So the GPL license to Linux is pulled for the entire company.
Impossible. By the nature of the GPL license, the author has no right to "pull" it from any user. Only someone who violates the GPL will suffer (and that's automatic, without any action taken by the original author).
The only conceivable way the entire company could lose rights is if the infringing action had be by the company, ie Bob was instructed to do it as part of his job.
And of course, reverse-engineering BK wasn't in Tridge's work assignment...
I skimmed TFA inadequately before posting, and made a mistake about how Sony is actually conducting this. Although that's mainly because their approach to the problem is so wrong-headed, I didn't believe anyone would actually try this.
Gold-farmers and other people who profit by the exchange of in-game resources have been an irritation in MMORPGs for a while, because the presence of people who are treating something as a job makes it less enjoyable to those who want it to be a fun escape. Rampant professionalism robs the "game" of spontaneity and makes it a regimented bore.
Naturally, the game publishers must combat this effect, and they have two obvious ways to do so: 1) forbid the practice, and aggressively ban anyone who is caught selling items, as Blizzard does in Warcraft, or 2) usurp the practice, and sell items themselves, using their inifinitely superior production speeds to undercut whatever prices for-profit gold-farmers ask.
Each of those options has its downsides, but they both can be basically effective. But Sony is bizzarely following a different approach: facilitate the predictable transfer of money for items, which will only increase the.
That is such a bad idea, I'm still having trouble believing they're stupid enough to try it. Maybe they're faking it, and have an alternate secret plan in mind: 3) by legitimizing item trading, they can monitor and control it, and throttle-down the rate of sales so no professional players can profit. 4) they will secretly enter the item-selling business themselves: their Game Master players, who have the ability to instantly summon an item of any rarity, will enter into auctions themselves, always undercutting by 15% whatever prices real players can charge for an item. This is just a more secretive version of (2), above, and may be designed to slow down player dissatisfaction at a hyper-commercialized game.
Note, I was taking the longer-term view, that if game-items are exchangable for real cash, Sony will eventually join those auctions themselves. That is their only sane way to implement it, but they might not do so.
then how many people are really going to skip the journey?
Some of them will, because they have extra dollars sitting around, or because they genuinely want to see the gorgeous 3-d model of the Sword Of Pwnitude, or because they like to spoil other peoples' fun.
And once that happens, everyone else who is working through the missions "honestly" will feel silly, as they are visibily reminded that the "challenges" they are facing are completely arbitrary inventions of a game master. Like motorcycles at the tour-de-france. (Oh, sure, SOME people will continue playing without taking shortcuts, but their numbers will shrink, and the effect will be negative)
By grabbing for short-term profit from item sales, Sony is damaging their long-term income from ongoing subscriptions.
There's no complicated quest to get this, it's just wandering around killing shit till you get the pieces.
That's an example of a poor game design (or at least a game design which you don't personally enjoy). The correct solution would've been to build a better game initially, not allow people to skip the boring parts of your game for an extra fee.
So in a way, the selling of game-items is a telltale symptom that the gameplay isn't working out like it should.
. If Sony is making a game where it's possible to win/earn actual money,
There is no indication that they are. In fact, they're doing the opposite: preventing players from earning real dollars in game.
Sony will start selling game-property for real cash. But will they pay YOU cash to turn in game items? Of course not! If they want more epic dragonskin breastplates, they can create more with a mouse-click.
Currently, some players do earn money in the game, by selling "gold" on IGE to other players. Once Sony starts selling gold themselves, that market will go away, because nobody else will be able to compete with Sony's miniscule labor costs and prime advertising position.
What Sony's doing here isn't legally different from how arcade videogames work: put in cash, get some extra-lives for your character. Both skill and luck factor into how long those lives hold out, but it doesn't matter legally, since you have no way to extract coins from the machine once it's accepted them.
What's the difference if the "rocks" are instead just pixels, with their rarity controlled by a loot table rather than via access to stockpiles of goods secured in vaults?
Even if there isn't a difference, that's no defense. The DeBeers diamond monopoly is a BAD THING for the world at large- ask any economist. It's a fake market based on false scarcity creating false value. It fools people into spending "just half a year's salary" on rocks with no practical purpose. So if SOE's EQ monopoly functions similarly, it will also be BAD.
