The funny thing is, both Gates _and_ Wall Street are "right", but they're talking about different things.
From the point of view of whether the PC will disappear and people will start running their corporate software on PDAs (yeah, that would be a "fun" data entry job), Gates is right. The PC isn't going anywhere any time soon.
But I suspect that's not what Wall Street is talking about. Wall Street isn't about having a product or a steady market, but about buying and selling shares. A company which just has a steady product and a steady income isn't that interesting there, because its shares don't go up by that much, if at all. You don't make the big bucks trading those.
What you want ideally is something with seemingly exponential growth. (Even if it can't be sustained much longer, you can probably find an idiot who can be dazzled by graphs showing that in 20 years they'll have their products in 10 billion houses and bogus formulas calculating a fair share value based on that prediction. He'll buy your shares for that price.) You want spectacular announcements driving the share values up. Etc.
Companies just having a steady market and income are boring in that aspect. They may make enough money to stay afloat for ever, but you won't make a mint trading their shares.
Cue investors starting to scream for measures that can help them hype the shares before they dump them, even if they mean gutting the company in the long term. E.g., firing a quarter of the employees in the name of cost savings can create a temporary surge in profits and drive shares up. So it's always a popular thing to demand. It may be unsustainable or outright fatal in the long run (see for example SGI exitting the graphics arena without even a fight back then, and where SGI is now), but in the short run it makes Wall Street very happy.
(And I'm not even gonna go into such abnormal situations as a profitable company being outright valued a negative sum. Seriously. At one point 3Com was seen by investors as being worth _less_ than the shares it owned in Palm Inc. Divisions with real products, market and income were basically worth a negative sum. Cue idiotic investors starting to scream that 3Com should get rid of those.)
From the Wall Street perspective the PC era is over not because the PC market is somehow disappearing, but because the exponential growth is long gone and in fact growth is slowing down. Even the upgrade cycles are slowing down. E.g., I have a 2.26 GHz workstation at work and, well, look at when Intel launched that CPU and how many years ago "Moore's Law" said a 4.5 GHz replacement should have been available... and still isn't. It used to be that a 3 year-old PC would be almost obsolete, whereas nowadays for most businesses and even most home users (hardcore gamers notwithstanding) there's very little reason to buy a new one.
And major hype-worthy announcements are getting fewer and far in between. Vista is taking for ever to come out, and just can't be used to create the same hype as, say, Windows 95's move to 32 bits anyway.
Even if you look at other companies than MS, well, look at the Slashdot headlines form the last year. There just isn't anything sounding like "fast growing company with killer app/hardware/whatever, poised to be worth tens of billions in the long run", so there's nothing to promise making $$$$ fast with their shares. Everywhere it's just small upgrades and incremental tweaks. What passes for a tech headline these days is something like "AMD announces DDR2 support next year".
So I suspect that's what Wall Street means by PC era being over. They see the same turning into a steady industry as Gates sees, but from their perspective tere's a lot less to be excited about that future.
I'm still not following your analogy with cars. Yes, car companies buy each other every year too, and incorporate each other's technology in their own cars.
E.g., when I mentioned VW and Audi, guess what? They actually own Audi. And if you buy a luxurious Bentley or a cheap Skoda, you might find those were bought by Volkswagen some time ago too, and, yes, share engines and even chasis designs between them. E.g., not only you'll find that the Skoda Octavia shares the engine choices with a VW Golf or Audi A4, you'll find it's really the same chasis as in a Golf too. One of them is little more than a relabelled version of the other car.
Or let's imagine Daimler-Benz bought Chrysler... oh, wait, they already did. Guess what? That's some more shared technology between them.
And one less competitor too, yeah. And factories they can use for their own stuff. And other advantages.
And yes, they offer the same warranty for cars with bought technology as on their own designs... same as Creative does with Ensoniq cards. They're not sold under any conspiracy theory conditions to destroy the Ensoniq brand in favour of Creative cards, they're sold under the exact same warranty and drivers (good or bad) as the Creative cards. Since since the SB64 PCI they _are_ the Creative cards. There are no non-Ensoniq Creative cards to get preferrential treatment there.
So the whole "waah!!! Creative is evil because they _buy_ technology" strikes me as... surrealistic. Yeah, and? Everyone does that.
Apple bought NextStep, VIA bought S3's graphics business, etc. (So, yeah, any VIA graphics card or motherboard with integrated graphics, guess what? It has a relabelled S3 graphics core.) And they use the technology they've bought. Whop-de-fucking-do, big surprise and drama there. Not.
As for the whole "kool-aid" and "brainwashed sheep" tantrum... here's one thought of the day for you. The japanese have this saying that life is like a mirror. If you smile at it, it smiles back. Worth giving it some thought. It's surprising to how many people it does apply, and to what extent. From RIAA or BSA drones seeing only dishonest thieves around, to nerds seeing only idiots around them, a lot just see really just what they project into that mirror.
"That's because of marketing, not product quality. Read Creative's forums/newsgroups for all the problems people have with Creative and their products. People have been brainwashed into believing that they *need* a Creative sound card for high-end gaming, but it's just not true any more because Creative has stopped innovating in that area."
Dude, let's just put it like this: if you can't hear the difference between some 20-30 dB signal-to-noise on the average Realtek board and over 100 dB SNR on an Audigy 2 (or "only" 96 on an Audigy 1), both actually _measured_... well, then you're deaf. You have my sincere compassion for whatever horrible thing destroyed your ears to that extent. I was originally tempted to make some fun, but it would be mean of me to make fun of someone that crippled.
There's no other way to put it. A difference of 70 dB is a difference of 7 orders of magnitude. That's right, that's a whole 10,000,000 times more noise from those crap on-board solutions, and it goes up to 100,000,000 on the lowest end crap.
At any rate, if that's ok for your damaged ears, fine by me. It's good to know someone actually liked those crap Realtek chips, and it's not just subsidizing a crap company out of my pocket. But do get the clue that there may actually be some actual sound quality we buy those things for.
And that's not even taking other stuff into account, such as the _much_ lower CPU utilization.
"Things started going sharply downhill for me when I bought my SB PCI128 and found out it was just a relabeled Ensoniq card."
And the problem is... what? WTF do you care if a SB has an Ensoniq chip? Did you also boycott the AdLib and earlier SoundBlaster card for having a Yamaha OPL chip for sound synthesis? Do you also boycott Nvidia because a lot of what's in their chips comes from patents bought and engineers taken over from 3DFX and SGI and Matrox?
