And how exactly do you determine in which country the money was made? The country the buyer resides in? The country the seller resides in? The country the product was produced? The country the raw materials were sourced in? The country the product was researched? The country the corporation was founded? The country the buyer was in at time of purchase? etc etc etc. Your statement is over-simplistic to the point of idiocy.
There is no rootkit you idiot, just some fool who didn't know how to use some rootkit detection utilities and mistook a single registry entry for a rootkit.
The whole programmers need an office cubicle thing is vastly overrated. Programmers need interesting work. I have created some of the best work I have ever done in cubicle farms and wasted months doing nothing in the same environment. I can say the same for working at home or in my own office.
What makes people get a lot done is NOT the environment they work in so much as their interest in the work they do. It is, I believe something Joel misses completely in his write up. People tend to skew things based on their own experiences and extrapolate generalisations from them and then some pasty nerd who thinks he is hot shit won't work in a cubicle because some article on the internet says he will be 10% less productive in that environment.
If your programmers are not being productive it is more likely because they couldn't care less about the work they have than it is anything to do with their environment.
As far as I am aware the legal situation is that Blizzard claim ownership of all the items/gold etc in WoW. By selling these items the gold sellers are basically selling Blizzards property which amounts to theft.
The new system is better from an EU standpoint because the data is sent to a single secure source. They no longer have to worry about it being pulled from an untrusted source. There is no longer an external logon to the EU system that could potentially reveal private information. Instead it is pushed securely to a trusted homeland security site which is then responsible for distributing it within the US. Because the EU is no longer a risk for distributing private information it is OK within the EU. If there is a privacy breach it won't be the fault of the EU and that makes the EU authorities happy. From the standpoint of the consumer the same data still flies around but that was never the issue, the issue was that there was potential for the EU system to leak sensitive data which was unacceptable.
NULL means something very specific and is absolutely necessary in many places, including strings. Does the user not need to enter a string at all (use NULL), or did they deliberately skip the input field (use "")?
A very good example of a very bad way to use null. A programmer using NULL as a non-entered optional field, '' as a non entered required field may think he is being very clever but it is either a design error (the field shouldn't be required since you are allowing blank values) or a bug (the programmer is using syntax tricks to get around the required field criteria). Of course it is easier to use '' to trick the database or better yet make an arrogant alternative that implies that the programmer is more l33t than the database than it is to do the right thing and go back and make the user actually enter a value for the required field.
Laziness at the data validation level leads to headaches wherever you use the fields later, in SQL NULL is not equal to NULL, so a NULL state field in a users address wont match another NULL state field, and so a guy with NULL for state has no people living in the same state as him but someone with '' as a state has all the other people with '' living in the same state as him. You are forcing every subsequent query to manually check "WHERE field IS NOT NULL AND LENGTH(field) 0" whenever they want to get people with that field set. Whether the field is required or not should not be determined by whether it has an '' or a NULL for blanks, that is a part of your business logic and shouldn't be information you store in the database. Don't get mad when your clever hack to make an end run around the design isn't allowed. Bite the bullet and fix either the design or your input logic.
Also you still don't see that even if you wanted to support the messy tri-state hack you suggested that is something you can do once in, yeah you guessed it, the data access layer and it will never bother you again.
Which programming languages coerce "" into NULL? I know these don't: C, C++, Java, Lisp, Kornshell, Perl, VB.
I didn't say coerce, i said treat them the same. Perl treats empty strings as logically false as do most scripting languages, C treats them as true. A database treats empty strings as logically true.
Finally I won't even bother to dignify an AC claim that Oracle is not usable for "an enormous data warehouse" with a response. Classic programmer arrogance, you don't know how to do something with Oracle, therefore oracle sucks. Whenever I hear a programmer claim "i could do x, y, z except the tools hold me back" I know its time to find a different programmer. If you are talking databases and the tool you have is Oracle then there isn't a team lead alive that wouldn't laugh you out of the room. Grow up, learn to say "I don't know how" instead of "it can't be done".
Maybe I wasn't being clear, the whole purpose of a database abstraction layer is to manage all these issues. They are only an issue if your code is too closely coupled to an individual database.