What I'm not seeing in your post (informative btw) is who's the loser in this situation.
In the long term, it's both the players and Sony who lose, because selling items makes the game less fun, and everyone unsubscribes (sooner than they would've otherwise). Of course, that's a simplification, but it will happen partially.
# Player wants items, doesn't want to grind, buys items - winner
That won't stay true for very long. Once players are more exposed to the fact that the items have a fixed real-world dollar value, their in-game attraction to them will decrease.
Remember that theoretically, a game is a journey, not a destination. As a wise man said, "If you find winning the game more fun than playing the game, you are..." um, I don't remember the rest. But it was very wise. Point is, the process of getting those items and the achievement of winning quests is what should make the game fun and memorable. Not the sparkly Crown of Lordly Magnificence you get when the dragon is beat.
Just imagine if Valve published two versions of Half-Life in stores: the $50 one like the normal game, and a $70 one which skips all gameplay and just gives you the winning cutscenes.
Or what if I were playing football, and I bribed 2 of the opposing team to limp for the rest of the game. Is that fun, really?
Governments control the supply of housing by using zoning to restrict the land available.
Governments control the supply of tobacco and alcohol by requiring licenses for the production and sale of these.
Wrong. The government doesn't "control", it "limits" and "influences". The USA government couldn't decide there will be 90 trillion new homes for sale tommorrow.
There is a huge difference between the power wielded in-game by SOE and real-world by a mortal government. The game administrator can spawn or delete millions of (previously) rare items with a single mouse-click. The USA government can only instruct people to speed or slow the rate of creation/deletion of an item. They can't conjure matter from nothing, and they can't even remove items without violating the Fifth Amendment of the USA Constitution.
There is no difference at all between what we're seeing here and a classic economic system.
There are huge differences. As the editor of The Economist said: "Real economies aim to maximize efficiency. Game economies aim to maximize fun, and fun is inherently inefficient"
you trade your hours (in the form of money) for someone else's hours (in the form of game goods).
Nope. If IGE or a random player on ebay.com is selling game goods, then it would be true: your money rents their hours.
But when Sony Entertainment, the operator of the game, starts selling game items for real money, you aren't renting hours of their time; less than a second in fact. How long to you think it takes a server script to deduct $10 from your balance and add 10,000,000 to your character's wealth number?
That happens in a millisecond. It's quite close to as if the seller is creating the item from nothing.
No difference selling game goods than trading Dollars on forex
To the extent that is true, it's an indictment of the USA's irresponsibly expanding federal deficeit, not a defense of SOE.
1) People can already buy their end-game setup at the beginning.
Previously, to do so was in violation of most subscription agreements. There were obstacles: there was a moderate risk of fraud, some players would balk on principle, and most importantly of all, many players would not even think to look for AO credits on ebay.
When the game publisher themselves get into the act, that all changes. The sales become totally legitimized, safe, and well-advertised as part of the in-game GUI. Whatever effects item-selling had before, they will be magnified one hundred fold.
I'd argue that those effects were already detrimental to game enjoyment, so EQ will just get worse now.
2) People who are serious about the game are already spending the money.
Talking to members of high-power guilds, this certainly doesn't seem to be true. (Unless prehaps they are lying to me, because they don't want to get their account banned if I report them as violating the subscription agreement)
3) Not everything can be traded. I've never played EQ, but in AO, there are a lot of NODROP items that can't be transfered.
That's somewhat illogical to mention, or at least presumes schizophrenic behavior from SOE. NODROP items (aka "Bind on Acquire") are a game developers' tool to prevent item exchange. As this story reveals, SOE will now be working to encourage item exchange, from their e-commerce servers to players.
Those items might in fact become NODROP once the sale is final, but it makes no difference to the overall effect on the game.
PS. I almost thought the AC to whom you replied was echoing me, but in a summarized form.
This isn't going to legitimize IGE, this is going to put them out of business, once Sony gets rolling with this.
Quite true. Obviously, no 3rd-party seller of in-game resources can survive being undercut by the system administrators, who can accomplish the equivalent of MONTHS of gil-farming with a single command-line.
However, although the short-term effect may seem beneficial, I've always thought that the legitimized (or merely widespread) sale of in-game items would hasten the collapse of any typical MMORPG. This seems to be a desparation move by SOE, whose EQ2 project has been eclipsed by WoW anyhow.
