I'm a major company. I spend billions of dollars on advertising every year. I give five people $40K apiece so they can quit their day job and do nothing but play WoW and build up for their 5-man arena team, and I've just spent $200K to have my company's name seen by the people who play the most popular game in the world. Worth it?
Many of the new zones now have a world PvP objective, in which one side, Horde/Alliance, needs to capture and hold certain points. Some of these objectives have interesting mechanics - the PvP point Halla in Nagrand has gryphon roosts that allow you to bomb out the center of the flag point before moving in. Fighting at these points rewards you with battle tokens that can be turned in for good armor and the like, and the side that holds a PvP objective often gains a zone-wide buff for their side as long as they hold it, like a +5% damage bonus. It's a bit of a pain on some PvE servers where the Alliance has a large population side, but it's otherwise good times with less BG queue.
You might think this is nuts, but Guild Wars pulled this off excillently... Ah, yes, because everyone knows about another MMO that does things better than WoW.
It may also help to follow the example of people like Cheapass Games and print your games on inexpensive material - very plain cardboard and the like, don't include dice or tokens in your packaging and encourage people to scrounge an old monopoly game for those things, and etc. The game itself may not hold up well to pressure, but if it's a good game, then maybe you'll get a grant to print it on heavier material anyway.
As a Mac user, and a fan of obscure music videos and Husker football games, it's been a serious source of annoyance that Launch and Yahoo Sports both require the latest version of Windows Media Player to run. And when there are so few diverse video sites out there, and the Oklahoma Sooners website linked straight to Yahoo Sports as the only place to hear the Big 12 Championship game for those of us living out of state, that means that sometimes you really miss out on content just for your choice of computer, much less your choice of browser, for which those sites also require IE on top of the Windows base interface. When a site as big as Yahoo makes it clear that they express a serious preference in browsing, that can have a real impact on market share for people who really want to get into a specific site.
I can't afford to own two computers right now, and I chose to buy a Mac because I prefer it for my "work" duties. Having said that, one of the reasons I originally opted to get into World of Warcraft was that I was bored, I wanted a game to get into, and I didn't own a Windows box - which pre-empts me from owning the vast majority of top-tier PC titles. I recall hearing from a videogame podcast at some point where an expansion pack for The Sims for the Mac had momentarily broke into the top 10 selling games of the week for any platform. That may speak to something about the general interests of people who run OS X, that they're more interested in The Sims than Half-Life, but there's still something to be said about the number of people who want to play PC games and want to do it on OS X. While the market is smaller, so is the competition. I'd love to see some kind of survey as to how that plays into the sale of certain Mac titles, and especially when applied to Blizzard titles.
Of course, in the case of World of Warcraft, the time spent to port the game may be worth it on profit for the fact that the game continues to pay the company every month as opposed to just a "1000 copies for $50" equation. It's also worth noting that some companies hire out-of-house programmers to port their work to OS X, but end up with buggy or otherwise lesser quality products as a result (see: Civilization IV).
When you put a Craigslist ad up, add the following to it:
DISCLAIMER: Responding to this ad is not a binding contract to deliver housing. Respondents are subject to be denied housing based on arbitrary issues of incompatibility with current tenants. Void where prohibited. Contact current tenant for details.
While it may be a bit overly "liberal," understand that it's a reaction to a period of time in which people of certain races were not allowed to rent outside of their own area. You quote "bigots" and sounding like some angry redneck type that puts on white masks and burn crosses, but what happens when some quiet, friendly landlord just decides that he'd rather not have those those "other people" renting out his rooms? What happens when a lot of landlords like that do it together unconsciously? Moreover, it's almost certainly going to be directed more at people who own the property that are looking for tenants more than people who are looking for a roommate and such - it's one thing to say that a white guy likely wouldn't want to share a flat with a black panther, but it's another to say that an apartment complex landlord refuses to rent to people of a certain race.