1 is the kind of issue that can be readily managed through a database abstraction layer, having code where '' and NULL differ is a bad idea anyway which is why so many programming languages treat them as the same anyway.
2 and 3 are all fixed since 9i as far as I know, technically oracles READ UNCOMMITTED and READ COMMITTED transaction isolation levels are identical since its internal structure means there is no difference between them.
4 again is data access layer solvable.
I'm not sure what people expect, if everything beneath your database access layer was going to be the same for all databases then you wouldn't need one. All these issues can be solved and have been solved on many projects. If their SQL code is so thoroughly embedded in the app that its easier to fork it than it is to put in a database access layer then thats what they have to do, but if that is the case then it is most certainly a case of being very badly bitten by an avoidable design flaw.
Do you know how expensive it is to abstract away differences in database syntax (especially when large companies like Oracle make significant ca$h intentionally making their syntax different/nonstandard)? If you think it's so easy, perhaps you should write it yourself for OpenACS instead of bitching about why it's not there...
Both Oracle and PostgreSQL put a lot of effort into standards compliance. Contrary to your unfounded claim Oracle has better standards compliance than pretty much any other database out there and has always been the benchmark against which other databases are judged, I will be very surprised if you can point to any reputable source that claims Oracle deliberately violates SQL standards.
In fact Oracles implementation of the SQL-92 standard is better than PostgreSQLs, better is probably the wrong word, more feature complete would be more accurate since both databases are highly compliant where they implement the standard. They do differ somewhat in the various implementation defined parts, but that is mostly to do with data definition and not the normal query/update syntax where both oracle and postgresql behave very closely.
That's the beauty of the evolution of open source software.
And also the horrer of open source software. 2006 and people are still developing code without a database abstraction layer. That is so ridiculous as to boggle belief in this day and age. Ok, we all know the developers are working for free but if they cant simply abstract the database code (and lets face it, we are talking Postgres and Oracle here, it isn't exactly a minefield of interoperability issues to do that) they probably wouldn't be able to get paid for the work anyway.
Just to clarify, the secret question should not give access to your account, the secret question just is required to reset your password. Its like putting a sheet of newspaper over your head under an umberella, it wont help a lot if the umbrella blows away but it wont make you any wetter either.
They are not supposed to be secure on their own, just a bit more secure than not having them.
Normal password retrieval method:
1. Click the "I forgot my password button" 2. Enter your email address 3. Click Ok to get a confirmation mail sent 4. Go to your email account and read the mail
With secret questions it becomes:
1. Click the "I forgot my password button" 2. Enter your email address 3. Answer the secret question correctly 4. Click Ok to get a confirmation mail sent 5. Go to your email account and read the mail
The secret questions method when correctly used has all the same steps as the method without and the extra step of the secret question. While the secret question itself is relatively trivial to break for anyone who knows you and is deliberately targeting you, a random hacker who just happened to break into your email probably doesn't know your mothers maiden name or the town in which you were born thus making your data slightly more secure. This is where it is intended to help, to add some difficulty in the step of getting from a compromised email address to compromising everything else.
Of course, many sites mail you the answer you entered to the secret questions, so it is probably still sitting in your email archive somewhere and thus easy to find particularly if you use a site like gmail where your entire mail history is available to anyone who gets your mail account.
Anyway, that is how the secret questions work. Yes your friends and people who know you can get them easily, but for a random hacker who gets access to 10,000 mailboxes through some exploit the fact that he needs to give a couple of hours to find some trivial information about you is probably enough to save you or at the very least slow drastically the speed with which he can proceed.
I think the main problem people have is that it is google leveraging their search engine business to get an unfair advantage in the web payments business. It is the method they are using anytime they enter a new market, offer the exact same service just integrate it with google. This is exactly the same behaviour that landed microsoft in trouble when they kept bundling new stuff with windows, everyone uses windows so doing so allowed them to use their dominant position to get an unfair advantage.
