Clearly a voice actor isn't going to work consistent lengthy periods for one game.
Thus they try to pickup several projects that don't overlap.
And you say I don't know how many hours either party works? I know how many hours the game company employees work (both from reading and from having been one).
So the voice actor isn't being paid fairly at $300+/hr while the programmers and artists pulling 50-80+hr weeks are being paid salaries of 35 to $80k/yr, which if you consider the number of hours they work, isn't a whole lot.
My response to the voice actors: If $300+/hr isn't enough, don't take the gig. Or better yet, start your own game company.
Here's some useful info. The people getting "rich" from game development are the company owners/publishers, not the people making the work. The best you can hope for is a tiny royalty, but to get that you usually get shafted on pay.
Judging by the dates on these articles, I'd say at least since 2001, but I'd bet it was long before that.
IBM may be bigger (I dunno, and I'm not going to spend time now researching), but they're not a bigger "software" company. IBM does lots of different things - in fact their business goal since 2001 has been to shift focus to services.
Many corporate actions are just games designed to artificially increase stock price.
SCO just happened to have the balls (or the incredibly stupid idea) to sue the 2nd largest software company in the world for an astronomical figure.
Consider this perspective. Even if IBM had rolled over and paid SCO some big number in a settlement, that wouldn't impact the company's value nearly as much as the potential of winning the huge case. So basically, the threat of the huge payoff, magnified by stock market gambling, would (and did) push the stock price up far more.
Everyone with inside information then cashes out (inside meaning executives, primary funding investors, and Martha Stewart-type friends) while the stupid general "investing" public buys more stock after reading the daily press releases.
The trade of virtual items has gone on and will continue to go on whether authorized by the game companies or not.
It should be _better_ for the game when companies like Sony actually begin selling in-game items, money, and bonuses.
On games where players themselves are the providers of goods for sale, there is a huge business in "farming" items and coin for resale. So not only do you have players with real money able to buy things (rather than earn them), but you also have the contention for resources due to all the farmers.
If game company provides the virtual goods, that essentially undercuts any player-farmed trade. That is definitely an improvement.
Heh heh, you're right. Ignoring the occasional crashes, the servers never go down.
Actually, the "honor" (such an incredibly poor choice for the name) system probably increased the stress on their server/network by 10x.
I PvP a lot in large battles now (since you can't really quest anymore - thanks Blizzard), and it is a fairly common occurrence for everyone to get dumped from the game unexpectedly.
And I know it's not just us being disconnected, because I can quickly log back in and play. Normally if you get disconnected, when you try to login you get "A character with that name already exists" message. Not getting that message strongly suggests that the server, or some part of it, reset.
Yes my standards are high, but having seen and worked at companies that live financially by their ability to deliver data/answers accurately, in real time, and in high volume, I know it's perfectly reasonable to believe that WoW's service could be much much better.
Lack of content updates is secondary. The real serious problem is the continued instability of the servers and network.
The WoW service frequently has unplanned outages, slow performance, server crashes, rollbacks (where you lose X minutes/hours of play development), and occasionally actual bugs.
Anyone who denies this or defends Blizzard's track record here simply doesn't play often, or plays on one of the rare low-population servers.
And despite seeming like an obviously useful option, Blizzard has been extremely reluctant to allow character transfers. At this point I believe that's because their game is very poorly designed, at least with respect to how they manage character data.
There is no valid excuse or defense against the claims I make. My experiences are mirrored by thousands of other players. Anyone who isn't experiencing these issues simply isn't playing often, isn't playing on a moderate/high pop server, or isn't willing to concede that a previously high quality game company has slipped.
I made the above post shortly after the article was made available. My brief post was not redundant. My post stayed at +3 Interesting for days.
Now, mysteriously, it is "redundant".
Who comes back to an old post and moderates it as redundant? This is exactly the kind of crap that caused me to quit posting, and even quit reading Slashdot for a while.
The moderation system is broken, and some of the moderates are just plain jerks. Perhaps it's some of the kids who were regularly beat up on the schoolyard, and now they seek out their revenge with their mighty moderator sword. Sad.