That's like saying that you bought a VW car and were shocked, nay, outraged, that it has the same engine as an Audi.
Sorry to break it to you, but the age where one manufacturer made everything itself are long gone. And if someone bought another company, well, duh, they're going to use that expertise or their products. Noone (except rarely MS) buys a company just to kill it and/spit on it corpse, WoW style. They buy it because they figure they could actually make more money from it than they paid for the shares.
"I don't buy products from either company. Creative markets to the uninformed, and Apple markets to the trendy. Being a socially-retarded computer geek, I fall under neither category."
I was suspecting socially-retarded geek already by the time you got into tirades about brainwashed sheep, and blowing one aspect out of proportion as the only relevant issue about something. It's, sad to say, typical socially-retarded geek. But I do appreciate and respect the honesty of admitting it.
"Soundblaster == Adlib with 8 bit audio playback."
Ah-ha. So they did add something to the Adlib design, didn't they? Sounds like innovation enough to me.
"They just ripped the Adlib design and HWQ interface (which used off the shelf Yamaha OPL FM synth chips, thus no legal issues) and added 8 bit sample playback chip. That was all."
And the difference for the end user was _huge_. It opened possibilities that the AdLib just didn't have. E.g., good luck getting voice-overs synthetised via AdLib's two-tone sound synthesis. No, seriously, try it. Heck, good luck getting an AdLib to even sound like some instrument or effect you didn't already have in some library. So basically the very fact that today you can have the whole spectrum of sounds including voice overs, realistic-sounding orchestra music (e.g., in SW KOTOR), ambient sounds (e.g., dogs barking or wolves howling), etc, are all made possible by the fact that someone gave PC a DAC.
At any rate, that's innovation. That's what it's all about. No matter how easy it is to hand-wave something as trivial in retrospect, the fact is, someone had to do that first step. And if you look around you or at history, some of the inventions and innovations with the farthest reaches and implications started with such a trivial step:
- someone deciding to tie a rope to two valves of a steam piston to make it keep moving on its own (that's how the steam engine got invented),
- bake some mud (ceramics),
- compress a gasoline and air mixture instead of firing it as it is (the Otto engine),
- use a lever and counter-weight to swing a large staff-sling (the trebuchet)
Etc.
Innovation isn't when some corporate PR department hypes the CEO's latest fart, but when some engineer sat down and, yes, figured out "hmm... you know, this thing would be more useful with a DAC on it."
Creative innovated too. Show me who did they copy the original SoundBlaster from, for example. I also think technically they invented the HDD-based MP3 player, _before_ Apple.
And more importantly the tended to offer products that offer a good bang-per-buck balance. Yes, it's easy to do the "bah, but <insert pro card costing 500$> sounded better or had lower latency" sneer, but from a more pragmatic point of view, Creative did an outstanding job of bridging the gap between pro equipment and the utter crap everyone else was selling.
It's pretty telling that even though virtually any modern motherboard comes with some Realtec or some such sound solution, people still buy SoundBlasters. Because invariably those on-board solutions sound like crap. The signal-to-noise ratio is invariably crap, and often they tend to squeak too whenever anything happened on the bus. Pretty much they amplify any noise and EM interference in the system together with the signal. And having actually tried some, let me assure you that the sound boards based on those Realtek, Cirrus Logic and whatnot chips don't sound any better.
I even went and bought an USB soundcard/headphones combo from Plantronics in my misguided days of trying to boycott Creative, and, honestly, for all the hype about USB being better because of not picking up EM stuff inside the computer, it actually sounded the worst. It was more of a white noise generator than anything else. _And_ it offered _nothing_ except a DAC on the USB bus. There was no way to get any effects out of it, in games or otherwise. There was not even any way to hook it to anything else (e.g., to speakers). Looking back in retrospect, it was just a waste of money, as eventhe lowest end Creative cards cost a lot less and I already had better headphones too.
And a lot of those supposedly better-than-Creative sound cards were just a case of fanboyism and Amiga persecution syndrome. E.g., I've actually had an Aureal Vortex based card -- you know, _the_ one that got everyone up in arms along the lines of "waah!! Creative killed Aureal Vortex!! They're evil!!" -- and frankly it wasn't half as great as it sounded on paper. All that reflection processing and whatnot, sure, sounded like a major technical achievement. In practice most of the time it just made it impossible to tell where the sound is coming from, or WTH did they think it reflected on over there to sound actually louder from there than the original sound. I.e., from the perspective of a gamer who lived or died by hearing the enemy's footsteps or gunfire, it actually was a bigger disadvantage than those no-frills DAC-on-a-card cards.
And so on.
Yes, I know it's slashdot and it's good for your karma to sneer at any corporation -- as long as it's not Apple --, not to mention to rehash variants of the same "alas, the only way to get ahead is to be a monopolist" fatalism and defeatism. But I'll go ahead and say that they (A) innovated plenty, and (B) at least in the sound card market, actually offered good bang/buck.
Where they lost it in the MP3 player market was being utterly clueless about user interfaces and, again, they got beaten in the bang/buck arena. Where Apple got ahead wasn't being the only ones who innovated, but in having an all around good product and placed just right. There were plenty who had ideas before Apple, believe it or not, and there were plenty who had one extra gimmic or advantage over the iPod. Where they failed was invariably having more disadvantages to make up for that. Some were a LOT bigger than an iPod (I still remember some, e.g., Archos ones which were bigger than a 3" hard drive!), some were actually a lot more expensive in the name of some gimmick noone needed, some had a crap user interface, and so on.
Creative's players, for example, tended to be both bigger _and_ have a crap interface, and some had other faults too. It wasn't lack of innovation, it was simply a combination of a flawed perception of the market and flawed execution.
MS has no problems losing money on something, when it fits their world domination plans in some perverse way.
E.g., they never had a problem giving away IE or MS Media Player, and even arguing in a court of justice that they can't stop giving them away withot breaking the OS completely, if it served some other plan. In both cases the plot was about owning the media format (HTML is a file format too), and in Media Player's case owning the DRM for the next generation of media. There's some real money dumped into developping those, too.
E.g., see the relatively recent (last year?) story about them starting to give away a pretty complete version of their latest compiler, to keep people from getting started on GC and the like.
Etc.
Now they're not the only ones, and I'm not going to argue either pro or against MS there. Just saying it does happen.