The only added value their services add is google integration, which their opponents cannot add. Rather than making a better system than paypal, they make a clone and use their search space dominance to take over the market and this is a very shady way to do business and the kind of monopoly position abuse that got microsoft in so much hot water.
You mean, except for repair costs (Varies by class), high level enchants, potions, and upgrading equipment via the AH?
The only one of these that last is repair costs and potions. There is a very limited amount of equipment you can get via the AH once you hit level 60.
I know one or two people who actually farm for gold. The majority of people I can pry an answer out of admit to having bought gold at least once.
You are skewing your numbers here, your entire sentence implies that you group people into two groups, those who have admitted buying gold to you, and those you havent been able to pry that admission out of. I know a lot of lvl 60 people and none of them have ever bought gold and find the thoughts of doing so both amusing and repulsive.
The majority of players have jobs, and your idea that only one farmer can support one player is illogical.
You argue that farming gold takes so long that the majority of people can't do it. Then also argue that everyone buys gold. So my question is, if everyone is buying gold, how is the small few farmers supplying them. If everyone is buying and even 10% of the server population are gold sellers then that person needs to be able to gather enough gold to supply 10 people. If getting gold is so hard that one person can't supply himself as you argue, then how does one person supply 10? They can't. If everyone was buying their gold then there would need to be a LOT of gold farmers to meet the demand. There aren't therefore not many people are buying gold.
How? Farming in Tyr's hand? Good luck, 50G will take you awhile, a lot longer than an hour or two of effort. I suppose you could run the low end dungeons (ie UBRS and below) roll on BoE's and sell them, but that is shaky at best, and you will be lucky to get done with that inside of 2 hours if you go with a pickup group. Of course this does vary by class, and certain classes (ie rogue) have an easier time farming. 50G an hour is unrealistic if you straight up farm.
Herbalism/Alchemy makes getting gold ridiculously easy. 20 Gromsblood is about 12g, 20 Dreamfoil is about 15g, 20 goldan sansam the same. Two hours in feralas will easily get you several stacks of these. With alchemy you also have your transmute which you can make about 10g on every two days just by buying an arcane crystal and reselling the arcanite bar every two days. Tyr's hand is far too luck based. Enchanter's can make a lot just farming low level instances for items to disenchant as another poster said. Making money is about asking two things, who has gold, what do they want? In Warcraft that basically means supplying the high end guilds. They need herbs and to a lesser extent enchanting supplies, and they need a lot. If you don't have time to raid you can also ask some of the guilds if they could send you some spare items in exchange for supplying lots of herbs. Most guilds that are farming MC have more bracers and belts than they can use. Even if you can't attend then some will be willing to send you those in exchange for supplying them with a bunch of herbs.
As for how many people buy gold, look at all the epic mounts you see running around. Do you really think people are farming 1000 gold? Or even 570?
Have you played the game to level 60? Once you get there you can get 50g a day with just an hour or two of effort. Most people have epic steeds because they put in that effort. If you don't even bother doing anything you will end up with the 800g for your epic steed after a while because at level 60 you have pretty much no use for gold after you have your epic mount. On a reasonably mature server most of the players you see are second and third characters, they have gold because they get it from their level 60 alts.
Not to mention the simple fallacy that if you couldnt get enough gold for an epic there would need to be more farmers than players in order to keep them coming. When you are level 20 1000g for an epic mount seems like a huge amount of money, by the time you reach level 60 you can now buy it for 800g and you have realised that it is not at all unattainable.
Simple. The farmers sell their farmed materials to create gold. Therefor the price of those materials goes down. They then sell the gold to people who buy equipment driving the price of equipment up. It works the same in real world economies, we spend a fortune subsidising the farmers to keep prices of food down (and preventing non-subsidised farmers from competing) and in doing so free up money to buy luxury goods, driving the prices of those up.
Damn right he is stupid. This guy just sent $60 of his money to the same people who are responsible for his skins being worthless in AH. That is the problem with gold farming, it makes gathering skills worthless by having two seperate effects, first the raw materials are oversupplied so they sell very cheaply affecting people like this guy who can no longer earn any reasonable amount through skinning, secondly they artificially inflate the prices of items by giving plenty gold to clueless nabs who throw it around like theres no tomorrow. Pity this dude was too dumb to realise that he is basically rewarding the people who created his problem.