Windows has 90% desktop marketshare. So by your logic, Windows must not have many problems...
WoW is the newest big-name MMORPG on the market. It also has a great look and decent gameplay. It is definitely a success.
However, it is far from what it could/should have been, given the company behind it. If this MMORPG had come from some unknown development shop I wouldn't expect much, but Blizzard has already demonstrated its ability to create top-notch games.
I'm glad you've enjoyed your brief introduction to WoW.
Just because you've had no unusual maintenance situations in your 1+ week doesn't mean there haven't been many many issues. There have been numerous major outages, some lasting 24+ hours!
I've been playing WoW since closed beta. Features that were promised to be available in release still aren't available. Some are critically important, such as a PvP honor system.
Why did you feel the need to respond to my post when you have no real experience? You call my complaints cookie cutter. You have no idea what you're talking about.
Britain alone spends some 600 million pounds ($1.15 billion) a year treating leg ulcers, which affect 1 percent of the population and can persist for years.
But what's not impressive is the availability and performance of the server (US at least); very frequent emergency maintenance; unexplained lag surges (at seemingly low-volume times, like 5am CST); client crash bugs; raid/instance bugs; etc.
WoW may grow more, but I believe it will retract in subscriber numbers within the year. While the game world seems large at first, it really is fairly small. There are only so many places to go and things to kill. Ultimately you end up with a server full of level 60 players who are bored out of their minds. Sure they can roll another char and play it up, but even that gets old.
WoW promised to offer new content frequently, but that's not been delivered. Whether the content has gotten delayed due to constant server/network issues is not known to the public, but what is known is that features that were promised long ago have yet to appear in the game. But of course, great things are Coming Soon!
WoW will be a success overall, but the first year will remain bumpy. Us early adopters didn't begin to get what we expected, so many of us have already left.
And for any people who reply to this with comments about "every other game has had launch issues", save it. I've played a good many of other MMORPGs, and most of them from the day they opened (or the beta before). WoW's rocky start (server/network problems) is unacceptable.
I played EQ for five years, beginning with opening weekend on May? of 1999.
I was there. It started with a bang, was slow, and then they suffered router trouble. They were having 8,000 connections dumped at a time, and then their login server would choke on the big simultaneous volume (that they never expected).
However, it took them only two days to get that issue completely worked out. Then they began a process of increasing bandwidth, server count, and most importantly, backbone connections (adding ATT was the big step).
I know all these details because I was there. And more importantly, Verant actually communicated.
Blizzard, on the other hand, had a hellacious start. It was horrid for the first several days, and despite them adding servers rapidly, their backend db system just couldn't keep up. Everyone was constantly lagging up to several minutes each time they tried to loot something or deal with a quest mob.
This is in stark contrast to the performance of WoW during stress test, which Blizzard touted as being a huge win because of their 500,000 downloads. Then weeks after their public launch failure, they claimed "we never expected to sell so many copies (260,000)". Uh, that stress test wasn't an indication of interest?...
A - Appearance B - Story A - Quest system mechanics A - Number of quests C - Quest content C - Player classes D - PvP D - Incomplete D - Nerfs FFF - Availability and reliability of game world
o Basically, it's got:
o Blizzard Polish
o Fisher Price difficulty
o redundant and boilerplate quests
o modestly evolutionary game mechanics
o the worst online world management and availability I've ever experienced (out of UO, AC, EQ, DAoC, ATITD), bar none
Blizzard has made so many poor decisions regarding capacity planning and management it hurts. Top that off with a policy of "nerf first, research later". Let's not forget the unimplimented features, namely the PvP honor system.
Yeah I'm still playing it, because despite those problems it's fun, but it definitely is not 100% quality. It does not begin to meet the standard set by Blizzard on previous games.
Or you could just compare their performance on common applications.
We've heard enough praise of the advances of the G3/4/5 over the years, as well as all the "supercomputer" hype, but still, anything but a 2.5GHz dual G5 is sluggish, whereas a P3 doesn't feel slow in day to day use.
