Unfortunately, I'd be hard pressed to see a correlation.
A game like COH/COV, which is at the trailing end of the market, has provided 6 major free content additions so far. "Issue 1" was the game as released and 2 to 7 (7 is the current) have added new zones, (at one point) new classes, new outfit pieces, new quests, new power sets, new kinds of conetent like arch-villains and giant monsters, etc. Pretty much half the game at this point, and a lot more than half the quests, are new stuff. It also includes _all_ the level 40 to 50 content: areas, quests, rewards, you name it. The game launched with level 40 as the cap, and the last 10 levels have been added later.
By comparison, EQ2, which topped at a lot higher numbers of subscribers, well, I don't think it's given a single area for free yet, other than the Isle of Refuge (the newbie area). New areas, including those for the newly introduced extra levels, have been sold as a commercial expansion pack. They have been however churning new quests in a hurry. Down side: they all feel like mass-produced crap. E.g., you get to kill a bunch of bears and deers and wolves to see which of them stole a manuscript. I'm not making this up, sadly.
Moving to the other end, WoW didn't seem to give that much for free yet. They have added the battlegrounds and some high end pure-grind dungeons, together with the equipment to grind for, but other than that there's been very little new content AFAIK.
SOE has a generic game card that works for (almost) all of their games, including SWG.
A) That's now what I've seen for sale on Amazon, but nevertheless,
B) It would somehow doesn't add up with the next point:
Obviously, a lot of people do those things. I suspect some of it has to do with parents buying cards for their kids, thinking they still play that game they bought them last Christmas. A lot of people also flat out don't like regular monthly charges on their credit cards, so they prefer using the game cards.
A) I don't know, if I got such a generic SOE card, SWG would be the last place I'd think of using it. Between EQ, EQ2, and a few others, it's not like it _must_ be used for SWG, if it's that universal.
B) Also, someone who flat out doesn't play the game any more, I doubt they'd use that card at all. So if we're talking active accounts, such mistakes are a lot less relevant.
You're also forgetting about people who are registering an account for the first time in a given month on their free month, and probably thousands of comped accounts.
True, but that doesn't really add anything. You _can't_ play until you've selected one method of payment. They'll start actually billing you after a month, yes, but you have to select one before you connect at all. So if you've selected monthly payments, you _will_ be counted in their number of monthly payment accounts. I.e., this particular case won't get added on top of other accounts, but is just a subcategory of the others. They're already counted.
Wrong, because they're not still paying for it. With an SOE station pass, you are, even if you aren't using it.
As far as I'm concerned, that SA account is now purely for the EQ2 extras and, many months ago, it used to be also for Planetside. Sony never actually got a cent extra for my copy of SWG being activated under that plan. I.e., what I'm saying is that it can distort the numbers a _lot_. There may be a pretty large number of accounts which are counted as "active SWG accounts", but are "active" only by virtue of not costing anything to keep and being nigh-impossible to deactivate.
Still, I suppose it's just a matter of semantics, in the end. _Technically_ I do have an active account. (For another two weeks.) Fairy 'nuff.
The type of number that would work for what you're looking for is monthly unique logins, which is a very interesting number in its own right, with its own advantages and disadvantages.
Unique logins have nothing to do with it. This time it's not about people with multiple accounts, but about people who, for all practical reasons, aren't either playing the game or paying anything for it.
If you have a year-long record of simultaneous connections reported by the servers, feel free to provide them. I suspect they'll correlate fairly well.
Well, that's just the thing: dunno about correlation, and the data hasn't been available for a year to plot it, but the image painted by the snapshots I've see looks... weird. Post-NGE the total number of logins tops in the low thousands even at peak hours. Some servers top at something like 170 players at the peak, and I haven't seen any in that list that goes over 500. (Or maybe I've missed one.)
If you do a number_of_accounts / number_of_simultaneous_logins ratio, taking the number of logins from your site, it's just out of whack compared to what happens on any other game. (E.g., with what happened on EQ back when Sony still publically displayed such numbers.) The ratio is somewhere around the 20:1 range even at peak hours, when for other games it's 10:1 or less. If you also consider the rampant macroing, the ratio should actually be lower than in other games, but it's actually double or more.
I.e., assuming that you are right about that number of acc
I don't believe this is true. You just click on the button next to SWG to unsubscribe from it if you no longer want to be counted as a SWG subscriber. You don't have to cancel the entire station access account.
Heh. Well, I had already done it at one point, so I already _knew_ it would cancel the whole Station Access subscription, but I thought I'd try it again just to be sure. Yep, it cancelled my subscription to all SOE games in one fell swoop.
So, yes, I know what I'm talking about. Once a game has been activated under Station Access, you can only cancel it by cancelling your whole Station Access subscription, for all games.
And conversely, if you ever re-activate your Station Access for any game (e.g., because your co-workers still play EQ2 and nag you about it), it will automatically reactivate everything else, SWG included. I'm not going to try that now, but, again, I've done it before, and it had exactly that result.
So, yes, there's no way to make a point to Sony by unsubscribing SWG even if you wanted to.
Heck, in SWG's case they have their head so far up their ass that you can't even give them feedback why you unsubscribed. The usual "give us feedback about <insert game>" link you get when unsubscribing, this time led to a page saying basically "well, go away, you need an active account for that." (Never mind that the account is still paid for and active until the middle of July.) Very subtle, that. Guess they really don't want to hear what people think about the NGE. Heh. But I digress...
Well, still, good riddance. I should have done that a long time ago. Guess I must thank you for reminding me:)
Look, nothing personal or anything, but precisely _because_ I had read that analysis I'm unconvinced. Here's one excerpt:
Inside sources have offer a more precise but incomplete picture; as of March 2006 SWG only had 120,00 monthly paying subscribers, but this number does not include those who are subscribed to the game via game time cards or SOE station pass subscriptions. SOE station pass subscriptions are not counted unless they actually have registered a SWG account. Based on previously known data, I put the total number of subscribers for SWG at 190,000 for March 2006.
I'm sorry, but that's just looks funny to me. So 120,000 monthly paying accounts, plus 50,000 _total_ Station Access accounts (most of which have no interest in SWG in any form or shape)... leads you to a guess of 190,000? No offense, but... heh. Let's say _half_ the SA accounts had anything to do with SWG (though even that's a _very_ generous over-estimate), that leaves 45,000 coming from some mysterious source. Game Cards? For SWG? Does any shop even still carry those? Or do so many people use their credit card on Amazon or Sony's own store to... avoid using their credit card on Sony's station site? Do people buy each other game cards to an unpopular game as gifts? Ranks just about up there with getting Daikatana as a gift. Or how does that add up to such a large number?
At any rate, it's just one big guesswork from 120,000 as the only known figure, to 190,000 as plotted there. About 37% of the final number is simply pulled out of the hat.
I could go on about how it doesn't correlate with the number of simultaneous connections, as reported by the servers, and stuff like that, but that's already then my guesswork against yours. And the real point is that I don't see much room for such guesswork -- either yours or mine -- in a serious statistic. What you really have there is what in SQL is called a "null". It's just a big lack of actual information. I don't know if the guessed numbers are bad or (by sheer coincidence) the right ones, but I don't see any use for them as long as they're guessed. That's all.
Are the other numbers ok? Heck if I know, because at that point I had no interest in researching each and every one. Running into one number that's (A) a wild guess, and (B) completely contrary to any experience or data I've seen or experienced about SWG, just ruined the whole "suspension of disbelief" for me, for lack of a better word.
But even if it is true, it's irrelevant. Signing up for station access MEANS you're subscribed to all those games that you've bought, even if you no longer play them anymore. You're no different from the guy who buys a sub to just one game and then has no intention to play it, but still pay.
No offense, but... by that logic, you should also include everyone who's bought UO in the 90's and hasn't played or paid a subscription ever since. I mean, hey, they went out and bought the box even if they don't play it any more. Right? Or, hey, for that matter, add me to the number of AO players, since I played it for about 2 weeks before cancelling my account, back at launch. But, hey, I went out and bought the box even if I don't play it any more. Right?:P
If stopping playing doesn't actually matter once you've registered it once, then we certainly should apply the same criterion to other games too.
The way I see it is more along the lines: having SWG by sheer virtue of Station Access, when I only got that SA for the extra EQ2 character slots, just doesn't equal a SWG subscription any more than my old cancelled AO account counts as an AO account. It's not actually playing the game _and_ it's not even bringing in more money for Sony. So even going by the comparison with the guy paying a subscription without playing... it's still wrong, since I'm not actually paying a cent for SWG. It's at best more like never having bothered to delete my old characters on some free MUDs, since it doesn't actually cost anything to leave them there.
You're not alone, and it's not just the running speed. The EQ2 graphics (and probably the animations too) as a whole look... subtly, but disturbingly wrong. They're high res, they're detailed, but tripped my suspension of disbelief all the time. In a _major_ way. There's something about them that says "nope, this isn't real" in a worrying way. I'd run towards a tree, and it would be a beautiful and detailed tree, shaded and everything, but nevertheless it would make something inside me go "WTF, this is _not_ a tree."
The best I can compare it to is an oil painting. It's beautiful and all, but you just know it's not real.
It's basically why you read all over the place descriptions like "sterile" for EQ2's world. It looks somehow... dead and soulless and strangely, disturbingly wrong.
Strangely enough, WoW's cartoonish graphics don't trigger the same reaction. You know they're cartoonish, and in some places (e.g., Gnomeregan) it looks like something straight out of a Warner Brothers cartoon, but somehow they're easy to accept. A lot easier than EQ2's.
