Except that there are actually three bid values in question: the lowest you can get away with, the amount you would like to pay, and the highest price you can possibly imagine paying for an item. eBay handles the first one well enough, but the "maximum bid" is usually used for for the second, not the third, and herein lies the trouble. If I'd like to pay about $100, I'll bid $100, and then I can be comfortable with what I pay for it. However, if I could maybe see myself paying $200 for it, I can put that in, but then if I change my mind and decide it's not worth that much, I'm out of luck. As such, people usually enter what they want to pay for an item, not their highest price possible. If someone decides, "Well okay, I guess I could go higher," eBay says, "Sure! I'll raise the current bid right away, too!" And, of course, that's what people are upset about.
Of course, even if they did enter the highest price they'd go, it would still be abuseable, just in a different way. Imagine a seller in cahoots with a buyer. (Or less obvious, 10 sellers and 10 buyers.) Now they can make sure that everyone who bids on an item pays the maximum price they're willing to by entering values slightly below round numbers. (The bid's at $80? Try $95.25. Watch it hit $100 rather than $100.25 and you know their max bid.) Of course, if you make a mistake, just leave positive feedback for both sides, and relist the item. If the same buyer bids, just push it to what you now KNOW the max is.
Eliminating proxy bidding (but keeping outbid notices) would do several things: make more money for the sellers on an item someone just wants to bid on once (they probably wouldn't bid the lowest possible), prevent buyer/seller collusion, and prevent legitimate buyers from sniping items by paying less than the bid increment (e.g., it's at $90, I think you bid $100, so I'll bid $100.01 with 15 seconds left). Adding in a soft close time would help reduce sniping further.
Or it least, it was, the last time I used it years ago. The trouble is it's so easy to abuse.
You know the exact time the auction will end. You can price snipe at the last minute.
You can determine the high bidders maximum bid. Most people will bid an even amount, say, $100. Bid $96, see the current at $100, and you know you can bid $105 at the last moment. See above.
Surprised as I am to find myself saying this, the largest auction house on the internet could stand to learn a thing or two from a game feature. WoW's auction house avoids both these issues. You don't know when an auction will end, only a range, and bids delay the end of the auction by a small amount. And there is no proxy bidding, so you don't know how high someone might be willing to go.
Server problems depend on your server. Choosing a low-pop server will basically avoid the biggest problems.
I don't have an issue giving Blizzard money since all the previous games were free to play online. Even D2, which required more than just matching players. WoW takes a little bit more resources.
First of all, you're not on the battle.net forums.:-p
I haven't seen that particular lecture. I've seen one with Charlie Sheen and 2 shmucks saying all the things you should do in theaters. It's a little long.
I don't like commercials in movie theaters, though the ones that don't look like pixelated TV commercials are less annoying. If you're going to advertise, don't look like crap.
As for movie trailers, I'd say 3-4 is a good number. Especially if the trailer is itself good, in which case it may be more enjoyable than the movie, or if the movie looks really crappy, in which case it just saved me an hour or two.
My understanding is that there are people who bought the game legitimately through a retailer who are downloading it because they don't want to have the CD in the drive. These people have legitimate keys and legitimate copies of the game.
There's a REASON I hate comics. Print COMICS, that is. They randomly feel the NEED to put random words IN bold and italics. Usually, these WORDS are not what you would emphasize if you WERE speaking, and they're not ALWAYS of any importance. I find IT distracting. DOES anyone else?
It could. Your average DivX stream at 640x480 is about 125K/sec. For anime, anyway. (Granted, that's usually an easy encode.) That would be streamable over even 1.5Mbps. But Apple would probably want to push MPEG-4, which is nicer for the processors, but that would probably be too much at the same resolution.
On the other hand, some of the movie trailers are pretty high res, and they stream just fine.
Slashdot Mirror
They probably do; they just don't use the alt key. ...Access?
I refer you to my post in reply to someone else where I describe how you can drive up prices for that.
Except that there are actually three bid values in question: the lowest you can get away with, the amount you would like to pay, and the highest price you can possibly imagine paying for an item. eBay handles the first one well enough, but the "maximum bid" is usually used for for the second, not the third, and herein lies the trouble. If I'd like to pay about $100, I'll bid $100, and then I can be comfortable with what I pay for it. However, if I could maybe see myself paying $200 for it, I can put that in, but then if I change my mind and decide it's not worth that much, I'm out of luck. As such, people usually enter what they want to pay for an item, not their highest price possible. If someone decides, "Well okay, I guess I could go higher," eBay says, "Sure! I'll raise the current bid right away, too!" And, of course, that's what people are upset about.
