Blame your friends for that policy. Buy a game on Friday, play a few days....take it back for another. Retail outlets can't make a profit and stay in business when they have a 30% return on perfectly good merch.
A good real world scenario is looking at how much movies on VHS cost in the early nineties. The Hunt for Red October was over $75.....and when I was working at a major chain video store, we only sold a few copies (five if I remember correctly).
Today a blockbuster release will run you somewhere around $25 on DVD.....and will sell like hotcakes. You get your margin from volume in cheap entertainment.
If you're going to play the dev cost inflation card, you also have to look at market saturation and the prevalence of engine licensing. You will find a much higher percentage growth in the number of households that have one or more gaming consoles/PCs today than twenty years ago on the NES.
When someone releases a console that includes keyboard/mouse support out of the box, THEN, and ONLY THEN, will you see the slow death of PC gaming on the horizon.
...but the irony is, at that point, the console will have become the personal computer.
The key is that they were taught to be mousers by their mother.
Predatory drive is instinctual, not taught. People seem to forget that cats and dogs are carnivores and (with the exception of some purebreds) perfectly capable of sourcing their own food even without Mama showing them how.
Do a little reading on where the "ddt killed the raptors" came from. Basically it was based off of fictional accounts that spawned assumptions which were later hyped by the media with no real scientific or factual backing... Hmmmm...media hysteria being mistaken as reality....wow, what a novel concept.
Sadly, your post will be taken seriously by some readers. If your installations of Exchange (beyond 5.0) have met with "randomly losing and delaying mail" then it sounds like incompetence at the implementation and administration end. Our firm has a few hundred Exchange servers in production at client sites and rarely have issues. If I had to put a major complaint or two on the table, it would revolve around the method of backing up and restoring mailboxes and the piss-poor planning that went into Exchange 2007.
For the record, we also have a number of Zimbra and other assorted mailservers in production as well. So far, most of our more collaborative clients have found paying for a solid and inclusive mail/groupware solution is preferable to the loss of functionality of the OSS offerings.
2-3 years? I'm still using the Intellimouse Explorer I bought in ~1999. It gets beaten about in a laptop bag every day.....so it hasn't led the decadent and coddled lifestyle that some of you geeks grant your mouse.
Agreed, we really should find a replacement for the shuttle program before scrapping it.....but. The shuttle program is the classic example of what has happened to NASA over the past 30 years. It has become an obese creature guzzling funds to fuel a bureaucracy rather than push science and exploration. Since it's inception the shuttle program has been a farce. It delivered nothing but a heavy payload vehicle that was more inefficient than our existing rocket programs.
NASA exists to further space exploration, not provide jobs for educated sycophants and fanbois.
Because far too often at least one of the parties doesn't really want to be there. And is 'consenting' to something out of financial desperation/outright fear. That isn't how business transactions are supposed to be conducted.
That's funny, your description matches a number of jobs I've had over the years. I didn't want to be there, but I was 'consenting' because I desperately feared not being able to pay for my internet connection the next month.
EQ - Will run on just about anything with a 3d card. Huge world with many expansions already live. Death penalties require real dedication...not the best for the casual player.
EQ2 - Very fun game since they did their revamp. Friendly to casual players, but is a more complex game than WoW.
Eve - Amazing scope for an MMO. Hard to establish yourself unless you have friends already in game.
FFOnline - Do not start unless you have a good group that will be levelling with you, or already know a guild starting new alts.
WoW - The defacto standard for casual gaming on less than bleeding edge systems. The expansion in November should boost populations.
Warhammer Online - New MMO, still has some bugs. Only of interest to the PvP or RvR crowd. Possibly the best PvP MMO implementation yet.
LotRO - Beautiful world, but you get sick of killing boars at level 1...level 5....level 10...level 15...ad infinum. Very limited in variation due to restrictions of canon.
It's also worth mentioning that the UI layout editor is notoriously unreliable. Splitting out text boxes for Combat, Chat, Guild, and ALL generally results in a reset to defaults after logging.
There are plenty of items that you can legitimately criticize. You brought up tradeskilling and Cultivating in particular...which is a good start. Your take on Reknown ranks smacks of someone who has spent only a couple of hours in game and has very little experience with MMO frameworks.
The first few ranks/levels (be they tradeskill, reknown, or character) in ANY MMO go by in the blink of an eye. Why? To give the new player a sense of accomplishment...the whole reward addiction. Your Reknown went up a rank when your team capped an area because it was going up it's first rank...which means it took only a few points to do so. Much like killing a couple of rats will give you your first character rank-up. It becomes somewhat exponential beyond that...just like character levelling.