Unfortunately for this guy once he gets to high level in WoW he will realise that he can not do ANYTHING without having a lot of time to invest, he has also missed the early warning signs that WoW as you go up in level becomes more and more about grinding. He should get out now if he can't afford that time.
The final thing he has done is by having a glut of gold he has turned his questing into an utter waste of time, since he can now afford better items than the quest rewards he is truly just grinding them for the xp now. He has turned the part of the game he liked into the part of the game he hated.
He really didn't think it through did he?
Using something from outside the game to improve your chances inside the game is cheating. Whether or not it is serious you can debate until the cows come home, but it is cheating.
The fact that people can and have had their accounts deleted for doing it would suggest that blizzard do take the problem seriously, and even if there is a minority who are willing to spend cold hard cash for wow gold, the fact remains that the vast majority spend their cold hard cash on a subscription every month to play in a controlled realm where this doesn't happen.
The economics is simple, blizzard can have 1% of the people who spend 5 times as much each, or 99% of the people who spend just the set amount, its no contest.
Yes, of course, and that is part of the charm of the pen and paper RPG, the game evolves to match the players rather than the players evolving to match the game. Technically I think writing a game that could do the same would be very difficult and very hard to do, if the game could sense whether the players enjoyed that big melee and add more or whether they enjoyed that npc encounter and add similar and grow the game the players enjoyed that would be great but I think it is a long time until that happens.
The original poster however implied that he would like to play a game the same as WoW but without the numbers. Just because the numbers are no longer visible doesn't mean they are not there, it just means you can no longer see them easily and people will figure them out. Such a system also lacks one of the fundamental parts of gaming the reward, the very reason WoW is successful is because blizzard have managed to refine doling out rewards to a fine art. Every time you play you can see your character gaining, whether it is 105 xp for killing a gnoll or an epic item from majordomo you get your reward. Without the numbers to look at all you are left with is an abstract non-specific grind to maybe improve stats you cant see.
It depends on how random you wish to make the game world, if you want to provide some form of progression then there needs to be a mechanism internally to determine if SwordA is better than SwordB. You could make the maths behind it more complicated, factor in arm strength, arm fatigue, sword sharpness, sword skill, eyesight, player age, mob abilities which are also highly variable and evolving and so on to the point that the maths becomes sufficiently complicated that it is very hard to determine exactly what the underlying mechanism is but in order to balance the game somewhere in the background there has to be a decision that SwordA does on average D6 damage vs goblins and SwordB does D6+1 damage vs goblins.
One of the hardest parts of game design is controlling progression. You need to make sure that players are of approximately similar power at a certain point in their lives. To do this you need to establish bounds of performance for them and make sure that they stay within those bounds. The more complex your maths becomes the harder this is to achieve and the more open it becomes to the risk of fringe cases where you break game balance.
I suppose it comes down to the goal of the game, if the goal is to become a more powerful toon then the game needs to have a pretty well defined structure for toon power, if your goal is something less deterministic then you can afford to have less deterministic mechanics for it.
You are working on the assumption that the game world is inhabited entirely by morons who will not work out the mechanics. Whether or not the numbers are displayed to the player they will work out what the underlying mechanics are. All the numbers do is save them that hassle.
No matter what you do, players will decode every formula, statistic, and algorithm in your world via experimentation.
If they cannot see the numbers intelligent players WILL figure them out and then they will tell everyone else. Any game that relies on hiding the game mechanics from the player is doomed to failure.
Thanks for spoiling the movie
on
Kong Lives!
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· Score: 1
A big thank you to the slashdot editors for posting a spoilor for the movie on the front page
I agree wholeheartedly. The nice thing about choosing a difficulty is that you get to decide how much challenge you feel like, if you can only afford one game a month then you can play em hard to make the experience last. With ADD your only option is to play it clean through, knowing all along that the enemies are handicapped to accomodate you. That sucks.