In this case, we don't know if MS planned their console to be hackable. Maybe or maybe not. (Relying 100% on DVD drive firmware, and not even trying to authenticate that firmware, seems surprising... _weak_... for a company also trying to push DRM. It could be stupidity not conspiracy, though.) However, it certainly won't be the end of the line for MS. They could:
A) realize that, in fact, piracy makes buggerall difference. E.g., see the Galactic Civilizations 2 game recently which made headlines by being _the_ bestseller for a while in spite of being completely unprotected. Some may even say partially _because_ of being unprotected. I'm a legit buyer and I know _I_ enjoy not searching for the freakin' CD each time I want to play, for a change. Plus there's some peace of mind from knowing I won't lock myself out if I get the CD scratched. (Don't laugh, it has actually happened to me.)
And speaking of consoles, I know people who actually own the games for, say, their PSP (and had the original with them), but preferred to hack the BIOS and play off the memory card anyway. It actually had lower load times. Or I know I've enjoyed subverting some of the stupid region protections to play imported games I have bought. Sure, Sony or whoever may regard that as piracy, but as far as I'm concerned they (A) got my money, and (B) got it for some games they weren't planning to sell in Europe anyway. So if they're gonna complain about my forcing them to take my money, as far as I'm concrned they can STFU and go fuck themselves.
So the equation "lack of protection == big $$$$ lost" isn't even that clear cut. You will lose some users' money, but you will gain other users' money. As Gal Civ 2 showed, it can even out or even work in your favour.
And point in case, look at near history. The PSX and PS2 were trivial to chip, and I don't think Sony made a loss with either of them. The Dreamcast didn't even require any modding: as soon as people figured out how to extract an ISO of those proprietary CDs, you could just burn it on an ordinary CD and the console would cheerfully boot it. Yet the Dreamcast enjoyed a particularly high rate of games sold per console sold. I.e., the average Dreamcast user was actually buying more games, which is pretty much the opposite of the supposed doom-and-gloom effect of piracy on the industry.
B) make a PR win out of it anyway. More consoles sold can be spun into sounding like not only a major console-war win, but as being a huge market for the publishers. God knows the publishers never stopped making PS2 games just because the GameCube is harder to put a pirated game in. Which in turn can further boost sales of consoles, and so on.
C) just care about taking market share from Sony, as usual. Let's face it, I don't think the first XBox actually made a profit on the whole, and that didn't stop MS from making the XBox 360 an even bigger hole to throw money in. MS's plot doesn't seem to be about breaking even, or much less about actually making a profit, but about killing off those who do currently live off their profits in the market. To what end, I couldn't know, but they sure don't seem to mind losing money to that end.
So basically I wouldn't be surprised if they're perfectly OK with the idea of your buying an XBox 360 even only to play, ahem, "backups", as long as that keeps you from getting a PS3.
"Electricity is metered. Water is metered. Hell, even my trash is metered. What makes you think bandwidth will be any different? People need to be prepared to pay, per MB or GB, if they want quality service."
Well, that's just the thing. They're not even trying to do that, they're trying to extort money out of Google and MS instead.
See, it's one of those cases where everyone sold what they can't possibly deliver, and now they're tripping on each other's lies. Everyone promised "FREE UNLIMITED DSL!!!" based on the idea that, nah, you're not actually gonna use it. They figured that, yes, you're gonna see a web site or two, send a couple of emails, maybe even download a MB or two of short pixelated movies, but that on the whole you wouldn't actually _use_ 99.999% of that capacity.
Unfortunately it turns out it's as unsustainable as promising "FREE UNLIMITED ELECTRICITY!!!" and thinking people won't use more of it.
And the problem isn't just one of wishful thinking and creative marketting, but it's always been an outright lie. E.g., there was always some clause hidden in the fine print, or not even there, saying they can kick you out if you use "too much" of that "unlimited" thing you've bought. And for a while it worked to villify those who actually use the unlimited bandwidth they bought, and present them as some predators leeching off the rest of the society, because there were few of them, and everyone else didn't give a rat's arse.
But now it's more and more of them, and there's increasing resistance to buying "FREE UNLIMITED DSL" and then being treated like some kind of heinous criminal if you actually use what you've bought. It worked when those "villains" were some lone nerds running a server at home, but it gets people writing to the relevant authorities when their mom gets mis-treated for spending too much time talking to them on VOIP. Or when they themselves get a nasty letter because little Billy played too much World Of Warcraft. (But more likely, they don't even know why. It just says you've used too much bandwidth.)
No matter how you want to look at it, it's a scam. I'm not even opposed to mettered access as such, but I _am_ opposed to selling something and then villifying the people who use just what they've bought. If they sell something as unlimited, then it damn better be just that. It's like selling monthly bus cards on the explicit claim that you can ride the bus as often as you want to with that card, and then tarring and feathering some retired grandma for riding the bus 6 times a day instead of the 2 times a day your marketroids estimated when they priced that card. It's that sick and dishonest.
And the problem is that now getting out of that losing proposition is a bit of a prisoner's dillema, except the losing move is to confess the truth. Anyone trying to sell a service honestly, a la "ok, guys, it costs X dollars per gigabyte" is losing their customers to those promising "FREE UNLIMITED DSL!!!"
So now the plan is basically "I know!!! Google has money, right? Let's extort some protection money out of Google instead." The ISPs would now like to have their cake and eat it. They'd like to continue to scream "FREE UNLIMITED DSL!!!" all over the place, but be allowed to extort someone else to pay the bill. That's all.
It's not even that Google's search even costs the ISPs that much bandwidth. FFS, it's a simple text page, with no graphics other than the "Gooooogle" letters. Even the Google ads are actually using _much_ less bandwidth than the more traditional ads, which in the meantime have inflated to be hideously huge animated popups or overlays. And certainly Google isn't responsible for P2P file swaps and P2P VOIP traffic.
But Google has money, and the ISP would like to be legally allowed to extort some money from Google. And for that matter, from everyone else doing any business on the Internet.
And the stupidity of it all is that all those sites already paid per gigabyte to their uplink. Having to pay extra so the users of some ISP can see your site -- or can see it without it taking 5 minutes to load -- is nothing short of extortion.
Hmm... I didn't know there already was a theory about it, but then again I should have imagined there must be one after a few centuries of this recurring phenomenon. Thanks for the link.
"In order for dishonesty and greed to work, you need stupidity."
Oh yes, you are right there. Not gonna argue with that. But the interesting part is the perverse way stupidity enters that equation.