Of course, even if they did enter the highest price they'd go, it would still be abuseable, just in a different way. Imagine a seller in cahoots with a buyer. (Or less obvious, 10 sellers and 10 buyers.) Now they can make sure that everyone who bids on an item pays the maximum price they're willing to by entering values slightly below round numbers. (The bid's at $80? Try $95.25. Watch it hit $100 rather than $100.25 and you know their max bid.) Of course, if you make a mistake, just leave positive feedback for both sides, and relist the item. If the same buyer bids, just push it to what you now KNOW the max is.
Eliminating proxy bidding (but keeping outbid notices) would do several things: make more money for the sellers on an item someone just wants to bid on once (they probably wouldn't bid the lowest possible), prevent buyer/seller collusion, and prevent legitimate buyers from sniping items by paying less than the bid increment (e.g., it's at $90, I think you bid $100, so I'll bid $100.01 with 15 seconds left). Adding in a soft close time would help reduce sniping further.
Or it least, it was, the last time I used it years ago. The trouble is it's so easy to abuse.
You know the exact time the auction will end. You can price snipe at the last minute.
You can determine the high bidders maximum bid. Most people will bid an even amount, say, $100. Bid $96, see the current at $100, and you know you can bid $105 at the last moment. See above.
Surprised as I am to find myself saying this, the largest auction house on the internet could stand to learn a thing or two from a game feature. WoW's auction house avoids both these issues. You don't know when an auction will end, only a range, and bids delay the end of the auction by a small amount. And there is no proxy bidding, so you don't know how high someone might be willing to go.
No, the one that actually exists.
Well.... it is Microsoft. Embrace and extend, and all that.
|.0.|.|.3.|2.5.|.4.7.3.5!
Heh, I searched for "roflocopters" and it spit this back:
"j00|2 534|2(|-| - roflocopters - c|1c| |\|07 |\/|4+(|-| 4|\|y c|0(V|\/|3|\|+5. 5|-|17!!!!"
I like the last word there...
I'd heard it stood for "pistol own", coming from FPS games, where the pistol was generally the weakest gun.
The typo theory is probably correct, though. More people should use Dvorak.
I usually pronounce it as "powned". Not to be confused with "boned".
Try looking under "pron".
They just made you pay money if you didn't bring it back it time!
Server problems depend on your server. Choosing a low-pop server will basically avoid the biggest problems.
I don't have an issue giving Blizzard money since all the previous games were free to play online. Even D2, which required more than just matching players. WoW takes a little bit more resources.
So... did you buy it or not?
If you haven't yet and decide to, two suggestions:
1) Visit http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/serverstatus/ during peak play time (nights and weekends) and look for servers with "Low" population.
2) Visit http://www.wowcensus.com/no_realm.php and choose a server on which you can try to balance the faction populations, using your list from #1.
Have you not been following well enough to know that it was pulled from stores and you CAN'T buy a new one?
First of all, you're not on the battle.net forums. :-p
I haven't seen that particular lecture. I've seen one with Charlie Sheen and 2 shmucks saying all the things you should do in theaters. It's a little long.
I don't like commercials in movie theaters, though the ones that don't look like pixelated TV commercials are less annoying. If you're going to advertise, don't look like crap.
As for movie trailers, I'd say 3-4 is a good number. Especially if the trailer is itself good, in which case it may be more enjoyable than the movie, or if the movie looks really crappy, in which case it just saved me an hour or two.
I thought of that too. I wonder how often they would be cleaned.
I question the wisdom of a private public place.
My understanding is that there are people who bought the game legitimately through a retailer who are downloading it because they don't want to have the CD in the drive. These people have legitimate keys and legitimate copies of the game.
There's a REASON I hate comics. Print COMICS , that is. They randomly feel the NEED to put random words IN bold and italics. Usually, these WORDS are not what you would emphasize if you WERE speaking, and they're not ALWAYS of any importance. I find IT distracting. DOES anyone else?
Call me crazy, but I'm not fond of needing to be root to install a shareware/freeware app.
It could. Your average DivX stream at 640x480 is about 125K/sec. For anime, anyway. (Granted, that's usually an easy encode.) That would be streamable over even 1.5Mbps. But Apple would probably want to push MPEG-4, which is nicer for the processors, but that would probably be too much at the same resolution.
On the other hand, some of the movie trailers are pretty high res, and they stream just fine.
Support for free? G5? Hell, the G5 is supposed to be for you. Everyone else gets a used G4.
(Wanna trade?)
You know, you finally made me curious enough. I keep seeing Sonic commercials and wondering where the hell they are. These must be national spots.
:\
I live in Massachusetts. The closest sonic is in either Virginia or Ohio.
Apparently, the whole Northeast is either too urban or too rural for a Sonic?
...then you might as well just sleep at the office.
Naked.
Maybe not, but once Blizzard carbonized it for OS X it did. The bnetd stuff (lawsuit, shut down, etc.) happened after that, during the release of WC3.