My thesis is that MMORPGs provide a substantial amount of their entertainment in the same way casino gambling does: the players' victories and rewards are quite arbitrarily handed out by the operators, but the cold-blooded arithmetic is hidden behind a screen of glamour and fun. Expose the honest real-dollars cost of an activity to the player, and they'll flee to a more fantastical game.
If a slot machine has a sign on it that each 10 minutes of play loses an average of $2.85, few people will enjoy pulling the lever. If level 60 epic flame-armor has a "Buy Now" hyperlink which costs $14.31, few people will find it fun to camp a dragon every 3 hours hoping he drops one more of the pieces.
Basic psychological principles: addiction can best be sustained if the game gives out rewards unpredictably. Game items are valued more because it was hard to know when they'd appear. Putting a blatant dollar-sign on the items is the ultimate form of predictabilty. The virtual Skinner box falls apart. When the mystique is gone, the players will be too.
PS. The Economist magazine agrees with my prediction, although the article isn't posted for nonsubscriber online reading.
The phat lewt has level requirements, and the good stuff is lvl 55+ I think.
Well of course. The Honor system is basically just for level 60 (max). Essentially, players collect XP to go from level 1-60, then collect Honor Points afterwards.
For a non-60 player to hunt other players is too dangerous to be worth it, because you'll run into someone higher.
It should be easy enough for Sony to insert an intentional delay to the network access, to approximately simulate CD effect. However, to do it right, they'd need to include spin-up/spin-down, and the fact that disc access uses more electricity, etc.
That said, level 50 people are SCREWED! They are going to get farmed until they quit the game!
Their best bet is to team up with some friendly 60s, and act as bait to lure enemy 60s to chase them. When the friendly 60s you've called come to save you, you can put in a few hits on the enemy 60s, earning you some big XP when they go down. (moving you closer to be 60 yourself)
They're green to level 60s, so they're honorable kill worthy.
Hopefully a 50 will be worth much less honor than a fellow 60.
I know some type of guild diminishing returns was talked about
If so, then it will encourage people to work together, but not join a formal guild. For example, you can gank a few 50s somewhere, then call on chat for the other 60s of your faction to come get them on ressurect.
and "secret agreements" between guilds of opposite factions.
The specific term for those "secret agreements" are "fight club", btw. The reasoning should be obvious.
Though the interesting thing to note is when Alliance and Horde play nice. In certain areas, Horde and Alliance co-exist (to a reasonable degree) as they are BOTH attempting to complete quests.
It's a little interesting to note that the enmity between Horde & Alliance is maintained by what is essentially NPC bigotry. In towns with NPC guards, players of the other factions will automatically be attacked. Fighting back will flag them for PVP, attracting the nearby PCs to come pound on them.
But in the wilderness, there are no NPC faction-members to start fights. And since the two sides aren't warring by default in that situation, they tend to cooperate like you described.
with the new patch, it will be just as beneficial, if not MORE for us to simply kill each other,
The game is called "Warcraft" after all- you're supposed to be at war, and that means attacking on sight. From the perspective of authors trying to make a game world fulfill their longstanding preconceptions, that effect will be exactly what they want.
make it more difficult to complete quests in contested areas.
Hey, if Honor points will be giving better l00t anyhow, why bother questing? The quest location becomes like a meeting-place for Honor battles, with the quest reward a consolation prize for when you're standing around there and don't meet an enemy party.
When you are paying upwards of 50 bucks for the game and 15 bucks a month for the game the casual player who plays an hour or two a night is not going to be too pleased to not be able to meaningfully interact with the virtual world as he has done for the past 6 months
Really, he should've thought of that before joining a PVP server. If you're a casual guy who wants to run dungeons without worrying about PK, then join a PVE server!
However, it would be honorable for Blizzard to offer all PVP characters a free opportunity to move to a PVE server whenever they change the laws on what kind of PVP is acceptabl.
No. They have underwater bases in both hemispheres.
Doesn't matter. If you look carefully at the region-code map, you'll see it only covers the land-masses. The Atlantic and Pacific oceans are technically not inside any region.
In fact, it is even illegal for humans. To watch any DVD in a ship on the high sea is an act of terrorism, and Sony is authorized to launch cruise missiles at anyone attempting this.