Slashdot Mirror
And how exactly do you determine in which country the money was made? The country the buyer resides in? The country the seller resides in? The country the product was produced? The country the raw materials were sourced in? The country the product was researched? The country the corporation was founded? The country the buyer was in at time of purchase? etc etc etc. Your statement is over-simplistic to the point of idiocy.
There is no rootkit you idiot, just some fool who didn't know how to use some rootkit detection utilities and mistook a single registry entry for a rootkit.
I just like that it is the Permissive Microsoft Licence, the PMSL.
The whole programmers need an office cubicle thing is vastly overrated. Programmers need interesting work. I have created some of the best work I have ever done in cubicle farms and wasted months doing nothing in the same environment. I can say the same for working at home or in my own office.
What makes people get a lot done is NOT the environment they work in so much as their interest in the work they do. It is, I believe something Joel misses completely in his write up. People tend to skew things based on their own experiences and extrapolate generalisations from them and then some pasty nerd who thinks he is hot shit won't work in a cubicle because some article on the internet says he will be 10% less productive in that environment.
If your programmers are not being productive it is more likely because they couldn't care less about the work they have than it is anything to do with their environment.
As far as I am aware the legal situation is that Blizzard claim ownership of all the items/gold etc in WoW. By selling these items the gold sellers are basically selling Blizzards property which amounts to theft.
RTFA Please
The new system is better from an EU standpoint because the data is sent to a single secure source. They no longer have to worry about it being pulled from an untrusted source. There is no longer an external logon to the EU system that could potentially reveal private information. Instead it is pushed securely to a trusted homeland security site which is then responsible for distributing it within the US. Because the EU is no longer a risk for distributing private information it is OK within the EU. If there is a privacy breach it won't be the fault of the EU and that makes the EU authorities happy. From the standpoint of the consumer the same data still flies around but that was never the issue, the issue was that there was potential for the EU system to leak sensitive data which was unacceptable.
NULL means something very specific and is absolutely necessary in many places, including strings. Does the user not need to enter a string at all (use NULL), or did they deliberately skip the input field (use "")?
A very good example of a very bad way to use null. A programmer using NULL as a non-entered optional field, '' as a non entered required field may think he is being very clever but it is either a design error (the field shouldn't be required since you are allowing blank values) or a bug (the programmer is using syntax tricks to get around the required field criteria). Of course it is easier to use '' to trick the database or better yet make an arrogant alternative that implies that the programmer is more l33t than the database than it is to do the right thing and go back and make the user actually enter a value for the required field.
Laziness at the data validation level leads to headaches wherever you use the fields later, in SQL NULL is not equal to NULL, so a NULL state field in a users address wont match another NULL state field, and so a guy with NULL for state has no people living in the same state as him but someone with '' as a state has all the other people with '' living in the same state as him. You are forcing every subsequent query to manually check "WHERE field IS NOT NULL AND LENGTH(field) 0" whenever they want to get people with that field set. Whether the field is required or not should not be determined by whether it has an '' or a NULL for blanks, that is a part of your business logic and shouldn't be information you store in the database. Don't get mad when your clever hack to make an end run around the design isn't allowed. Bite the bullet and fix either the design or your input logic.
Also you still don't see that even if you wanted to support the messy tri-state hack you suggested that is something you can do once in, yeah you guessed it, the data access layer and it will never bother you again.
Which programming languages coerce "" into NULL? I know these don't: C, C++, Java, Lisp, Kornshell, Perl, VB.
I didn't say coerce, i said treat them the same. Perl treats empty strings as logically false as do most scripting languages, C treats them as true. A database treats empty strings as logically true.
Finally I won't even bother to dignify an AC claim that Oracle is not usable for "an enormous data warehouse" with a response. Classic programmer arrogance, you don't know how to do something with Oracle, therefore oracle sucks. Whenever I hear a programmer claim "i could do x, y, z except the tools hold me back" I know its time to find a different programmer. If you are talking databases and the tool you have is Oracle then there isn't a team lead alive that wouldn't laugh you out of the room. Grow up, learn to say "I don't know how" instead of "it can't be done".