PQ's do require multiple characters. Some, particularly in the Tier 2+ areas, require some serious teamwork. Sometimes it is hard to find enough players to complete a stage (which you get bonus Influence for each stage). Deal with it. It is no different than any other MMO that requires a group for a dungeon/instance/raid. Creative approaches have allowed small groups with no tank to finish PQ bosses...just step outside the box and think tactically. Ping-pong kiting, for example.
Speaking of thinking tactically...your whining about having a health bar, mana/focus bar, morale bar, and building grudge is weak. You're complaining that you now have MORE options to how you take a fight to your enemy. You're not limited by this, it gives you a greater scope of approach. If you want a simplistic system, just stick with something like WoW and be happy....but don't complain because a game expands your tactical arsenal.
Finally, the rolling for loot is a bit odd, but if you were there for all PQ stages, you can start at +500 based on your contribution, giving you a better than average chance of a loot bag. You're not guaranteed, just like you're not guaranteed anything when you roll on a WoW or EQ raid (but there you're never given a better than average chance). Reknown rewards, PQ loot, Quest loot, Influence rewards, and regular MOB loot are all valuable. My toons are wearing bits from each type of loot...because no one really trumped all others.
At the end of the day, Warhammer needs polish. The tradeskilling needs a near total revamp. It has a number of technical bugs that need addressing. Support forums are non-existent. Even with all that, our entire gaming group is having more fun with it than we have any other MMO in years. When you have 8 guys that regularly disagree on how good a game is, have been gaming since the 80's, and MMOing since MUDs...that's worth something.
While I do agree with you, having bought gold/characters/items in at least three MMOs that I've played, gold sellers do create an issue for both players and the parent company. Inflation. That 5k gold you ground for your Minotaur Axe would have only cost about 2k gold if it were not so readily accessible on a website.
Exchange has traditionally had exactly one reason for its popularity: vendor lock-in. If this really is a drop-in replacement without annoying CALs, we'll be Microsoft-free on our servers by Monday.
Right. It has nothing to do with it's functionality, reliability, ease of use, etc... Exchange, Groupwise, and Notes do what corporations need....they allow for integration and collaboration. I have never understood why OSS or Linux zealots will howl at the moon about how unstable Windoze is or how they can't get Exchange or MSSQL to work. Then two seconds later look down their noses at IT guys that support MS products and have zero problems throwing together a stable XP machine and adminning a stable Exchange server.
Out of over 300 clients, I have some running pure POP3 or Zimbra and others running Exchange. A fair percentage of those Exchange servers have over 40GB stores and handle a GB or so of traffic a day. Guess what....they run fine. 365 days a year they chug along moving mail....just like the BSD boxes and Linux boxes.
If an organization can't afford a couple of grand for collaboration...they don't need it. It's kind of like those clients that whine about the cost of a backup...wanting to go with a cheap solution. You get what you are willing to invest in.
If you only require 25 licenses, most companies rely on Small Biz Server which makes bundled licensing significantly cheaper. Also, an Exchange CAL comes with a license for Outlook/Entourage...it does not require a separate Outlook or Office CAL to run the client.
Certs mean little of nothing. A degree means little of nothing. Working in an IT department of a major company means nothing. I know these three things because at one time this was a part of how I judged applicants.
A guy with certs had paid for a bootcamp of test preps. A guy with the degree was a regurgitating dumbass, incapable of thinking for himself. A guy from a huge IT department was very skilled in a niche area, but knew enough to BS about most of the other areas he claimed experience.
I now basically disregard experience, education, and certs. Rather, I weight half of the interview on the verbal interview and half on the written exam. This gives me a more complete picture of how they will relate to clients and what their approach is to solving problems. If it fits in with our corporate culture, we make an offer.
Other professionals have governing bodies and more tight knit associations. Lawyers are disbarred. Medical professionals can be stripped of their licenses. Hell, even if they haven't been caught, word gets around between firms and hospitals as to the relative competence of their people. IT is a much more individualistic and secretive area that (I assume) is a result of introverted geek kids that are all growed up.
Slashdot Mirror
Blame your friends for that policy. Buy a game on Friday, play a few days....take it back for another. Retail outlets can't make a profit and stay in business when they have a 30% return on perfectly good merch.
