Like I said to another poster- name one time that a company has ever lowered prices because they started accepting ads.
*cough*BF2142*cough* While I can see a handful of Indie publishers moving towards the play-for-ads model, the big publishers will never do that. It has been interesting though to see all of the ad-supported net games out there. Yeah they are pretty lame usually and churned out by some Chinese script-shop, but still interesting...it means there is a viable business model there.
Screw that! The only position I have is sitting in my Aeron. The only duties I have is making lots of money for the firm and not getting a drunken quote in the NYT where names are involved.
It's a simple life, but a satisfying one. I show up at work when I want, the company pays me what it thinks will keep me happy. No one is complaining, it's all at will.
If that is really what your job description permits, then more power to you--I'm jealous even. But I'd be really surprised if that is actually the case and would be willing to bet that your boss would beg to differ as to what your specific job duties entailed.
The future of search is not clogging every query result set with commercial links. You almost can't access legitimate information anymore, because every search returns advertisement after advertisement. It's almost to the point where you might as well go straight to wikipedia instead of bothering with Google.
This is largely because of affiliate marketing. Everybody wants to make a buck and it is becoming easier to do so online. That said, I think it is forcing us to become savvier in how we search. This will force us to develop resources that provide targeted information that we are searching for (without the ads) such as Wikipedia. It will also force us to learn how to be more critical of what we find and learn to identify when people have a vested interest in steering us towards one direction or another. Not to mention people will actually have to learn how redirects work and learn how to spot affiliate IDs. Remember, if someone is getting paid to get you to buy a product, you can't trust their review of it (btw review sites are the next big thing that affiliate marketers have been doing as of late).
Words like "required" and "RESOURCE" just say "I am a cog in the machine."
Professionals, by definition, know this is BS.
Then again, most programmers are hacks, not professionals. (some are seasoned hacks, but so what?)
As much as I hate to say it, we are all cogs in one machine or another. Some cogs might perform better than others, but in the end they are still cogs. You see, the company did not hire you to be a pretty little snowflake. If you want to be that, go start your own business where you can give yourself as many compliments as you want. Companies hire you to be a cog in the machine, a replaceable resource. That is just where software development has headed due to globalization. Sorry to break it to you but reality sucks.
And when I use the word "required" it is because that is one of your duties in that position. They are PAYING YOU to do a certain job and that job is to be a cog that fills out status reports. If you don't like that and don't wish to do it, nobody is holding a gun to your head...go work somewhere else. Just don't complain when you sign-up for a job and then they ask you to do what was actually in the job description.
See, and in the next half of your sentence you provide the exact reason for why you don't do that. You don't sell what you don't have. I'm regularly amazed at how many people still fail on this glaringly trivial premise.
Allow me to expand on my comment. What I meant was that if I was in sales and I've told a customer X feature will be ready by a certain date BECAUSE THAT IS THE LAST GUESTIMATE I HEARD FROM THE DEV TEAM....
If you think you don't sell something that doesn't exist yet then you clearly don't know how a software business works. It is called building anticipation and if you have existing customers who are eager for new features, it is perfectly reasonable to let them know "we are planning on releases X feature at Y date." However to do so requires accurate knowledge of the status of said feature. Hence why status reports are crucial for driving new/existing business.
Do you really think lawyers, doctors, talent agents, sitcom writers, fighter pilots, traders, salespeople etc, fill out status reports?
Well some of those I'll agree with but you are dead wrong on lawyers. The one difference between all of those professions you listed and lawyers is that lawyers get paid based on billable hours. Their firms make damn sure that they are filling out their time sheets (essentially a status report) on time and with incredible accuracy. They are charging clients large amounts of money for this time and thus clients want to know how every freaking minute is spent (not that I blame them).
So even professions that are considered "high-profile" have status reports. It really comes down to the job.