If you have a room to share, and a guy shows up at your apartment to look at the place, and he makes you uncomfortable because of his race / religion / etc., tell him that there are other people who have already been looking at the apartment, and if he calls back later, tell him that you found another roommate. Simple enough. If some bigot, though, is denying any sort of service, including housing space, to certain people, then yes, they should be forced into doing so. That's "We don't serve your kind here," and that's not good from any shape or form. Freedom of association only goes so far - just because a person has freedom of religion doesn't mean they're necessarily allowed to harass people who work at abortion clinics, either.
"The reason I never really got into MMORPGs, despite trying several including WOW was that you're living in a world where every real person is a hero."
Well, but that's a bit like saying everyone in the Justice League is like Batman or Superman. There's going to be a difference between the guild leader who main-tanks Naxx and the rogue who only gets into the run when there's an open DPS slot. You've probably got a lead priest who coordinates the healing. There's likely a guild on the server that everyone secretly wants to get into... or despises for it. And there's always the guy with the higher honor rating than you. It's more like being soldiers in an army than about being "heroes." Truth be told, the real heroes are NPC's.
Fox and Universal, coming off a long season of shitty movies run by shitty directors, suddenly decide that it would be a bad idea to make a sci-fi epic with a potentially large cult audience, with the backing of one of the modern era's most successful names in fantasy epics... because they think the director's a newbie. Boy, smart move, there.
Seriously, someone has to do it. I mean, wouldn't it be disappointing for the fifty Windows fanboys who have already posted to not have someone come in and apologize for Apple so that they can justify their +5 Insightful flames?
"Hi, kids! We make one of the most popular products in the tech world right now! And we'd just like you to know... that we messed up. There may be a virus on your iPod. You should check that. We're really sorry about it. You should make sure you're running anti-virus software, because this shit happens sometimes. Not just to us, but to a thousand other legitimate companies out there who just can't fully worm-proof their hardware every time. We just thought we'd let you know. I mean, you know how much you hate all that spyware and junk that you get on your computer? We hate that, too, and we kinda hope Windows does something about it someday since we have to be compatible with their OS to have any kind of market share."
I'm going to completely ignore any fault that Apple has in here as well, just to make you all angry. Now mark me down -1 Overrated, you totally non-fanboyish people, you.
...anti-Apple hateboys taking preemptive strikes at Apple apologists that haven't even spoken up yet. Welcome to another fun-filled Apple thread at Slashdot.
Seeing as how T2's stock price fluctuates a lot based on public fear of their constant litigation,even when they do win a few now and then, I'm not sure I'd go that far yet.
Well, you could always join a large group committed to aligning attacks and correspondence in order to make your voice heard by volume. But then you'll be ridiculed as a radical and news organizations will treat you as an anomaly that no one listens to. (e.g. MoveOn.org)
"You aren't doing yourself any favors when you talk about your constitutional rights being eroded. The constitution is supposed to serve as documentation of the rights and powers that the people have given to the government, not as documentation of the rights that the government gives to the people."
You have completely ignored the implications of the other posters, that this sort of legislation is unnecessary given the tools that we already have, and have attempted to switch the argument around to once again say that we cannot prosecute or capture terrorists without this bill. No one is saying that we should hold peace talks with al-Qaida, no one except for strawmen erected in the yards of Republican Congressmen to be smacked around as necessary. Don't ask to not be flamed if you're throwing around flamebait.
I'm not going to answer these trollish questions because they are foregone conclusions. If you want to make America "safer," don't continue loading us up with these bullshit bills that provide just as much pass to investigate people who are not al-Qaida suspects. Instead, foot the bill to intelligence agencies to increase the number of agents in the field, increase communcation with foreign relations. What we need right now is not a stronger net with barbs and poison - what we need are more nets. This bill does nothing to actually increase enforcement of policy - it only increases policy.
The answer to your last question, which many progressives have provided and many Democrats agree with, is that we need to begin phasing out military operations in Iraq so that we can shift funds to intelligence agencies, bring our National Guard troops back to home grounds so that they can be ready to serve as first-responders for attacks that slip through our intelligence webs, and to begin preparing for possible engagements with Iran. As long as we continue blowing as much money as possible on the Iraqi occupation, then we're going to continue to hamper ourselves in the real goal, which is protecting American soil from terrorists. No, not the "war against terrorism," but the "protection against terrorism," which involves proactive intelligence and military action based on that intelligence. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and read any further into your questioning.
