factor, otherwise surely a blimp design would beat all other entries.
Er 'by' should have been 'buy'. Typos in a rant, imagine that.
Oh no! Imagine the idea of someone being slapped in the face and not wanting to come back for seconds. I'm sure this really offends your capitalist sensibilities but some of us actually care about what we by beyond the media hype.
a kid was arrested for posession of this book a few years ago. http://hightimes.com/news/ht_admin/3720
The article says that the son was convicted only of the thoughtcrime. I would've thought that if he was actually involved with making the poison, both could've been convicted for that.
The police sometimes need small over reaching laws. For example in the UK its illegal to walk your dog in an unban environment off the lead. Now its a law that is almost never enforced but its a handy tool to have, for example it was recently enforced on a guy who lives down the road from me. He staggers drunkenly down the road with a snarling doberman off its lead and frightens local people. Suddenly the police have a handy tool for stopping this. They don't want to abuse their over reaching laws because then there is inevitably a public outcry and they loose a useful tool.
Apple sales reps will be boycotting mobile phone shops dressed in grey hoodies advising people "These are not the droids you are looking for."
Buy an android phone instead?
Flamebait with a built in 'Flame me and I win' clause..... sneaky.
I've got to say that I really like Steam. CDs do not live very long in my untidy flat where as games I've bought on steam I can play on anyones computer thats connected to the internet and dont need boxes, leaflets and cd's lying around the place. Before Steam I used to pirate a lot of games (even ones I had legitimately bought) because I absolutely hate having to look out a CD and hope it still works.
I can understand some peoples materialistic need to physically hold something they have purchased but I don't subscribe to the argument that they will take your games back off you for no reason and with no recourse. That would be a great way to loose all your customers. The only people who have to worry are those who use or create 3rd party software to give themselves an unfair advantage in competative online environments and thank God somebody is finally doing something about these arsefountains.