One theory I've heard about it is the "uncanny valley", which says basically that the closer you get to the real thing, the more people start to notice the details that aren't right. So at some point the people's reaction takes a nose dive and even gets briefly into the negatives. Then it starts rising again. That abrupt dip is basically the "valley". And it could be that EQ2 is basically at a point in that valley.
Then again, Oblivion and other games with at least comparable graphics disprove that theory about EQ2. Oblivion didn't exhibit the same effect. Which makes me thinks that probably it's just something about EQ2's graphics.
A lot of numbers are just wild guesses. For example SOE brags something like "SWG is the third biggest multiplayer game!", but not by what criterion or how it's counted or anything... and the guy then goes and guesses a number between that of game number 2 and game number 4 in the charts. (Or rather between number 2 and what would have been number 3 if we go by known figures or if Sony is lying.)
Frankly, I fail to see any point in charting something that's a collection of wild guesses, and with the accuracy of being somewhere between 175,000 and 250,000. When you imagine that guesswork margin around the graph, it could have pretty much any shape whatsoever. Allowing for that huge margin of error, it could have actually gained players in the NGE. (Yeah, I know it didn't, but the margin of error is high enough to allow even that. Just shows how utterly useless that graph is.)
Add the fact that you have no clue what Sony measured there (or _if_ it measured anything.) Was it number of players? Number of accounts? Number of sold boxes? Simultaneous connections? What? Did they include every single Station Access account, even if it doesn't actually play SWG? Was that claim made during at the apex of some "try the game free for 7 days" campaign and including the free accounts? Or what? Basically what's the point of graphing something if you don't even know what that number means or how it was measured?
And that's a general problem, not just a Sony one. Some games track players. (E.g., WoW counts you only once even if you have multiple accounts.) Some track accounts. Some include every single PC in an internet cafe in Korea, whether anyone actually plays the game on it or not. (Internet cafe owners have to license each game for each PC, which for some games it's half the revenue.) Etc.
It's basically like comparing the size of three cities, except one gives you the number of families, one gives you the number of inhabitants, and one gives you the number of houses. All are valid metrics, but you can't compare numbers that aren't in the same units.
Add other distorting factors such as average number of accounts per player, or number of simultaneous connections. They can vary massively between games. E.g., if game A would ban your cheating ass if you used a second automated character (e.g., a priest set on auto-heal following your warrior), and game B actually encourages it, you can bet that game B will attract a lot of people using a second PC to do just that. Since it's an automated character, it can even be a cheap old PC with the game set to the minimum resolution allowed and absolute minimum graphics quality. And that's not the only factor. I remember reading somewhere about people having as many as 8 accounts in some games.
E.g., does the game allow macroing? I can imagine that SWG would rank deceptively higher in number of simultaneously active players (thus maybe supporting Smedley's brag) because while in other games (e.g., WoW) you'd get banned for macroing unattended, in SWG it was always fair game. A _lot_ of people leave a character just dancing in the cantina unattended overnight, and in the old days even macroing combat XP was pretty common. (In fact, rumour has it that the crap FPS-like interface in NGE is to make unattended scripted combat impossible. Sony went _that_ far to avoid tackling macro-ers.)
E.g., again, does that include Station Access accounts? A lot of people got that for some other games, or for the extras in EQ2, or whatever, and got all other SOE games for free as a result. So it's hardly apples to apples to compare people who pay $15 per month for another MMO to people who got a SWG account just because it was free.
Even if you stopped playing one of Sony's games, there's no way to unsubscribe it from your Station Access (but then it doesn't cost anything to leave it active). I know I'm technically still subscribed to SWG by virtue of the Station Pass, and so is one co-worker, although neither of us actually
The units for all three numbers are fatal accidents per million miles, my mistake typing the wrong units. But as for you, YOU could have taken 5 minutes to check that my figures were RIGHT, the units were just typed in wrong. But no, you just went and laid into me.
No, loser. Nice backpedalling, but nope. I actually checked your maths before writing that answer:
1046 days = 25104 hours
2 accidents per 25104 hours = 2 * 1,000,000 / 25104 accidents per million hours = 79.6 accidents per million hours
Remember that 79 number? That's the same one you've used. So, yes, your number for the shuttle was indeed per million hours. There's no way for that to be per million miles, unless you're telling me that the shuttle travels at one mile per hour.
And oh, looky, even inside the same message, Mr Prom Queen still can't make up his mind about whether it was miles or hours. Just three paragraphs lower you try to salvage the "per million hours" number with that "moves THIRTY TIMES FASTER" reasoning. Which of them is it, loser? No, you can't have both. Was it miles for both, in which case "moves THIRTY TIMES FASTER" is fucking irrelevant to that statistic, or was it hours, in which case you did write a stupid comparison all over the first message?
Seriously, you're fucking pathetic. I see no reason to even attempt any kind of logical or scientiffic conversation with the pathetic kind of prom queen that will even argue two exact opposites in the same message, more concerned with saving image and shifting blame than with any kind of logic, science or even with showing some basic human dignity. You have all my heart-felt contempt. Grow up. Grow a spine.
Ah well...
As for the rest of the argument, I have nothing against the "but it's experimental" or "but it goes at a different speed" lines of reasoning. Of course. We all know it's experimental, and NASA is still busy discovering what foam, insulation washers, etc, can do and where they can go. Yep, no disaggreements there. That much is pretty common knowledge. All I'm refutting is the notion that it's somehow as safe as civilian aviation nowadays. It isn't. Not even close.
Remember your baby, the commericial aircraft industry (read: air bus)? It used to be quite dangerous to take a flight. In the last 35 years, the accident rate of commercial airlines has reduced over an order of magnitude!
Even _with_ an extra order of magnitude introduced in there, it still remains a helluva lot safer than the Space Shuttle. One order of magnitude down, about 3-4 more to go. Heh. Even 35 years ago, heck, even in the 40s, the only airplane that tended to blow up by itself more than the shuttle was the Me 163 Komet rocket fighter. Much like the Shuttle, it was a highly experimental, liquid fuel rocket powered aircraft, with a very rough landing and a tendency to blow up even without anyone shooting at it. Probably more were lost to take off and landing than to enemy fire.
Still, at least there _is_ a comparable aircraft in that time period. I have no problem if you want to compare the Shuttle to the Me 163 disaster:P
Just not with modern aviation, that's all I'm saying.
Call me back when your head finds its way out of your ass.
Heh. Call me back when you grew enough of a spine and learned about personal responsibility. For example about honestly admitting a mistake instead of pulling a prom-queen maneuver of pretending you've said something else.
Well, let's put it like this. Regardless of whether the original article actually mentioned Activision (the Gamasutra article is just a quick excerpt from the real thing), I still read it as:
1. He's been asked explicitly about prices. It's not like Sony came up with a PR announcement or anything. It actually makes a difference if you see it as an answer, and not like something separate.
2. In that context, it's pretty much just a mild evasive answer, nothing more. Ha basically says (A) "well people expect games to be priced between 39 and 59, so it's not like we could go much higher" and (B) a bit of evasive corporate speak that can best be summarized as "not burning the bridges". He says that he can't exclude that sometimes in the future the prices might go up, but even then don't expect to see big jumps.
In the end, if you think about it, that doesn't really say anything. In the end, (A) is just common sense, given that he can't push games prices much higher than the XBox even if he wanted to, and (B) is just an evasive maneuver that again doesn't say anything any economist couldn't have told you.
Of _course_ he can't promise that the prices will stay fixed for ever, because there's this thing called "inflation". Sooner or later the prices _will_ go up, but not by much. So I wouldn't be surprised if he just doesn't want to be on the receiving end of a "but Sony promised the games will never be above 59$!!!" backlash in 2010. Or worse yet, some class action lawsuit where 1000 idiots sue Sony for damages, saying that they only bought their PS3s based on this guy's promise that games will always be priced the same. So he does what corporate PR usually does and explicitly states that he makes no promises.
Plus, there's also a possibility that he doesn't want to go on record as being the guy that flat-out caused Activision or whatever to break all ties with Sony, because that again can come back to bite him in the ass. So whether Activision was explicitly mentioned or not, if he's smart, he'll know better than to go on record as saying anything that sounds like a definitive set-in-stone "nope, we'll never budge, you can't negotiate that with us." The old Nintendo did that lots, but Sony tends not to. So he'll give you a definite "maybe".
I mean, whop-de-do, unlike a thousand other corporations which do the same thing. Making sure they burn no bridges and don't go on record as making any promise is pretty much Business 101 these days. Read the canned statements corporations give all over the place, from interviews to when they show up for each other's announcements, and all are the same pattern of vague and explicitly avoiding any promises that you haven't publically announced already. If you as much hint at a date or price or not-yet-announced product, you can get your ass kicked sky high.
And if this guy made it to his current position at Sony, he's smart enough to know that already. People who talk without thinking tend to not make it too far in your average corporation.
Mind you, I'm a nerd. I'm not particularly fond of such corporate gobbledygook either. But, eh, it's a fact of life. No point blowing it out of proportion when it's just a standard evasive maneuver.
How about the other part of the article, where they put it in context regarding Activision's request? Sure, if it were a quote out of the blue, it would be one thing, but put into the proper context it's something completely different.
Well, well, in a sense it's not a new market, since their "market" is selling eyeballs to the companies paying to advertise. You're not Google's customer, you're what Google sells to its customers. All the neat free things they offer are just the bait to get your eyeballs there.
