The problem with these studies is they equate 100% of downloads with sales, when more likely 5% at best would have been sales, more likely lower. Especially since portable games are such small files, the people who pirate them feel encouraged to download every single game that comes out, no matter how awful and even if they never even intend to boot it up, just to "collect" them.
In other words, you like writing clever AI, but you don't like playing WoW. That's fine, but you don't have to damage the game experience for others to have fun writing clever AI. As for topping the healing charts in battlegrounds, that's not exactly difficult as most players do not attempt to heal others or work as a team. And I have seen bots set up like that to try and heal in battlegrounds. They're very easy for an experienced player to notice, and someone who does realize it's a bot isn't going to bother sending tells to an empty chair; they're just going to open a GM ticket and report it.
If people using glider did not intend to connect to Blizzard's servers, then your analogy would work. But we all know that's a lie. If glider was intended to only function on private servers it would not need to take any steps to get around Blizzard's cheat detection, because there would be no ramifications on its users for cheating.
Yes it is. A jobless player is unlikely farm herbs 20 hours a day because it simply is not fun. They are unlikely to continually join battlegrounds and not contribute and lose, because that is not fun. The effort/reward for a real player simply does not match up. A bot has no sense of fun or effort/reward.
And yes, while there is the 0.1% of players who are immune to something being "not fun", bots open up that possibility for the other 99.9% (including those with jobs etc.) to be useless assholes and waste other players' time and cheapen their game experience.
WoW cannot be "played" by a bot. They can't complete dungeons or raids and cannot kill players who are paying attention in PvP. What they can do is ruin the PvP experience of other players by wasting limited player slots in battlegrounds, frustrate players in dungeons by wasting a player spot there, and harm the economy by farming more minerals/herbs than any sane player could possibly procure on their own.
And that meth lab in my basement is just for me to educate myself on the chemical process of creating meth. Same goes for my marijuana farm in the garage. I just love gardening. Nice try, buddy.
You know, at least I can have some respect for people who try to claim they have the right to cheat on Blizzard servers, because at least they're being honest.
Bots can't do anything in WoW beyond farming minerals/herbs or just solo killing mobs in the world for gold/drops. They can't complete dungeons or raids, and pose no threat to semi-conscious players in PvP. The method bots use to level is so mind-numbingly boring and inefficient that no sane player would attempt it themselves.
That's not how PvP bots work, or the problem with them. PvP bots run into the middle of the zone or follow a random player and cast random spells. They are very obvious and are not a threat to anyone. The problem with them is that they waste space in battlegrounds which have a limited number of players per team. If your team has 2 bots and it's 10v10 normally, it's now effectively 8v10 and you're at a severe disadvantage. Not only that but it cheapens the win of the team without bots, which will eventually cause those players to lose interest in PvP if it happens too frequently or to an extreme degree.
There are in-game tools to get rid of "afk" players, but they don't function against these bots because of the random spell casting and following other players around.
Listen, if you don't play WoW, don't try to talk about it. Botters in battlegrounds are not like aim botters in an FPS. They run into the middle of the zone and cast random spells so that the auto-afk-detection system won't boot them out. They contribute nothing to the game. It is to your advantage for the *other* team to be filled with bots. They ruin the game by putting you at a numbers disadvantage if they're on your side, and by cheapening your win when they're on the opponent's side. And yes, winning too easily will discourage someone into quitting a game after a certain amount of time.
It's a lot harder to track down and ban every user of a bot than it is to just sue the shit out of whoever created the bot to make them stop making new versions.
They're arguing it because that's what every software company has established for the past 20 years and it's what has held up in court in the past. It's not like Blizzard is some evil corporation treading new water trying to steal your freedoms out from under you. These are freedoms you "secretly" (it's in almost every EULA ever, but no one ever reads them) have never had to begin with.
At their core, Blizzard probably doesn't even actually care about the specifics of whether you own their software. They just don't want people cheating in their game and are willing to use every legal loophole and trick in existence to prevent it.
CNN Headline News used to be the last refuge for 24 hr hard news coverage, but now that they rebranded to HLN I honestly have no idea what they're supposed to be. They seem to mainly focus on unbearable entertainment coverage.
There seems to be a reading comprehension problem on your part here.
The question being posed is: "If I write a new OS now, won't developers have to write all new apps?" Answer: "No, because we're designing the OS for users of web apps, which do not need to be ported. They'll 'just work' because they're already platform independent."
In the past, before web apps existed or had come into significant use, this was a huge barrier for writing (or, more accurately, marketing) a new OS. e.g. "Why should I switch to Linux if it doesn't run MS Office?" or "Shit, I want to buy an Android phone because AT&T sucks but I can't until someone ports."
But because this web app framework has already been developed, it is no longer a barrier for a new OS, as long as there is a market for users who only need access to web apps. e.g. "I'm already only using web apps on my netbook, so I can drop the price and a ton of overhead (resulting in a theoretical speed increase) by switching to Chrome OS and not lose any significant functionality that I had before."
