Remember: Time is money, pirating costs time, buying costs money. And you got it exactly right 17 year olds are more likely to not be able to afford a high end computer, so will have more antiquated computers.
I still play a lot of Quake III, so I bump into more 30 and 40 year olds there actually.:)
Also quick disclaimer: I've never played, downloaded, pirated or know anyone who plays Crysis 2.
So I'm looking at "Have fun playing on your antiquated hardware with a bunch of 17 year olds." and thinking, what? You need a little more of a meaty comment to chew on there.
But how many people kept it on their computers for over a week?
I'd bet a good chunk of those are from "Will my computer run Crysis 2?" or "Is this game worth buying or is it garbage?" throw in a few hoarders (You know, those ones who pirate everything, but never play a thing) on top of poor college students who are surviving on ramen noodles.
Also, since beta leaked before the actual final version, I'd bet many folks who bought it pirated it before hand, just to see if it would be worth their money.
By the way: Raid finder is only for the current tier raid (Deathwing) not older raids, you have it backwards. Big thing is it's on an "easy" difficulty only, so you don't get the "best" gear from it. This will probably change, most people are wanting to do normal and even heroic content with raid finder raids.
We'll probably see raid locks go away eventually, there's a hardcore mentality that things have to stay "hard" in terms of needing lots of time invested, instead of "hard" as a form of challenge. They serve an important purpose allowing people to take more time to finish raids, which tend to be giant instances taking hours and hours of time. If it takes you 6 hours to kill all the bosses, having your time investment go away after you leave is bad. Most guilds spread these across 2~3 days in smaller chunks. Many guilds even invest just an hour a night in raiding, making it their main focus.
As far as rez sickness, as well as the waiting time, they're an integral part of world pvp. Without them you end up in situations where new players are camped for hours on end.
It's more than just parents, it is a factor, but it isn't a big thing.
What would help more than anything would be simply to hire more teachers. Classes are overcrowded, and you have ratios of 50~70 students to one teacher.
In the past, students who fell behind could be caught and individually helped by teachers, right now, there's just too many students per teacher to be able to catch up, so students who don't get help at home don't have a chance. Add onto that kids today having to pick up more than their parents did, and you end up with even willing parents who can't help.
Money spent on building classrooms and hiring more teachers would go worlds beyond investing in laptops and other things. The ideal ratio is about 1 teacher for every 7 students, that isn't practical, but if we could get it to where it was 20 years ago (1 teacher for every 30 students) it would be an improvement.
They're using two types of controllers: The wii controllers and the new one. Most games will probably end up using the wii motion plus types of controllers.
It's not even a huge leap in innovation, they're bringing the same "gimmick" that turned out to be a giant success with the DS to a console.
It's also enough of a nod that Sony is listing their new PSP as being workable as a controller with PS3, and selling it as such.
Radio has completely replaced television news for me. I live in Minnesota, so our local public radio (Minnesota Public Radio) has very solid news. Commercial news outlets (other radio stations, television) have totally devolved to the point of not really having any actual news to me. Nothing on reporting the local legislature and goverment, nothing on local happenings aside from "people stories" and an increased take on always pushing whatever big crisis is going on.
What's sad is, most of the broadcasters are the same, and over the years I've seen worse and worse stories pushed on them, and you can see a sinking feeling on their end as things change up. They have gotten a little better lately, which is good, but they still obviously have awful stuff pushed on them by their parent company (which is sadly... Fox News)
As someone who's worked for years as a web developer: Knowing what browser people are using is 100% needed.
Mostly, you use it as a priority list as far as what browser bugs you're fixing, it's not as serious now, but I know there's many web developers waiting for IE6 usage to drop below.1% so they can safely ignore it.
Now, using content headers to "guess" which version of a page to serve up is wrong (you can easily use mobile stylesheets for that) but we're nowhere near that kind of real world application.
New music isn't the problem, it's that they're sitting on, basically, all music from the past century. Recording (compared to say, literature) is a new industry, and we don't have that much public domain to draw on.
