It depends on the amount of abstraction that you are willing to accept. Game physics are currently focused on accuracy rather than results, which is why ragdolls go haywire and objects get stuck into corners and bounce out of the world at relativistic speeds.
A bucket of sand is a bucket of sand, so if you get a bucket from the beach, it does not matter exactly which grains of sand wind up in the bucket, or on the NPC. Thus, you 'scoop', and wind up with x cubic centimeters of sand in your bucket. You dump the bucket on an NPC, and the NPC gets covered in random sand particles.
A wall can easily be abstracted to a single entity, rather than the individual components. Drive a car through it, and the associate component's properties are used to determine how the wall breaks up into smaller pieces, but again, it really does not matter exactly how the wall breaks, or exactly how the bricks scatter. What matters is that there is now a hole in the wall, and the wall is now divided into smaller discrete objects and a mess of random bricks. Because the discrete entities do not form a solid body from the top of the previous wall to the bottom, they no longer offer support to whatever is above, potentially causing a chain reaction.
Digging a tunnel in an MMO is problemtic not because of technology, but because of other players. An engine could certainly be developed that allowed for the construction of tunnels, with location-based criteria for starting a tunnel, and valid tunneling areas defined underground. It could even have advanced engineering aspects such as shoring, cave-ins, and flooding. But the more robust you make a multiplayer system, the easier it is for one individual to ruin it for numerous others.
The idea of sneaking into the enemy's tunnel system and causing a cave-in is certainly enticing, and would be filled with peril and what not, but what about someone on your own team going down and causing that same cave-in, due to malice or incompetence? And where does all of the excavated dirt go? Player made mountains are perhaps of even greater concern...
Taking leaves from trees is reaching into assinine territory, but tree limbs are perfectly reasonable, and chopping down trees has been done many times. Perhaps not with molecular simulations of axe versus wood, but why bother? You hit the tree at a given location, it gets a notch. You hit the notch, and it gets bigger. Once ht notch is big enough, the tree falls over. If you spread your swings around, you get a bunch of little notches. Accuracy, strength, and technique could all be factored into the one end result, the goal of chopping down a tree.
Re:replace "smart" with "good basketball player"..
on
The Prodigy Puzzle
·
· Score: 1
Perhaps because athletic prowess is considered 'fair' by a large enough portion of the population; these people believe that anyone can become a great athlete with a little talent and enough hard training, and therefore athletes who succeed are role models for their hard work and dedication. Natural talent is acknowledged as a factor, but always overshadowed by the athletes own training and drive. Athletes are better than non-athletes because they are vastly dedicated to the pushing about of whatever ball catches their fancy, whereas 'genius' is considered a pretentious declaration of superiority, and asking for education that is different from the standard fare is tantamount to calling all of the other students stupid.
Extremely intelligent individuals are to be feared and shunned, for who are they to claim that they are inherently better than everyone else? This is America, where everyone is equal and has the same chance as everyone else of being great. It is the same 'reasoning' that prevents serious discussion of the difference in thinking patterns between men and women, or the possibility of inherent aptitudes based on genetic factors.
Currently, corporations are blessed with many of the benefits of citizenship, and few of the limitations.
What we need are reforms to greatly limit the impact that corpotations can have on individual citizens.
To start, a corporation suing an individual citizen must cover that citizens legal fees, up to a certain percentage of their own legal cost, for instance 25%. The money will be paid up front on a monthly basis, and does not need to be returned under any circumstances. Any taxes for the legal fee reimbursement will be paid by the corporation, such that the citizen recieves, after all applicable taxes, the required amount. The legal fee reimbursement will not be considered income for purposes of welfare, disability, unemployment, etc, and can be used for any purpose with no limitations.
Obviously the first things corporations will do is claim that their legal costs are next to nothing, because all of their lawyers are on retainer, and thus 'free' Good job at finding the loophole, Mr. Suit, that simply means that the assumed legal cost will be the monthly salary of each lawyer who touches the case, times the number of years that the case. Alternate compensation would also need to be considered, including stock options, company cars and houses, so forth and so on.