Obviously this won't be true for all netbook users, but clearly Google is banking on it applying to a lot of them (or at least enough of them for it to be profitable).
I'd like to add that being a gamer and being a coder are completely independent. It's a bit like thinking a great football player could engineer a great stadium or come up with a great new sport. I'm not saying it's impossible, just not really any more likely than a non-gamer.
I still manage to play TF2 and L4D at LANs despite those requiring everyone be online while playing locally. The only "problem" is when someone doesn't already own the game. You used to be able to just pirate it but now you *gasp* actually have to pay for it. God forbid.
The "activation" is the same as "activation" of Valve games on Steam. You simply bind your "cd key" to a Battle.net 2.0 account the same way you must bind it to a Steam account the first time you play HL2/Portal/etc. It doesn't do any kind of system information recording/binding or anything like that. This is not Windows-style activation.
Victory? So you're willing to believe he was lying when he said he wanted to do more offshore drilling just so you can feel good about voting for someone who wasn't quite as liberal as you'd hoped?
The goal isn't "selling as many copies as possible". The goal is "selling as many copies as possible at a profit". If you set your price to $100 million per copy, and sold 2 copies, you'd probably make your profit. Setting your price to $1 per copy might work for something popular that sells a lot of copies, but won't work for something unpopular that doesn't sell a lot of copies, and IN THEORY it's better for consumers and musicians to have the higher cost of albums subsidize the unpopular albums because it means publishers are more likely to take risks with a potentially unpopular band/album (more choices for consumers, monetary incentive for more artists to form bands and record albums).
Because there's no way to know for sure how many people are going to buy any particular album, you have to look at some average number of albums sold and adjust the price accordingly, so that you're not damaging the market by having this huge price flux of $1 for a known popular band and $50 for a new or niche band. And what if that supposedly popular band's album tanks? Now instead of maybe breaking even on your low number of sales at $20 (or whatever based on your guess) you're losing tons of money (even though your number of sales is higher at $1, your profit is so much lower that you end up losing more money, because you priced it based on a higher estimated number of sales, rather than just using what you already knew was your safe price based on average sales of all albums).
Anyway, my point is that your theory is terribly out of phase with simple logic and macro economics.
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The problem with these studies is they equate 100% of downloads with sales, when more likely 5% at best would have been sales, more likely lower. Especially since portable games are such small files, the people who pirate them feel encouraged to download every single game that comes out, no matter how awful and even if they never even intend to boot it up, just to "collect" them.
Clearly the marketing department should be driving the ROV's and engineering new ways to capture the leaking oil.
In other words, you like writing clever AI, but you don't like playing WoW. That's fine, but you don't have to damage the game experience for others to have fun writing clever AI. As for topping the healing charts in battlegrounds, that's not exactly difficult as most players do not attempt to heal others or work as a team. And I have seen bots set up like that to try and heal in battlegrounds. They're very easy for an experienced player to notice, and someone who does realize it's a bot isn't going to bother sending tells to an empty chair; they're just going to open a GM ticket and report it.
If people using glider did not intend to connect to Blizzard's servers, then your analogy would work. But we all know that's a lie. If glider was intended to only function on private servers it would not need to take any steps to get around Blizzard's cheat detection, because there would be no ramifications on its users for cheating.
He's not giving them that right, you are by running their software and agreeing to their EULA. If you don't agree to the terms, don't play the game.
Yes it is. A jobless player is unlikely farm herbs 20 hours a day because it simply is not fun. They are unlikely to continually join battlegrounds and not contribute and lose, because that is not fun. The effort/reward for a real player simply does not match up. A bot has no sense of fun or effort/reward.
And yes, while there is the 0.1% of players who are immune to something being "not fun", bots open up that possibility for the other 99.9% (including those with jobs etc.) to be useless assholes and waste other players' time and cheapen their game experience.
WoW cannot be "played" by a bot. They can't complete dungeons or raids and cannot kill players who are paying attention in PvP. What they can do is ruin the PvP experience of other players by wasting limited player slots in battlegrounds, frustrate players in dungeons by wasting a player spot there, and harm the economy by farming more minerals/herbs than any sane player could possibly procure on their own.
And that meth lab in my basement is just for me to educate myself on the chemical process of creating meth. Same goes for my marijuana farm in the garage. I just love gardening. Nice try, buddy.
You know, at least I can have some respect for people who try to claim they have the right to cheat on Blizzard servers, because at least they're being honest.
Bots can't do anything in WoW beyond farming minerals/herbs or just solo killing mobs in the world for gold/drops. They can't complete dungeons or raids, and pose no threat to semi-conscious players in PvP. The method bots use to level is so mind-numbingly boring and inefficient that no sane player would attempt it themselves.