We have roughly 75 years of public domain (mid 1850~1925 roughly) for recorded music. Before that everything is based more around performance art, as in you make your own, instead of you going out, and listening to a specific person perform, mainly the original artist. As a result, the RIAA sits on about half of the medium. This will become less significant over time of course, but we still have a long way before their chunk isn't "significant". Assuming they keep extending copyright, which has now been set solidly at "whenever steamboat willy came out".
Writing, by contrast, has thousands of years of public domain. And while we have some written music, even that doesn't go back as far, since we only have roughly 400 years worth of music. Offering little variety in comparison to ancient history and myth. Even considering it that way, the recording industry has a strangle hold on a quarter of the music we have in human collective memory, as far as spans of time.
If they set up Diablo 3 the same way as StarCraft 2...
Install restrictions -- Install on as many computers as you like, just have your account handy. Each install gets three "guest" accounts on the machine, which have no access to online play, and don't record achievements.
Internet connection -- there's a one time authentication, don't have internet connection on the computer you're installing on? There's a offline activation code available from the website. This supposedly has to be re-entered once a year if you don't connect online.
The future -- It's always playable in offline mode, it doesn't need battle.net to run, just for the online aspects. And given you can still actually buy Diablo I in stores, Blizzard keeps supporting most of its games.
The bugs -- They don't use sony style drm. Blizzards philosophy is to control the online space, and not worry about normal piracy. They see the future in online multiplayer and social gaming, thus the removal of lan in sc2, which takes out the legal loophole in South Korea starcraft I had.
They did ban people who were cheating single player mode while online. Those people were using it to get the online achievements and portraits, which are disabled when you use cheats normally, but not when you use a trainer to hack the game.
People who use trainers in offline mode for single player weren't banned, but they don't get achievements either (which is the point)
Honestly, if someone manages to hijack the password for my slashdot and forums accounts, its not that big a deal. At worst, they can pretend to be me on a forum somewhere.
I keep a few separate passwords for email, all of them secure, I keep a very secure one for banking type activities online that I change on a regular basis (same goes for email).
I keep another password for things I assume are completely insecure, and don't care if people break into it ever. This is for things like game downloads and the like.
For my actual bank... I don't go online, at all, it doesn't exist on my computer, I recieve bank records by mail, and keep them in a filing cabinet. Why? The bank "forgets" records after a few months, and charges a fee to dig through my accounts. So instead, I keep a permanant record so I have a physical court usable record of my finances, and deal with the bank for major issues in person directly. I can't get more secure than that.
As much as people fight against screen scrapers, they're always people who are your visitors trying to get at your content outside of a web browser. There's an exception for robots who are using them as spam sites, but those are more a niche trick.
So what do you do? You have to make ads a bit more flexible than just the fixed image. People want to scrape your site? Great! Make an RSS feed, but sneak a "Sponsored by Product X, The most fantastic thing ever!" into it. You create the same ad presence, and people don't become adverse to your product from intrusive advertising, but still get the catchy saying in their head.
A clean, machine readable, site is at the top of the index in search engines. And that's far more important to driving traffic to your site than making things hard to read for bad spiders. On top of that, you want your site to look good when pulled up on someones cell phone while looking up data, and as more and more of the web goes away from the classic desktop setup, this gets more and more important.
Most of what I learned about chemistry came from an old science kit from my dad as well as a book that he had as a child growing up (with lots of physical experiments as well) I also got a full dissection kit from my grandfather when I was eight.
I was also learning how to cook starting when I was seven, and made an absolutely horrid cake (okay sweetie, you pick the ingredients, and lets see how it works!) amazingly, it was edible...
Talking about removing rulers from science kits seems like a slippery slope to me, my science kit had razors, beakers, a tealight bunsen burner, needles and tweezers.