It's not the only way to view that, hence the "in a sense" part, but it is at the very least one way to see that.
And at the very least, IMHO it helps understand what they're doing and why they're doing it. And why it's important to be doing it. And what's in it for MS in trying to "fucking kill Google", in Steve Balmer's own words. Maybe it's an academic exercise, and it certainly doesn't tell us anything fundamentally new. (You already knew that companies do stuff for money, right?) But, still... after seeing so many false images being thrown around, maybe stating the obvious isn't that great a sin, after all.
Actually, I'll do just that: it's an utterly meaningless comparison.
1. It's not even using the same units. One is in crashes per million miles and the other is in crashes per million hours. I don't know how you compare hours to miles, but in my book that's bull. I'm sorry, but if I compared miles to hours even in a primary school science class, I'd get an F for that.
Just like the Space Shuttle, aircraft spend most of their operating hours in cruise. And just like aircraft, the Shuttle is most likely to suffer an accident during takeoff and landing.
2. Then how about doing it in crashes per number of flights, then? No, seriously. If you tell me that the thing that counts is takeoff/landing and not hours or miles spent cruising, then why hand-wave in a metric that you yourself just declared meaningless?
Doubly so, when, again, it's not even apples to apples. Using hours or miles instead is only justified when you can imply that there's some proportionality between that and the things that do count. E.g., comparing accidents per million miles for two airplanes is only justified if you can imply that, on the average, a million miles means approximately as many flights for both. Now let's look at shuttles vs airplanes: for an airplane a flight is measured in hours (sometimes even less), while for the shuttle it can be as high as 17 days. So pay attention: the same number of hours does not translate into the same number of takeoffs and landings.
If you do take the number of flights into account, the same Wikipedia page tells you that there have been 2 fatal acidents in 114 flights. That's a 1.75% chance to go *boom* per flight. Now I don't know what the numbers are for commercial aviation, but something tells me that we'd have a major scandal if every 67'th flight was fatal.
3. Furthermore, for an airplane measuring it in miles or hours does make some sense, because an airplane could suffer an engine failure or terrorist attack in mid-flight too, while the shuttle is mostly just idle while in orbit. It isn't just "in cruise", it was just sitting there with the engines turned off.
4. But here's a metric that's right on that wikipedia page and might be a lot more meaningful: 2% chance to die per astronaut per flight. Again, I don't know what the numbers are for commercial aviation, but I do believe we'd have some major scandals if you had a 2% chance to die in each flight.
But to check that hypothesis, let's look at that Airplane Liability page you linked to. They say 635 fatalities in the USA in 2004. (Out of which only 13 for large commercial airlines.) If that were a 2% chance to die per flight, then in 2004 the USA would have had no more than 635 * 50 = 31,750 total persons times flights, including pilots, co-pilots, stewardesses, etc. It would also mean that only 13 * 50 = 650 people travelled with large commercial airlines. Does that sound freaking unbelievable yet? Something tells me there have been at least millions, so the the chance to die per flight must have been _much_ lower. Many orders of magnitude lower.
So basically if you take the metrics that _do_ matter, instead of handwaving in some stupid miles to hours comparison, the shuttle is a freakin' disaster compared to airplanes. It's not an exemplary safety record, it's not comparable to civilian aviation, it's just a freakin' disaster. It's several orders of magnitude less safe. If the shuttle were an airplane, no airline would want to have anything to do with it.
No, it's not just semantics, it's actually an important distinction for understanding what's really going on. So what I'm saying is:
1. Focusing on where the money is actually makes one hell of a sense for a company.
2. All those attempts at getting into other "markets" are a bit more related than it looks, because they're tied 1-to-1 to the same source of revenue. One ad served on Gmail or Orkut or whatever brings in exactly as much money as one ad served on their search engine. And they use the same keyword matching too, as a bonus. I.e., attitudes like "well, Google is a search engine, it can just be happy to stay a search engine" are missing the real point. The money is in serving the ads, so from a business perspective anything that allows them to serve extra ads isn't really much of a shift of attention, but rather just expanding what they were already doing.
3. That shiny-hippy... err... shiny happy "well, they forced innovation, changed the landscape of the Internet, and forced MS and Yahoo to improve their act anyway" attitudes are missing the point even more. Noone sets their goal to just change landscapes for change sake, or to force their competitors to innovate. Forcing MS to improve their search engine may be good for society as a whole, but bad for Google, if it just means less people to serve ads to.
The problem with being a leader in the "internet search" market is that there's no such market, actually. Nobody pays to search the Internet. Much as you probably like Google, if they started requiring a paid-for account to use their search engine, you'd probably just say "fuck you very much" and go use Yahoo instead. Charging sites to be listed on your search engine would probably go even worse, and not leave you with much of a search engine if most sites refuse to be indexed.
There is no _money_ in being the leading internet search company, and there is no money in just changing the landscape and enabling people just for the hell of it. If that's all that Google were about, trust me, MS would have a hearty laugh and leave them to it.
Google makes its money out of serving ads. _That_ is its real market. The search engine is partially just a way to get people to see those ads, and partially about getting brand recognition.
And a lot of the other ventures actually follow the same pattern: getting even more people and page hits for those ads they serve. E.g., Gmail isn't there just because Google is kind and wants to donate large email accounts to the people, it's there because someone figured out, "wait, wait... people receive all these billions of emails each day... what if we could show an ad for each of those emails?" Insert cash register sounds. E.g., they come up with all these ideas for holding your data for you, not because they have too much HDD space, not because they're Big Brother and want your secrets, but because it sounds like a free ticket to show you ads each time you want to do anything with your own data.
Now I'm not saying that that's bad. It isn't. That's how capitalism works, and it certainly worked well so far. But just putting it in perspective. And saying why it's actually _not_ ok to be just a search engine: because that's not where the money is.
And conversely, for MS it's the exact same thing. They don't just want Google's internet search market, because there is no such market. What they want is you coming to MSN instead and seing _their_ ads.
Are they gonna build a Shuttle cockpit relpica to land this pig, or is it just gonna be a 15" CRT and a second-hand Saitek joystick?
Damn right. I hope they have at least a 19" TFT and a Thrustmaster HOTAS;)
Or better yet, one of those force feedback joysticks, programmed to wantonly shake your hand arround for no other reason than because someone thought it was "immersive". I'm sure they'll appreciate the "immersion" and "realism" when aiming the shuttle at the runway.
Ok, now seriously, I think in reality they'll just let the computer do it. I'm pretty sure that when you're landing something that expensive, it's not a big problem to have Class III ILS on the runway you use for it. In which case it can just land itself.
Now I do "believe" in evolution and natural selection, and there are better examples than this.
But this (alone) doesn't either prove or disprove evolution at all, much less "conclusive proof". Just because species X has A, and species Y has B, it doesn't mean they couldn't have been created like that.
E.g., look at the bears in World Of Warcraft. Some are white, some are brown, some are black, some are bigger, some are smaller... but there was no evolution involved anyway. Some game designer or artist just went and modelled a white bear. So _if_ I was to believe in the Big Game Designer In The Sky, I see no problem why He can't create two species of ants which work differently. I mean, seriously, why is that impossible to create?
E.g., look at some of the artifficial things humans have been creating by genetic engineering. E.g., rabbits which glow in the dark. You could say the same. "Wow, so a rabbit didn't see at night, so it evolved into a light source. It's conclusive proof of evolution." Well, nope, not really. A human just created that rabbit.
The "proof" of evolution is in the intermediate steps, not in the fact that two species are different. Just being different won't even start to contradict creationism. Sure, they'll say, they were created different. What "proves" evolution (or at least makes a very compelling point for it) is finding enough intermediate steps to actually show that species A really transformed gradually into species B. E.g., finding enough bones and such to make a compelling case of how and over what timeline did a small-ish ape turn into Homo Sapiens.
Apollo was safer, and Soyuz is safer than Apollo. But you're flying in a cramped closet. The shuttle is still THE best space vehicle in the world.
The best by what criterion? By costing a helluva lot more to do the same job, just to resemble travelling in a mac truck instead of a car? Just as a national penis size symbol along the lines of "we can afford to haul a giant truck into orbit, even at the expense of blowing up a few astronauts now and then"? Or maybe as a way to waste whatever space budget is left on a couple of uber-expensive flights per year instead of several flights with a smaller vehicle?
Yes, in an ideal world, where money and resources are unlimited, flying in style in a giant airplane would be cool. In the real world, you have a finite space budget. Wasting it on lifting something that size _and_ on trying to patch an unsafe design is actually detrimental. The same budget would allow a helluva lot more if it wasn't wasted on the shuttle.
Even the original shuttle design would disaggree with your assessment that the current shuttle is good. Just as a quick reminder:
The original shuttle design was, basically, the equivalent of a car. It was little more than a reusable capsule with wings. It was supposed to be reusable, cheap, safe, and pay for itself by doing lots of trips up and down. It also had buggerall cargo space and was only supposed to go into sane orbits.
Except NASA didn't have the budget for it. So they look at who else has a budget to put stuff in orbit: the Airforce. They're shooting these huge spy satellites into space. So NASA goes to the Airforce and says basically "you know, if you gave us your l(a)unch money, we could put those satellites in orbit for you safer and cheaper. And even bring them back down if needed! You won't have to launch another Titan rocket ever again. Won't that be nice?"
The Airforce payloads were, however, (A) bloody huge, and (B) went in a polar orbit, so they'd sweep over the soviet union. That's what the Airforce needed done. So if they're to give their space budget to NASA, then NASA had to guarantee they could do that. Enter the new shuttle concept: a freaking huge truck that can load one of those in its cargo bay.