A good real world scenario is looking at how much movies on VHS cost in the early nineties. The Hunt for Red October was over $75.....and when I was working at a major chain video store, we only sold a few copies (five if I remember correctly).
Today a blockbuster release will run you somewhere around $25 on DVD.....and will sell like hotcakes. You get your margin from volume in cheap entertainment.
If you're going to play the dev cost inflation card, you also have to look at market saturation and the prevalence of engine licensing. You will find a much higher percentage growth in the number of households that have one or more gaming consoles/PCs today than twenty years ago on the NES.
When someone releases a console that includes keyboard/mouse support out of the box, THEN, and ONLY THEN, will you see the slow death of PC gaming on the horizon.
...but the irony is, at that point, the console will have become the personal computer.
Halo was available when the XBox launched.
The key is that they were taught to be mousers by their mother.
Predatory drive is instinctual, not taught. People seem to forget that cats and dogs are carnivores and (with the exception of some purebreds) perfectly capable of sourcing their own food even without Mama showing them how.
Do a little reading on where the "ddt killed the raptors" came from. Basically it was based off of fictional accounts that spawned assumptions which were later hyped by the media with no real scientific or factual backing... Hmmmm...media hysteria being mistaken as reality....wow, what a novel concept.
I, for one, welcome our new velociraptor overlords.
If my alt had mod points, I'd mod you both insightful.
My eyes!!!! MY EYEEESSS!!!!
Sadly, your post will be taken seriously by some readers. If your installations of Exchange (beyond 5.0) have met with "randomly losing and delaying mail" then it sounds like incompetence at the implementation and administration end. Our firm has a few hundred Exchange servers in production at client sites and rarely have issues. If I had to put a major complaint or two on the table, it would revolve around the method of backing up and restoring mailboxes and the piss-poor planning that went into Exchange 2007.
For the record, we also have a number of Zimbra and other assorted mailservers in production as well. So far, most of our more collaborative clients have found paying for a solid and inclusive mail/groupware solution is preferable to the loss of functionality of the OSS offerings.
2-3 years? I'm still using the Intellimouse Explorer I bought in ~1999. It gets beaten about in a laptop bag every day.....so it hasn't led the decadent and coddled lifestyle that some of you geeks grant your mouse.
How about the child of one of my clients....who was crippled while his playmate died.
Agreed, we really should find a replacement for the shuttle program before scrapping it.....but. The shuttle program is the classic example of what has happened to NASA over the past 30 years. It has become an obese creature guzzling funds to fuel a bureaucracy rather than push science and exploration. Since it's inception the shuttle program has been a farce. It delivered nothing but a heavy payload vehicle that was more inefficient than our existing rocket programs.
NASA exists to further space exploration, not provide jobs for educated sycophants and fanbois.
Taking a bite outta crime!!
Because far too often at least one of the parties doesn't really want to be there. And is 'consenting' to something out of financial desperation/outright fear. That isn't how business transactions are supposed to be conducted.
That's funny, your description matches a number of jobs I've had over the years. I didn't want to be there, but I was 'consenting' because I desperately feared not being able to pay for my internet connection the next month.
EQ - Will run on just about anything with a 3d card. Huge world with many expansions already live. Death penalties require real dedication...not the best for the casual player.
EQ2 - Very fun game since they did their revamp. Friendly to casual players, but is a more complex game than WoW.
Eve - Amazing scope for an MMO. Hard to establish yourself unless you have friends already in game.
FFOnline - Do not start unless you have a good group that will be levelling with you, or already know a guild starting new alts.
WoW - The defacto standard for casual gaming on less than bleeding edge systems. The expansion in November should boost populations.
Warhammer Online - New MMO, still has some bugs. Only of interest to the PvP or RvR crowd. Possibly the best PvP MMO implementation yet.
LotRO - Beautiful world, but you get sick of killing boars at level 1...level 5....level 10...level 15...ad infinum. Very limited in variation due to restrictions of canon.
It's also worth mentioning that the UI layout editor is notoriously unreliable. Splitting out text boxes for Combat, Chat, Guild, and ALL generally results in a reset to defaults after logging.
There are plenty of items that you can legitimately criticize. You brought up tradeskilling and Cultivating in particular...which is a good start. Your take on Reknown ranks smacks of someone who has spent only a couple of hours in game and has very little experience with MMO frameworks.