I think the question you're opening up here is not, "Why would anyone go to such overexaggerated critiques for videogames?" but more, "Why would people go to such overexaggerated critiques for anything?" Such masturbatory criticisms are usually written for a specific audience - for people who like to read critiques. Naturally, those people want to see such things for everything...
Another explanation might be that many companies prefer students who have graduated rather than students still going to school. For one, the game release schedule doesn't always perfectly work into the summer - if you've got a game being released in September, you may need a guy who can work forty hours a week for three months before that. What's more, you may need someone who works fifty hours a week the few weeks before the release date to cover the final ground, just like everyone else at the company does, and if you're trying to balance class time against work time, you can often find yourself lacking for space in your schedule even more than the average programmer grunt.
I have to wonder if that wasn't part of Nintendo's decision to allow for region-free coding - that they realized that region coding ain't stopping anybody from pirating games to begin with...
When a Japanese game company releases a game, though, and doesn't plan on releasing an English version, do you think they'll turn on the region coding to deliberately shut out any potential import market, or they'll leave it off in the hopes of attracting a few extra buyers from overseas? Giving the option for region coding is likely for the companies with separate divisions - so that, say, Sega of America doesn't have to feel like they're competing with Sega of Japan on the same game. I'm guessing that for the most companies who do use the region coding, they'll probably be releasing a version in your area sooner or later anyway, so the lack of ability to import probably won't hurt as much, wihle smaller single-division companies will have a little more opportunity to pick up a niche audience.
I've been talking to other friends lately, and many of them say that they won't even finish a lot of the games they play, just because they don't have the time to do so, and playing through a game a second time quickly becomes a real luxury reserved for people with time. Yet many people who play through WoW create a second character, for three reasons - one, you don't feel like the end is so far out of reach that it's pointless to split your attention; two, the gameplay is different and has different rewards depending on the class that you choose and the paths that you take; and three, the gameplay at lower levels is still rewarding. When you look at the recent trend in console RPG's, I think there's a lesson that should be learned there about game design. I heard a lot of people telling me about how the new Dragon Warrior has some great old-school gameplay, but I just can't get myself excited enough to play through a game that innocuously huge that I know will take me a half a year to complete. The much hyped underground hit Disgaea, I picked up and began playing but sold on eBay halfway through the game because I didn't feel like I was being rewarded accordingly for the amount of time I was putting into it.
Games like Civilization, on the other hand, I'll not only play through one campaign, but eventually come back to play other campaigns, because I don't feel like I'm in an endless battle, nor do I feel like starting from the beginning puts me back on a trail that I can't complete. I can't stand to play a level 1 character in a standard RPG, because the real fun doesn't much start until you have several abilities. With games like WoW or Civilization, it's not so much that the early game is lacking so much as it's a separate entity. With Civ, you move from world building to intermediate diplomacy to the endgame race to complete your ultimate goal. With WoW, you go from simpler questing and personal grinding in the early game to the emphasis on five-man raiding after level 40 or so to the preparation for large raid content. The biggest difficulty is making early game content feel less like just a learning process and preparation for later material and feel more like its own separate part of the game. I would much rather see shorter games which emphasis on making the experience different each time you play the game than see games that focus on one huge, unique experience.