And while I want to avoid this becoming a long winded rant, the reason developers, regardless of skill level, are required to fill out such things is because they are considered a RESOURCE by the company. The company needs to know how many resources it takes and how long to complete a project because that lets them determine the cost of the project and ultimately the ROI which is all that matters to the bottom line. It may suck but that is how software companies work. I know some companies are starting to move to more of a "its done when its done" methodology, and in fact my own follows that, but it definitely has its downsides. For example, if I'm in sales and I've told a customer X feature will be ready by a certain date, and then without warning the dev team pushes it back several months, I'm screwed. However if they had simply provided thorough status reports, I would have an accurate timeframe to convey to my customer and there wouldn't be that mess.
Indeed. I mean, for us Americans--isn't this the "American Dream?" Bust your ass for a risky but potentially massive payoff?
This guy is part of a dying breed of explorers that laid the foundation of society as we know it.
Those numbers might not have been the best choice in this instance. My point was that they are trying to make more by providing you less content. Now, to your point, there may be some consumer value in being able to only pay for the micro-expansions you want but if you buy them all, you are paying more in the long run, which is their goal.
Micro-expansions are just another experiment we are trying out to try to latch on to the sweet, sweet tit of recurring revenue streams like those filthy rich MMO's have. If we can get you to pay more overall for less content than would be found in a bigger release, we'll be rich!
Fixed that for you....
I understand there are lots of efficiencies to doing smaller releases, but one of the trends I've noticed lately with these "episodic" releases is that they give you a smaller amount of content and charge you more than what you'd normally pay for a combined larger release. Ie. $10 each for three micro-expansions that, if the content were to be combined and released as a single expansion would probably retail for about $20 total. Make no mistake, they may have done some things that won them points with gamers in the past (awesome game, no DRM, etc.) but this is SOLELY about increasing profit. That's what they are in business for.
A bit of a site plug but my site, BuySteampunk.com is a site that aggregates steampunk listings on eBay and separates them into categories. Lately, I've noticed a lot of gears grab bags popping up for all the steampunk crafters out there. The site updates every time you reload so I'd recommend checking back daily to see if there's any new loot.
Often times you can find an amazing assortment of spare parts for dirt cheap, certainly cheaper than these other places that people have linked.
Sorry for the shameless promotion but it is actually incredibly relevant and useful for the question at hand.
I don't get the purpose of the hand...was it so that the beating heart wouldn't move vertically but would instead push on the glove which would expand horizontally?
Pretty soon they'll just use robots (nanites) and won't need a surgeon at all, except to act as a kind of "general" giving orders to the tiny machines.
A general? As in a Surgeon General?!?!? Wow...I need to leave work already...
Now question is, how will you ensure players are creating decent content instead of: A: Kill this uber monster optimized to level you asap. B: Kill this uber monster that you've no chance of defeating cause I like to laugh while you die. c: Kill this penisvagina monster. Allowing players to vote on content and having the devs implement the high ranking ones removes B and C, but A will never go away short of a MMO that doesn't require grinding of any short whether it be item grind or level grind
And this is why I occasionally find myself going back to Battlefield time and time again. Even now that they introduced the unlock system which is a pain in the butt, you still advance at a steady pace regardless of your play style.
If anybody knows of an MMO that has ZERO grinding and no microtransactions, please by all means share!
Don't worry, it seems blizzard has found a solution to your problem. There will be 3 Starcraft2 games. This way, you too can pay the equivalent of a yearly subscription to play a game even though you hate MMO. The reason given is the abundance of stories to tell. Does it sound familiar?
Bingo.
Episodic gaming has been about only one thing from day one...increasing the amount of revenue companies receive from a single title and the regularity for which they receive the payments. Ie. mimicking the subscription model that MMOs use but for single player games. They would NOT be doing it unless it made them more money. Period. I'll be buying one copy of Starcraft and pirating the rest thank you very much.