Bubbles don't happen because, suddenly, a lot of people just inexplicably become stupid. Well, ok, they do become stupid, but not inexplicably. There's in fact a very simple explanation for it: bubbles happen when people start thinking that everyone else is stupid.
Look at the apex of the last tech bubble, or for that matter at the renaissance Dutch tulip bulb craze, just to illustrate that nothing changed in centuries. It wasn't plain simple stupidity of the "ooh, tech shares or tulips are valuable, I must own some too" kind. It was belief that someone else would be more stupid and buy them at an even higher price. (And in the tulip craze, at one point the idea started being thrown around that the rest of the world would start buying those bulbs too. Basically giving those greedy people an even larger pool of people they could imagine to be that stupid.)
If you do manage to get a bubble started, the bubble _itself_ becomes proof that, indeed, everyone else is stupid and ripe to be scammed by you. You can take 1000 people who, each taken separately, would have never even considered investing in a tulip bulb or in shares of a company with no sales of any kind. But if you manage to get a bubble going, each of them can get their judgment clouded enough by greed to believe that the other 999 are stupid. And each of them thinking that he being the obviously smarter one will have no problem buying something for X dollars and selling it to one of those 999 dolts for at least twice that.
Where the dot-com bubble differed (in a minor way) from the tulip bubble is that the dot-com bubble was a two-stage design. The first stage that got it started was the belief that surely the advertisers are too stupid to notice that they're paying 10x the money for 1/10 the return. The fact that the advertisers were at first slow to react to people doubling or quadrupling the number of ads, and then could be for a while slowed down by smoke-and-mirrors metrics, was taken as proof of that. The belief was formed that basically you can scam them as hard as you want to, and anyone only needs a web site to rake in ridiculous quantities of cash multiplied by their number of users.
So, again, in both stages instrumental wasn't just blind stupidity, but the belief that everyone _else_ is a drooling idiot with money to throw down a rat hole.
You could say that this in itself is a form or manifestation of stupidity, and we could even aggree there very quickly. Yep, it is. Very much so.
But I find it an interesting form anyway, because it's a form where people are basically victims of their own greed and dishonesty. It's not someone else who smooth-talked them to buy a timber mill in Sahara, but their own greed who clouded their judgment enough to think "hmm, there aren't even any bloody trees there, but I bet there are plenty of idiots I could sell that mill to for twice the money." Very interesting phenomenon that, IMHO.
At any rate, I'll make the prediction that that's the way the next bubble will start too. And, sadly, it won't even be that much different from the last one. It might even end up a verbatim rehash.
Nope, it was 400,000 subscriptions. The peak number of concurrent users was about 1/10 that.
The general rule of thumb is around that 10:1 ratio, so if EQ1 ever had 400,000 concurrent users, we'd have heard about it big time. Until WoW it was doubtful that the whole MMO market is 1 million people, so any game reaching 4 million subscribers would have made _headlines_ in a major way. (Like WoW did.)
So, yes, WoW eclipses it by more than a member of magnitude. Even if you don't count China, since EQ1 didn't exist there, it's still an order of magnitude.
Still, as you've said, it doesn't really matter that much since I was talking about the quantity of content. EQ1 eclipsed WoW in that aspect, I'll gladly concede that, but noone else I know of does. That was really the whole point, and I must thank you for filling in the blanks about the timeline and ways of getting that content.
Thing is, the last bubble was a lot more complex than pure stupidity. A lot of it was dishonesty, and a lot of the rest is that special kind of stupidity-from-pure-greed that makes people "invest" in pyramid schemes and the like. The knowledge that, yes, it can't possibly go on for ever, but hoping that it would last just long enough for _you_ to get your pay-off at the expense of others.
E.g., for the greed part, don't assume that all investors were unable to learn that those "internet companies" tend not to last. But that was ok. They didn't plan to hold onto that stock for ever. They planned to buy some "my_cat_photos.com" site at cents per share, hype it to insane values, then sell right before the company crashes and burns and let someone else take the loss.
(And those in the most profitable position were the stock analysts, some of which had no remorse in telling their clients "buy!" while they told their own agents "sell!" I.e., they were in a position to _create_ a bubble around a company, and profit from it.)
A lot of the hyping dot-com stock you may have read fell basically in this category, and partially in the dishonesty one. It's not that those people were too stupid to see that a company without income can't survive. They were hoping _you_ would be stupid enough to believe them and help them pump up the share price. When they proclaimed an income-less and busines-plan-less new economy, well, the money making part of that economy was actually very present in their mind: it was the stock market. Namely hoping that some other dolt would buy the pumped up shares before they crash and burn.
And a lot of the posing, posturing and seemigly illogical behaviour of the dot-coms actually fit that hype-and-dump pattern. Now _some_ of the company owners may have blown money on gazillions of employees, Ferraris and buying football teams just out of stupidity. ("Look, ma! I'm someone! I can throw money out the window just like the rich guys!") But for a lot of them and for some VCs this simply constituted a kind of behaviour they could pump before they dump. It could be hyped as a young, dynamic, fast-growing company that's poised to take over the world. At the rate they're growing, they'll soon be the next Microsoft, and you'll be sorry that you didn't buy their shares when they were cheap! The fact that the only "fast growing" part were the expenses, well, they hoped you wouldn't notice that.
E.g., for the dishonesty part, one of the things that started the bubble was... advertising money. See, in the early day of the Internet web sites had maybe one ad banner on the main page, and some of us even clicked on them. And ad rates were based on this in more than one way. I.e., not only did the advertiser only count on paying for 10,000 or 100,000 views of that ad, but they also counted on the relatively high return on that investment, since people hadn't been yet buried in obnoxious ads and desensitized to them.
But in true "tragedy of the commons" fashion, someone figured that they could rake in twice the money if they put two ads on their site. Or 10x the money if they put an ad banner on each page. Some went as far as to imagine a site which would have a tiny content frame in the middle, while the rest of the screen would be filled by wall-to-wall ads. I know I've actually worked for one.
Some were even less honest than that, and also generously inflated their page view statistics. If you believed them, some sites had millions of pages (and thus ad views) served per month, even though they were barely more than someone's blog site. And not even the blog site of someone famous.
So basically what started the bubble was the idea that "hey, looky, we can make a bunch of cash by defrauding the advertisers!" Except that in the resulting 3-way con-war between websites, ad providers, and the companies paying for the ads (with the ad providers trying hard to cheat _both_ the webmasters and the paying customers), the prices per ad dropped like a rock, making that gold mine a
Let's face it, KOTOR was more of a Bioware game than a Lucas Arts game.