Put a label on it and say adult supervision required, and trust the adult to keep the kids from whacking eachother over the head with sticks. A bratty kid who pokes another kid bad enough to seriously injure them will find something outside the science kit to do the same thing, taking things out of the science kit wont do a bit of good.
Its an interesting point of view, in recent years, many companies have been pushing the view that products they make are also their intellectual property, in addition to software. Some people see this acceptable, as you do, others think this is a horrible thing, and don't accept it.
For your toaster example, as a customer, you actually do have the right to go to Wal-Mart, take a $20 toaster, and say you only want to pay $10 for it. That's called haggling over the price, which is perfectly legal. Many places still are fine with haggling, especially if its on something they know probably wont sell anytime soon, although they may say no deal as well.
But lets say, you buy an alarm clock for $10, and you can modify it so it becomes a toaster. You're still in your rights to do that as well. The alarm clock maker's company may say what you've created is an abonination, and you voided your warrenty, but that's not stealing, its altering something you own.
Companies are trying to create a new idea, which is everything they make is intellectual property, so they own it, even if they sell the product, since the product is their "idea". This hasn't happened yet though, the laws still side with consumers for the most part on this, but they're trying to push the law in their favour, so that anything companies (or people) make is owned by the person who makes it, not the one who bought it, which is what all of this arguing is about.
Its a movement towards the elimination of personal property, and making everything owned by the companies who produce the goods when carried out to its extreme.
I've seen several great open source projects out there fail. No matter how great your programmers are, you still need direction.
A distinction needs to be drawn , there are programmers out there who make good project leads, and there are programmers out there who have a good aesthetic sense. More often than not, some poor schmo who's godly at code but horrible at project management gets stuck with the job.
The commercial model is out there because it works. You can adapt it for things that don't necessarily turn a profit, but are maintainable over a long period of time. Any project without guidance will fail, open source, closed source, commercial or just for fun. There always has to be someone leading the direction of it.
Given the time spans involved, it's pretty practical to assume that entire families and social groups will be the traders. One ship would probably be more likely to have several families moving along, not just isolated individuals. Remember, given the time frame these ships would operate on, they'd need a small stable population to continue, and people would also settle on planets they arrived at even if most of the population is stable on the ship.
Although, assuming that you have lousy workers to choose from, it just means the company can pay them in living goods and supporting them over the journey.
When the local CompUSA was closing down they were selling very heavily discounted copies of Visa, I came back a few times to look around for bargains and the Visa copies just sat there, 50% off, 75% off, it didn't matter, nobody bought them.
Visa is a horrid operating system, I just hope whatever they release next isn't such a horrid mess, although by then I might even think of moving to a Mac.
Black Morass is actually so nasty (and it was even worse near the release of BC) that one of the mages in my guild, fully decked out in epics, refuses to even run regular Black Morass because of the sheer nightmares he remembers.
Actually, IE tends to be only in the majority on weekdays, and towards weekends firefox starts taking up 30% of the browser share. During the week, IE 7 has about 30% share, and IE 6 50% (it's slowly losing ground), and firefox 10%. With a mix of browsers after that.
My personal sites get around 60% firefox views, so I'm guessing at home, more people use firefox, and at work, ie. I'd say in releasing IE 8 they should just assume standards compliance, forcing it to use standards is a giant headache. But if they added the tag to force IE 7 rendering it would be more optimal (adding a single tag is much lower maintainance than redesigning a whole site).
Right now it's more of a rough time for the web as everyone adapts and consolidates to a single standard, and everything gets streamlined, it's slow, clunky, and works badly, but as time goes on everything will be smoothed out more.
I hope that when html 5 finally rolls out, IE will get something that will simply be assumed to be compliant across the board and keep rendering to spec, or as close to it as possible.
I used to play Ragnarok Online, I loved the game horribly, and it still has a special place in my heart (I actually have a tiny alchemist figurine on the bookshelf in my bedroom). I played for six years, went through several server wipes during the beta phases (I was in open, then closed beta, and skipped over until retail) and despite the long horrible grind the game is actually quite fun in a silly way.