Another downside of sklil-based systems seems to be the lack of excitement in some of the choices that you get to make. When you play a melee class in D+D, you might obtain the ability to go into berserk mode, or get a strong pet and strong scouting skills, or a smattering of holy spells, or maybe just a lot of different melee feats. When you look at something like Gurps, you don't see a lot of truly unique skills like that. You get "karate" and "first aid" and the like, but you don't get "uncanny dodge" or "divine smiting" or "precise shot" and such, because abilities like that aren't things that get scaled over the amount of building points that you put into them. You don't have the huge wizard's spellbook like you do in D+D - instead, you just get "You gained three more experience points, so your fire magic does one more point of damage now." WhiteWolf systems, as well as Shadowrun, tend to feel similarly restricted, where you can do anything, but there's really a very small percentage of your game that's actually going to change because of the things you take. You're also usually going to fall into a particular archetype anyhow - the blaster, the tank, the healer, etc. - so most people don't feel that out of place with choosing classes. To some extent, even Hero System, with its total open-ended skill design, still tends to make it feel like every ability is the same at its core, though the ones with the time to crunch numbers can figure things out.
I think that's part of WoW's popularity as well. If I want to play a spellcasting class, do I want to be the mage with lots of different useful ice spells, or the one that just nukes for heavy fire damage? Or do I want to have the warlock's special debuffing power, or the shaman's versatility and melee strength, or a shadow priest with decent heal ability? And the excitement of hitting 40 for the first time and getting the talent at the top of one of your talent trees. For all the "customization" that skill-based systems provide, they rarely have the depth and uniqueness of options that class-based systems provide, since class-based systems are usually able to offer unique feats and abilities to different people rather than just making lowest-common-denominator abilities.
On the day that Cheapass Games, Steve Jackson Games, and Wizards of the Coast all simultaneously go out of business, please be sure to submit that story. But after ten, fifteen years of predicting the death of the non-electronic games industry, we're still waiting for the sky to hit ground. Yes, it's not a fad anymore, but neither is it necessarily unprofitable. People still play board games and card games, they still play D&D and GURPS, and judging by the massive crowd at the last prerelease tournament I went to, they still play Magic: the Gathering (in fact, the last core set has been getting rave reviews). Despite our new electronic religion, people who get together "IRL" still like to put down the joystick for a while and go do something outside of it. Long live the mass niche market.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a major company. I spend billions of dollars on advertising every year. I give five people $40K apiece so they can quit their day job and do nothing but play WoW and build up for their 5-man arena team, and I've just spent $200K to have my company's name seen by the people who play the most popular game in the world. Worth it?
Many of the new zones now have a world PvP objective, in which one side, Horde/Alliance, needs to capture and hold certain points. Some of these objectives have interesting mechanics - the PvP point Halla in Nagrand has gryphon roosts that allow you to bomb out the center of the flag point before moving in. Fighting at these points rewards you with battle tokens that can be turned in for good armor and the like, and the side that holds a PvP objective often gains a zone-wide buff for their side as long as they hold it, like a +5% damage bonus. It's a bit of a pain on some PvE servers where the Alliance has a large population side, but it's otherwise good times with less BG queue.
You might think this is nuts, but Guild Wars pulled this off excillently... Ah, yes, because everyone knows about another MMO that does things better than WoW.
It may also help to follow the example of people like Cheapass Games and print your games on inexpensive material - very plain cardboard and the like, don't include dice or tokens in your packaging and encourage people to scrounge an old monopoly game for those things, and etc. The game itself may not hold up well to pressure, but if it's a good game, then maybe you'll get a grant to print it on heavier material anyway.
As a Mac user, and a fan of obscure music videos and Husker football games, it's been a serious source of annoyance that Launch and Yahoo Sports both require the latest version of Windows Media Player to run. And when there are so few diverse video sites out there, and the Oklahoma Sooners website linked straight to Yahoo Sports as the only place to hear the Big 12 Championship game for those of us living out of state, that means that sometimes you really miss out on content just for your choice of computer, much less your choice of browser, for which those sites also require IE on top of the Windows base interface. When a site as big as Yahoo makes it clear that they express a serious preference in browsing, that can have a real impact on market share for people who really want to get into a specific site.