If you look at what came before KOTOR, you see a lot more of that stuff being _merchandising_ SW stuff than being concerned with making a good game. And I really mean pure merchandising, not unlike selling t-shirts with Darth Vader's head on them: it's not about making a better t-shirt, it's about milking some cash from SW die-hard fans.
E.g., you see stuff like "Episode 1: Pod Racer", which had less content than some minigames in other games, but OMG! You can pilot the same pod that Anakin piloted! Its _only_ merit was merchandising some of the SW franchise. Or, yeah, SWG which was little more than merchandising SW characters and costumes in an otherwise piss-poorly designed and piss-poorly run game. (Again, not unlike selling t-shirts with that stuff on them: you don't count on people buying those because they're a better t-shirt, but just because it has that stuff printed on it.)
It took someone like Bioware to basically have the balls to step out of the Episode 4 to 6 rut, in fact make sure they get as far from it as they can possibly get away with (a few thousands of years, in fact), and finally be concerned with the game and the story, not with merchandising Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker and the gang.
And if you look at what came _after_ Bioware, KOTOR II again started to move back towards peddling the franchise (WTH is an _Imperial_ Destroyer doing there, thousands of years before the empire?) and Lucas's new revisionist vision of the SW universe.
Now they didn't manage to ruin it too much, so I won't say it's crap or anything. But if you look closely you can see the step back it took. If it still stayed a good game it may well be more because it had to stay a sequel of Bioware's game, than because of being a Lucas game. Maybe in fact because the Old Republic setting prevents it from becoming too much of a Lucas game. At any rate, a lot of its being good still is, indirectly, a Bioware thing rather than a Lucas thing.
So, I don't know, if anything I'd take it as confirmation of his theory, rather than "shooting down" his theory. The fact that for your example of great SW games you had to pick a Bioware game, not a Lucas Arts game, I don't know, says something.
Sure, any SW title would sell just because it's SW and, sure, it would be in-character for Lucas to do some more merchandising of his franchise. E.g., to sell you some lightsaber-styled Wii controllers for a hefty mark-up.
But that's not what they've actually said. That's really the whole point.
They haven't said "we're intensely excited about the Wii", they've said "we know about it" and "we're looking into it", which is corporate lingo for saying nothing whatsoever. It doesn't mean any commitment, it doesn't mean that a horde of engineers have been assigned to look into designing that controller, it really doesn't mean anything more than "we're not burning this bridge yet". It can just mean that it's in a FYI memo at their merchandising division, or at the bottom of someone's list of possible things to do, or not even that.
It's like Dell yearly "looking into" getting AMD CPUs. It never meant that they actually were excited about them (they were more excited about getting a big discount from Intel) or that they had engineers designing motherboards for Opterons. In fact, in Dell's case it was more of a veiled threat for their negotiations with Intel than anything else.
In the corporate world, neutral phrases like "we're looking into it", or company A's being present at company B's product launch and shaking hands on stage, don't really mean _anything_. You can even get stuff IBM shaking hands and giving canned endorsements at an AMD launch, only to then go and invest 100 million dollars (literally) into their X3 chipset to make Intel computers more competitive with AMD's offerings.
Basically until you see an actual product announcement, simply getting a canned "we're looking into it" means exactly nothing. It's just a more PR-friendly way of saying "no comment."
Yes, we can all argue that Lucas would be stupid not to milk this thing for every penny, but then we're talking our own guesses, and not what was actually said. (And also let's remember that people have argued that Lucas would be stupid to not make a Sam And Max 2, yet that was cancelled.)
"Sure it's easy to say "Blizzard can't make infinite content" but other MMOs have a lot more quests and things to do than WoW."
Having actually played other MMOs too, I'd actually challenge that.
E.g., COH/COV? COH launched with a _much_ smaller world than WoW, and it's still smaller. And it _still_ doesn't really have that many different quests. Sure, it has a lot of them, but they're all variation of the same dozen or so mission templates, and all inside maps are made of the same large building blocks arranged differently. (Yay for another instance of the exact same room I've seen since level 1, only placed in another position in the maze.) Plus, it doesn't even actually _have_ endgame content. It survived for more than a year on the Hamidon raid as the _only_ endgame mission. You can do it again and again if you want to, but that's about it.
E.g., EQ2? It launched again with an even smaller world (but to make up for it, it was divided into tiny zones and you had massive zoning times... several times even to get from Qeynos South to Greystone Yard, the equivalent of getting from the Stormwind gates to the dwarven quarter), fewer quests, massive balance issues, and problems like whole level ranges where there was not much to do or nothing soloable. Sony did in the meantime hire a huge team to churn out quests in wholesale quantities to catch up, but ended up with a lot of copy-and-paste ones or outright illogical ones.
(E.g., to find a manuscript, I have to first kill deer to see if the deer have the manuscript. Then wolves. Then bears. Then finally my character comes at the idea of killing forest wardens to see if they found the manuscript. A direct equivalent would be a WoW Alliance character killing the woodcutters in Eastvale to see if they found a manuscript. Not stole or anyhthing punishable by death, but to see if they found a lost manuscript. That stupid. WTH happened to asking? And that's just one in a hundred or more quests that defy any logic or suspension of disbelief.)
E.g., AO? Heh. Now that one was launched with _only_ randomly generated quests, and at that only reruns of the same "go there, kill all NPCs in the building" quest. No, seriously. Even if the quest text said you must "infiltrate", "spy", or use stealth, you wouldn't get the token unless you hunted down every single NPC on the map.
E.g., SWG? Whole classes, e.g., Entertainers, _still_ don't actually have any content for their class. (And can't do the combat quests either.) Or Smugglers can't actually smuggle, Bounty Hunters are at best some weird assassins, etc. The few quests it actually has that aren't automatically generated crap are little more than exercising in merchandising the SW characters. And again it doesn't even actually _have_ endgame content. Once you've hit level 80 (which until NGE everyone did by macroing anyway), it doesn't actually have either raids or anything else for you to do. You can just go PvP with that character, just for the sake of PvP, or retire it, or that's about it.
Just about the only thing it does have is a larger world size, but even that's mostly empty space for the players to build houses on. And it was even sadder than that at launch, where whole areas weren't even populated with either quests or NPCs. They'd be either literally empty computer-generated terrain, or someone had placed some houses there to make it look like a ghost town. Keywords: ghost town. There were no actual NPCs, quests, or anything there. It was in fact very little more than a placeholder.