Under current market and legal conditions, often it is such that citizens have little to no recourse when corporations violate laws in a way harmful to said citizens. And yet, the same corporations that are effectively immune to citizen retaliation can effortlessly bankrupt numerous citizens via legal entanglements.
Corporations should not be able to force citizens into disfavorable settlements that entail large fines and the sacrifice of the citizens rights and future liability by threatening a never-ending legal battle that will cost the citizen large amounts of money even to enlist a single lawyer for the duration of their defense.
Corporations may exist solely to turn a profit for the shareholders, but they are allowed to exist solely to benefit the economy and thus the country. Suing private citizens rarely has any kind of benefit beyond establishing corporate dominance over the citizen, which is certainly bad for the country, as the country is, in fact, said citizen.
Of course, I am in no way qualified for legal or economic analysis, so obviously all of this will no doubt cause an economic recession as the rights of the pitiful corporations are simply trampled upon by an uncaring, unfeeling mass of citizens, who the corporations have no means of stopping. Which would be rather similar to the current situation, except with the trampling being the other way around.
Most smoking bans are not in place because of disease concerns, but rather because many people find smoke to be distracting anf foul smelling. One cigarrette can lessen a dining or movie experience for a large number of people, and over time the smoke and ash saturate the environment. Thus even if there are nos mokers present, it can still smell, and therefore taste, of smoke.
If I were addicted to highly concentrated sulfur fumes, or banging symbols loudly, I would not expect establishments to tolerate me.
Crying babies are another issue, but at least the baby will eventually grow up into a productive member of society. In theory, that is.
If Alan Moore were making a deal out of something that did not concern him, then he would be an arrogant prick. But here is he, defending his honor, and being called a prick by some arrogant spud on the internet, and all we can talk about is Natalie Portman. What is this, Fark?
But enough about Moore, what about Gaiman? Nothing like a chapter from Books of Magic to steal Harry Potter's thunder. Hermione has nothing on Molly, that is for damn sure.
I predict a lot of police/fire showing up at my NOC because that is the address on record for the IP.
You expect a lots of law enforcement to show up looking for you, hmm? That does not sound suspicious at all...
Criminals using the internet for nefarious deeds, yet another reason to banish the whole thing. And Cell phones while we are at it. Protect me, Georgie!
Overclocking is not something that is generally done professionally; it is a hobby, simply to show off and make one feel important. The same is true of 'tricking out' a motor vehicle, or modding a PC case, or the entire industry of do-it-yourself interior decoration.
When rendering, and presumably other activities that might theoretically benefit from increased performance from overclocking such as data analysis and science simulations, your are often leaving the computers working overnight or over the weekend, and the last things that you want are crashes or visual errors due to unstable hardware. Sometimes I even underclock my rendering system, for it is far better for a render to take a few extra hours or days than to have the whole render wasted because somethign went wrong with your elite hacked overclocking with ten percent enhanced performance.
Overclocking also reduces the life of the components, noticeably when they are rendering at full capacity nearly 24/7 for most of the year.
There are certainly professionals that overclock, but they have either carefully weighed the cost benefit ratios and decided on the most logical course of action, or have had a series major setbacks and mistakes and are desperate to finish before the deadline next monday; the boss will not be happy when he finds out that another project is late because of your bumbling incompetency, Jones, so you had better move right in to your cubical for the next week, or you will find yourself moving right out, permanently. You can have that little wife of yours bring you meals; I certainly would not mind having her around the office. Maybe she will finally see reason and bail out on that train wreck of a career that you are conducting, and set her sights up closer to where her standards should be. And if not, she will still be something nice to look at. Tell her to wear something that will cheer you up...Man, this is going to be a Hell of a week. Now get back to work, Jones.
The primary issue with XBox backwards compatibility is that games were loaded onto the hard disk and played from there, and so many games used this functionality to go beyond simple cacheing nad integrated it into the way the game stored and processed information.
Lacking a hard drive, the 360 will have a hard time with games that used teh hard drive excessively.
Or did they add a hard drive to the 360? I value my ignorance of such things higher than my credibility with those who do not.
Forced ads would require control of the playback medium; it would need to be streamed, with no ability to fastforward or rewind, and the whims of buffering and internet traffic to deal with. Even if the ads were targetted and interesting, 'they' would not trust the viewers to watch them unless forced to, even though people use that three to seven minutes to go doing something away from the television already.