Look at that huge cargo bay, and that's what it's for. It's not to give the astronauts leg room or anything, it's just big enough to pack one of those huge spy satellites.
The aftermath:
1. Even for those satellites, using a manned shuttle is fucking stupid. You don't need humans onboard to put a satellite into orbit, when a computer can do the same thing. And you don't need to deal with the media fallout when you blow up some humans. (Not to mention the irresponsibility of risking some human lives when you can do the exact same without them.) And you don't need to lift a huge ultra-expensive shuttle either, when you can just lift the satellite itself instead.
So do you want to know how those satellites are launched nowadays? By the Airforce, with a big rocket.
2. For smaller satellites, which was the original shuttle's idea, now the thing is too big and expensive. It's like using an 18 wheeler truck to haul your computer. It's just not worth it.
So how are all those satellites launched nowadays? With a smaller rocket.
3. For hauling humans into orbit, it's too big, too expensive, and too unsafe. And it becomes even more expensive by trying to patch that unsafe design.
4. But wait, isn't it used to haul materials up to the ISS? Isn't that worth having a huge flying truck? Well, guess what? The same applies as for the Airforce's satellites: the cargo can go up with a cheap rocket just as well. A computer can put it into any kind of orbit you want it in. And the Russians have been doing just that, for a fraction of the cost, _and_ more reliably. Who do you think supplies the ISS when the shuttle is grounded for months trying to figure out what foam to use and where? Right. Traditional Russian rockets do.
Even if you needed something assembled into space, there's no reason whatsoever to carry the humans and the cargo together. You can put the humans up with a small shuttle and whatever cargo they need up with a rocket.
And I just wanted to add one more thing: the GM _could_ revive that world if he really wanted to.
E.g., in Valkyrie Profile, the "best" ending involves the world being destroyed, but in a Deus Ex Machina kind of twist, a pissed off Valkyrie finds the strength to undo that and beat seven shades of shit out of Loki for it. It's not making up for some player mistake, it's been the (cheesy) plot from the start. You _will_ lose the first round, Loki _will_ destroy the world, and that causes Lenneth to get a rage fit and power-up like Superman. It's in fact the game's justification of why you can beat up an Aesir. (God.) In the second round, the Einherjar are still just as useless as in the first round, but Lenneth is pissed off enough to hit like a tank.
Maybe cheesy, but I can't see why a GM couldn't pull the same kind of a stunt.
Or better yet, "Ok, the Daikatana has the power to restore the world, but it would get destroyed in the process. Do you want to use it?" Neat Deus Ex Machina, and removes a too powerful artefact from the party too.
Of course, if Romero had refused even that, then he'd be the prick. But in that excerpt it's the GM that stuck to "nope, it's over."
Now I can understand someone being mislead by the wrong Slashdot summary, but, no offense, commenting on the wording of an article would imply you bothered to actually RTFA first.
Here's the short summary: Activision wants higher game prices to cover their huge development costs. Sony guy answers to that along the lines of "well, we _can't_ start selling games for $99, because people expect games to be between $39 at the low end and $59 at the high end."
Basically, no, he doesn't think he's hyping the console, he's not trying to justify a price increase, or whatever the highly incorrect Slashdot summary would want you to believe. He's just saying they _can't_ increase game prices, and anyway not by the huge ammount that Activision wants. That's all.
Actually, the summary on Slashdot is highly incorrect. If you read what the guy says on Gamasutra, it's
A) in response to Activision's making a fuss that games should be more expensive, since apparently Activision's development costs are too high to be covered even by $59, and
B) all that the Sony guy basically says is along the lines of "well, we can't go much higher than $59, because people expect games to be between $59 and $39. We can't suddenly price a game at $99, because noone would buy it. Even if we could slightly increase the price, it would be at most a very small increase, not what Activision wants."
Basically that's all there. It's _not_ about Sony wanting to raise game prices, it's Sony telling Activision "dude, put down the bong, we _can't_ sell your games for $99." I.e., pretty much the opposite of what the Slashdot summary says.
Actually, I don't feel like a "hardcore gamer", I feel like a casual gamer, playing very casually for serveral hours a day;)
Well, ok, it's not entirely a joke there. I never understood most of the "hardcore gamer" mentality, or what it even means. Sure, defining it as seeing games as a part of your life is one thing, but half the time "hardcore gamer" is passed off for meaning anything between tough-as-nails kick-me-in-the-teeth I-eat-bosses-for-breakfast adrenaline-soaked challenge-seeker and being outright anti-social. (I remember posts actually praising games with hideous travel times as "hardcore", because the poster can be alone, soloing some obsucure monsters, a mile away from any other players. And that was supposedly "hardcore.") Can't say I've ever fit those descriptions. I've always played to relax, forget stress, be told a nice story, and seeking some grand nearly-impossible challenge or quests/levels/whatever that take 5 hours of retrying to overcome.... was always just about the last thing I've looked for in a game. I guess there would be quite a few people to proclaim me non-"hardcore".
And let me assure you it's not Flash or card games either. Ok, maybe I'm the wrong example there, but let's take someone else then. Mom? She played games like Tropico or Mario 64 before, and is currently (still) playing Lumines and Mercury on her PSP. Dad? He plays Counter-Strike, in 15-30 minute bursts. No idea if a CS player can actually count as "casual", but he's not the die-hard Real-Man kinda clansman either. He played Mario 64 before too.
There also seem to be a lot of casual gamers in MMOs. There are some people who took more than a year to get their character to level 50 in COH, for example.
The point isn't about playing 15 minutes a day, it's about being able to play in 15 minute bursts, if I so choose. You know, if someone's on the phone, or I have to get the laundry from the washing machine, or I'm playing just a quick round before going to work, or whatever, don't make me search for a save point for half an hour first and don't make me freakin' need a 40 man raid for a long mission. Just let me save there and then, or park my character in a safe place, because I need to take a break _now_.
The worst in that aspect was a game which made me play for 10 _hours_ before giving me a save point. FFS, 10 _hours_. It's insane. Noone who has even the bare minimum of a life can put up with that. Heck, it was at the apex of my gamer-without-a-life times, and even I didn't find it funny.
And let me get back to the idea of trying to squeeze in a mission before going to work, or while the pizza is in the oven, or whatever. I do that a lot. E.g., I've been known to squeeze in one COH mission between the morning shower (right, I'm probably losing geek points here;) and going to work, while my hair dries. I don't want a 2 hour raid there, complete with a major elite boss fight. I just want to jump in as my Scrapper (think: Fury spec Warrior, in WoW terms) and run through some warehouse punching any Carnies/Malta/whatever in the way, then get the mission bonus and run to work.
And let me also say: this isn't just for casual gamers. I can imagine that a lot of the generation conflict and "Auugh! My kid is addicted! He keeps playing and/or throws a tantrum when I tell him to turn off the console and clean his room _now_!" angst actually happen when the poor kid is actually desperately looking for a save point. Noone wants to just lose the last hour of anything. So a lot of it might be just that, rather than true addiction and being unable to put the controller down.
And the sooner the game industry finally figures out that they can let them save and put the controller down, the better we'll all be for it.
Also: more people dissed it than played it, because playing it cost fifty dollars.
Then how about shutting the fuck up about things they don't have a fucking clue about? Noone's saying "you should have bought Daikatana." Just, you know, then talk about stuff you _did_ experience first hand. Judging a game -- _any_ game -- without actually having played it, strikes me as idiotic to the extreme.
It would be like me trying to tell you why Dark Age Of Camelot or Age Of Empires suck hairy ass, except I've never played them and never even saw anyone playing them. Or telling you in how many ways driving a Honda sucks, except I've never actually driven one. Oh, I've seen some Honda promotional video and read some "LOL, OMG, Honda sucks" on Something Awful, and that sooo makes me qualified to objectively judge it. Wouldn't you then say, "how about shutting the fuck up, if you don't actually have the experience to base that on?"
Same for Daikatana, or any other game for that matter. Sure, I can accept "man, the demo sucked, so I have no intention to play that." Sure. But going on whole tirades about the quality of design and gameplay in Daikatana as a whole, is just idiotic without having the actual data to base that judgment on.
And, again, a lot of people haven't even played that sucky demo before joining in the SFV chorus of how much Daikatana sucks. They've just read some Something Awful rant and felt suddenly qualified to talk at length about a game they hadn't even _seen_.
Regardless of how cool it was to attack Daikatana on some obscure gaming forums, I don't think the number of all the critics could possibly have reached the millions of teenage girls, moms, dads, cousins and even hardcore gamers that bought The Sims.
You'd be surprised what kind of momentum it seemed to have gathered. There were non-gaming magazines and web-sites screaming for blood and digging up all possible shit they could dig up against Ion Storm, Romero, Romero's girlfriend, everything. Even benign stuff like Killcreek's being at the Ion Storm booth at E3 was taken out of context, distorted and presented as some grievous act against humanity.
And I can definitely say that I've run into people IRL, not on some obscure forum, that just knew that "Daikatana sucks", yet refused to even try it or the demo to see for themselves if it sucked or not. I mean, geesh, the demo was shitty enough anyway, so I could have understood it if someone played the first level and decided that it sucked. But there were people who had religiously decided that it sucks, and refused to even consider trying anything that would have challenged their religion.
Admittedly, I'm a gaming nerd and I'm among nerds, and most of them are gamers. So it's hard to say if it's representative for the larger population. But, still, it felt disgusting and it's hard to resist the temptation to extrapolate.