You don't have a EULA when you buy a camera, because they're not licensing the camera for you to use. They're SELLING you the camera, which you then own.
You don't have an EULA when you buy a program, because they're not licensing the program for you to use. They're SELLING you a copy of the software, which you then own.
That Nikon wants the professionnals or prosumers to pay a little more to use their technology?
If it were a simple matter of paying an additional $100 to get the functionality, the buyers would have little to complain about. But, that isn't an option: Nikon doesn't sell a Photoshop plugin, so there is no (legal) way to get the images into Photoshop without going through the awkwardly designed GUI of Nikon View.
The bottom line is that you can do things with Photoshop + Canon you can't do with Photoshop + Nikon. That makes Nikon look bad.
Games don't need administrator either. They just need physical write access to the CD device, a privilege you can grant explicitly.
Nope. Some games need access to 100% of ram, so they can scan for unapproved device drivers or other things that may provide an unfair advantage to online competitors.
I personally feel, especially after reading the interview, that the approach of running the user as root for lindows is a good idea. It does offer the choice of setting up users but doesn't force you too.
The Apple Macintosh system has a good reputation for stability, security, and user-friendliness. And, do they give the normal user root permissions by default? Absolutely not. Why do we think this is?
Anyway, "Copy what Apple does" is rarely a bad starting point for configuring a desktop user interface.
Here education and experience is needed in either case.
Yes, and that's why non-root is a good default. When the user is poking around and seeing what things he can change, he won't be able to lose the libc.so file just because he dragged some mysterious icon a few pixels. The request for a root password to complete that operation is a great warning sign that he probably shouldn't be screwing around with whatever he just clicked on, and is a fine signal that more education might be needed before proceeding.
Consider how police dogs are trained- they learn to attack and bite people only when wearing a tight collar, which makes them safer to be around the 99% of the time when there are no burglars to chase. The root login is like a spiked collar that reminds the dog-handler to be extra careful, because now major damage can be done.
Slashdot Mirror
So the GPL license to Linux is pulled for the entire company.
Impossible. By the nature of the GPL license, the author has no right to "pull" it from any user. Only someone who violates the GPL will suffer (and that's automatic, without any action taken by the original author).
The only conceivable way the entire company could lose rights is if the infringing action had be by the company, ie Bob was instructed to do it as part of his job.
And of course, reverse-engineering BK wasn't in Tridge's work assignment...
I skimmed TFA inadequately before posting, and made a mistake about how Sony is actually conducting this. Although that's mainly because their approach to the problem is so wrong-headed, I didn't believe anyone would actually try this.
.
Gold-farmers and other people who profit by the exchange of in-game resources have been an irritation in MMORPGs for a while, because the presence of people who are treating something as a job makes it less enjoyable to those who want it to be a fun escape. Rampant professionalism robs the "game" of spontaneity and makes it a regimented bore.
Naturally, the game publishers must combat this effect, and they have two obvious ways to do so:
1) forbid the practice, and aggressively ban anyone who is caught selling items, as Blizzard does in Warcraft, or
2) usurp the practice, and sell items themselves, using their inifinitely superior production speeds to undercut whatever prices for-profit gold-farmers ask.
Each of those options has its downsides, but they both can be basically effective. But Sony is bizzarely following a different approach: facilitate the predictable transfer of money for items, which will only increase the
That is such a bad idea, I'm still having trouble believing they're stupid enough to try it. Maybe they're faking it, and have an alternate secret plan in mind:
3) by legitimizing item trading, they can monitor and control it, and throttle-down the rate of sales so no professional players can profit.
4) they will secretly enter the item-selling business themselves: their Game Master players, who have the ability to instantly summon an item of any rarity, will enter into auctions themselves, always undercutting by 15% whatever prices real players can charge for an item. This is just a more secretive version of (2), above, and may be designed to slow down player dissatisfaction at a hyper-commercialized game.
Note, I was taking the longer-term view, that if game-items are exchangable for real cash, Sony will eventually join those auctions themselves. That is their only sane way to implement it, but they might not do so.
then how many people are really going to skip the journey?
Some of them will, because they have extra dollars sitting around, or because they genuinely want to see the gorgeous 3-d model of the Sword Of Pwnitude, or because they like to spoil other peoples' fun.