And that is exactly the problem they are trying to address. All of those ways you mentioned to become a well-known entity in today's typical MMO require MASSIVE amounts of time that casual players do not have, which to me sounds like an opportunity in the MMO market. Bioware is simply trying to bring the epic feel that can be found in single player games successfully over to the MMO world.
Its funny that most people mention things like TinyMUD, diku and its ilk. While I certainly played them, what really got me hooked was Gemstone III and Dragonrealms by Simutronics. They had some of the most vibrant communities I've seen in an online game to date. No other game I've seen has an empath's guild where healers will just sit there and chat all day and heal people that come in. Who would have thought that if you created a healer class, and a hospital, that people would actually *gasp* GO TO THE HOSPITAL WHEN HURT!
Those games had such great mechanics that I'm always tempted to log back in and play again.
So would something like these Koss Sparkplugs be bad for my ears if I listen to them at a reasonable volume (which is made easier thanks to the noise cancelling foam)?
If they do I hope institutions like the EFF will make printable fliers available for students to bring to classes where they teach in order to hand out to other students and use to refute the points preached by these folks.
A simple way to ensure metrics are not negatively impacted is to integrate them into the system. Have a built in timer that tracks how much time they spend on it. If someone is spending an undue amount of time, automatically alert their manager to look into it.
Of course the hope is that this will actually lower call times. So in that instance, I would propose a test run with a sample group and see how it impacts their metrics over a period of time and compare to the control group.
The key thing to communicate to management is that they will at some point need to take a small risk in testing this. But you can try to find research to back you up for how/why these systems can improve metrics. A good way to do so is look for a couple vendors who sell these systems and get them to share their metrics and then just pass those on.
I'd actually be shocked if gold farmers made as much on WAR as they do on WoW, even if you factor in the subscriber discrepancy. Reason being is that gold is easy to come by in WAR, and things are cheap. When a mount is 15g and you easily have more than that through casual gameplay by the time you are lvl 20, there's no real need to buy gold.
Now power leveling is a different story. Anytime there you have a game that requires you to spend a certain minimum amount of time playing to get to a certain level of playability (for example, getting to Tier 4 with appropriate renown gear), you will have power leveling services.
Thats why FPS don't have this problem for the most part (although I've heard rumors that such services exist for BF2142). You have access to all your gear immediately, and the only thing that determines how well you do is your actual skill and familiarity with the game, which money can't buy.
Yep, Gemstone and the rest of the MUDs are the real first MMORPGs. I still think Dragonrealms is one of the finest games I've ever played. I have never in my life seen so much effort put into masking the numbers from players to make them actually read whats going on and immerse them in the story. Combat was an absolute joy as was everything else. Great playerbase too.
Not to mention that episodic gaming as a whole has been one thinly veiled attempt at milking more money out of consumers "per episode" than it would normally cost for the game. Remember way back in the day when companies used to release free content patches? Yeah, that'll never happen again. Episodic content will ensure you get nickle and dimed for everything you've got.
Whoever is running this MMO we call RL, can't possibly have the resources to simulate every single particle all the time.
That's a pretty big assumption to make. When you have something the size of the universe with the unimaginable amounts of energy it contains it could be VERY possible for everything to be simulated.
Re:So if the this is completely free of charge....
on
1-800-Google Launches
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"Well, one idea is that they could sell what company shows up first in your area when you ask for "Pizza." That ought to be worth a lot."
The question then becomes how they indicate that it is a sponsored listing. I would hope they would notify you in some way that the person at the top PAID to get there rather than being the most relevant.
You bring up a good point though. I'm a gamer and now that I'm considering buying a new computer it looks like I will be forced to get Vista on it. And since graphics are somewhat important to me, if I want DX10, I need Vista (thanks a ton MS). So what version do people recommend? I should mention I also use my computer to connect to my HDTV and play pirated videos on it. Want to make sure that that function still works and not sure how Vista's DRM will affect divx torrents I download.