Very perceptive. Now also look at when work on Daikatana had commenced.
You know, seeing that I've explicitly stated that by the time it was released, other games with a story already existed, it just makes me wonder what the point is spewing the exact same thing back as some grand rebuttal. Are you just trolling, or genuinely can't read and comprehend more than one sentence at a time?
Are you being facetious? Daikatana's target audience was hard-core FPS players. The Sims reached out to every segment of the market. What a ridiculous statement!
Again, are you trolling, or genuinely too stupid to comprehend even the simplest metaphor? The point wasn't about market sizes, the point was simply that more people criticized Daikatana than people who've actually played it. That's all. _Can_ you address the real point, or is fabricating straw-men out of phrases taken out of context the best you can do? No, seriously. I'm curious.
The first level of the demo consisted of killing small frogs in the rain. The whole level. Design genius? Perhaps in an abstract fun-is-not-cool hipster universe. But in this world, it was stupid, and pointless.
Yes, and the first level of the demo is sooo indicative of the design of the game as a whole. Shooting frogs in the rain is sooo representative for the quality of, say, the later Ancient Greece levels. Not.
Still, at least you've played a level of the demo. That's already one level more than 90% of the karma-whores and SFVs at the time.
"I CAN'T LEAVE WITHOUT MY BUDDY SUPERFLY!"
As opposed to half the party-based RPGs, which did the exact same thing? Or as opposed to every single scientist escort mission in Half Life? (And a few others. Even MMOs, like COH love to have that kind of missions.) I'd love to see you leave without the companion NPC in those.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, I'd be hard pressed to see a correlation.
A game like COH/COV, which is at the trailing end of the market, has provided 6 major free content additions so far. "Issue 1" was the game as released and 2 to 7 (7 is the current) have added new zones, (at one point) new classes, new outfit pieces, new quests, new power sets, new kinds of conetent like arch-villains and giant monsters, etc. Pretty much half the game at this point, and a lot more than half the quests, are new stuff. It also includes _all_ the level 40 to 50 content: areas, quests, rewards, you name it. The game launched with level 40 as the cap, and the last 10 levels have been added later.
By comparison, EQ2, which topped at a lot higher numbers of subscribers, well, I don't think it's given a single area for free yet, other than the Isle of Refuge (the newbie area). New areas, including those for the newly introduced extra levels, have been sold as a commercial expansion pack. They have been however churning new quests in a hurry. Down side: they all feel like mass-produced crap. E.g., you get to kill a bunch of bears and deers and wolves to see which of them stole a manuscript. I'm not making this up, sadly.
Moving to the other end, WoW didn't seem to give that much for free yet. They have added the battlegrounds and some high end pure-grind dungeons, together with the equipment to grind for, but other than that there's been very little new content AFAIK.
A) That's now what I've seen for sale on Amazon, but nevertheless,
B) It would somehow doesn't add up with the next point:
A) I don't know, if I got such a generic SOE card, SWG would be the last place I'd think of using it. Between EQ, EQ2, and a few others, it's not like it _must_ be used for SWG, if it's that universal.
B) Also, someone who flat out doesn't play the game any more, I doubt they'd use that card at all. So if we're talking active accounts, such mistakes are a lot less relevant.
True, but that doesn't really add anything. You _can't_ play until you've selected one method of payment. They'll start actually billing you after a month, yes, but you have to select one before you connect at all. So if you've selected monthly payments, you _will_ be counted in their number of monthly payment accounts. I.e., this particular case won't get added on top of other accounts, but is just a subcategory of the others. They're already counted.
As far as I'm concerned, that SA account is now purely for the EQ2 extras and, many months ago, it used to be also for Planetside. Sony never actually got a cent extra for my copy of SWG being activated under that plan. I.e., what I'm saying is that it can distort the numbers a _lot_. There may be a pretty large number of accounts which are counted as "active SWG accounts", but are "active" only by virtue of not costing anything to keep and being nigh-impossible to deactivate.
Still, I suppose it's just a matter of semantics, in the end. _Technically_ I do have an active account. (For another two weeks.) Fairy 'nuff.
Unique logins have nothing to do with it. This time it's not about people with multiple accounts, but about people who, for all practical reasons, aren't either playing the game or paying anything for it.
Well, that's just the thing: dunno about correlation, and the data hasn't been available for a year to plot it, but the image painted by the snapshots I've see looks... weird. Post-NGE the total number of logins tops in the low thousands even at peak hours. Some servers top at something like 170 players at the peak, and I haven't seen any in that list that goes over 500. (Or maybe I've missed one.)
If you do a number_of_accounts / number_of_simultaneous_logins ratio, taking the number of logins from your site, it's just out of whack compared to what happens on any other game. (E.g., with what happened on EQ back when Sony still publically displayed such numbers.) The ratio is somewhere around the 20:1 range even at peak hours, when for other games it's 10:1 or less. If you also consider the rampant macroing, the ratio should actually be lower than in other games, but it's actually double or more.
I.e., assuming that you are right about that number of acc
Heh. Well, I had already done it at one point, so I already _knew_ it would cancel the whole Station Access subscription, but I thought I'd try it again just to be sure. Yep, it cancelled my subscription to all SOE games in one fell swoop.
So, yes, I know what I'm talking about. Once a game has been activated under Station Access, you can only cancel it by cancelling your whole Station Access subscription, for all games.
And conversely, if you ever re-activate your Station Access for any game (e.g., because your co-workers still play EQ2 and nag you about it), it will automatically reactivate everything else, SWG included. I'm not going to try that now, but, again, I've done it before, and it had exactly that result.
So, yes, there's no way to make a point to Sony by unsubscribing SWG even if you wanted to.
Heck, in SWG's case they have their head so far up their ass that you can't even give them feedback why you unsubscribed. The usual "give us feedback about <insert game>" link you get when unsubscribing, this time led to a page saying basically "well, go away, you need an active account for that." (Never mind that the account is still paid for and active until the middle of July.) Very subtle, that. Guess they really don't want to hear what people think about the NGE. Heh. But I digress...
Well, still, good riddance. I should have done that a long time ago. Guess I must thank you for reminding me
I'm sorry, but that's just looks funny to me. So 120,000 monthly paying accounts, plus 50,000 _total_ Station Access accounts (most of which have no interest in SWG in any form or shape)... leads you to a guess of 190,000? No offense, but... heh. Let's say _half_ the SA accounts had anything to do with SWG (though even that's a _very_ generous over-estimate), that leaves 45,000 coming from some mysterious source. Game Cards? For SWG? Does any shop even still carry those? Or do so many people use their credit card on Amazon or Sony's own store to... avoid using their credit card on Sony's station site? Do people buy each other game cards to an unpopular game as gifts? Ranks just about up there with getting Daikatana as a gift. Or how does that add up to such a large number?
At any rate, it's just one big guesswork from 120,000 as the only known figure, to 190,000 as plotted there. About 37% of the final number is simply pulled out of the hat.
I could go on about how it doesn't correlate with the number of simultaneous connections, as reported by the servers, and stuff like that, but that's already then my guesswork against yours. And the real point is that I don't see much room for such guesswork -- either yours or mine -- in a serious statistic. What you really have there is what in SQL is called a "null". It's just a big lack of actual information. I don't know if the guessed numbers are bad or (by sheer coincidence) the right ones, but I don't see any use for them as long as they're guessed. That's all.
Are the other numbers ok? Heck if I know, because at that point I had no interest in researching each and every one. Running into one number that's (A) a wild guess, and (B) completely contrary to any experience or data I've seen or experienced about SWG, just ruined the whole "suspension of disbelief" for me, for lack of a better word.
No offense, but... by that logic, you should also include everyone who's bought UO in the 90's and hasn't played or paid a subscription ever since. I mean, hey, they went out and bought the box even if they don't play it any more. Right? Or, hey, for that matter, add me to the number of AO players, since I played it for about 2 weeks before cancelling my account, back at launch. But, hey, I went out and bought the box even if I don't play it any more. Right?
If stopping playing doesn't actually matter once you've registered it once, then we certainly should apply the same criterion to other games too.
The way I see it is more along the lines: having SWG by sheer virtue of Station Access, when I only got that SA for the extra EQ2 character slots, just doesn't equal a SWG subscription any more than my old cancelled AO account counts as an AO account. It's not actually playing the game _and_ it's not even bringing in more money for Sony. So even going by the comparison with the guy paying a subscription without playing... it's still wrong, since I'm not actually paying a cent for SWG. It's at best more like never having bothered to delete my old characters on some free MUDs, since it doesn't actually cost anything to leave them there.
You're not alone, and it's not just the running speed. The EQ2 graphics (and probably the animations too) as a whole look... subtly, but disturbingly wrong. They're high res, they're detailed, but tripped my suspension of disbelief all the time. In a _major_ way. There's something about them that says "nope, this isn't real" in a worrying way. I'd run towards a tree, and it would be a beautiful and detailed tree, shaded and everything, but nevertheless it would make something inside me go "WTF, this is _not_ a tree."
The best I can compare it to is an oil painting. It's beautiful and all, but you just know it's not real.
It's basically why you read all over the place descriptions like "sterile" for EQ2's world. It looks somehow... dead and soulless and strangely, disturbingly wrong.
Strangely enough, WoW's cartoonish graphics don't trigger the same reaction. You know they're cartoonish, and in some places (e.g., Gnomeregan) it looks like something straight out of a Warner Brothers cartoon, but somehow they're easy to accept. A lot easier than EQ2's.