I can't afford to own two computers right now, and I chose to buy a Mac because I prefer it for my "work" duties. Having said that, one of the reasons I originally opted to get into World of Warcraft was that I was bored, I wanted a game to get into, and I didn't own a Windows box - which pre-empts me from owning the vast majority of top-tier PC titles. I recall hearing from a videogame podcast at some point where an expansion pack for The Sims for the Mac had momentarily broke into the top 10 selling games of the week for any platform. That may speak to something about the general interests of people who run OS X, that they're more interested in The Sims than Half-Life, but there's still something to be said about the number of people who want to play PC games and want to do it on OS X. While the market is smaller, so is the competition. I'd love to see some kind of survey as to how that plays into the sale of certain Mac titles, and especially when applied to Blizzard titles.
Of course, in the case of World of Warcraft, the time spent to port the game may be worth it on profit for the fact that the game continues to pay the company every month as opposed to just a "1000 copies for $50" equation. It's also worth noting that some companies hire out-of-house programmers to port their work to OS X, but end up with buggy or otherwise lesser quality products as a result (see: Civilization IV).
When you put a Craigslist ad up, add the following to it:
DISCLAIMER: Responding to this ad is not a binding contract to deliver housing. Respondents are subject to be denied housing based on arbitrary issues of incompatibility with current tenants. Void where prohibited. Contact current tenant for details.
While it may be a bit overly "liberal," understand that it's a reaction to a period of time in which people of certain races were not allowed to rent outside of their own area. You quote "bigots" and sounding like some angry redneck type that puts on white masks and burn crosses, but what happens when some quiet, friendly landlord just decides that he'd rather not have those those "other people" renting out his rooms? What happens when a lot of landlords like that do it together unconsciously? Moreover, it's almost certainly going to be directed more at people who own the property that are looking for tenants more than people who are looking for a roommate and such - it's one thing to say that a white guy likely wouldn't want to share a flat with a black panther, but it's another to say that an apartment complex landlord refuses to rent to people of a certain race.
If you have a room to share, and a guy shows up at your apartment to look at the place, and he makes you uncomfortable because of his race / religion / etc., tell him that there are other people who have already been looking at the apartment, and if he calls back later, tell him that you found another roommate. Simple enough. If some bigot, though, is denying any sort of service, including housing space, to certain people, then yes, they should be forced into doing so. That's "We don't serve your kind here," and that's not good from any shape or form. Freedom of association only goes so far - just because a person has freedom of religion doesn't mean they're necessarily allowed to harass people who work at abortion clinics, either.
"The reason I never really got into MMORPGs, despite trying several including WOW was that you're living in a world where every real person is a hero."
Well, but that's a bit like saying everyone in the Justice League is like Batman or Superman. There's going to be a difference between the guild leader who main-tanks Naxx and the rogue who only gets into the run when there's an open DPS slot. You've probably got a lead priest who coordinates the healing. There's likely a guild on the server that everyone secretly wants to get into... or despises for it. And there's always the guy with the higher honor rating than you. It's more like being soldiers in an army than about being "heroes." Truth be told, the real heroes are NPC's.
What he's actually saying is that WoW needs to be more like Second Life, Matrix Online, and other RPG's that it outsells by the millions.
Weird Al: the Troubadork
Fox and Universal, coming off a long season of shitty movies run by shitty directors, suddenly decide that it would be a bad idea to make a sci-fi epic with a potentially large cult audience, with the backing of one of the modern era's most successful names in fantasy epics... because they think the director's a newbie. Boy, smart move, there.
Seriously, someone has to do it. I mean, wouldn't it be disappointing for the fifty Windows fanboys who have already posted to not have someone come in and apologize for Apple so that they can justify their +5 Insightful flames?
"Hi, kids! We make one of the most popular products in the tech world right now! And we'd just like you to know... that we messed up. There may be a virus on your iPod. You should check that. We're really sorry about it. You should make sure you're running anti-virus software, because this shit happens sometimes. Not just to us, but to a thousand other legitimate companies out there who just can't fully worm-proof their hardware every time. We just thought we'd let you know. I mean, you know how much you hate all that spyware and junk that you get on your computer? We hate that, too, and we kinda hope Windows does something about it someday since we have to be compatible with their OS to have any kind of market share."
I'm going to completely ignore any fault that Apple has in here as well, just to make you all angry. Now mark me down -1 Overrated, you totally non-fanboyish people, you.