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*cough*BF2142*cough* While I can see a handful of Indie publishers moving towards the play-for-ads model, the big publishers will never do that. It has been interesting though to see all of the ad-supported net games out there. Yeah they are pretty lame usually and churned out by some Chinese script-shop, but still interesting...it means there is a viable business model there.
If that is really what your job description permits, then more power to you--I'm jealous even. But I'd be really surprised if that is actually the case and would be willing to bet that your boss would beg to differ as to what your specific job duties entailed.
This is largely because of affiliate marketing. Everybody wants to make a buck and it is becoming easier to do so online. That said, I think it is forcing us to become savvier in how we search. This will force us to develop resources that provide targeted information that we are searching for (without the ads) such as Wikipedia. It will also force us to learn how to be more critical of what we find and learn to identify when people have a vested interest in steering us towards one direction or another. Not to mention people will actually have to learn how redirects work and learn how to spot affiliate IDs. Remember, if someone is getting paid to get you to buy a product, you can't trust their review of it (btw review sites are the next big thing that affiliate marketers have been doing as of late).
As much as I hate to say it, we are all cogs in one machine or another. Some cogs might perform better than others, but in the end they are still cogs. You see, the company did not hire you to be a pretty little snowflake. If you want to be that, go start your own business where you can give yourself as many compliments as you want. Companies hire you to be a cog in the machine, a replaceable resource. That is just where software development has headed due to globalization. Sorry to break it to you but reality sucks.
And when I use the word "required" it is because that is one of your duties in that position. They are PAYING YOU to do a certain job and that job is to be a cog that fills out status reports. If you don't like that and don't wish to do it, nobody is holding a gun to your head...go work somewhere else. Just don't complain when you sign-up for a job and then they ask you to do what was actually in the job description.
Allow me to expand on my comment. What I meant was that if I was in sales and I've told a customer X feature will be ready by a certain date BECAUSE THAT IS THE LAST GUESTIMATE I HEARD FROM THE DEV TEAM....
If you think you don't sell something that doesn't exist yet then you clearly don't know how a software business works. It is called building anticipation and if you have existing customers who are eager for new features, it is perfectly reasonable to let them know "we are planning on releases X feature at Y date." However to do so requires accurate knowledge of the status of said feature. Hence why status reports are crucial for driving new/existing business.
Well some of those I'll agree with but you are dead wrong on lawyers. The one difference between all of those professions you listed and lawyers is that lawyers get paid based on billable hours. Their firms make damn sure that they are filling out their time sheets (essentially a status report) on time and with incredible accuracy. They are charging clients large amounts of money for this time and thus clients want to know how every freaking minute is spent (not that I blame them). So even professions that are considered "high-profile" have status reports. It really comes down to the job.
And while I want to avoid this becoming a long winded rant, the reason developers, regardless of skill level, are required to fill out such things is because they are considered a RESOURCE by the company. The company needs to know how many resources it takes and how long to complete a project because that lets them determine the cost of the project and ultimately the ROI which is all that matters to the bottom line. It may suck but that is how software companies work. I know some companies are starting to move to more of a "its done when its done" methodology, and in fact my own follows that, but it definitely has its downsides. For example, if I'm in sales and I've told a customer X feature will be ready by a certain date, and then without warning the dev team pushes it back several months, I'm screwed. However if they had simply provided thorough status reports, I would have an accurate timeframe to convey to my customer and there wouldn't be that mess.
Indeed. I mean, for us Americans--isn't this the "American Dream?" Bust your ass for a risky but potentially massive payoff?
This guy is part of a dying breed of explorers that laid the foundation of society as we know it.
Those numbers might not have been the best choice in this instance. My point was that they are trying to make more by providing you less content. Now, to your point, there may be some consumer value in being able to only pay for the micro-expansions you want but if you buy them all, you are paying more in the long run, which is their goal.
Fixed that for you....