I switched over to wow after realizing I could run a rabidly hardcore raiding guild with less time than it took to level in Ragnarok. I now run a laid back casual raiding guild and have much more time in my life.
However, Ragnarok is actually working to making the game less of a grind by letting players level while afk to some extent, basically copying the swarms of bots that infest the game (a large number of which arn't there for money, but just to level characters). With the mercenary system, and the homunculous for alchemist, you can make a sandwich have dinner, do some cleaning, and still catch up with your friends.
As far as activity goes, 2400 hours of activity can be called casual, just not all together. For example, if someone spends 4 hours a week on World of Warcraft, it would take them 1.64 years (600 weeks) to build up 2400 hours game time.
This would usually be someone who spends a couple hours during the week, and on weekends goes "all out" and plays two hours. I'd say it's casual and more fun than watching tv.:)
People like to fight. In a pure RP (role play) world, they'll have RP fights, but without game support, it's likely to become a school-boy wankfest. "I shot you!" "No, you missed, loooser". "Yo mamma wears army shoes, you ****head!!". At least with game support, you can tell who shot whom.
It doesn't work quite that abstractly, every single mmo I've been to that's pure RP (including muds) tends to include a "roll an x number of x sided die" command. So they basically play out similar to an online version of classic kitchen table rpgs. Not everyone uses the same rules, and often situations like that involve talking out out of character what happens.
Without dice, the above one would go along the lines of "I shoot at you!" "I dodge!" (ooc You've already dodged three times, remember? That's your last one, next time you get hit!) (Oh fine, but you can't make it a lethal shot) (Okok) "I shoot again!" "I get shot in the knee, limping and glowering at you, "Alright I yield!""
There's still wankers who powerplay, but they quickly get added to ignore lists.
Slashdot Mirror
I was talking about pirates, not myself. :P
Remember: Time is money, pirating costs time, buying costs money. And you got it exactly right 17 year olds are more likely to not be able to afford a high end computer, so will have more antiquated computers.
I still play a lot of Quake III, so I bump into more 30 and 40 year olds there actually. :)
Also quick disclaimer: I've never played, downloaded, pirated or know anyone who plays Crysis 2.
So I'm looking at "Have fun playing on your antiquated hardware with a bunch of 17 year olds." and thinking, what? You need a little more of a meaty comment to chew on there.
But how many people kept it on their computers for over a week?
I'd bet a good chunk of those are from "Will my computer run Crysis 2?" or "Is this game worth buying or is it garbage?" throw in a few hoarders (You know, those ones who pirate everything, but never play a thing) on top of poor college students who are surviving on ramen noodles.
Also, since beta leaked before the actual final version, I'd bet many folks who bought it pirated it before hand, just to see if it would be worth their money.
You don't need a terrorist organization, we have what's needed to do this already.
Anybody with a vendetta against a website can basically shut it down with a bit of effort, pretending to be an organization.
Good old fashioned internet trolls will cause mass chaos if this actually goes into effect as written.
By the way: Raid finder is only for the current tier raid (Deathwing) not older raids, you have it backwards. Big thing is it's on an "easy" difficulty only, so you don't get the "best" gear from it. This will probably change, most people are wanting to do normal and even heroic content with raid finder raids.
We'll probably see raid locks go away eventually, there's a hardcore mentality that things have to stay "hard" in terms of needing lots of time invested, instead of "hard" as a form of challenge. They serve an important purpose allowing people to take more time to finish raids, which tend to be giant instances taking hours and hours of time. If it takes you 6 hours to kill all the bosses, having your time investment go away after you leave is bad. Most guilds spread these across 2~3 days in smaller chunks. Many guilds even invest just an hour a night in raiding, making it their main focus.
As far as rez sickness, as well as the waiting time, they're an integral part of world pvp. Without them you end up in situations where new players are camped for hours on end.
It's more than just parents, it is a factor, but it isn't a big thing.