But if they were to distribute, the best manner would involve simply liscencing bittorrent and using that along with a few high quality seeders, rather than having everyone download directly. Less cost, les maintenance, more work for the consumer, is there any downside?
Luckily for the numerous suffering chilcren of the world, The Lord has a special place reserved for them in Heaven, and the wonders of eternity shall infinitely outnumber the woes of this existence.
Furthermore, God maintains a fairly 'hands off' policy since the birth, death, and resurrection of Christ. He now works primarily through the good will of humans, rather than by raining manna down on hungry masses.
If God made sure that all of would-be hungry children were not, then why stop there? Prevent all crime and cruelty, stop all wars and disease, disallow natural disasters and catastrophes.
And then without a doubt we would become spoiled and weak, and free will would become nonexistent.
Those children are starving not because God is cruel, but because humanity is cruel. Overpopulation and a lack of concern from most of the 'civilized' world are human problems, not divine ones. It is up to the more fortunate to help the less so.
Should an professional trainer come in during a little league baseball game and train some of the less athletic children? Sure those children might not enjoy being less able than the star players on that little diamond, but compared to the potential joy of the rest of their lives, such unhappiness is miniscule. Furthermore, it is up to the parents and coaches to improve and encourage the children, not an outside force whoc an guarantee success with no effort.
This is a fair sight worse than simply not wanting to hear what someone is saying; the lawyers do not want these things said at all, or for them to be heard by anyone, because then people might start questioning their power and seeking legal reforms, and we cannot have that, can we?
Here's hoping that I am not sued for posting this/
Perhaps one of the hundreds of Ronald Fitch's in the United States,least eleven of them found in Maine, would like to start a commune of sorts so that they can all share everything that is in their common name, since apparently your name on something implies ownership without question. Your philosophy of sharing via complete ownership is indeed novel.
A torrent client can provide you with a sutatined bandwidth load as wide as your pipe is; generally several hundred kB a second for standard broadband, and three or four times that for professional or academic connections. Furthermore these programs are left running twenty four hours a day in most cases, and there are millions of clients running worldwide.
In contrast, web pages are rather tiny, and you only load one every few minutes, or at most several times a minute. Certainly there are bloated flash-driven monstrosities pretending to be functional web pages, but they are in enough of a minority to not change the numbers by much.
I am going to throw some theoretical numbers at you, because I doubt he is going to give you any real numbers to contradict the ones that I am about to retrieve from that infinite repository of questionable facts that is my arse.
Let us assume that fifty people are paid directly by this game; this includes live content creators, the design team, 24 hour IT guys, and management at the companies involved. It does not include the full team that created the boxed product, or the Game Masters, or tech support.
If we take half of that monthly fee then that is an average of 27,000 a year, and we are left with 1.35 million.
The hourly customer service and GM support, being paid ten dollars an hour with an average of thirty people working twenty-four-seven ( A measly 1 to 834 ratio of customer to service assuming 25,000 as a peak average), which is another 216,000 a month. Multiply that if you want better ratios.
Assuming a consistent output of 5kB per player per second, and an average cieling of 25,000 players online at once, that is 128,125,000 bits per second, which is about 85% of an OC-3 pipe, which can cost 35-60 thousand a month, simply for their base bandwidth. They will need extra for patches, and will need reserve bandwidth on tap in case the load gets heavier than normal.
There is also several million dollars of server hardware, which needs to be maintaned, updated, upgraded, and expanded over its lifetime.
Massive games also have longer development time, with more people working on the project during that time, but the box costs the standard price of a stand alone game, which means the publisher needs to recoup the costs of paying for all of those extra salaries and that extra cooking time.
No doubt a fair bit of the monthly fee is pure profit, which is why you see so many massive games being released. But the entire development team is not running around with giant sacks of the playerss cash and laughing manically. Well, they might be, but eventually they will use that money to pay for the upkeep of the game.
The upkeep costs associated with massive online games have already been mentioned, but I would like to point out that even at fifteen dollars a month, Online games are still a far better dollar to entertainment hour purchase than three matinees a month. Perhaps not as cost effective as a game such as Diablo II, but the online component and long term patching ate considerably into Blizzard's profits, and I doubt that Diablo III will be similar in that regard.