I understand there are lots of efficiencies to doing smaller releases, but one of the trends I've noticed lately with these "episodic" releases is that they give you a smaller amount of content and charge you more than what you'd normally pay for a combined larger release. Ie. $10 each for three micro-expansions that, if the content were to be combined and released as a single expansion would probably retail for about $20 total. Make no mistake, they may have done some things that won them points with gamers in the past (awesome game, no DRM, etc.) but this is SOLELY about increasing profit. That's what they are in business for.
A bit of a site plug but my site, BuySteampunk.com is a site that aggregates steampunk listings on eBay and separates them into categories. Lately, I've noticed a lot of gears grab bags popping up for all the steampunk crafters out there. The site updates every time you reload so I'd recommend checking back daily to see if there's any new loot.
Often times you can find an amazing assortment of spare parts for dirt cheap, certainly cheaper than these other places that people have linked. Sorry for the shameless promotion but it is actually incredibly relevant and useful for the question at hand.
I don't get the purpose of the hand...was it so that the beating heart wouldn't move vertically but would instead push on the glove which would expand horizontally?
A general? As in a Surgeon General?!?!? Wow...I need to leave work already...
And this is why I occasionally find myself going back to Battlefield time and time again. Even now that they introduced the unlock system which is a pain in the butt, you still advance at a steady pace regardless of your play style. If anybody knows of an MMO that has ZERO grinding and no microtransactions, please by all means share!
Bingo. Episodic gaming has been about only one thing from day one...increasing the amount of revenue companies receive from a single title and the regularity for which they receive the payments. Ie. mimicking the subscription model that MMOs use but for single player games. They would NOT be doing it unless it made them more money. Period. I'll be buying one copy of Starcraft and pirating the rest thank you very much.
And that is exactly the problem they are trying to address. All of those ways you mentioned to become a well-known entity in today's typical MMO require MASSIVE amounts of time that casual players do not have, which to me sounds like an opportunity in the MMO market. Bioware is simply trying to bring the epic feel that can be found in single player games successfully over to the MMO world.
Its funny that most people mention things like TinyMUD, diku and its ilk. While I certainly played them, what really got me hooked was Gemstone III and Dragonrealms by Simutronics. They had some of the most vibrant communities I've seen in an online game to date. No other game I've seen has an empath's guild where healers will just sit there and chat all day and heal people that come in. Who would have thought that if you created a healer class, and a hospital, that people would actually *gasp* GO TO THE HOSPITAL WHEN HURT! Those games had such great mechanics that I'm always tempted to log back in and play again.
So would something like these Koss Sparkplugs be bad for my ears if I listen to them at a reasonable volume (which is made easier thanks to the noise cancelling foam)?
If they do I hope institutions like the EFF will make printable fliers available for students to bring to classes where they teach in order to hand out to other students and use to refute the points preached by these folks.
Of course the hope is that this will actually lower call times. So in that instance, I would propose a test run with a sample group and see how it impacts their metrics over a period of time and compare to the control group.
The key thing to communicate to management is that they will at some point need to take a small risk in testing this. But you can try to find research to back you up for how/why these systems can improve metrics. A good way to do so is look for a couple vendors who sell these systems and get them to share their metrics and then just pass those on.
Now power leveling is a different story. Anytime there you have a game that requires you to spend a certain minimum amount of time playing to get to a certain level of playability (for example, getting to Tier 4 with appropriate renown gear), you will have power leveling services.
Thats why FPS don't have this problem for the most part (although I've heard rumors that such services exist for BF2142). You have access to all your gear immediately, and the only thing that determines how well you do is your actual skill and familiarity with the game, which money can't buy.
That's a pretty big assumption to make. When you have something the size of the universe with the unimaginable amounts of energy it contains it could be VERY possible for everything to be simulated.
The question then becomes how they indicate that it is a sponsored listing. I would hope they would notify you in some way that the person at the top PAID to get there rather than being the most relevant.