I think Bliz has done a good job of handling this so far. Their game design has a few features to make things easier on the casual gamer.
1. Quest rewards cannot be traded as they are automatically bound to the player turning in the quest. And many of the quest rewards are quite good. Real hard-core gamers might want to grind/pay for better items, but these are a real option and they can't be used to flood the economy.
2. Many higher level drops are bind-on-pickup when they are looted. A farmer can turn this into gold, but they can't sell the item to anyone else.
3. Instanced dungeons prevent some higher-level content from being camped. If you have your own private place to quest, no one can keep you away.
4. Quest items are also soul bound. When you are sent to collect x of y to gain some reward, in most cases you can't trade/sell/give them away. So the only way to gain that reward is to finish the quest yourself.
5. Most items have level requirements. So you can't give a level 1 character the Rod of Ultimate Buttkicking and allow them to instantly kill everything they attack. Someone could trade/sell/give a lower level character an uber item, but theu wouldn't be able to use it until they hit the minimum level.
Of course, the one thing Blizzard can't stop is the accumulation and sale of gold. But even a person with unlimited in-game gold can only buy things of their level and wouldn't be able to buy their way through most quests.
I've only run into 1 or 2 farmers at this point and I can't say it's ruined my experience. But if/when every 3rd player is there just to sell gold for real cash, I don't know.
Check out Baen's web site. They not only give away free unprotected content, they end up doing better because of it. This has been covered over, and over and over again.
My wife told me long before we got engaged that she thinks diamonds are nothing special. She's far more interested in opals. So, she has an opal engagement ring. Some people have commented to us that opals are delicate, so the opal engagement ring is silly. Well, it's lasted 4 years so far.
For another possibility, some friends of mine bought a house together and they consider that their enagagement present. If a house doesn't represent a long-term commitment, what does?
Actually, besides pricing differences and features (which I'm sure does make DVDs more appealing) people are just buying all their videos in a new format. I remember reading an article here a few weeks ago about the music industry getting a reprieve from their demise when everyone had to replace their tapes with cds. I know I'm buying stuff on DVD I have in video, because the quality is better and the extras. And I'm re-buying when they come out with the "22 disc extra bonus edition! Now with 3 min of new footage!" versions.
The first thing is to is look at what's already available. The (admittedly smaller) university where I worked has a Novell network and the networking gods in Academic Technology managed to connect the Netware server to a linux box and serve pages in people's home directories out via Apache. Here's a description of how.
If there's something there that your users are familiar with, it'll be easier for them and for your support people.
But how about Fractal Painter, Paint Shop Pro, and all the other programs with tabbed palettes? They are enforceing their poatents where they will do the most good, against a competitor that scares them. If it was about enforcing their patents, it wouldn't be just Macromedia.
Marillion is releasing their next album with no help from any labels. They are supporting it with pre-sales to fans. They took a chance in trying this, and the fans came through and MArillion has the capitol to get working. Look here for the details.
I worked for 6 years at a University helping faculty to use computers in their classes. I'm doing the corporate thing now (or trying), and I miss it a lot. We were using a lot of Linux solutions to problems and open source was a good thing. Check out this page to see the kind of thing they're doing.
Of course it takes the right place, and the pay isn't corporate, but you do feel like you're doing something that matters.
Anyone else notice the countdown error during the ball drop in times Square? As they started counting down minutes and seconds, it would display 15:01, 14:00, 14:59. It did this all the way to midnight. And Sam Donaldson said nothing was wrong.
Onceler (sp?) was the one making factories to make Thneeds. The Lorax tried to stop him and save the enviornment. This is the book they banned (or tried to) in logging communities because kids were coming home and telling daddy to stop killing trees.
A friend's mom worked for Lucent, right after they changed the name. Her problem with the new name was that the accounts she worked with were Japan, Korea, etc. and they just couldn't pronounce Lucent very well. They had a hell of a time just talking to them about the new name.
My impression was that 3com bought USR, who had previously bought Palm. They wanted the modem buisness and got the Palm as a bonus. They want to focus, so they let Palm go and keep a chunk of stock just in case. Makes sense to me. What I want to know is whether 3com is keeping the PalmOS. Does it leave with Palm computing or do they continue to license to both them and Handspring? That makes things more interesting.
Not to mention that by that time, they might have worked out the whole HDTV/DVD screen ratio thing. I won't get DVD or HDTV until they play nice together.
We're coming from the angle of having faculty, many of whom are scared of their computer but excited about the information available on the web and want to create web pages for courses. The url below explains how we're doing it in detail, but for users, they save a file from Netscape Composer into a directoy called WWW on their network drive and its live. Moving from FTP to this system caused a page explosion, and we have more pages for courses than ever. Sure they aren't all fantastic, but they're trying and getting better all the time. http://www.depts.drew.edu/acadtech/Projects/Mike/W ebspace/howto.html
We recently got a machine from Acer ( http://www.acer.com/aac/products/a_power/flex/inde x.htm ) and this is the next step in PC design. Look how small it looks under the 17" monitor in the pic. It's like a thick laptop. Think about television. TVs started as ugly but functional, then they were furniture. Now TVs and VCRs just kind of fade into the background. The PC will eventually be a component like a VCR or just vanish into the infrastructure of the house. So right now, the iMac is moving us into the In-Your-Face phase of computer evolution, and Dell is moving with them.