...anti-Apple hateboys taking preemptive strikes at Apple apologists that haven't even spoken up yet. Welcome to another fun-filled Apple thread at Slashdot.
Seeing as how T2's stock price fluctuates a lot based on public fear of their constant litigation,even when they do win a few now and then, I'm not sure I'd go that far yet.
Well, you could always join a large group committed to aligning attacks and correspondence in order to make your voice heard by volume. But then you'll be ridiculed as a radical and news organizations will treat you as an anomaly that no one listens to. (e.g. MoveOn.org)
"You aren't doing yourself any favors when you talk about your constitutional rights being eroded. The constitution is supposed to serve as documentation of the rights and powers that the people have given to the government, not as documentation of the rights that the government gives to the people."
...Um, Amendment IV?
You have completely ignored the implications of the other posters, that this sort of legislation is unnecessary given the tools that we already have, and have attempted to switch the argument around to once again say that we cannot prosecute or capture terrorists without this bill. No one is saying that we should hold peace talks with al-Qaida, no one except for strawmen erected in the yards of Republican Congressmen to be smacked around as necessary. Don't ask to not be flamed if you're throwing around flamebait.
I'm not going to answer these trollish questions because they are foregone conclusions. If you want to make America "safer," don't continue loading us up with these bullshit bills that provide just as much pass to investigate people who are not al-Qaida suspects. Instead, foot the bill to intelligence agencies to increase the number of agents in the field, increase communcation with foreign relations. What we need right now is not a stronger net with barbs and poison - what we need are more nets. This bill does nothing to actually increase enforcement of policy - it only increases policy.
The answer to your last question, which many progressives have provided and many Democrats agree with, is that we need to begin phasing out military operations in Iraq so that we can shift funds to intelligence agencies, bring our National Guard troops back to home grounds so that they can be ready to serve as first-responders for attacks that slip through our intelligence webs, and to begin preparing for possible engagements with Iran. As long as we continue blowing as much money as possible on the Iraqi occupation, then we're going to continue to hamper ourselves in the real goal, which is protecting American soil from terrorists. No, not the "war against terrorism," but the "protection against terrorism," which involves proactive intelligence and military action based on that intelligence. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and read any further into your questioning.
Anyone remember the "MTV Music Generator" created by Codemasters?
I think the question you're opening up here is not, "Why would anyone go to such overexaggerated critiques for videogames?" but more, "Why would people go to such overexaggerated critiques for anything?" Such masturbatory criticisms are usually written for a specific audience - for people who like to read critiques. Naturally, those people want to see such things for everything...
Another explanation might be that many companies prefer students who have graduated rather than students still going to school. For one, the game release schedule doesn't always perfectly work into the summer - if you've got a game being released in September, you may need a guy who can work forty hours a week for three months before that. What's more, you may need someone who works fifty hours a week the few weeks before the release date to cover the final ground, just like everyone else at the company does, and if you're trying to balance class time against work time, you can often find yourself lacking for space in your schedule even more than the average programmer grunt.
I have to wonder if that wasn't part of Nintendo's decision to allow for region-free coding - that they realized that region coding ain't stopping anybody from pirating games to begin with...
When a Japanese game company releases a game, though, and doesn't plan on releasing an English version, do you think they'll turn on the region coding to deliberately shut out any potential import market, or they'll leave it off in the hopes of attracting a few extra buyers from overseas? Giving the option for region coding is likely for the companies with separate divisions - so that, say, Sega of America doesn't have to feel like they're competing with Sega of Japan on the same game. I'm guessing that for the most companies who do use the region coding, they'll probably be releasing a version in your area sooner or later anyway, so the lack of ability to import probably won't hurt as much, wihle smaller single-division companies will have a little more opportunity to pick up a niche audience.