Etc.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that those games suck or anything. (Well, maybe except for SWG.) I'm playing COH again myself, if nothing else, because it's still better than waiting 3 hours for a raid group in WoW. But let's not pretend that they're a cornucopia of unique quests and massive amounts of content, because they aren't. Sadly enough WoW does have more quests, and (sad as it may seem, knowing the WoW quests) more varied ones.
The only one which might give WoW a run for its money is EQ1 with all the expansion packs. But then it took how many years to get all that content?
Believe it or not, Blizzard doesn't have infinite funds, nor infinite manpower. They can't _possibly_ provide an endless stream of new content, so your level 60 character can go through a dozen new quests per hour like you did at level 1 in Northshire Abbey. Even if they had 10 times the total content in WoW, you'd still run out of it in a couple of months at that rate. Then what?
So they developped as much content they could afford, and messed with how much they give you at each level. If you plotted a graph with the time along X and the percent of content you've seen as Y, let's just say it would look like very much an asymptote. It starts by going up pretty quickly, but then it slows down, and it takes more and more time to get closer to that covetted 100% spot. By the end of it, huge amounts of time are required to make even the tiniest of progress.
I fondly call it the "boiling a frog alive model". They say that if you put a frog in hot water, it will just jump out. But if you put it in cool water and slowly heat it up, it will stay in and get boiled alive. Now I don't know if that's true with frogs, but it's certainly true with about half the WoW players. Because that's what Blizzard does.
In the beginning you're not up against any major challenge, farming or grinding is entirely unnecessary, travel times are 1-2 minutes, and you get to do new quests and see new content all the time. And you're as happy as a frog in a pool of cool water. (Some people may whine that it's cooking pot shaped, but you're sure it's only whiners/fanboys/whatever.)
It's a _great_ game at that level. And it had to be like that, because that's what gets people addicted.
But unfortunately they can't afford to keep it like that for ever. They just don't have the funds, the manpower or the infrastructure for the insane quantities of content that would be required.
So from there it goes slowly downhill, and more and more time-sinks are worked in. Gradually you need more time spent travelling, more time farming for your next weapon or recipe, more time waiting for a good group for that instance, etc. But still, you work your way slowly towards that 100% point.
Until eventually there are only 2-3 instances left total, and that's it. That's all that separates you from finishing the game, getting bored, and cancelling your account. You've consumed everything else already. So all they can do to keep you busy (and paying the monthly fee) is to make you do those over and over again for months.
That's, in a nutshell, why it becomes repetitive.
Why does it require large groups too? Well, for various reasons. Among others, because:
- it's viral marketting. It's a way to make people beg their friends to keep playing. In other games it was just the thought of "oh man, but all my online 'friends' are in this game" that kept you playing. But in this one said friends _need_ you. They start sending you tells or even emails that you're _needed_ for that 1000'th MC raid. You may even feel like you've failed your friends if you can't log on for that raid. It can make it very hard for some people to cancel their account, even long after they stopped having any fun in WoW.
- to further dillute the rewards. Even if you hit that 1% jackpot and the boss drops that item you were after, too bad, you're one of maybe 8-12 people rolling for it. (Or even more fun, you may know from the start that you're not going to get it, because your guild implemented some "contribution points" system. So you can know from the start that although you've played for 8 hours a day, someone else who's played 16 hours a day is ahead of you, and you'll only get that item if they don't want it.) Time to do it again next week.
Or maybe that boss doesn't even drop anything you need, but you're helping someone else get it. So hopefully they'll reciprocate and help you get yours. Well, that's even better. That's some hours for each of you which didn't get you any closer to your own goal. You're still as far from th
"People in western countries, and in the United States in paticular, have, for reasons inexplicable, a huge problem with sex."
While you're right about parts of the US (and even then: parts), I'd challenge your blanket extrapolation about "people in western countries."
E.g., I'm pretty damn sure that here in Germany noone makes a big fuss about it. You can see various degrees of nudity (or lemme qualify that: it's complete nudity, but the girl might or might not have her arms crossed over her breasts or be photographed from the back or such) right on billboards on the road side. Or on magazine covers proudly displayed on supermarket aisles and various other shops. Here the censorship craze (e.g., in video games or movies) is about violence, not about sex. And certainly noone villifies normal sex relations, nor argues to keep kids ignorant of what a clitoris is. Au contraire.
But lemme challenge it a bit further: "People in western countries"? As opposed to what? As opposed to people in Eastern countries, presumably? Well, which ones?
E.g., I'm pretty sure that China for example proudly waves the "protecting people from pornography" banner each time it justifies its Great Firewall Of China. I also happen to know that it has some hideous prison penalties for trafficking pornography in any form or shape. And we're talking Chinese prisons, which in Western world terms are no better than concentration camps. And, yes, it has already sent a bunch of people to prison even for some mild softcore stuff. There goes most of far east from that list.
E.g., the middle-east arab countries perchance? Well, no, I'm pretty sure most Islamic countries frown upon pornography more than the USA ever did. And then there are the islamist ones, who'd find it obscene to even see a woman's face or legs, or anything other than her eyes unless you're her husband. Displaying her completely naked or, to borrow Bill Hick's expression, "wearing a cock up the ass. They wear them like that in Europe", can be a case for all the way up to death penalty. I'm sure even the USA never went that far.
That actually doesn't include only the arab peninsula, btw, but also extends to some asian muslim nations. Afghanistan comes to mind, for example.
Eastern Europe, maybe? Well, I don't know how it's evolved since the 90's, but let me assure you that during communism they didn't quite promote a sexual freedom kind of culture. The official party doctrines and propaganda made the family the alpha and the omega, and relentlessly condemned anything that could come in the way of that. And while not many gave a damn about party ideals as such, it didn't quite exert any pressure to change early 1900's views. At any rate, if you moved outside the circle of some students or intellectuals who didn't give a damn, you'd have found that most of the population, especially the lowest classes, was still... well, let's just say more conservative about it than the worst USA Bible Belt example you can dig up.
Etc.
So if you're going to single out and sneer at "western countries" as a whole, then better be prepared to document in which way everyone else is better. Because from where I stand, the vast majority of the rest of the world is actually quite far behind Western Europe in terms of open-mindedness for sex.
And to go on a tangent: in many cases in any kind of open-mindedness. In most of those countries racism runs rampant, religious intollerance is par for the course, etc.