That's not how PvP bots work, or the problem with them. PvP bots run into the middle of the zone or follow a random player and cast random spells. They are very obvious and are not a threat to anyone. The problem with them is that they waste space in battlegrounds which have a limited number of players per team. If your team has 2 bots and it's 10v10 normally, it's now effectively 8v10 and you're at a severe disadvantage. Not only that but it cheapens the win of the team without bots, which will eventually cause those players to lose interest in PvP if it happens too frequently or to an extreme degree.
There are in-game tools to get rid of "afk" players, but they don't function against these bots because of the random spell casting and following other players around.
Listen, if you don't play WoW, don't try to talk about it. Botters in battlegrounds are not like aim botters in an FPS. They run into the middle of the zone and cast random spells so that the auto-afk-detection system won't boot them out. They contribute nothing to the game. It is to your advantage for the *other* team to be filled with bots. They ruin the game by putting you at a numbers disadvantage if they're on your side, and by cheapening your win when they're on the opponent's side. And yes, winning too easily will discourage someone into quitting a game after a certain amount of time.
That is "capped and left".
It's a lot harder to track down and ban every user of a bot than it is to just sue the shit out of whoever created the bot to make them stop making new versions.
Read the page. The EULA was only invalid because it directly contradicted a verbal contract made for the purchase of the same software.
They're arguing it because that's what every software company has established for the past 20 years and it's what has held up in court in the past. It's not like Blizzard is some evil corporation treading new water trying to steal your freedoms out from under you. These are freedoms you "secretly" (it's in almost every EULA ever, but no one ever reads them) have never had to begin with.
At their core, Blizzard probably doesn't even actually care about the specifics of whether you own their software. They just don't want people cheating in their game and are willing to use every legal loophole and trick in existence to prevent it.
CNN Headline News used to be the last refuge for 24 hr hard news coverage, but now that they rebranded to HLN I honestly have no idea what they're supposed to be. They seem to mainly focus on unbearable entertainment coverage.
There seems to be a reading comprehension problem on your part here.
The question being posed is: "If I write a new OS now, won't developers have to write all new apps?"
Answer: "No, because we're designing the OS for users of web apps, which do not need to be ported. They'll 'just work' because they're already platform independent."
In the past, before web apps existed or had come into significant use, this was a huge barrier for writing (or, more accurately, marketing) a new OS. e.g. "Why should I switch to Linux if it doesn't run MS Office?" or "Shit, I want to buy an Android phone because AT&T sucks but I can't until someone ports ."
But because this web app framework has already been developed, it is no longer a barrier for a new OS, as long as there is a market for users who only need access to web apps. e.g. "I'm already only using web apps on my netbook, so I can drop the price and a ton of overhead (resulting in a theoretical speed increase) by switching to Chrome OS and not lose any significant functionality that I had before."
Obviously this won't be true for all netbook users, but clearly Google is banking on it applying to a lot of them (or at least enough of them for it to be profitable).
I'd like to add that being a gamer and being a coder are completely independent. It's a bit like thinking a great football player could engineer a great stadium or come up with a great new sport. I'm not saying it's impossible, just not really any more likely than a non-gamer.
I still manage to play TF2 and L4D at LANs despite those requiring everyone be online while playing locally. The only "problem" is when someone doesn't already own the game. You used to be able to just pirate it but now you *gasp* actually have to pay for it. God forbid.
The "activation" is the same as "activation" of Valve games on Steam. You simply bind your "cd key" to a Battle.net 2.0 account the same way you must bind it to a Steam account the first time you play HL2/Portal/etc. It doesn't do any kind of system information recording/binding or anything like that. This is not Windows-style activation.
Battle.net 1.0 is still up and it's been 14 years. So far so good.
Victory? So you're willing to believe he was lying when he said he wanted to do more offshore drilling just so you can feel good about voting for someone who wasn't quite as liberal as you'd hoped?
The goal isn't "selling as many copies as possible". The goal is "selling as many copies as possible at a profit". If you set your price to $100 million per copy, and sold 2 copies, you'd probably make your profit. Setting your price to $1 per copy might work for something popular that sells a lot of copies, but won't work for something unpopular that doesn't sell a lot of copies, and IN THEORY it's better for consumers and musicians to have the higher cost of albums subsidize the unpopular albums because it means publishers are more likely to take risks with a potentially unpopular band/album (more choices for consumers, monetary incentive for more artists to form bands and record albums).
Because there's no way to know for sure how many people are going to buy any particular album, you have to look at some average number of albums sold and adjust the price accordingly, so that you're not damaging the market by having this huge price flux of $1 for a known popular band and $50 for a new or niche band. And what if that supposedly popular band's album tanks? Now instead of maybe breaking even on your low number of sales at $20 (or whatever based on your guess) you're losing tons of money (even though your number of sales is higher at $1, your profit is so much lower that you end up losing more money, because you priced it based on a higher estimated number of sales, rather than just using what you already knew was your safe price based on average sales of all albums).
Anyway, my point is that your theory is terribly out of phase with simple logic and macro economics.
That's not a bug.