One theory I've heard about it is the "uncanny valley", which says basically that the closer you get to the real thing, the more people start to notice the details that aren't right. So at some point the people's reaction takes a nose dive and even gets briefly into the negatives. Then it starts rising again. That abrupt dip is basically the "valley". And it could be that EQ2 is basically at a point in that valley.
Then again, Oblivion and other games with at least comparable graphics disprove that theory about EQ2. Oblivion didn't exhibit the same effect. Which makes me thinks that probably it's just something about EQ2's graphics.
It's even worse than that.
A lot of numbers are just wild guesses. For example SOE brags something like "SWG is the third biggest multiplayer game!", but not by what criterion or how it's counted or anything... and the guy then goes and guesses a number between that of game number 2 and game number 4 in the charts. (Or rather between number 2 and what would have been number 3 if we go by known figures or if Sony is lying.)
Frankly, I fail to see any point in charting something that's a collection of wild guesses, and with the accuracy of being somewhere between 175,000 and 250,000. When you imagine that guesswork margin around the graph, it could have pretty much any shape whatsoever. Allowing for that huge margin of error, it could have actually gained players in the NGE. (Yeah, I know it didn't, but the margin of error is high enough to allow even that. Just shows how utterly useless that graph is.)
Add the fact that you have no clue what Sony measured there (or _if_ it measured anything.) Was it number of players? Number of accounts? Number of sold boxes? Simultaneous connections? What? Did they include every single Station Access account, even if it doesn't actually play SWG? Was that claim made during at the apex of some "try the game free for 7 days" campaign and including the free accounts? Or what? Basically what's the point of graphing something if you don't even know what that number means or how it was measured?
And that's a general problem, not just a Sony one. Some games track players. (E.g., WoW counts you only once even if you have multiple accounts.) Some track accounts. Some include every single PC in an internet cafe in Korea, whether anyone actually plays the game on it or not. (Internet cafe owners have to license each game for each PC, which for some games it's half the revenue.) Etc.
It's basically like comparing the size of three cities, except one gives you the number of families, one gives you the number of inhabitants, and one gives you the number of houses. All are valid metrics, but you can't compare numbers that aren't in the same units.
Add other distorting factors such as average number of accounts per player, or number of simultaneous connections. They can vary massively between games. E.g., if game A would ban your cheating ass if you used a second automated character (e.g., a priest set on auto-heal following your warrior), and game B actually encourages it, you can bet that game B will attract a lot of people using a second PC to do just that. Since it's an automated character, it can even be a cheap old PC with the game set to the minimum resolution allowed and absolute minimum graphics quality. And that's not the only factor. I remember reading somewhere about people having as many as 8 accounts in some games.
E.g., does the game allow macroing? I can imagine that SWG would rank deceptively higher in number of simultaneously active players (thus maybe supporting Smedley's brag) because while in other games (e.g., WoW) you'd get banned for macroing unattended, in SWG it was always fair game. A _lot_ of people leave a character just dancing in the cantina unattended overnight, and in the old days even macroing combat XP was pretty common. (In fact, rumour has it that the crap FPS-like interface in NGE is to make unattended scripted combat impossible. Sony went _that_ far to avoid tackling macro-ers.)
E.g., again, does that include Station Access accounts? A lot of people got that for some other games, or for the extras in EQ2, or whatever, and got all other SOE games for free as a result. So it's hardly apples to apples to compare people who pay $15 per month for another MMO to people who got a SWG account just because it was free.
Even if you stopped playing one of Sony's games, there's no way to unsubscribe it from your Station Access (but then it doesn't cost anything to leave it active). I know I'm technically still subscribed to SWG by virtue of the Station Pass, and so is one co-worker, although neither of us actually
No, loser. Nice backpedalling, but nope. I actually checked your maths before writing that answer:
1046 days = 25104 hours
2 accidents per 25104 hours = 2 * 1,000,000 / 25104 accidents per million hours = 79.6 accidents per million hours
Remember that 79 number? That's the same one you've used. So, yes, your number for the shuttle was indeed per million hours. There's no way for that to be per million miles, unless you're telling me that the shuttle travels at one mile per hour.
And oh, looky, even inside the same message, Mr Prom Queen still can't make up his mind about whether it was miles or hours. Just three paragraphs lower you try to salvage the "per million hours" number with that "moves THIRTY TIMES FASTER" reasoning. Which of them is it, loser? No, you can't have both. Was it miles for both, in which case "moves THIRTY TIMES FASTER" is fucking irrelevant to that statistic, or was it hours, in which case you did write a stupid comparison all over the first message?
Seriously, you're fucking pathetic. I see no reason to even attempt any kind of logical or scientiffic conversation with the pathetic kind of prom queen that will even argue two exact opposites in the same message, more concerned with saving image and shifting blame than with any kind of logic, science or even with showing some basic human dignity. You have all my heart-felt contempt. Grow up. Grow a spine.
Ah well...
As for the rest of the argument, I have nothing against the "but it's experimental" or "but it goes at a different speed" lines of reasoning. Of course. We all know it's experimental, and NASA is still busy discovering what foam, insulation washers, etc, can do and where they can go. Yep, no disaggreements there. That much is pretty common knowledge. All I'm refutting is the notion that it's somehow as safe as civilian aviation nowadays. It isn't. Not even close.
Even _with_ an extra order of magnitude introduced in there, it still remains a helluva lot safer than the Space Shuttle. One order of magnitude down, about 3-4 more to go. Heh. Even 35 years ago, heck, even in the 40s, the only airplane that tended to blow up by itself more than the shuttle was the Me 163 Komet rocket fighter. Much like the Shuttle, it was a highly experimental, liquid fuel rocket powered aircraft, with a very rough landing and a tendency to blow up even without anyone shooting at it. Probably more were lost to take off and landing than to enemy fire.
Still, at least there _is_ a comparable aircraft in that time period. I have no problem if you want to compare the Shuttle to the Me 163 disaster
Just not with modern aviation, that's all I'm saying.
Heh. Call me back when you grew enough of a spine and learned about personal responsibility. For example about honestly admitting a mistake instead of pulling a prom-queen maneuver of pretending you've said something else.
Well, let's put it like this. Regardless of whether the original article actually mentioned Activision (the Gamasutra article is just a quick excerpt from the real thing), I still read it as:
1. He's been asked explicitly about prices. It's not like Sony came up with a PR announcement or anything. It actually makes a difference if you see it as an answer, and not like something separate.
2. In that context, it's pretty much just a mild evasive answer, nothing more. Ha basically says (A) "well people expect games to be priced between 39 and 59, so it's not like we could go much higher" and (B) a bit of evasive corporate speak that can best be summarized as "not burning the bridges". He says that he can't exclude that sometimes in the future the prices might go up, but even then don't expect to see big jumps.
In the end, if you think about it, that doesn't really say anything. In the end, (A) is just common sense, given that he can't push games prices much higher than the XBox even if he wanted to, and (B) is just an evasive maneuver that again doesn't say anything any economist couldn't have told you.
Of _course_ he can't promise that the prices will stay fixed for ever, because there's this thing called "inflation". Sooner or later the prices _will_ go up, but not by much. So I wouldn't be surprised if he just doesn't want to be on the receiving end of a "but Sony promised the games will never be above 59$!!!" backlash in 2010. Or worse yet, some class action lawsuit where 1000 idiots sue Sony for damages, saying that they only bought their PS3s based on this guy's promise that games will always be priced the same. So he does what corporate PR usually does and explicitly states that he makes no promises.
Plus, there's also a possibility that he doesn't want to go on record as being the guy that flat-out caused Activision or whatever to break all ties with Sony, because that again can come back to bite him in the ass. So whether Activision was explicitly mentioned or not, if he's smart, he'll know better than to go on record as saying anything that sounds like a definitive set-in-stone "nope, we'll never budge, you can't negotiate that with us." The old Nintendo did that lots, but Sony tends not to. So he'll give you a definite "maybe".
I mean, whop-de-do, unlike a thousand other corporations which do the same thing. Making sure they burn no bridges and don't go on record as making any promise is pretty much Business 101 these days. Read the canned statements corporations give all over the place, from interviews to when they show up for each other's announcements, and all are the same pattern of vague and explicitly avoiding any promises that you haven't publically announced already. If you as much hint at a date or price or not-yet-announced product, you can get your ass kicked sky high.
And if this guy made it to his current position at Sony, he's smart enough to know that already. People who talk without thinking tend to not make it too far in your average corporation.
Mind you, I'm a nerd. I'm not particularly fond of such corporate gobbledygook either. But, eh, it's a fact of life. No point blowing it out of proportion when it's just a standard evasive maneuver.
How about the other part of the article, where they put it in context regarding Activision's request? Sure, if it were a quote out of the blue, it would be one thing, but put into the proper context it's something completely different.
So the level designer is Satan? Dunno, that seems a bit harsh
Well, well, in a sense it's not a new market, since their "market" is selling eyeballs to the companies paying to advertise. You're not Google's customer, you're what Google sells to its customers. All the neat free things they offer are just the bait to get your eyeballs there.
It's not the only way to view that, hence the "in a sense" part, but it is at the very least one way to see that.
And at the very least, IMHO it helps understand what they're doing and why they're doing it. And why it's important to be doing it. And what's in it for MS in trying to "fucking kill Google", in Steve Balmer's own words. Maybe it's an academic exercise, and it certainly doesn't tell us anything fundamentally new. (You already knew that companies do stuff for money, right?) But, still... after seeing so many false images being thrown around, maybe stating the obvious isn't that great a sin, after all.