This may be redundant, but I really don't care to read 400+ comments to find out.
Contract to Hire is what you're describing, and it's done all the time. It's typically win/win for contractor/company because it gives each time to get a feel for the other.
Believe me, once they know how good you are (assuming you don't suck), they'll want to keep you. In fact, companies typically have a harder time coercing contractors to become employees than the other way around.
A recently found computer glitch in the voting machines in Franklin County, Indiana has given a democrat enough votes to bump a republican from victory in a County Commissioner's race.
The glitch in the machines recorded straight Democratic Party votes for Libertarians.
The votes were re-counted last night, by hand.
The company who made the voting machine is also checking into programming of it's equipment in nine other Indiana counties.
Not much information to make a story out of. Are they saying that a Rep should have won, but a Dem won instead because all Lib votes were counted for Dems?
No it's not just you. Not only is this old, and stupid, it's total flamebait.
What's really sad is that some freak spent time putting this page together. What kind of life (or lack thereof) does one have when they get that motivated against a distro that they put up a special webpage?
There's probably something surprising and interesting in that theory.
It could be said that Python programmers are more likely to think outside the norm (which could be why they're Python programmers instead of Java programmers).
If that's true, then it's probably also true that Python-programmer-written essays might introduce more useful and interesting topics than Java-programmer-written essays.
Whether you prove it true or not isn't so important, as long as you develop the idea and follow the path. That's his point.
Slashdot Mirror
Man, you were rolling along with such a great post until your liberal flame system fired up.
The WSJ journal was indeed junk, primarily because they mischaracterized some of the studies (in an effort to be funny).
This had nothing to do with GOP, religious right, or any particular group.
Clearly a voice actor isn't going to work consistent lengthy periods for one game.
Thus they try to pickup several projects that don't overlap.
And you say I don't know how many hours either party works? I know how many hours the game company employees work (both from reading and from having been one).
Why am I responding to an AC anyway?
Unions to the rescue! WTF.
So the voice actor isn't being paid fairly at $300+/hr while the programmers and artists pulling 50-80+hr weeks are being paid salaries of 35 to $80k/yr, which if you consider the number of hours they work, isn't a whole lot.
My response to the voice actors: If $300+/hr isn't enough, don't take the gig. Or better yet, start your own game company.
Here's some useful info. The people getting "rich" from game development are the company owners/publishers, not the people making the work. The best you can hope for is a tiny royalty, but to get that you usually get shafted on pay.
I've "known" about it for years. But to back it up I provide these links:
Here
Here
Here
Here
and Here
Judging by the dates on these articles, I'd say at least since 2001, but I'd bet it was long before that.
IBM may be bigger (I dunno, and I'm not going to spend time now researching), but they're not a bigger "software" company. IBM does lots of different things - in fact their business goal since 2001 has been to shift focus to services.
You're right, no pity.
But it is unfortunate that (for now) the "evil people" have profited.
Hopefully the SEC will do something to _dissuade_ the offending parties from doing that again.
Many corporate actions are just games designed to artificially increase stock price.
SCO just happened to have the balls (or the incredibly stupid idea) to sue the 2nd largest software company in the world for an astronomical figure.
Consider this perspective. Even if IBM had rolled over and paid SCO some big number in a settlement, that wouldn't impact the company's value nearly as much as the potential of winning the huge case. So basically, the threat of the huge payoff, magnified by stock market gambling, would (and did) push the stock price up far more.
Everyone with inside information then cashes out (inside meaning executives, primary funding investors, and Martha Stewart-type friends) while the stupid general "investing" public buys more stock after reading the daily press releases.
Those who can afford it pirate it less.
Those who can't begin to afford it supposedly pirate it more.
I think I see a correlation here...
It reminds me of a story a real estate attorney friend of mine told me about working at Tandy (Radio Shack).
In asking for a salary increase, he asked an upper level manager why Tandy's pay was so far below industry average.