And once that happens, everyone else who is working through the missions "honestly" will feel silly, as they are visibily reminded that the "challenges" they are facing are completely arbitrary inventions of a game master. Like motorcycles at the tour-de-france. (Oh, sure, SOME people will continue playing without taking shortcuts, but their numbers will shrink, and the effect will be negative)
By grabbing for short-term profit from item sales, Sony is damaging their long-term income from ongoing subscriptions.
There's no complicated quest to get this, it's just wandering around killing shit till you get the pieces.
That's an example of a poor game design (or at least a game design which you don't personally enjoy). The correct solution would've been to build a better game initially, not allow people to skip the boring parts of your game for an extra fee.
So in a way, the selling of game-items is a telltale symptom that the gameplay isn't working out like it should.
. If Sony is making a game where it's possible to win/earn actual money,
There is no indication that they are. In fact, they're doing the opposite: preventing players from earning real dollars in game.
Sony will start selling game-property for real cash. But will they pay YOU cash to turn in game items? Of course not! If they want more epic dragonskin breastplates, they can create more with a mouse-click.
Currently, some players do earn money in the game, by selling "gold" on IGE to other players. Once Sony starts selling gold themselves, that market will go away, because nobody else will be able to compete with Sony's miniscule labor costs and prime advertising position.
What Sony's doing here isn't legally different from how arcade videogames work: put in cash, get some extra-lives for your character. Both skill and luck factor into how long those lives hold out, but it doesn't matter legally, since you have no way to extract coins from the machine once it's accepted them.
What's the difference if the "rocks" are instead just pixels, with their rarity controlled by a loot table rather than via access to stockpiles of goods secured in vaults?
Even if there isn't a difference, that's no defense. The DeBeers diamond monopoly is a BAD THING for the world at large- ask any economist. It's a fake market based on false scarcity creating false value. It fools people into spending "just half a year's salary" on rocks with no practical purpose. So if SOE's EQ monopoly functions similarly, it will also be BAD.
What I'm not seeing in your post (informative btw) is who's the loser in this situation.
In the long term, it's both the players and Sony who lose, because selling items makes the game less fun, and everyone unsubscribes (sooner than they would've otherwise). Of course, that's a simplification, but it will happen partially.
# Player wants items, doesn't want to grind, buys items - winner
That won't stay true for very long. Once players are more exposed to the fact that the items have a fixed real-world dollar value, their in-game attraction to them will decrease.
Remember that theoretically, a game is a journey, not a destination. As a wise man said, "If you find winning the game more fun than playing the game, you are..." um, I don't remember the rest. But it was very wise. Point is, the process of getting those items and the achievement of winning quests is what should make the game fun and memorable. Not the sparkly Crown of Lordly Magnificence you get when the dragon is beat.
Just imagine if Valve published two versions of Half-Life in stores: the $50 one like the normal game, and a $70 one which skips all gameplay and just gives you the winning cutscenes.
Or what if I were playing football, and I bribed 2 of the opposing team to limp for the rest of the game. Is that fun, really?
Governments control the supply of housing by using zoning to restrict the land available.
Governments control the supply of tobacco and alcohol by requiring licenses for the production and sale of these.
Wrong. The government doesn't "control", it "limits" and "influences". The USA government couldn't decide there will be 90 trillion new homes for sale tommorrow.
There is a huge difference between the power wielded in-game by SOE and real-world by a mortal government. The game administrator can spawn or delete millions of (previously) rare items with a single mouse-click. The USA government can only instruct people to speed or slow the rate of creation/deletion of an item. They can't conjure matter from nothing, and they can't even remove items without violating the Fifth Amendment of the USA Constitution.
There is no difference at all between what we're seeing here and a classic economic system.
There are huge differences. As the editor of The Economist said: "Real economies aim to maximize efficiency. Game economies aim to maximize fun, and fun is inherently inefficient"
(Quote is paraphrased)
you trade your hours (in the form of money) for someone else's hours (in the form of game goods).
Nope. If IGE or a random player on ebay.com is selling game goods, then it would be true: your money rents their hours.
But when Sony Entertainment, the operator of the game, starts selling game items for real money, you aren't renting hours of their time; less than a second in fact. How long to you think it takes a server script to deduct $10 from your balance and add 10,000,000 to your character's wealth number?
That happens in a millisecond. It's quite close to as if the seller is creating the item from nothing.