So in which way _are_ western countries worse off than the rest of the world?
"I haven't played but working in IT everyone I work with plays it incessantly and all admit that it's reached apoint where they can't stop and yet they don't see any point in continuing. I don't need to use cocaine to know it's addictive and has no real finite purpose."
Some people get addicted to it, yes. But then people get addicted to anything else. Including:
- counterstrike - BSD/Linux/Amiga/obscure-programming-language debates - Everquest2 (and unlike EQ1, I can't even really see what a couple of co-workers even see in EQ2, since it's mostly just a mediocre idea and badly executed) - sex - porn (see people who end up unable to stop browsing for it even at work, and then sue the employer for firing them) - karma-whoring on Slashdot
Etc, etc, etc.
The problem isn't as much the game, as the people. Some people are the kind that just has to find refuge in something and, unsurprisingly, a good game will collect more of them than a bad one. So, yes, you're more likely to find them in WoW than in crap games like Anarchy Online or SWG.
And some people basically have an Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder, so they can't leave anything they haven't 100% finished. They _must_ have opened every single chest, killed every single boss and collected every single armour piece, before they can consider a game finished and move on. I can see how some MMOs would trap them, because they're games designed so you can't really finish them. The end-game grind in WoW is there precisely so you'd need at _least_ a year of doing the same thing over and over again before you're finally "finished".
Again, I'd "blame" the people not the game. (Well, not as much "blame" as have some compassion.) The same personality types do the exact same in other games too. E.g., I had a friend who simply _had_ to find every single chest, secret door and quest in such games as "Betrayal At Krondor". I remember that game particularly because he's explicitly fumed about not being sure if he covered 100% of an area, and there could be some chest he's missed. Or in games like Panzer General he'd save before moving each and every single unit, and reload if the dice-driven result was anything less than _perfect_. (Meaning his unit had to take exactly zero damage, and the enemy had to take exactly the maximum attack value of his unit.) Not because he couldn't have finished it otherwise, but because it _had_ to be perfect, if he could help it.
At any rate, I'd venture a guess that it's not really the game which turned them into that.
Is it just addiction and carrot-on-a-stick for everyone? I'd say I'm proof enough that it isn't, seein' as I'm not even playing it any more. Can't recall any withdrawal syndrome either. If you _don't_ approach it with some silly idea that it's like a marriage for life, or that you _must_ finish everything before you give up, giving it up is actually pretty darn easy. It's just a game. You've seen as much content as was enjoyable, and when it starts being consistently unenjoyable, it's goodbye and good riddance.
As for my comments about "trolling" or "noise drowning the signal", they're not about your having an opinion. It's about your passing a harsh judgment on something you just don't have the data to judge. Knowing one IT guy who's a WoW addict doesn't make you an expert in WoW, and, no, doesn't give you enough data to extrapolate about why everyone else is playing it. It's like knowing that some terrorist was from South America and did drugs, and deciding that surely all people in South America are terrorists and junkies. It's that uninformed a judgment. That's all.
"Seriously do any of you WoW players see the string that is tied around that ever-fleeting carrot?
Having never played I can speak down upon your addiction with impunity but I do feel for you all...please get well soon."
So, you've never actually played something, you have no first-hand experience with it, but you feel qualified anyway to pass judgment upon it and compare it with a carrot in the stick. Pray tell, on what do you base that judgment, then?
_How_, pray tell, do you know then whether WoW is good or bad, and what do those players find in it? Maybe, just maybe, it's not just illogical addiction, but paying for a game that's every bit comparable to Oblivion as both complexity and fun factor go. In fact, to about 10-12 Oblivions, since it has a _lot_ more content to explore and enjoy.
WoW has its own issues, later, much later in the game. You need to play pretty damn intensively for a month or more before you get anywhere near the level where it becomes a carrot-on-a-stick exercise. Or more if you try playing more than one character. At which point you got more content for your money out of it than out of any SP RPG you can get for love or money nowadays.
Still, yes, it has them. But you've never experienced them. So even then I'll rather hear about them from other players who _do_ know first hand what they're talking about. Do you even know what the carrot _is_ in that metaphor you sling about? What do you bring to the table, other than some more noise to drown the useful signal with?
So, yeah, I feel for you. Get well soon. Talk to a competent psychiatrist about getting your head removed from your ass. And maybe, just maybe, try talking about stuff you have any clue about next time. Might keep you from looking like a trolling retard, for a change. Because even as trolling goes, this has got to be the most retarded form of it.
Well, that's exactly the thing: it creates more problems than it solves.
If I'm allowed an awfully long metaphor: There's one thing you get to learn early in Go (and presumably most other game boards) and that is not to lose good pieces trying to save bad pieces. At some point you have to look at a group of your pieces on the board and recognize that they're dead. That's it. It may take another 1 or 100 moves to actually get them encircled and removed from the board, but that's it, there's no way to save them. The newbie mistake, leading to some spectacular defeats, is to try to anyway, and lose more "good pieces" trying to save those who can't possibly be saved. The only good course of action is to abandon them and resign to the idea that they're already lost.
The same applies here IMHO: adding even more bad (if "realistic") ideas to save previous bad ideas, is IMHO the wrong way to go about it. At some point you have to look at it and admit that it was a dead end, and prolonging the suffering with even more bad ideas won't save it.
E.g., your solutions not only create more problems than they solve (as you yourself have correctly noted), but also don't solve the real problem. If stashing the iron swords in the banks won't break the economy, then players will stash them somewhere else and still break the economy. E.g., create 20 mule characters each, which exist only to store a few dozen swords each in their backpacks.
What next? Have NPCs rob random characters which aren't even logged on? Surely that's a way to piss off most of the player base, who didn't take part in the scam in the first place.
It can easily become an arm race, or an equivalent of Go's "ladder" formation, that leads nowhere. You end up piling even more "fixes" to the problems created by the previous "fix", until it breaks or it loses most players' interest.
So while I'll aggree that "a game really needs to be designed to minimize the impact of the 0.1% of the assholes that will play it", as you aptly put it, I'll disaggree that such an arms race is the way. Sometimes the right solution is to discard a previous bad idea, not to keep "fixing" the wrong "fix".
In UO's case, the solution was to simply get rid of that iron-tracking silliness. It removed both the problem _and_ the consequences of the assholes' actions in one fell swoop. The game works perfectly well without it, and a hundred or so other MMOs never needed it either. There are other, better, ways of regulating an economy, or even better: of letting it regulate itself.