Maybe I wasn't being clear, the whole purpose of a database abstraction layer is to manage all these issues. They are only an issue if your code is too closely coupled to an individual database.
1 is the kind of issue that can be readily managed through a database abstraction layer, having code where '' and NULL differ is a bad idea anyway which is why so many programming languages treat them as the same anyway.
2 and 3 are all fixed since 9i as far as I know, technically oracles READ UNCOMMITTED and READ COMMITTED transaction isolation levels are identical since its internal structure means there is no difference between them.
4 again is data access layer solvable.
I'm not sure what people expect, if everything beneath your database access layer was going to be the same for all databases then you wouldn't need one. All these issues can be solved and have been solved on many projects. If their SQL code is so thoroughly embedded in the app that its easier to fork it than it is to put in a database access layer then thats what they have to do, but if that is the case then it is most certainly a case of being very badly bitten by an avoidable design flaw.
Do you know how expensive it is to abstract away differences in database syntax (especially when large companies like Oracle make significant ca$h intentionally making their syntax different/nonstandard)? If you think it's so easy, perhaps you should write it yourself for OpenACS instead of bitching about why it's not there...
Both Oracle and PostgreSQL put a lot of effort into standards compliance. Contrary to your unfounded claim Oracle has better standards compliance than pretty much any other database out there and has always been the benchmark against which other databases are judged, I will be very surprised if you can point to any reputable source that claims Oracle deliberately violates SQL standards.
In fact Oracles implementation of the SQL-92 standard is better than PostgreSQLs, better is probably the wrong word, more feature complete would be more accurate since both databases are highly compliant where they implement the standard. They do differ somewhat in the various implementation defined parts, but that is mostly to do with data definition and not the normal query/update syntax where both oracle and postgresql behave very closely.
That's the beauty of the evolution of open source software.
And also the horrer of open source software. 2006 and people are still developing code without a database abstraction layer. That is so ridiculous as to boggle belief in this day and age. Ok, we all know the developers are working for free but if they cant simply abstract the database code (and lets face it, we are talking Postgres and Oracle here, it isn't exactly a minefield of interoperability issues to do that) they probably wouldn't be able to get paid for the work anyway.
Just to clarify, the secret question should not give access to your account, the secret question just is required to reset your password. Its like putting a sheet of newspaper over your head under an umberella, it wont help a lot if the umbrella blows away but it wont make you any wetter either.
They are not supposed to be secure on their own, just a bit more secure than not having them.
Normal password retrieval method:
1. Click the "I forgot my password button"
2. Enter your email address
3. Click Ok to get a confirmation mail sent
4. Go to your email account and read the mail
With secret questions it becomes:
1. Click the "I forgot my password button"
2. Enter your email address
3. Answer the secret question correctly
4. Click Ok to get a confirmation mail sent
5. Go to your email account and read the mail
The secret questions method when correctly used has all the same steps as the method without and the extra step of the secret question. While the secret question itself is relatively trivial to break for anyone who knows you and is deliberately targeting you, a random hacker who just happened to break into your email probably doesn't know your mothers maiden name or the town in which you were born thus making your data slightly more secure. This is where it is intended to help, to add some difficulty in the step of getting from a compromised email address to compromising everything else.
Of course, many sites mail you the answer you entered to the secret questions, so it is probably still sitting in your email archive somewhere and thus easy to find particularly if you use a site like gmail where your entire mail history is available to anyone who gets your mail account.
Anyway, that is how the secret questions work. Yes your friends and people who know you can get them easily, but for a random hacker who gets access to 10,000 mailboxes through some exploit the fact that he needs to give a couple of hours to find some trivial information about you is probably enough to save you or at the very least slow drastically the speed with which he can proceed.
I think the main problem people have is that it is google leveraging their search engine business to get an unfair advantage in the web payments business. It is the method they are using anytime they enter a new market, offer the exact same service just integrate it with google. This is exactly the same behaviour that landed microsoft in trouble when they kept bundling new stuff with windows, everyone uses windows so doing so allowed them to use their dominant position to get an unfair advantage. The only added value their services add is google integration, which their opponents cannot add. Rather than making a better system than paypal, they make a clone and use their search space dominance to take over the market and this is a very shady way to do business and the kind of monopoly position abuse that got microsoft in so much hot water.