In addition to the problems mentioned in the other reply, involving yoru own hardware can make you far more liable for a situation than if you simply 'followed procedure'.
Whenever something goes wrong in a business environment, there is a fight over who gets the blame. Whenever something goes right, there is a fight over who gets the credit. The person actually responsible is rarely the victor, in either case.
Since CitiBank abandoned their
c2it service last year, PayPal now seems to be a monopoly by default.
Citibank simply lacked the knowledge to successfully stimulate their service's userbase. Proper manipulation of customers is key when attempting to peak profits and make people come back for more. Unfortunately CitiBank was to preoccupied with measuring itself against the competition tow orry about the satisfaction of others.
Private citizens flying to the other side of the globe for medical procedures is not outsourcing in the traditional sense; rather, it is yet another sign that malpractice insurance is crippling the medical industry here in the USA.
Outsourcing of technical support and programming, on the other hand, is a problem because US corporations who are benfitting from US protection and US tax breaks are sacrificng US workers in order to get labor done cheaper overseas, and using the increased profit margin to line executives pockets rather than offering consumers a lower price or higher quality. The upper ranks of the company, along with shareholders, theoretically, are the ones that benefit, while the workers that still have jobs are forced to work unpaid overtime to make up for what their former coworkers would be doing that cannot be sent overseas to be done.
Tariffs need to be placed on outsourced labor, with the procedes going to education. And of course Executive salaries need to be controlled, either directly or through taxes, but when executives can pay buy votes for a fraction of what they would lose each year if such reforms were made into law, I do not see that happening any time soon.
The second dimension is an abstraction that is used to describe an object or system where there re only two pertinent locational identifiers, either because the third dimension does not exist or it is not relevant because the system lies entirely on a single plane.
Slashdot Mirror
More appropriately:
1. Piss off your customers
2. Lose them to competitors
3. ?
4. !Profit
Who is rating this 'Informative'?
It's kind of creepy...
According to the article, the software only shows what name, age, and location the user is claiming. It does not provide any other information.
This is a well thought-out solution, as it provides the important information while still providing privacy to the user.
Unfortunately, for many teens any information is too much to share, and many parents think that any privacy is too much to allow.
The information is already in the wrong hands. It was born into the wrong hands.
She was dead; it mattered not.
It depends on the amount of abstraction that you are willing to accept. Game physics are currently focused on accuracy rather than results, which is why ragdolls go haywire and objects get stuck into corners and bounce out of the world at relativistic speeds.
A bucket of sand is a bucket of sand, so if you get a bucket from the beach, it does not matter exactly which grains of sand wind up in the bucket, or on the NPC. Thus, you 'scoop', and wind up with x cubic centimeters of sand in your bucket. You dump the bucket on an NPC, and the NPC gets covered in random sand particles.
A wall can easily be abstracted to a single entity, rather than the individual components. Drive a car through it, and the associate component's properties are used to determine how the wall breaks up into smaller pieces, but again, it really does not matter exactly how the wall breaks, or exactly how the bricks scatter. What matters is that there is now a hole in the wall, and the wall is now divided into smaller discrete objects and a mess of random bricks. Because the discrete entities do not form a solid body from the top of the previous wall to the bottom, they no longer offer support to whatever is above, potentially causing a chain reaction.
Digging a tunnel in an MMO is problemtic not because of technology, but because of other players. An engine could certainly be developed that allowed for the construction of tunnels, with location-based criteria for starting a tunnel, and valid tunneling areas defined underground. It could even have advanced engineering aspects such as shoring, cave-ins, and flooding. But the more robust you make a multiplayer system, the easier it is for one individual to ruin it for numerous others.
The idea of sneaking into the enemy's tunnel system and causing a cave-in is certainly enticing, and would be filled with peril and what not, but what about someone on your own team going down and causing that same cave-in, due to malice or incompetence? And where does all of the excavated dirt go? Player made mountains are perhaps of even greater concern...