I've been talking to other friends lately, and many of them say that they won't even finish a lot of the games they play, just because they don't have the time to do so, and playing through a game a second time quickly becomes a real luxury reserved for people with time. Yet many people who play through WoW create a second character, for three reasons - one, you don't feel like the end is so far out of reach that it's pointless to split your attention; two, the gameplay is different and has different rewards depending on the class that you choose and the paths that you take; and three, the gameplay at lower levels is still rewarding. When you look at the recent trend in console RPG's, I think there's a lesson that should be learned there about game design. I heard a lot of people telling me about how the new Dragon Warrior has some great old-school gameplay, but I just can't get myself excited enough to play through a game that innocuously huge that I know will take me a half a year to complete. The much hyped underground hit Disgaea, I picked up and began playing but sold on eBay halfway through the game because I didn't feel like I was being rewarded accordingly for the amount of time I was putting into it.
Games like Civilization, on the other hand, I'll not only play through one campaign, but eventually come back to play other campaigns, because I don't feel like I'm in an endless battle, nor do I feel like starting from the beginning puts me back on a trail that I can't complete. I can't stand to play a level 1 character in a standard RPG, because the real fun doesn't much start until you have several abilities. With games like WoW or Civilization, it's not so much that the early game is lacking so much as it's a separate entity. With Civ, you move from world building to intermediate diplomacy to the endgame race to complete your ultimate goal. With WoW, you go from simpler questing and personal grinding in the early game to the emphasis on five-man raiding after level 40 or so to the preparation for large raid content. The biggest difficulty is making early game content feel less like just a learning process and preparation for later material and feel more like its own separate part of the game. I would much rather see shorter games which emphasis on making the experience different each time you play the game than see games that focus on one huge, unique experience.
Another downside of sklil-based systems seems to be the lack of excitement in some of the choices that you get to make. When you play a melee class in D+D, you might obtain the ability to go into berserk mode, or get a strong pet and strong scouting skills, or a smattering of holy spells, or maybe just a lot of different melee feats. When you look at something like Gurps, you don't see a lot of truly unique skills like that. You get "karate" and "first aid" and the like, but you don't get "uncanny dodge" or "divine smiting" or "precise shot" and such, because abilities like that aren't things that get scaled over the amount of building points that you put into them. You don't have the huge wizard's spellbook like you do in D+D - instead, you just get "You gained three more experience points, so your fire magic does one more point of damage now." WhiteWolf systems, as well as Shadowrun, tend to feel similarly restricted, where you can do anything, but there's really a very small percentage of your game that's actually going to change because of the things you take. You're also usually going to fall into a particular archetype anyhow - the blaster, the tank, the healer, etc. - so most people don't feel that out of place with choosing classes. To some extent, even Hero System, with its total open-ended skill design, still tends to make it feel like every ability is the same at its core, though the ones with the time to crunch numbers can figure things out.
I think that's part of WoW's popularity as well. If I want to play a spellcasting class, do I want to be the mage with lots of different useful ice spells, or the one that just nukes for heavy fire damage? Or do I want to have the warlock's special debuffing power, or the shaman's versatility and melee strength, or a shadow priest with decent heal ability? And the excitement of hitting 40 for the first time and getting the talent at the top of one of your talent trees. For all the "customization" that skill-based systems provide, they rarely have the depth and uniqueness of options that class-based systems provide, since class-based systems are usually able to offer unique feats and abilities to different people rather than just making lowest-common-denominator abilities.
"In agreement with the pending lawsuit, we have sent you a copy of our latest game, Bully, for your perusement."
And inside the package is a copy of Ping Pong. With the word "Bully" taped over the front.
On the day that Cheapass Games, Steve Jackson Games, and Wizards of the Coast all simultaneously go out of business, please be sure to submit that story. But after ten, fifteen years of predicting the death of the non-electronic games industry, we're still waiting for the sky to hit ground. Yes, it's not a fad anymore, but neither is it necessarily unprofitable. People still play board games and card games, they still play D&D and GURPS, and judging by the massive crowd at the last prerelease tournament I went to, they still play Magic: the Gathering (in fact, the last core set has been getting rave reviews). Despite our new electronic religion, people who get together "IRL" still like to put down the joystick for a while and go do something outside of it. Long live the mass niche market.