You mean, except for repair costs (Varies by class), high level enchants, potions, and upgrading equipment via the AH?
The only one of these that last is repair costs and potions. There is a very limited amount of equipment you can get via the AH once you hit level 60.
I know one or two people who actually farm for gold. The majority of people I can pry an answer out of admit to having bought gold at least once.
You are skewing your numbers here, your entire sentence implies that you group people into two groups, those who have admitted buying gold to you, and those you havent been able to pry that admission out of. I know a lot of lvl 60 people and none of them have ever bought gold and find the thoughts of doing so both amusing and repulsive.
The majority of players have jobs, and your idea that only one farmer can support one player is illogical.
You argue that farming gold takes so long that the majority of people can't do it. Then also argue that everyone buys gold. So my question is, if everyone is buying gold, how is the small few farmers supplying them. If everyone is buying and even 10% of the server population are gold sellers then that person needs to be able to gather enough gold to supply 10 people. If getting gold is so hard that one person can't supply himself as you argue, then how does one person supply 10? They can't. If everyone was buying their gold then there would need to be a LOT of gold farmers to meet the demand. There aren't therefore not many people are buying gold.
How? Farming in Tyr's hand? Good luck, 50G will take you awhile, a lot longer than an hour or two of effort. I suppose you could run the low end dungeons (ie UBRS and below) roll on BoE's and sell them, but that is shaky at best, and you will be lucky to get done with that inside of 2 hours if you go with a pickup group. Of course this does vary by class, and certain classes (ie rogue) have an easier time farming. 50G an hour is unrealistic if you straight up farm.
Herbalism/Alchemy makes getting gold ridiculously easy. 20 Gromsblood is about 12g, 20 Dreamfoil is about 15g, 20 goldan sansam the same. Two hours in feralas will easily get you several stacks of these. With alchemy you also have your transmute which you can make about 10g on every two days just by buying an arcane crystal and reselling the arcanite bar every two days. Tyr's hand is far too luck based. Enchanter's can make a lot just farming low level instances for items to disenchant as another poster said. Making money is about asking two things, who has gold, what do they want? In Warcraft that basically means supplying the high end guilds. They need herbs and to a lesser extent enchanting supplies, and they need a lot. If you don't have time to raid you can also ask some of the guilds if they could send you some spare items in exchange for supplying lots of herbs. Most guilds that are farming MC have more bracers and belts than they can use. Even if you can't attend then some will be willing to send you those in exchange for supplying them with a bunch of herbs.
As for how many people buy gold, look at all the epic mounts you see running around. Do you really think people are farming 1000 gold? Or even 570?
Have you played the game to level 60? Once you get there you can get 50g a day with just an hour or two of effort. Most people have epic steeds because they put in that effort. If you don't even bother doing anything you will end up with the 800g for your epic steed after a while because at level 60 you have pretty much no use for gold after you have your epic mount. On a reasonably mature server most of the players you see are second and third characters, they have gold because they get it from their level 60 alts.
Not to mention the simple fallacy that if you couldnt get enough gold for an epic there would need to be more farmers than players in order to keep them coming. When you are level 20 1000g for an epic mount seems like a huge amount of money, by the time you reach level 60 you can now buy it for 800g and you have realised that it is not at all unattainable.
Simple. The farmers sell their farmed materials to create gold. Therefor the price of those materials goes down. They then sell the gold to people who buy equipment driving the price of equipment up. It works the same in real world economies, we spend a fortune subsidising the farmers to keep prices of food down (and preventing non-subsidised farmers from competing) and in doing so free up money to buy luxury goods, driving the prices of those up.