Taking leaves from trees is reaching into assinine territory, but tree limbs are perfectly reasonable, and chopping down trees has been done many times. Perhaps not with molecular simulations of axe versus wood, but why bother? You hit the tree at a given location, it gets a notch. You hit the notch, and it gets bigger. Once ht notch is big enough, the tree falls over. If you spread your swings around, you get a bunch of little notches. Accuracy, strength, and technique could all be factored into the one end result, the goal of chopping down a tree.
Perhaps because athletic prowess is considered 'fair' by a large enough portion of the population; these people believe that anyone can become a great athlete with a little talent and enough hard training, and therefore athletes who succeed are role models for their hard work and dedication. Natural talent is acknowledged as a factor, but always overshadowed by the athletes own training and drive. Athletes are better than non-athletes because they are vastly dedicated to the pushing about of whatever ball catches their fancy, whereas 'genius' is considered a pretentious declaration of superiority, and asking for education that is different from the standard fare is tantamount to calling all of the other students stupid.
Extremely intelligent individuals are to be feared and shunned, for who are they to claim that they are inherently better than everyone else? This is America, where everyone is equal and has the same chance as everyone else of being great. It is the same 'reasoning' that prevents serious discussion of the difference in thinking patterns between men and women, or the possibility of inherent aptitudes based on genetic factors.
Currently, corporations are blessed with many of the benefits of citizenship, and few of the limitations.
What we need are reforms to greatly limit the impact that corpotations can have on individual citizens.
To start, a corporation suing an individual citizen must cover that citizens legal fees, up to a certain percentage of their own legal cost, for instance 25%.
The money will be paid up front on a monthly basis, and does not need to be returned under any circumstances.
Any taxes for the legal fee reimbursement will be paid by the corporation, such that the citizen recieves, after all applicable taxes, the required amount.
The legal fee reimbursement will not be considered income for purposes of welfare, disability, unemployment, etc, and can be used for any purpose with no limitations.
Obviously the first things corporations will do is claim that their legal costs are next to nothing, because all of their lawyers are on retainer, and thus 'free'
Good job at finding the loophole, Mr. Suit, that simply means that the assumed legal cost will be the monthly salary of each lawyer who touches the case, times the number of years that the case. Alternate compensation would also need to be considered, including stock options, company cars and houses, so forth and so on.
Under current market and legal conditions, often it is such that citizens have little to no recourse when corporations violate laws in a way harmful to said citizens.
And yet, the same corporations that are effectively immune to citizen retaliation can effortlessly bankrupt numerous citizens via legal entanglements.
Corporations should not be able to force citizens into disfavorable settlements that entail large fines and the sacrifice of the citizens rights and future liability by threatening a never-ending legal battle that will cost the citizen large amounts of money even to enlist a single lawyer for the duration of their defense.
Corporations may exist solely to turn a profit for the shareholders, but they are allowed to exist solely to benefit the economy and thus the country. Suing private citizens rarely has any kind of benefit beyond establishing corporate dominance over the citizen, which is certainly bad for the country, as the country is, in fact, said citizen.
Of course, I am in no way qualified for legal or economic analysis, so obviously all of this will no doubt cause an economic recession as the rights of the pitiful corporations are simply trampled upon by an uncaring, unfeeling mass of citizens, who the corporations have no means of stopping. Which would be rather similar to the current situation, except with the trampling being the other way around.
Most smoking bans are not in place because of disease concerns, but rather because many people find smoke to be distracting anf foul smelling.
One cigarrette can lessen a dining or movie experience for a large number of people, and over time the smoke and ash saturate the environment.
Thus even if there are nos mokers present, it can still smell, and therefore taste, of smoke.
If I were addicted to highly concentrated sulfur fumes, or banging symbols loudly, I would not expect establishments to tolerate me.
Crying babies are another issue, but at least the baby will eventually grow up into a productive member of society. In theory, that is.
If Alan Moore were making a deal out of something that did not concern him, then he would be an arrogant prick. But here is he, defending his honor, and being called a prick by some arrogant spud on the internet, and all we can talk about is Natalie Portman. What is this, Fark?
But enough about Moore, what about Gaiman? Nothing like a chapter from Books of Magic to steal Harry Potter's thunder. Hermione has nothing on Molly, that is for damn sure.