No difference selling game goods than trading Dollars on forex
To the extent that is true, it's an indictment of the USA's irresponsibly expanding federal deficeit, not a defense of SOE.
1) People can already buy their end-game setup at the beginning.
Previously, to do so was in violation of most subscription agreements. There were obstacles: there was a moderate risk of fraud, some players would balk on principle, and most importantly of all, many players would not even think to look for AO credits on ebay.
When the game publisher themselves get into the act, that all changes. The sales become totally legitimized, safe, and well-advertised as part of the in-game GUI. Whatever effects item-selling had before, they will be magnified one hundred fold.
I'd argue that those effects were already detrimental to game enjoyment, so EQ will just get worse now.
2) People who are serious about the game are already spending the money.
Talking to members of high-power guilds, this certainly doesn't seem to be true. (Unless prehaps they are lying to me, because they don't want to get their account banned if I report them as violating the subscription agreement)
3) Not everything can be traded. I've never played EQ, but in AO, there are a lot of NODROP items that can't be transfered.
That's somewhat illogical to mention, or at least presumes schizophrenic behavior from SOE. NODROP items (aka "Bind on Acquire") are a game developers' tool to prevent item exchange. As this story reveals, SOE will now be working to encourage item exchange, from their e-commerce servers to players.
Those items might in fact become NODROP once the sale is final, but it makes no difference to the overall effect on the game.
PS. I almost thought the AC to whom you replied was echoing me, but in a summarized form.
This isn't going to legitimize IGE, this is going to put them out of business, once Sony gets rolling with this.
Quite true. Obviously, no 3rd-party seller of in-game resources can survive being undercut by the system administrators, who can accomplish the equivalent of MONTHS of gil-farming with a single command-line.
However, although the short-term effect may seem beneficial, I've always thought that the legitimized (or merely widespread) sale of in-game items would hasten the collapse of any typical MMORPG. This seems to be a desparation move by SOE, whose EQ2 project has been eclipsed by WoW anyhow.
My thesis is that MMORPGs provide a substantial amount of their entertainment in the same way casino gambling does: the players' victories and rewards are quite arbitrarily handed out by the operators, but the cold-blooded arithmetic is hidden behind a screen of glamour and fun. Expose the honest real-dollars cost of an activity to the player, and they'll flee to a more fantastical game.
If a slot machine has a sign on it that each 10 minutes of play loses an average of $2.85, few people will enjoy pulling the lever.
If level 60 epic flame-armor has a "Buy Now" hyperlink which costs $14.31, few people will find it fun to camp a dragon every 3 hours hoping he drops one more of the pieces.
Basic psychological principles: addiction can best be sustained if the game gives out rewards unpredictably. Game items are valued more because it was hard to know when they'd appear. Putting a blatant dollar-sign on the items is the ultimate form of predictabilty. The virtual Skinner box falls apart. When the mystique is gone, the players will be too.
PS. The Economist magazine agrees with my prediction, although the article isn't posted for nonsubscriber online reading.
The phat lewt has level requirements, and the good stuff is lvl 55+ I think.
Well of course. The Honor system is basically just for level 60 (max). Essentially, players collect XP to go from level 1-60, then collect Honor Points afterwards.
For a non-60 player to hunt other players is too dangerous to be worth it, because you'll run into someone higher.
So they can't profile disk access?
It should be easy enough for Sony to insert an intentional delay to the network access, to approximately simulate CD effect. However, to do it right, they'd need to include spin-up/spin-down, and the fact that disc access uses more electricity, etc.
That said, level 50 people are SCREWED! They are going to get farmed until they quit the game!
Their best bet is to team up with some friendly 60s, and act as bait to lure enemy 60s to chase them. When the friendly 60s you've called come to save you, you can put in a few hits on the enemy 60s, earning you some big XP when they go down. (moving you closer to be 60 yourself)
They're green to level 60s, so they're honorable kill worthy.
Hopefully a 50 will be worth much less honor than a fellow 60.
I know some type of guild diminishing returns was talked about
If so, then it will encourage people to work together, but not join a formal guild. For example, you can gank a few 50s somewhere, then call on chat for the other 60s of your faction to come get them on ressurect.
and "secret agreements" between guilds of opposite factions.