Their response was: "why should we pay people more? They're just going to quit in two years anyway."
The trade of virtual items has gone on and will continue to go on whether authorized by the game companies or not.
It should be _better_ for the game when companies like Sony actually begin selling in-game items, money, and bonuses.
On games where players themselves are the providers of goods for sale, there is a huge business in "farming" items and coin for resale. So not only do you have players with real money able to buy things (rather than earn them), but you also have the contention for resources due to all the farmers.
If game company provides the virtual goods, that essentially undercuts any player-farmed trade. That is definitely an improvement.
Heh heh, you're right. Ignoring the occasional crashes, the servers never go down.
Actually, the "honor" (such an incredibly poor choice for the name) system probably increased the stress on their server/network by 10x.
I PvP a lot in large battles now (since you can't really quest anymore - thanks Blizzard), and it is a fairly common occurrence for everyone to get dumped from the game unexpectedly.
And I know it's not just us being disconnected, because I can quickly log back in and play. Normally if you get disconnected, when you try to login you get "A character with that name already exists" message. Not getting that message strongly suggests that the server, or some part of it, reset.
Yes my standards are high, but having seen and worked at companies that live financially by their ability to deliver data/answers accurately, in real time, and in high volume, I know it's perfectly reasonable to believe that WoW's service could be much much better.
Lack of content updates is secondary. The real serious problem is the continued instability of the servers and network.
The WoW service frequently has unplanned outages, slow performance, server crashes, rollbacks (where you lose X minutes/hours of play development), and occasionally actual bugs.
Anyone who denies this or defends Blizzard's track record here simply doesn't play often, or plays on one of the rare low-population servers.
And despite seeming like an obviously useful option, Blizzard has been extremely reluctant to allow character transfers. At this point I believe that's because their game is very poorly designed, at least with respect to how they manage character data.
There is no valid excuse or defense against the claims I make. My experiences are mirrored by thousands of other players. Anyone who isn't experiencing these issues simply isn't playing often, isn't playing on a moderate/high pop server, or isn't willing to concede that a previously high quality game company has slipped.
How fascinating...
I made the above post shortly after the article was made available. My brief post was not redundant. My post stayed at +3 Interesting for days.
Now, mysteriously, it is "redundant".
Who comes back to an old post and moderates it as redundant? This is exactly the kind of crap that caused me to quit posting, and even quit reading Slashdot for a while.
The moderation system is broken, and some of the moderates are just plain jerks. Perhaps it's some of the kids who were regularly beat up on the schoolyard, and now they seek out their revenge with their mighty moderator sword. Sad.
This is my last post on Slashdot.
Windows has 90% desktop marketshare. So by your logic, Windows must not have many problems...
WoW is the newest big-name MMORPG on the market. It also has a great look and decent gameplay. It is definitely a success.
However, it is far from what it could/should have been, given the company behind it. If this MMORPG had come from some unknown development shop I wouldn't expect much, but Blizzard has already demonstrated its ability to create top-notch games.
This one falls short of their standard.
I'm glad you've enjoyed your brief introduction to WoW.
Just because you've had no unusual maintenance situations in your 1+ week doesn't mean there haven't been many many issues. There have been numerous major outages, some lasting 24+ hours!
I've been playing WoW since closed beta. Features that were promised to be available in release still aren't available. Some are critically important, such as a PvP honor system.
Why did you feel the need to respond to my post when you have no real experience? You call my complaints cookie cutter. You have no idea what you're talking about.
What the heck!?
1.5 million players is impressive.
But what's not impressive is the availability and performance of the server (US at least); very frequent emergency maintenance; unexplained lag surges (at seemingly low-volume times, like 5am CST); client crash bugs; raid/instance bugs; etc.
WoW may grow more, but I believe it will retract in subscriber numbers within the year. While the game world seems large at first, it really is fairly small. There are only so many places to go and things to kill. Ultimately you end up with a server full of level 60 players who are bored out of their minds. Sure they can roll another char and play it up, but even that gets old.