Slashdot Mirror
I think Bliz has done a good job of handling this so far. Their game design has a few features to make things easier on the casual gamer.
1. Quest rewards cannot be traded as they are automatically bound to the player turning in the quest. And many of the quest rewards are quite good. Real hard-core gamers might want to grind/pay for better items, but these are a real option and they can't be used to flood the economy.
2. Many higher level drops are bind-on-pickup when they are looted. A farmer can turn this into gold, but they can't sell the item to anyone else.
3. Instanced dungeons prevent some higher-level content from being camped. If you have your own private place to quest, no one can keep you away.
4. Quest items are also soul bound. When you are sent to collect x of y to gain some reward, in most cases you can't trade/sell/give them away. So the only way to gain that reward is to finish the quest yourself.
5. Most items have level requirements. So you can't give a level 1 character the Rod of Ultimate Buttkicking and allow them to instantly kill everything they attack. Someone could trade/sell/give a lower level character an uber item, but theu wouldn't be able to use it until they hit the minimum level.
Of course, the one thing Blizzard can't stop is the accumulation and sale of gold. But even a person with unlimited in-game gold can only buy things of their level and wouldn't be able to buy their way through most quests.
I've only run into 1 or 2 farmers at this point and I can't say it's ruined my experience. But if/when every 3rd player is there just to sell gold for real cash, I don't know.
Check out Baen's web site. They not only give away free unprotected content, they end up doing better because of it. This has been covered over, and over and over again.
My wife told me long before we got engaged that she thinks diamonds are nothing special. She's far more interested in opals. So, she has an opal engagement ring. Some people have commented to us that opals are delicate, so the opal engagement ring is silly. Well, it's lasted 4 years so far.
For another possibility, some friends of mine bought a house together and they consider that their enagagement present. If a house doesn't represent a long-term commitment, what does?
Actually, besides pricing differences and features (which I'm sure does make DVDs more appealing) people are just buying all their videos in a new format. I remember reading an article here a few weeks ago about the music industry getting a reprieve from their demise when everyone had to replace their tapes with cds. I know I'm buying stuff on DVD I have in video, because the quality is better and the extras. And I'm re-buying when they come out with the "22 disc extra bonus edition! Now with 3 min of new footage!" versions.
If there's something there that your users are familiar with, it'll be easier for them and for your support people.
But how about Fractal Painter, Paint Shop Pro, and all the other programs with tabbed palettes? They are enforceing their poatents where they will do the most good, against a competitor that scares them. If it was about enforcing their patents, it wouldn't be just Macromedia.
Marillion is releasing their next album with no help from any labels. They are supporting it with pre-sales to fans. They took a chance in trying this, and the fans came through and MArillion has the capitol to get working. Look here for the details.
Of course it takes the right place, and the pay isn't corporate, but you do feel like you're doing something that matters.
Anyone else notice the countdown error during the ball drop in times Square? As they started counting down minutes and seconds, it would display 15:01, 14:00, 14:59. It did this all the way to midnight. And Sam Donaldson said nothing was wrong.
Lorax book
Lorax video
Origami Slayer
A friend's mom worked for Lucent, right after they changed the name. Her problem with the new name was that the accounts she worked with were Japan, Korea, etc. and they just couldn't pronounce Lucent very well. They had a hell of a time just talking to them about the new name.
Given the earlier /. article (Investment Advisor Alleges MS Financial Fraud), how true is this MS-stock-as-pyramid-scheme thing and how should it factor into the judgement?
My impression was that 3com bought USR, who had previously bought Palm. They wanted the modem buisness and got the Palm as a bonus. They want to focus, so they let Palm go and keep a chunk of stock just in case. Makes sense to me. What I want to know is whether 3com is keeping the PalmOS. Does it leave with Palm computing or do they continue to license to both them and Handspring? That makes things more interesting.
Not to mention that by that time, they might have worked out the whole HDTV/DVD screen ratio thing. I won't get DVD or HDTV until they play nice together.
We're coming from the angle of having faculty, many of whom are scared of their computer but excited about the information available on the web and want to create web pages for courses. The url below explains how we're doing it in detail, but for users, they save a file from Netscape Composer into a directoy called WWW on their network drive and its live. Moving from FTP to this system caused a page explosion, and we have more pages for courses than ever. Sure they aren't all fantastic, but they're trying and getting better all the time. http://www.depts.drew.edu/acadtech/Projects/Mike/W ebspace/howto.html
We recently got a machine from Acer ( http://www.acer.com/aac/products/a_power/flex/inde x.htm ) and this is the next step in PC design. Look how small it looks under the 17" monitor in the pic. It's like a thick laptop. Think about television. TVs started as ugly but functional, then they were furniture. Now TVs and VCRs just kind of fade into the background. The PC will eventually be a component like a VCR or just vanish into the infrastructure of the house. So right now, the iMac is moving us into the In-Your-Face phase of computer evolution, and Dell is moving with them.