I predict a lot of police/fire showing up at my NOC because that is the address on record for the IP.
You expect a lots of law enforcement to show up looking for you, hmm? That does not sound suspicious at all...
Criminals using the internet for nefarious deeds, yet another reason to banish the whole thing. And Cell phones while we are at it. Protect me, Georgie!
Overclocking is not something that is generally done professionally; it is a hobby, simply to show off and make one feel important. The same is true of 'tricking out' a motor vehicle, or modding a PC case, or the entire industry of do-it-yourself interior decoration.
When rendering, and presumably other activities that might theoretically benefit from increased performance from overclocking such as data analysis and science simulations, your are often leaving the computers working overnight or over the weekend, and the last things that you want are crashes or visual errors due to unstable hardware. Sometimes I even underclock my rendering system, for it is far better for a render to take a few extra hours or days than to have the whole render wasted because somethign went wrong with your elite hacked overclocking with ten percent enhanced performance.
Overclocking also reduces the life of the components, noticeably when they are rendering at full capacity nearly 24/7 for most of the year.
There are certainly professionals that overclock, but they have either carefully weighed the cost benefit ratios and decided on the most logical course of action, or have had a series major setbacks and mistakes and are desperate to finish before the deadline next monday; the boss will not be happy when he finds out that another project is late because of your bumbling incompetency, Jones, so you had better move right in to your cubical for the next week, or you will find yourself moving right out, permanently. You can have that little wife of yours bring you meals; I certainly would not mind having her around the office. Maybe she will finally see reason and bail out on that train wreck of a career that you are conducting, and set her sights up closer to where her standards should be. And if not, she will still be something nice to look at. Tell her to wear something that will cheer you up...Man, this is going to be a Hell of a week. Now get back to work, Jones.
The primary issue with XBox backwards compatibility is that games were loaded onto the hard disk and played from there, and so many games used this functionality to go beyond simple cacheing nad integrated it into the way the game stored and processed information.
Lacking a hard drive, the 360 will have a hard time with games that used teh hard drive excessively.
Or did they add a hard drive to the 360? I value my ignorance of such things higher than my credibility with those who do not.
Forced ads would require control of the playback medium; it would need to be streamed, with no ability to fastforward or rewind, and the whims of buffering and internet traffic to deal with. Even if the ads were targetted and interesting, 'they' would not trust the viewers to watch them unless forced to, even though people use that three to seven minutes to go doing something away from the television already.
But if they were to distribute, the best manner would involve simply liscencing bittorrent and using that along with a few high quality seeders, rather than having everyone download directly. Less cost, les maintenance, more work for the consumer, is there any downside?
From the teachings of Buddha:
"Those who keep knowledge from you are setting a trap"
This attributation courtesy of google.
Luckily for the numerous suffering chilcren of the world, The Lord has a special place reserved for them in Heaven, and the wonders of eternity shall infinitely outnumber the woes of this existence.
Furthermore, God maintains a fairly 'hands off' policy since the birth, death, and resurrection of Christ. He now works primarily through the good will of humans, rather than by raining manna down on hungry masses.
If God made sure that all of would-be hungry children were not, then why stop there? Prevent all crime and cruelty, stop all wars and disease, disallow natural disasters and catastrophes.
And then without a doubt we would become spoiled and weak, and free will would become nonexistent.
Those children are starving not because God is cruel, but because humanity is cruel. Overpopulation and a lack of concern from most of the 'civilized' world are human problems, not divine ones. It is up to the more fortunate to help the less so.
Should an professional trainer come in during a little league baseball game and train some of the less athletic children? Sure those children might not enjoy being less able than the star players on that little diamond, but compared to the potential joy of the rest of their lives, such unhappiness is miniscule. Furthermore, it is up to the parents and coaches to improve and encourage the children, not an outside force whoc an guarantee success with no effort.
This is a fair sight worse than simply not wanting to hear what someone is saying; the lawyers do not want these things said at all, or for them to be heard by anyone, because then people might start questioning their power and seeking legal reforms, and we cannot have that, can we?
Here's hoping that I am not sued for posting this/
Perhaps one of the hundreds of Ronald Fitch's in the United States,least eleven of them found in Maine, would like to start a commune of sorts so that they can all share everything that is in their common name, since apparently your name on something implies ownership without question. Your philosophy of sharing via complete ownership is indeed novel.