What would help more than anything would be simply to hire more teachers. Classes are overcrowded, and you have ratios of 50~70 students to one teacher.
In the past, students who fell behind could be caught and individually helped by teachers, right now, there's just too many students per teacher to be able to catch up, so students who don't get help at home don't have a chance. Add onto that kids today having to pick up more than their parents did, and you end up with even willing parents who can't help.
Money spent on building classrooms and hiring more teachers would go worlds beyond investing in laptops and other things. The ideal ratio is about 1 teacher for every 7 students, that isn't practical, but if we could get it to where it was 20 years ago (1 teacher for every 30 students) it would be an improvement.
There's an easier alibi, which is being completely honest:
I was really curious where the fedex truck would end up, so just for kicks, I fedexed my phone to myself.
I wanted to see why they were taking so damned long to get my packages to me.
They're using two types of controllers: The wii controllers and the new one. Most games will probably end up using the wii motion plus types of controllers.
It's not even a huge leap in innovation, they're bringing the same "gimmick" that turned out to be a giant success with the DS to a console.
It's also enough of a nod that Sony is listing their new PSP as being workable as a controller with PS3, and selling it as such.
Radio has completely replaced television news for me. I live in Minnesota, so our local public radio (Minnesota Public Radio) has very solid news. Commercial news outlets (other radio stations, television) have totally devolved to the point of not really having any actual news to me. Nothing on reporting the local legislature and goverment, nothing on local happenings aside from "people stories" and an increased take on always pushing whatever big crisis is going on.
What's sad is, most of the broadcasters are the same, and over the years I've seen worse and worse stories pushed on them, and you can see a sinking feeling on their end as things change up. They have gotten a little better lately, which is good, but they still obviously have awful stuff pushed on them by their parent company (which is sadly... Fox News)
Yes, Wings of Liberty and Heart of the Swarm will also be on separate ladders as well.
As someone who's worked for years as a web developer: Knowing what browser people are using is 100% needed.
Mostly, you use it as a priority list as far as what browser bugs you're fixing, it's not as serious now, but I know there's many web developers waiting for IE6 usage to drop below .1% so they can safely ignore it.
Now, using content headers to "guess" which version of a page to serve up is wrong (you can easily use mobile stylesheets for that) but we're nowhere near that kind of real world application.
New music isn't the problem, it's that they're sitting on, basically, all music from the past century. Recording (compared to say, literature) is a new industry, and we don't have that much public domain to draw on.
We have roughly 75 years of public domain (mid 1850~1925 roughly) for recorded music. Before that everything is based more around performance art, as in you make your own, instead of you going out, and listening to a specific person perform, mainly the original artist. As a result, the RIAA sits on about half of the medium. This will become less significant over time of course, but we still have a long way before their chunk isn't "significant". Assuming they keep extending copyright, which has now been set solidly at "whenever steamboat willy came out".
Writing, by contrast, has thousands of years of public domain. And while we have some written music, even that doesn't go back as far, since we only have roughly 400 years worth of music. Offering little variety in comparison to ancient history and myth. Even considering it that way, the recording industry has a strangle hold on a quarter of the music we have in human collective memory, as far as spans of time.
If they set up Diablo 3 the same way as StarCraft 2...
Install restrictions -- Install on as many computers as you like, just have your account handy. Each install gets three "guest" accounts on the machine, which have no access to online play, and don't record achievements.
Internet connection -- there's a one time authentication, don't have internet connection on the computer you're installing on? There's a offline activation code available from the website. This supposedly has to be re-entered once a year if you don't connect online.
The future -- It's always playable in offline mode, it doesn't need battle.net to run, just for the online aspects. And given you can still actually buy Diablo I in stores, Blizzard keeps supporting most of its games.
The bugs -- They don't use sony style drm. Blizzards philosophy is to control the online space, and not worry about normal piracy. They see the future in online multiplayer and social gaming, thus the removal of lan in sc2, which takes out the legal loophole in South Korea starcraft I had.
