I thought it was pretty common to use a cell phone as part of the detonation device in bombs. You can make the call from anywhere in the world, and it's basically untraceable with a minimum of effort... now we want to make it easy for that bomb signal to come in with full connection bars? Great.
The common thread in all the Massivly Multiplayer Online Games I've seen is the eternal promise that the next patch will solve all those pesky bugs that keep the game from being what it should be.
The balance issue is not- "How can I keep my community balanced and viable?" or "Are my quests interesting and challenging enough to players?" or even "Do I have sufficiently easy/hard/numerous goals so that even the most dedicated players will always have a horizion to shoot for?"
The issues at stake are "Which gameplay issues can I afford to let slide and for how long?". "Can I promise to have fixed a particular bug one more time or do I need to actually correct it?". "How can I introduce new problems with a patch that solves old problems?". "When can I release the expansion that only costs an additional quarter of the price of the original but must be purchased if players want to get what they were promised in the original?"
It's a form of pavlov conditioning, only game publishers are relying much more heavily on negative reinforcement than people think.
You folks have gotten it all wrong! Terrorists ARE everywhere, lurking in the guise of loyal Americans. We need to analyze their patterns of consumption so that we can determine who has been raised to capitalism and who is only pretending. And besides, how else can we refine the total target marketing that makes this country so great?
I'm spending all my time here at work trying to think up a TIA for T.E.R.M.I.N.A.T.O.R.
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Time Warner subscribes to holistic IT. Why risk invasive repairs when incense and herbs are so much safer?
I thought it was pretty common to use a cell phone as part of the detonation device in bombs. You can make the call from anywhere in the world, and it's basically untraceable with a minimum of effort... now we want to make it easy for that bomb signal to come in with full connection bars? Great.
The common thread in all the Massivly Multiplayer Online Games I've seen is the eternal promise that the next patch will solve all those pesky bugs that keep the game from being what it should be.
The balance issue is not- "How can I keep my community balanced and viable?" or "Are my quests interesting and challenging enough to players?" or even "Do I have sufficiently easy/hard/numerous goals so that even the most dedicated players will always have a horizion to shoot for?"
The issues at stake are "Which gameplay issues can I afford to let slide and for how long?". "Can I promise to have fixed a particular bug one more time or do I need to actually correct it?". "How can I introduce new problems with a patch that solves old problems?". "When can I release the expansion that only costs an additional quarter of the price of the original but must be purchased if players want to get what they were promised in the original?"
It's a form of pavlov conditioning, only game publishers are relying much more heavily on negative reinforcement than people think.
You folks have gotten it all wrong! Terrorists ARE everywhere, lurking in the guise of loyal Americans. We need to analyze their patterns of consumption so that we can determine who has been raised to capitalism and who is only pretending. And besides, how else can we refine the total target marketing that makes this country so great?
I'm spending all my time here at work trying to think up a TIA for T.E.R.M.I.N.A.T.O.R.