Actually, I'll do just that: it's an utterly meaningless comparison.
1. It's not even using the same units. One is in crashes per million miles and the other is in crashes per million hours. I don't know how you compare hours to miles, but in my book that's bull. I'm sorry, but if I compared miles to hours even in a primary school science class, I'd get an F for that.
2. Then how about doing it in crashes per number of flights, then? No, seriously. If you tell me that the thing that counts is takeoff/landing and not hours or miles spent cruising, then why hand-wave in a metric that you yourself just declared meaningless?
Doubly so, when, again, it's not even apples to apples. Using hours or miles instead is only justified when you can imply that there's some proportionality between that and the things that do count. E.g., comparing accidents per million miles for two airplanes is only justified if you can imply that, on the average, a million miles means approximately as many flights for both. Now let's look at shuttles vs airplanes: for an airplane a flight is measured in hours (sometimes even less), while for the shuttle it can be as high as 17 days. So pay attention: the same number of hours does not translate into the same number of takeoffs and landings.
If you do take the number of flights into account, the same Wikipedia page tells you that there have been 2 fatal acidents in 114 flights. That's a 1.75% chance to go *boom* per flight. Now I don't know what the numbers are for commercial aviation, but something tells me that we'd have a major scandal if every 67'th flight was fatal.
3. Furthermore, for an airplane measuring it in miles or hours does make some sense, because an airplane could suffer an engine failure or terrorist attack in mid-flight too, while the shuttle is mostly just idle while in orbit. It isn't just "in cruise", it was just sitting there with the engines turned off.
4. But here's a metric that's right on that wikipedia page and might be a lot more meaningful: 2% chance to die per astronaut per flight. Again, I don't know what the numbers are for commercial aviation, but I do believe we'd have some major scandals if you had a 2% chance to die in each flight.
But to check that hypothesis, let's look at that Airplane Liability page you linked to. They say 635 fatalities in the USA in 2004. (Out of which only 13 for large commercial airlines.) If that were a 2% chance to die per flight, then in 2004 the USA would have had no more than 635 * 50 = 31,750 total persons times flights, including pilots, co-pilots, stewardesses, etc. It would also mean that only 13 * 50 = 650 people travelled with large commercial airlines. Does that sound freaking unbelievable yet? Something tells me there have been at least millions, so the the chance to die per flight must have been _much_ lower. Many orders of magnitude lower.
So basically if you take the metrics that _do_ matter, instead of handwaving in some stupid miles to hours comparison, the shuttle is a freakin' disaster compared to airplanes. It's not an exemplary safety record, it's not comparable to civilian aviation, it's just a freakin' disaster. It's several orders of magnitude less safe. If the shuttle were an airplane, no airline would want to have anything to do with it.
No, it's not just semantics, it's actually an important distinction for understanding what's really going on. So what I'm saying is:
1. Focusing on where the money is actually makes one hell of a sense for a company.
2. All those attempts at getting into other "markets" are a bit more related than it looks, because they're tied 1-to-1 to the same source of revenue. One ad served on Gmail or Orkut or whatever brings in exactly as much money as one ad served on their search engine. And they use the same keyword matching too, as a bonus. I.e., attitudes like "well, Google is a search engine, it can just be happy to stay a search engine" are missing the real point. The money is in serving the ads, so from a business perspective anything that allows them to serve extra ads isn't really much of a shift of attention, but rather just expanding what they were already doing.
3. That shiny-hippy... err... shiny happy "well, they forced innovation, changed the landscape of the Internet, and forced MS and Yahoo to improve their act anyway" attitudes are missing the point even more. Noone sets their goal to just change landscapes for change sake, or to force their competitors to innovate. Forcing MS to improve their search engine may be good for society as a whole, but bad for Google, if it just means less people to serve ads to.
The problem with being a leader in the "internet search" market is that there's no such market, actually. Nobody pays to search the Internet. Much as you probably like Google, if they started requiring a paid-for account to use their search engine, you'd probably just say "fuck you very much" and go use Yahoo instead. Charging sites to be listed on your search engine would probably go even worse, and not leave you with much of a search engine if most sites refuse to be indexed.
There is no _money_ in being the leading internet search company, and there is no money in just changing the landscape and enabling people just for the hell of it. If that's all that Google were about, trust me, MS would have a hearty laugh and leave them to it.
Google makes its money out of serving ads. _That_ is its real market. The search engine is partially just a way to get people to see those ads, and partially about getting brand recognition.
And a lot of the other ventures actually follow the same pattern: getting even more people and page hits for those ads they serve. E.g., Gmail isn't there just because Google is kind and wants to donate large email accounts to the people, it's there because someone figured out, "wait, wait... people receive all these billions of emails each day... what if we could show an ad for each of those emails?" Insert cash register sounds. E.g., they come up with all these ideas for holding your data for you, not because they have too much HDD space, not because they're Big Brother and want your secrets, but because it sounds like a free ticket to show you ads each time you want to do anything with your own data.
Now I'm not saying that that's bad. It isn't. That's how capitalism works, and it certainly worked well so far. But just putting it in perspective. And saying why it's actually _not_ ok to be just a search engine: because that's not where the money is.
And conversely, for MS it's the exact same thing. They don't just want Google's internet search market, because there is no such market. What they want is you coming to MSN instead and seing _their_ ads.
Damn right. I hope they have at least a 19" TFT and a Thrustmaster HOTAS
Or better yet, one of those force feedback joysticks, programmed to wantonly shake your hand arround for no other reason than because someone thought it was "immersive". I'm sure they'll appreciate the "immersion" and "realism" when aiming the shuttle at the runway.
Ok, now seriously, I think in reality they'll just let the computer do it. I'm pretty sure that when you're landing something that expensive, it's not a big problem to have Class III ILS on the runway you use for it. In which case it can just land itself.
Now I do "believe" in evolution and natural selection, and there are better examples than this.
But this (alone) doesn't either prove or disprove evolution at all, much less "conclusive proof". Just because species X has A, and species Y has B, it doesn't mean they couldn't have been created like that.
E.g., look at the bears in World Of Warcraft. Some are white, some are brown, some are black, some are bigger, some are smaller... but there was no evolution involved anyway. Some game designer or artist just went and modelled a white bear. So _if_ I was to believe in the Big Game Designer In The Sky, I see no problem why He can't create two species of ants which work differently. I mean, seriously, why is that impossible to create?
E.g., look at some of the artifficial things humans have been creating by genetic engineering. E.g., rabbits which glow in the dark. You could say the same. "Wow, so a rabbit didn't see at night, so it evolved into a light source. It's conclusive proof of evolution." Well, nope, not really. A human just created that rabbit.
The "proof" of evolution is in the intermediate steps, not in the fact that two species are different. Just being different won't even start to contradict creationism. Sure, they'll say, they were created different. What "proves" evolution (or at least makes a very compelling point for it) is finding enough intermediate steps to actually show that species A really transformed gradually into species B. E.g., finding enough bones and such to make a compelling case of how and over what timeline did a small-ish ape turn into Homo Sapiens.
The best by what criterion? By costing a helluva lot more to do the same job, just to resemble travelling in a mac truck instead of a car? Just as a national penis size symbol along the lines of "we can afford to haul a giant truck into orbit, even at the expense of blowing up a few astronauts now and then"? Or maybe as a way to waste whatever space budget is left on a couple of uber-expensive flights per year instead of several flights with a smaller vehicle?
Yes, in an ideal world, where money and resources are unlimited, flying in style in a giant airplane would be cool. In the real world, you have a finite space budget. Wasting it on lifting something that size _and_ on trying to patch an unsafe design is actually detrimental. The same budget would allow a helluva lot more if it wasn't wasted on the shuttle.
Even the original shuttle design would disaggree with your assessment that the current shuttle is good. Just as a quick reminder:
The original shuttle design was, basically, the equivalent of a car. It was little more than a reusable capsule with wings. It was supposed to be reusable, cheap, safe, and pay for itself by doing lots of trips up and down. It also had buggerall cargo space and was only supposed to go into sane orbits.
Except NASA didn't have the budget for it. So they look at who else has a budget to put stuff in orbit: the Airforce. They're shooting these huge spy satellites into space. So NASA goes to the Airforce and says basically "you know, if you gave us your l(a)unch money, we could put those satellites in orbit for you safer and cheaper. And even bring them back down if needed! You won't have to launch another Titan rocket ever again. Won't that be nice?"
The Airforce payloads were, however, (A) bloody huge, and (B) went in a polar orbit, so they'd sweep over the soviet union. That's what the Airforce needed done. So if they're to give their space budget to NASA, then NASA had to guarantee they could do that. Enter the new shuttle concept: a freaking huge truck that can load one of those in its cargo bay.
Look at that huge cargo bay, and that's what it's for. It's not to give the astronauts leg room or anything, it's just big enough to pack one of those huge spy satellites.
The aftermath:
1. Even for those satellites, using a manned shuttle is fucking stupid. You don't need humans onboard to put a satellite into orbit, when a computer can do the same thing. And you don't need to deal with the media fallout when you blow up some humans. (Not to mention the irresponsibility of risking some human lives when you can do the exact same without them.) And you don't need to lift a huge ultra-expensive shuttle either, when you can just lift the satellite itself instead.
So do you want to know how those satellites are launched nowadays? By the Airforce, with a big rocket.
2. For smaller satellites, which was the original shuttle's idea, now the thing is too big and expensive. It's like using an 18 wheeler truck to haul your computer. It's just not worth it.