They did ban people who were cheating single player mode while online. Those people were using it to get the online achievements and portraits, which are disabled when you use cheats normally, but not when you use a trainer to hack the game.
People who use trainers in offline mode for single player weren't banned, but they don't get achievements either (which is the point)
Their critieria is a bit strict.
Honestly, if someone manages to hijack the password for my slashdot and forums accounts, its not that big a deal. At worst, they can pretend to be me on a forum somewhere.
I keep a few separate passwords for email, all of them secure, I keep a very secure one for banking type activities online that I change on a regular basis (same goes for email).
I keep another password for things I assume are completely insecure, and don't care if people break into it ever. This is for things like game downloads and the like.
For my actual bank... I don't go online, at all, it doesn't exist on my computer, I recieve bank records by mail, and keep them in a filing cabinet. Why? The bank "forgets" records after a few months, and charges a fee to dig through my accounts. So instead, I keep a permanant record so I have a physical court usable record of my finances, and deal with the bank for major issues in person directly. I can't get more secure than that.
As much as people fight against screen scrapers, they're always people who are your visitors trying to get at your content outside of a web browser. There's an exception for robots who are using them as spam sites, but those are more a niche trick.
So what do you do? You have to make ads a bit more flexible than just the fixed image. People want to scrape your site? Great! Make an RSS feed, but sneak a "Sponsored by Product X, The most fantastic thing ever!" into it. You create the same ad presence, and people don't become adverse to your product from intrusive advertising, but still get the catchy saying in their head.
A clean, machine readable, site is at the top of the index in search engines. And that's far more important to driving traffic to your site than making things hard to read for bad spiders. On top of that, you want your site to look good when pulled up on someones cell phone while looking up data, and as more and more of the web goes away from the classic desktop setup, this gets more and more important.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/21654883/The-Golden-Book-of-Chemistry-Experiments for a link to the book.
Most of what I learned about chemistry came from an old science kit from my dad as well as a book that he had as a child growing up (with lots of physical experiments as well) I also got a full dissection kit from my grandfather when I was eight.
I was also learning how to cook starting when I was seven, and made an absolutely horrid cake (okay sweetie, you pick the ingredients, and lets see how it works!) amazingly, it was edible...
Talking about removing rulers from science kits seems like a slippery slope to me, my science kit had razors, beakers, a tealight bunsen burner, needles and tweezers.
Put a label on it and say adult supervision required, and trust the adult to keep the kids from whacking eachother over the head with sticks. A bratty kid who pokes another kid bad enough to seriously injure them will find something outside the science kit to do the same thing, taking things out of the science kit wont do a bit of good.
Its an interesting point of view, in recent years, many companies have been pushing the view that products they make are also their intellectual property, in addition to software. Some people see this acceptable, as you do, others think this is a horrible thing, and don't accept it.
For your toaster example, as a customer, you actually do have the right to go to Wal-Mart, take a $20 toaster, and say you only want to pay $10 for it. That's called haggling over the price, which is perfectly legal. Many places still are fine with haggling, especially if its on something they know probably wont sell anytime soon, although they may say no deal as well.
But lets say, you buy an alarm clock for $10, and you can modify it so it becomes a toaster. You're still in your rights to do that as well. The alarm clock maker's company may say what you've created is an abonination, and you voided your warrenty, but that's not stealing, its altering something you own.
Companies are trying to create a new idea, which is everything they make is intellectual property, so they own it, even if they sell the product, since the product is their "idea". This hasn't happened yet though, the laws still side with consumers for the most part on this, but they're trying to push the law in their favour, so that anything companies (or people) make is owned by the person who makes it, not the one who bought it, which is what all of this arguing is about.
Its a movement towards the elimination of personal property, and making everything owned by the companies who produce the goods when carried out to its extreme.
I've seen several great open source projects out there fail. No matter how great your programmers are, you still need direction.
A distinction needs to be drawn , there are programmers out there who make good project leads, and there are programmers out there who have a good aesthetic sense. More often than not, some poor schmo who's godly at code but horrible at project management gets stuck with the job.