WoW promised to offer new content frequently, but that's not been delivered. Whether the content has gotten delayed due to constant server/network issues is not known to the public, but what is known is that features that were promised long ago have yet to appear in the game. But of course, great things are Coming Soon!
WoW will be a success overall, but the first year will remain bumpy. Us early adopters didn't begin to get what we expected, so many of us have already left.
And for any people who reply to this with comments about "every other game has had launch issues", save it. I've played a good many of other MMORPGs, and most of them from the day they opened (or the beta before). WoW's rocky start (server/network problems) is unacceptable.
I played EQ for five years, beginning with opening weekend on May? of 1999.
I was there. It started with a bang, was slow, and then they suffered router trouble. They were having 8,000 connections dumped at a time, and then their login server would choke on the big simultaneous volume (that they never expected).
However, it took them only two days to get that issue completely worked out. Then they began a process of increasing bandwidth, server count, and most importantly, backbone connections (adding ATT was the big step).
I know all these details because I was there. And more importantly, Verant actually communicated.
Blizzard, on the other hand, had a hellacious start. It was horrid for the first several days, and despite them adding servers rapidly, their backend db system just couldn't keep up. Everyone was constantly lagging up to several minutes each time they tried to loot something or deal with a quest mob.
This is in stark contrast to the performance of WoW during stress test, which Blizzard touted as being a huge win because of their 500,000 downloads. Then weeks after their public launch failure, they claimed "we never expected to sell so many copies (260,000)". Uh, that stress test wasn't an indication of interest?...
Profiler Rx
A - Appearance
B - Story
A - Quest system mechanics
A - Number of quests
C - Quest content
C - Player classes
D - PvP
D - Incomplete
D - Nerfs
FFF - Availability and reliability of game world
o Basically, it's got:
o Blizzard Polish
o Fisher Price difficulty
o redundant and boilerplate quests
o modestly evolutionary game mechanics
o the worst online world management and availability I've ever experienced (out of UO, AC, EQ, DAoC, ATITD), bar none
Blizzard has made so many poor decisions regarding capacity planning and management it hurts. Top that off with a policy of "nerf first, research later". Let's not forget the unimplimented features, namely the PvP honor system.
Yeah I'm still playing it, because despite those problems it's fun, but it definitely is not 100% quality. It does not begin to meet the standard set by Blizzard on previous games.
Or you could just compare their performance on common applications.
We've heard enough praise of the advances of the G3/4/5 over the years, as well as all the "supercomputer" hype, but still, anything but a 2.5GHz dual G5 is sluggish, whereas a P3 doesn't feel slow in day to day use.
No actually it crashes because the current client version sucks!
The previous client version, and the ones dating back to closed beta, were more stable and faster.
The current client version is total crap.
It's truly sad that so many people are so stuck on the fact that Bush won another election.
They use every breath as a vehicle to point out that their guy should have won, or that the guy who did win (Bush), shouldn't have.
This is a story about a freaking game. Get over your Kerry loss.
This may be redundant, but I really don't care to read 400+ comments to find out.
Contract to Hire is what you're describing, and it's done all the time. It's typically win/win for contractor/company because it gives each time to get a feel for the other.
Believe me, once they know how good you are (assuming you don't suck), they'll want to keep you. In fact, companies typically have a harder time coercing contractors to become employees than the other way around.
Not much information to make a story out of. Are they saying that a Rep should have won, but a Dem won instead because all Lib votes were counted for Dems?
No it's not just you. Not only is this old, and stupid, it's total flamebait.
What's really sad is that some freak spent time putting this page together. What kind of life (or lack thereof) does one have when they get that motivated against a distro that they put up a special webpage?
There's probably something surprising and interesting in that theory.
It could be said that Python programmers are more likely to think outside the norm (which could be why they're Python programmers instead of Java programmers).
If that's true, then it's probably also true that Python-programmer-written essays might introduce more useful and interesting topics than Java-programmer-written essays.
Whether you prove it true or not isn't so important, as long as you develop the idea and follow the path. That's his point.