So how are all those satellites launched nowadays? With a smaller rocket.
3. For hauling humans into orbit, it's too big, too expensive, and too unsafe. And it becomes even more expensive by trying to patch that unsafe design.
4. But wait, isn't it used to haul materials up to the ISS? Isn't that worth having a huge flying truck? Well, guess what? The same applies as for the Airforce's satellites: the cargo can go up with a cheap rocket just as well. A computer can put it into any kind of orbit you want it in. And the Russians have been doing just that, for a fraction of the cost, _and_ more reliably. Who do you think supplies the ISS when the shuttle is grounded for months trying to figure out what foam to use and where? Right. Traditional Russian rockets do.
Even if you needed something assembled into space, there's no reason whatsoever to carry the humans and the cargo together. You can put the humans up with a small shuttle and whatever cargo they need up with a rocket.
Indeed.
And I just wanted to add one more thing: the GM _could_ revive that world if he really wanted to.
E.g., in Valkyrie Profile, the "best" ending involves the world being destroyed, but in a Deus Ex Machina kind of twist, a pissed off Valkyrie finds the strength to undo that and beat seven shades of shit out of Loki for it. It's not making up for some player mistake, it's been the (cheesy) plot from the start. You _will_ lose the first round, Loki _will_ destroy the world, and that causes Lenneth to get a rage fit and power-up like Superman. It's in fact the game's justification of why you can beat up an Aesir. (God.) In the second round, the Einherjar are still just as useless as in the first round, but Lenneth is pissed off enough to hit like a tank.
Maybe cheesy, but I can't see why a GM couldn't pull the same kind of a stunt.
Or better yet, "Ok, the Daikatana has the power to restore the world, but it would get destroyed in the process. Do you want to use it?" Neat Deus Ex Machina, and removes a too powerful artefact from the party too.
Of course, if Romero had refused even that, then he'd be the prick. But in that excerpt it's the GM that stuck to "nope, it's over."
Now I can understand someone being mislead by the wrong Slashdot summary, but, no offense, commenting on the wording of an article would imply you bothered to actually RTFA first.
Here's the short summary: Activision wants higher game prices to cover their huge development costs. Sony guy answers to that along the lines of "well, we _can't_ start selling games for $99, because people expect games to be between $39 at the low end and $59 at the high end."
Basically, no, he doesn't think he's hyping the console, he's not trying to justify a price increase, or whatever the highly incorrect Slashdot summary would want you to believe. He's just saying they _can't_ increase game prices, and anyway not by the huge ammount that Activision wants. That's all.
Actually, the summary on Slashdot is highly incorrect. If you read what the guy says on Gamasutra, it's
A) in response to Activision's making a fuss that games should be more expensive, since apparently Activision's development costs are too high to be covered even by $59, and
B) all that the Sony guy basically says is along the lines of "well, we can't go much higher than $59, because people expect games to be between $59 and $39. We can't suddenly price a game at $99, because noone would buy it. Even if we could slightly increase the price, it would be at most a very small increase, not what Activision wants."
Basically that's all there. It's _not_ about Sony wanting to raise game prices, it's Sony telling Activision "dude, put down the bong, we _can't_ sell your games for $99." I.e., pretty much the opposite of what the Slashdot summary says.
Actually, I don't feel like a "hardcore gamer", I feel like a casual gamer, playing very casually for serveral hours a day ;)
Well, ok, it's not entirely a joke there. I never understood most of the "hardcore gamer" mentality, or what it even means. Sure, defining it as seeing games as a part of your life is one thing, but half the time "hardcore gamer" is passed off for meaning anything between tough-as-nails kick-me-in-the-teeth I-eat-bosses-for-breakfast adrenaline-soaked challenge-seeker and being outright anti-social. (I remember posts actually praising games with hideous travel times as "hardcore", because the poster can be alone, soloing some obsucure monsters, a mile away from any other players. And that was supposedly "hardcore.") Can't say I've ever fit those descriptions. I've always played to relax, forget stress, be told a nice story, and seeking some grand nearly-impossible challenge or quests/levels/whatever that take 5 hours of retrying to overcome.... was always just about the last thing I've looked for in a game. I guess there would be quite a few people to proclaim me non-"hardcore".
And let me assure you it's not Flash or card games either. Ok, maybe I'm the wrong example there, but let's take someone else then. Mom? She played games like Tropico or Mario 64 before, and is currently (still) playing Lumines and Mercury on her PSP. Dad? He plays Counter-Strike, in 15-30 minute bursts. No idea if a CS player can actually count as "casual", but he's not the die-hard Real-Man kinda clansman either. He played Mario 64 before too.
There also seem to be a lot of casual gamers in MMOs. There are some people who took more than a year to get their character to level 50 in COH, for example.
The point isn't about playing 15 minutes a day, it's about being able to play in 15 minute bursts, if I so choose. You know, if someone's on the phone, or I have to get the laundry from the washing machine, or I'm playing just a quick round before going to work, or whatever, don't make me search for a save point for half an hour first and don't make me freakin' need a 40 man raid for a long mission. Just let me save there and then, or park my character in a safe place, because I need to take a break _now_.
The worst in that aspect was a game which made me play for 10 _hours_ before giving me a save point. FFS, 10 _hours_. It's insane. Noone who has even the bare minimum of a life can put up with that. Heck, it was at the apex of my gamer-without-a-life times, and even I didn't find it funny.
And let me get back to the idea of trying to squeeze in a mission before going to work, or while the pizza is in the oven, or whatever. I do that a lot. E.g., I've been known to squeeze in one COH mission between the morning shower (right, I'm probably losing geek points here;) and going to work, while my hair dries. I don't want a 2 hour raid there, complete with a major elite boss fight. I just want to jump in as my Scrapper (think: Fury spec Warrior, in WoW terms) and run through some warehouse punching any Carnies/Malta/whatever in the way, then get the mission bonus and run to work.
And let me also say: this isn't just for casual gamers. I can imagine that a lot of the generation conflict and "Auugh! My kid is addicted! He keeps playing and/or throws a tantrum when I tell him to turn off the console and clean his room _now_!" angst actually happen when the poor kid is actually desperately looking for a save point. Noone wants to just lose the last hour of anything. So a lot of it might be just that, rather than true addiction and being unable to put the controller down.
And the sooner the game industry finally figures out that they can let them save and put the controller down, the better we'll all be for it.
Then how about shutting the fuck up about things they don't have a fucking clue about? Noone's saying "you should have bought Daikatana." Just, you know, then talk about stuff you _did_ experience first hand. Judging a game -- _any_ game -- without actually having played it, strikes me as idiotic to the extreme.
It would be like me trying to tell you why Dark Age Of Camelot or Age Of Empires suck hairy ass, except I've never played them and never even saw anyone playing them. Or telling you in how many ways driving a Honda sucks, except I've never actually driven one. Oh, I've seen some Honda promotional video and read some "LOL, OMG, Honda sucks" on Something Awful, and that sooo makes me qualified to objectively judge it. Wouldn't you then say, "how about shutting the fuck up, if you don't actually have the experience to base that on?"
Same for Daikatana, or any other game for that matter. Sure, I can accept "man, the demo sucked, so I have no intention to play that." Sure. But going on whole tirades about the quality of design and gameplay in Daikatana as a whole, is just idiotic without having the actual data to base that judgment on.
And, again, a lot of people haven't even played that sucky demo before joining in the SFV chorus of how much Daikatana sucks. They've just read some Something Awful rant and felt suddenly qualified to talk at length about a game they hadn't even _seen_.
You'd be surprised what kind of momentum it seemed to have gathered. There were non-gaming magazines and web-sites screaming for blood and digging up all possible shit they could dig up against Ion Storm, Romero, Romero's girlfriend, everything. Even benign stuff like Killcreek's being at the Ion Storm booth at E3 was taken out of context, distorted and presented as some grievous act against humanity.
And I can definitely say that I've run into people IRL, not on some obscure forum, that just knew that "Daikatana sucks", yet refused to even try it or the demo to see for themselves if it sucked or not. I mean, geesh, the demo was shitty enough anyway, so I could have understood it if someone played the first level and decided that it sucked. But there were people who had religiously decided that it sucks, and refused to even consider trying anything that would have challenged their religion.
Admittedly, I'm a gaming nerd and I'm among nerds, and most of them are gamers. So it's hard to say if it's representative for the larger population. But, still, it felt disgusting and it's hard to resist the temptation to extrapolate.
Very perceptive. Now also look at when work on Daikatana had commenced.
You know, seeing that I've explicitly stated that by the time it was released, other games with a story already existed, it just makes me wonder what the point is spewing the exact same thing back as some grand rebuttal. Are you just trolling, or genuinely can't read and comprehend more than one sentence at a time?
Again, are you trolling, or genuinely too stupid to comprehend even the simplest metaphor? The point wasn't about market sizes, the point was simply that more people criticized Daikatana than people who've actually played it. That's all. _Can_ you address the real point, or is fabricating straw-men out of phrases taken out of context the best you can do? No, seriously. I'm curious.
Yes, and the first level of the demo is sooo indicative of the design of the game as a whole. Shooting frogs in the rain is sooo representative for the quality of, say, the later Ancient Greece levels. Not.
Still, at least you've played a level of the demo. That's already one level more than 90% of the karma-whores and SFVs at the time.
As opposed to half the party-based RPGs, which did the exact same thing? Or as opposed to every single scientist escort mission in Half Life? (And a few others. Even MMOs, like COH love to have that kind of missions.) I'd love to see you leave without the companion NPC in those.