The specific term for those "secret agreements" are "fight club", btw. The reasoning should be obvious.
Though the interesting thing to note is when Alliance and Horde play nice. In certain areas, Horde and Alliance co-exist (to a reasonable degree) as they are BOTH attempting to complete quests.
It's a little interesting to note that the enmity between Horde & Alliance is maintained by what is essentially NPC bigotry. In towns with NPC guards, players of the other factions will automatically be attacked. Fighting back will flag them for PVP, attracting the nearby PCs to come pound on them.
But in the wilderness, there are no NPC faction-members to start fights. And since the two sides aren't warring by default in that situation, they tend to cooperate like you described.
with the new patch, it will be just as beneficial, if not MORE for us to simply kill each other,
The game is called "Warcraft" after all- you're supposed to be at war, and that means attacking on sight. From the perspective of authors trying to make a game world fulfill their longstanding preconceptions, that effect will be exactly what they want.
make it more difficult to complete quests in contested areas.
Hey, if Honor points will be giving better l00t anyhow, why bother questing? The quest location becomes like a meeting-place for Honor battles, with the quest reward a consolation prize for when you're standing around there and don't meet an enemy party.
When you are paying upwards of 50 bucks for the game and 15 bucks a month for the game the casual player who plays an hour or two a night is not going to be too pleased to not be able to meaningfully interact with the virtual world as he has done for the past 6 months
Really, he should've thought of that before joining a PVP server. If you're a casual guy who wants to run dungeons without worrying about PK, then join a PVE server!
However, it would be honorable for Blizzard to offer all PVP characters a free opportunity to move to a PVE server whenever they change the laws on what kind of PVP is acceptabl.
No. They have underwater bases in both hemispheres.
Doesn't matter. If you look carefully at the region-code map, you'll see it only covers the land-masses. The Atlantic and Pacific oceans are technically not inside any region.
In fact, it is even illegal for humans. To watch any DVD in a ship on the high sea is an act of terrorism, and Sony is authorized to launch cruise missiles at anyone attempting this.
Wow, what a deal.
Limited offer! Buy two for the price of three!
You don't have a EULA when you buy a camera, because they're not licensing the camera for you to use. They're SELLING you the camera, which you then own.
You don't have an EULA when you buy a program, because they're not licensing the program for you to use. They're SELLING you a copy of the software, which you then own.
That is why *you* need to decrypt it, not Adobe.
And all this time, I've been emailing my pictures to Adobe to get them cropped, scaled, and printed!
That Nikon wants the professionnals or prosumers to pay a little more to use their technology?
If it were a simple matter of paying an additional $100 to get the functionality, the buyers would have little to complain about. But, that isn't an option: Nikon doesn't sell a Photoshop plugin, so there is no (legal) way to get the images into Photoshop without going through the awkwardly designed GUI of Nikon View.
The bottom line is that you can do things with Photoshop + Canon you can't do with Photoshop + Nikon. That makes Nikon look bad.
A good video game here and there is worth paying for; you know?
Doom, Quake, Unreal, Neverwinter, Americas Army... oh, and anything in Cedega
Games don't need administrator either. They just need physical write access to the CD device, a privilege you can grant explicitly.
Nope. Some games need access to 100% of ram, so they can scan for unapproved device drivers or other things that may provide an unfair advantage to online competitors.
I personally feel, especially after reading the interview, that the approach of running the user as root for lindows is a good idea. It does offer the choice of setting up users but doesn't force you too.
The Apple Macintosh system has a good reputation for stability, security, and user-friendliness. And, do they give the normal user root permissions by default? Absolutely not. Why do we think this is?
Anyway, "Copy what Apple does" is rarely a bad starting point for configuring a desktop user interface.
Here education and experience is needed in either case.
Yes, and that's why non-root is a good default. When the user is poking around and seeing what things he can change, he won't be able to lose the libc.so file just because he dragged some mysterious icon a few pixels. The request for a root password to complete that operation is a great warning sign that he probably shouldn't be screwing around with whatever he just clicked on, and is a fine signal that more education might be needed before proceeding.
Consider how police dogs are trained- they learn to attack and bite people only when wearing a tight collar, which makes them safer to be around the 99% of the time when there are no burglars to chase. The root login is like a spiked collar that reminds the dog-handler to be extra careful, because now major damage can be done.