The commercial model is out there because it works. You can adapt it for things that don't necessarily turn a profit, but are maintainable over a long period of time. Any project without guidance will fail, open source, closed source, commercial or just for fun. There always has to be someone leading the direction of it.
Given the time spans involved, it's pretty practical to assume that entire families and social groups will be the traders. One ship would probably be more likely to have several families moving along, not just isolated individuals. Remember, given the time frame these ships would operate on, they'd need a small stable population to continue, and people would also settle on planets they arrived at even if most of the population is stable on the ship.
Although, assuming that you have lousy workers to choose from, it just means the company can pay them in living goods and supporting them over the journey.
When the local CompUSA was closing down they were selling very heavily discounted copies of Visa, I came back a few times to look around for bargains and the Visa copies just sat there, 50% off, 75% off, it didn't matter, nobody bought them.
Visa is a horrid operating system, I just hope whatever they release next isn't such a horrid mess, although by then I might even think of moving to a Mac.
Black Morass is actually so nasty (and it was even worse near the release of BC) that one of the mages in my guild, fully decked out in epics, refuses to even run regular Black Morass because of the sheer nightmares he remembers.
Actually, IE tends to be only in the majority on weekdays, and towards weekends firefox starts taking up 30% of the browser share. During the week, IE 7 has about 30% share, and IE 6 50% (it's slowly losing ground), and firefox 10%. With a mix of browsers after that.
My personal sites get around 60% firefox views, so I'm guessing at home, more people use firefox, and at work, ie. I'd say in releasing IE 8 they should just assume standards compliance, forcing it to use standards is a giant headache. But if they added the tag to force IE 7 rendering it would be more optimal (adding a single tag is much lower maintainance than redesigning a whole site).
Right now it's more of a rough time for the web as everyone adapts and consolidates to a single standard, and everything gets streamlined, it's slow, clunky, and works badly, but as time goes on everything will be smoothed out more.
I hope that when html 5 finally rolls out, IE will get something that will simply be assumed to be compliant across the board and keep rendering to spec, or as close to it as possible.
I used to play Ragnarok Online, I loved the game horribly, and it still has a special place in my heart (I actually have a tiny alchemist figurine on the bookshelf in my bedroom). I played for six years, went through several server wipes during the beta phases (I was in open, then closed beta, and skipped over until retail) and despite the long horrible grind the game is actually quite fun in a silly way.
I switched over to wow after realizing I could run a rabidly hardcore raiding guild with less time than it took to level in Ragnarok. I now run a laid back casual raiding guild and have much more time in my life.
However, Ragnarok is actually working to making the game less of a grind by letting players level while afk to some extent, basically copying the swarms of bots that infest the game (a large number of which arn't there for money, but just to level characters). With the mercenary system, and the homunculous for alchemist, you can make a sandwich have dinner, do some cleaning, and still catch up with your friends.
As far as activity goes, 2400 hours of activity can be called casual, just not all together. For example, if someone spends 4 hours a week on World of Warcraft, it would take them 1.64 years (600 weeks) to build up 2400 hours game time.
:)
This would usually be someone who spends a couple hours during the week, and on weekends goes "all out" and plays two hours. I'd say it's casual and more fun than watching tv.
It doesn't work quite that abstractly, every single mmo I've been to that's pure RP (including muds) tends to include a "roll an x number of x sided die" command. So they basically play out similar to an online version of classic kitchen table rpgs. Not everyone uses the same rules, and often situations like that involve talking out out of character what happens.
Without dice, the above one would go along the lines of "I shoot at you!" "I dodge!" (ooc You've already dodged three times, remember? That's your last one, next time you get hit!) (Oh fine, but you can't make it a lethal shot) (Okok) "I shoot again!" "I get shot in the knee, limping and glowering at you, "Alright I yield!""
There's still wankers who powerplay, but they quickly get added to ignore lists.