The first few ranks/levels (be they tradeskill, reknown, or character) in ANY MMO go by in the blink of an eye. Why? To give the new player a sense of accomplishment...the whole reward addiction. Your Reknown went up a rank when your team capped an area because it was going up it's first rank...which means it took only a few points to do so. Much like killing a couple of rats will give you your first character rank-up. It becomes somewhat exponential beyond that...just like character levelling.
PQ's do require multiple characters. Some, particularly in the Tier 2+ areas, require some serious teamwork. Sometimes it is hard to find enough players to complete a stage (which you get bonus Influence for each stage). Deal with it. It is no different than any other MMO that requires a group for a dungeon/instance/raid. Creative approaches have allowed small groups with no tank to finish PQ bosses...just step outside the box and think tactically. Ping-pong kiting, for example.
Speaking of thinking tactically...your whining about having a health bar, mana/focus bar, morale bar, and building grudge is weak. You're complaining that you now have MORE options to how you take a fight to your enemy. You're not limited by this, it gives you a greater scope of approach. If you want a simplistic system, just stick with something like WoW and be happy....but don't complain because a game expands your tactical arsenal.
Finally, the rolling for loot is a bit odd, but if you were there for all PQ stages, you can start at +500 based on your contribution, giving you a better than average chance of a loot bag. You're not guaranteed, just like you're not guaranteed anything when you roll on a WoW or EQ raid (but there you're never given a better than average chance). Reknown rewards, PQ loot, Quest loot, Influence rewards, and regular MOB loot are all valuable. My toons are wearing bits from each type of loot...because no one really trumped all others.
At the end of the day, Warhammer needs polish. The tradeskilling needs a near total revamp. It has a number of technical bugs that need addressing. Support forums are non-existent. Even with all that, our entire gaming group is having more fun with it than we have any other MMO in years. When you have 8 guys that regularly disagree on how good a game is, have been gaming since the 80's, and MMOing since MUDs...that's worth something.
Will do. Post your home address, full name, and cellphone number so that I can call and make sure it made it through....
While I do agree with you, having bought gold/characters/items in at least three MMOs that I've played, gold sellers do create an issue for both players and the parent company. Inflation. That 5k gold you ground for your Minotaur Axe would have only cost about 2k gold if it were not so readily accessible on a website.
Exchange has traditionally had exactly one reason for its popularity: vendor lock-in. If this really is a drop-in replacement without annoying CALs, we'll be Microsoft-free on our servers by Monday.
Right. It has nothing to do with it's functionality, reliability, ease of use, etc... Exchange, Groupwise, and Notes do what corporations need....they allow for integration and collaboration. I have never understood why OSS or Linux zealots will howl at the moon about how unstable Windoze is or how they can't get Exchange or MSSQL to work. Then two seconds later look down their noses at IT guys that support MS products and have zero problems throwing together a stable XP machine and adminning a stable Exchange server.
Out of over 300 clients, I have some running pure POP3 or Zimbra and others running Exchange. A fair percentage of those Exchange servers have over 40GB stores and handle a GB or so of traffic a day. Guess what....they run fine. 365 days a year they chug along moving mail....just like the BSD boxes and Linux boxes.
If an organization can't afford a couple of grand for collaboration...they don't need it. It's kind of like those clients that whine about the cost of a backup...wanting to go with a cheap solution. You get what you are willing to invest in.
If you only require 25 licenses, most companies rely on Small Biz Server which makes bundled licensing significantly cheaper. Also, an Exchange CAL comes with a license for Outlook/Entourage...it does not require a separate Outlook or Office CAL to run the client.
Using edible crops to massively produce biodiesel is about as rational as buying a few hundred gerbils to get off the grid.
Certs mean little of nothing. A degree means little of nothing. Working in an IT department of a major company means nothing. I know these three things because at one time this was a part of how I judged applicants.
A guy with certs had paid for a bootcamp of test preps. A guy with the degree was a regurgitating dumbass, incapable of thinking for himself. A guy from a huge IT department was very skilled in a niche area, but knew enough to BS about most of the other areas he claimed experience.
I now basically disregard experience, education, and certs. Rather, I weight half of the interview on the verbal interview and half on the written exam. This gives me a more complete picture of how they will relate to clients and what their approach is to solving problems. If it fits in with our corporate culture, we make an offer.
Other professionals have governing bodies and more tight knit associations. Lawyers are disbarred. Medical professionals can be stripped of their licenses. Hell, even if they haven't been caught, word gets around between firms and hospitals as to the relative competence of their people. IT is a much more individualistic and secretive area that (I assume) is a result of introverted geek kids that are all growed up.