A torrent client can provide you with a sutatined bandwidth load as wide as your pipe is; generally several hundred kB a second for standard broadband, and three or four times that for professional or academic connections. Furthermore these programs are left running twenty four hours a day in most cases, and there are millions of clients running worldwide.
In contrast, web pages are rather tiny, and you only load one every few minutes, or at most several times a minute. Certainly there are bloated flash-driven monstrosities pretending to be functional web pages, but they are in enough of a minority to not change the numbers by much.
I am going to throw some theoretical numbers at you, because I doubt he is going to give you any real numbers to contradict the ones that I am about to retrieve from that infinite repository of questionable facts that is my arse.
Let us assume that fifty people are paid directly by this game; this includes live content creators, the design team, 24 hour IT guys, and management at the companies involved. It does not include the full team that created the boxed product, or the Game Masters, or tech support.
If we take half of that monthly fee then that is an average of 27,000 a year, and we are left with 1.35 million.
The hourly customer service and GM support, being paid ten dollars an hour with an average of thirty people working twenty-four-seven ( A measly 1 to 834 ratio of customer to service assuming 25,000 as a peak average), which is another 216,000 a month. Multiply that if you want better ratios.
Assuming a consistent output of 5kB per player per second, and an average cieling of 25,000 players online at once, that is 128,125,000 bits per second, which is about 85% of an OC-3 pipe, which can cost 35-60 thousand a month, simply for their base bandwidth. They will need extra for patches, and will need reserve bandwidth on tap in case the load gets heavier than normal.
There is also several million dollars of server hardware, which needs to be maintaned, updated, upgraded, and expanded over its lifetime.
Massive games also have longer development time, with more people working on the project during that time, but the box costs the standard price of a stand alone game, which means the publisher needs to recoup the costs of paying for all of those extra salaries and that extra cooking time.
No doubt a fair bit of the monthly fee is pure profit, which is why you see so many massive games being released. But the entire development team is not running around with giant sacks of the playerss cash and laughing manically. Well, they might be, but eventually they will use that money to pay for the upkeep of the game.
The upkeep costs associated with massive online games have already been mentioned, but I would like to point out that even at fifteen dollars a month, Online games are still a far better dollar to entertainment hour purchase than three matinees a month. Perhaps not as cost effective as a game such as Diablo II, but the online component and long term patching ate considerably into Blizzard's profits, and I doubt that Diablo III will be similar in that regard.
In addition to the problems mentioned in the other reply, involving yoru own hardware can make you far more liable for a situation than if you simply 'followed procedure'.
Whenever something goes wrong in a business environment, there is a fight over who gets the blame. Whenever something goes right, there is a fight over who gets the credit. The person actually responsible is rarely the victor, in either case.
Citibank simply lacked the knowledge to successfully stimulate their service's userbase.
Proper manipulation of customers is key when attempting to peak profits and make people come back for more.
Unfortunately CitiBank was to preoccupied with measuring itself against the competition tow orry about the satisfaction of others.
Private citizens flying to the other side of the globe for medical procedures is not outsourcing in the traditional sense; rather, it is yet another sign that malpractice insurance is crippling the medical industry here in the USA.
Outsourcing of technical support and programming, on the other hand, is a problem because US corporations who are benfitting from US protection and US tax breaks are sacrificng US workers in order to get labor done cheaper overseas, and using the increased profit margin to line executives pockets rather than offering consumers a lower price or higher quality. The upper ranks of the company, along with shareholders, theoretically, are the ones that benefit, while the workers that still have jobs are forced to work unpaid overtime to make up for what their former coworkers would be doing that cannot be sent overseas to be done.
Tariffs need to be placed on outsourced labor, with the procedes going to education. And of course Executive salaries need to be controlled, either directly or through taxes, but when executives can pay buy votes for a fraction of what they would lose each year if such reforms were made into law, I do not see that happening any time soon.
The second dimension is an abstraction that is used to describe an object or system where there re only two pertinent locational identifiers, either because the third dimension does not exist or it is not relevant because the system lies entirely on a single plane.