Damn right he is stupid. This guy just sent $60 of his money to the same people who are responsible for his skins being worthless in AH. That is the problem with gold farming, it makes gathering skills worthless by having two seperate effects, first the raw materials are oversupplied so they sell very cheaply affecting people like this guy who can no longer earn any reasonable amount through skinning, secondly they artificially inflate the prices of items by giving plenty gold to clueless nabs who throw it around like theres no tomorrow. Pity this dude was too dumb to realise that he is basically rewarding the people who created his problem. Unfortunately for this guy once he gets to high level in WoW he will realise that he can not do ANYTHING without having a lot of time to invest, he has also missed the early warning signs that WoW as you go up in level becomes more and more about grinding. He should get out now if he can't afford that time. The final thing he has done is by having a glut of gold he has turned his questing into an utter waste of time, since he can now afford better items than the quest rewards he is truly just grinding them for the xp now. He has turned the part of the game he liked into the part of the game he hated. He really didn't think it through did he?
Using something from outside the game to improve your chances inside the game is cheating. Whether or not it is serious you can debate until the cows come home, but it is cheating. The fact that people can and have had their accounts deleted for doing it would suggest that blizzard do take the problem seriously, and even if there is a minority who are willing to spend cold hard cash for wow gold, the fact remains that the vast majority spend their cold hard cash on a subscription every month to play in a controlled realm where this doesn't happen. The economics is simple, blizzard can have 1% of the people who spend 5 times as much each, or 99% of the people who spend just the set amount, its no contest.
Yes, of course, and that is part of the charm of the pen and paper RPG, the game evolves to match the players rather than the players evolving to match the game. Technically I think writing a game that could do the same would be very difficult and very hard to do, if the game could sense whether the players enjoyed that big melee and add more or whether they enjoyed that npc encounter and add similar and grow the game the players enjoyed that would be great but I think it is a long time until that happens.
The original poster however implied that he would like to play a game the same as WoW but without the numbers. Just because the numbers are no longer visible doesn't mean they are not there, it just means you can no longer see them easily and people will figure them out. Such a system also lacks one of the fundamental parts of gaming the reward, the very reason WoW is successful is because blizzard have managed to refine doling out rewards to a fine art. Every time you play you can see your character gaining, whether it is 105 xp for killing a gnoll or an epic item from majordomo you get your reward. Without the numbers to look at all you are left with is an abstract non-specific grind to maybe improve stats you cant see.
It depends on how random you wish to make the game world, if you want to provide some form of progression then there needs to be a mechanism internally to determine if SwordA is better than SwordB. You could make the maths behind it more complicated, factor in arm strength, arm fatigue, sword sharpness, sword skill, eyesight, player age, mob abilities which are also highly variable and evolving and so on to the point that the maths becomes sufficiently complicated that it is very hard to determine exactly what the underlying mechanism is but in order to balance the game somewhere in the background there has to be a decision that SwordA does on average D6 damage vs goblins and SwordB does D6+1 damage vs goblins. One of the hardest parts of game design is controlling progression. You need to make sure that players are of approximately similar power at a certain point in their lives. To do this you need to establish bounds of performance for them and make sure that they stay within those bounds. The more complex your maths becomes the harder this is to achieve and the more open it becomes to the risk of fringe cases where you break game balance. I suppose it comes down to the goal of the game, if the goal is to become a more powerful toon then the game needs to have a pretty well defined structure for toon power, if your goal is something less deterministic then you can afford to have less deterministic mechanics for it.
You are working on the assumption that the game world is inhabited entirely by morons who will not work out the mechanics. Whether or not the numbers are displayed to the player they will work out what the underlying mechanics are. All the numbers do is save them that hassle.
One of the basic laws of game design from http://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/laws.shtml is the game systems law: If they cannot see the numbers intelligent players WILL figure them out and then they will tell everyone else. Any game that relies on hiding the game mechanics from the player is doomed to failure.A big thank you to the slashdot editors for posting a spoilor for the movie on the front page
Next story will be "I tried ringing the stolen phone, did anyone hear a phone ringing?"
I agree wholeheartedly. The nice thing about choosing a difficulty is that you get to decide how much challenge you feel like, if you can only afford one game a month then you can play em hard to make the experience last. With ADD your only option is to play it clean through, knowing all along that the enemies are handicapped to accomodate you. That sucks.