1. You don't actually need an eco-system to create the illusion you describe. If all the reproduction happens behind the scenes anyway, and the most a user ever witnesses is the baby badgers crawling out of a hole in the ground, then you don't actually need parent badgers in that hole. The hole itself can be just a monster generator (a concept that existed for two decades) which spawns badgers crawling out of it. The player is free to imagine that some parent badgers must exist in that hole, but they don't actually have to exist as entities in the game world.
It's even used in a lot of games. E.g., in City Of Heroes a lot of the enemies come out of some door or elevator, and the rescued victims disappear by running to the nearest door or elevator. Problem solved, and it offers enough answer to "where do they come from?" or "where do they go to?" to keep the suspension of disbelief going. As a player you're free to use your own imagination (e.g., maybe that NPC actually lives in that building) and that's a very powerful tool in maintaining suspension of disbelief.
The moral of the story is: never go for something horribly complicated when a simple illusion works just as well. Or to put it a lot less nicely, that's the difference between newbies and pros. The newbies get stuck trying to immitate the real world... badly.
2. Origin did try hard to make their idiotic "realism" ideas work, and they had the funding, the motivation and the programmers to do so. It tried really hard to have a "realistic" world, not only including the creature spawns, but also stuff like ore distribution, or trying to force players to create their own in-character justice to deal with griefers. They tried for _years_ and tweaked each such concept in dozens of different ways, even if it pissed off their player base. (In fact, much of UO's decline and losing the crown in the genre it created, can be traced back to its never giving a damn about what their players wanted, and being stuck on trying "realistic" stuff that noone wanted.)
Basically if any of those ideas had an obvious way to make it work, I do believe they'd have eventually stumbled upon it. Don't assume that they missed the blatantly obvious, and only you can tell them how it's done. Or not unless you're prepared to show a comparable game where that works.
The problem of simulating RL isn't trivial when you have 10 to 100 players per acre of virtual world, and they're all hell-bent on exterminating everything in sight. And more importantly, where some will deliberately try to break the game, just because they can.
E.g., players or whole guilds can decide to exterminate every single badger in your world. If those badgers actually have a simulated biology, it doesn't matter if you gave them holes to hide in: the players _will_ be willing to camp day and night in front of the hole, until the mama and papa badger get hungry and come out. So you want to put them on top of a cliff? So player mages will bombard that cliff with AOE (area of effect) spells like fireballs, and player rangers will rain arrows upon it, until they finally manage to exterminate the last breeders.
So you want to regulate reproduction rates? Players will only take it as a challenge in the attempt to ruin the world.
E.g., this is an actual UO example, Origin tried to have a self-regulating economy by limiting the amount of available ore. To prevent the market from being flooded by 10 times as many weapons and armours as players are, their idea was that there'd be a fixed quantity of iron in the world. New ore would only be spawned when existing iron items broke down or were otherwise destroyed. Sounds smart, right?
Well, as soon as the players understood this, enough of them started working hard to take metal items out of the game. They'd stash hundreds of swords and breastplates in their bank, or in the banks of characters they didn't even play actively, until mining and smithing did grind to a painful halt.
And just to qualify it again: there was no plan to corner the market to make a profit selling them later. The whole plan was to _destroy_ the economy, just because they could.
Most worlds are unsustainable and utterly unrealistic because... they've been designed that way. Not because some imperfect AI decided to put his fortress half-way into a hill, where people can walk over the wall. Most worlds are designed as just "levels" for the player to conquer, and no thought is given to what would that town do when the player isn't around.
But here's my take: it's not actually necessary for the NPCs to actually _do_ that stuff while the player isn't around. I don't really care if an NPC has been sleeping, sweeping his floor, and restocking his shop when I'm not around, or if he just got spawned in the right point for that time of day when I entered the level.
Games are just about creating an illusion, and an illusion is perfectly good for me. What's missing is any attempt to even bother about that illusion.
E.g., if a tribe is presented as having fought for grazing land (e.g., the Tauren in WoW), I want them to either be able to graze themselves or have cattle. I want their culture, their myths, etc, to reflect that. There are (not-so-subtle) differences between a hunter-gatherer society and an agriculture/animal-husbandry society, so a tribe that fought for grazing land for their cattle damn better not act like they're hunters-gatherers. I want their towns or settlements to have stables. I want their economy and their quests to reflect that. (E.g., while mystical and ancestor worship concernns are good and fine, surely a lot of their peasants would worry about more mundane stuff like cattle thieves or wolves or land conflicts, because they're a more immediate threat to their livelyhood.)
E.g., in Morrowind if a town has built city walls, then I want someone to sit and think what did the citizens try to solve with that. Building and maintaining a city wall was a _huge_ expense, so noone would do it just for decoration sake. So I want it to be a functional defense. Maybe it would actually need city gates too, not just some wide arches that either enemies or wild animals can just walk through. Maybe it would need ramparts, towers, or other suitable places for the defenders on that wall. (An undefended wall, anyone can just prop a ladder against and climb over.)
E.g., if the Imperials there built a fortress, what did they try to achieve with it? Maybe placing it on _top_ of a hill would server that goal better than placing it between two hills and half-way into one of them. If anyone can climb an easy slope to the top of the hill and rain arrows _downwards_ into the fortress, then wth purpose do those walls serve? Doubly so if continuing to walk over the hill gets one neatly over the walls and into the fortress.
Or what are the logistics of such a place? If you read for example Sun Tzu, armies used to cost a _lot_ and could even break an economy. Maybe they'd need to be regularly supplied, for example? There'd be a whole economy supplying a nearby fortress with wood, weapons, food, ore and coal if they have their own smith, etc. Which is why IRL even a small castrum often evolved into a major city. A whole economy basically evolved around it and in turn depended on it for protection. Important or wealthy merchants would eventually be granted or bought the right to have a house _in_ the fortress, either for the services they provided or just because they were willing to pay for it.
And so on. Basically, again, I don't care if the NPCs actually do anything when I'm not around. All I want is an illusion that those places _could_ realistically function as places for the NPCs to live in, and not just as levels for me to conquer.
The fact is, a mouse allows perfectly good aiming to snipe a player circle strafing and ducking behind cover, and some of them have damn good reflexes. In my CS and UT days I had no problems turning and accurately headshotting a player crouched behind some crates in a split second, and I'm nowhere near the best player out there. Or I haven't heard of anyone having problems with the bots in Noone Lives Forever, which _do_ take cover. At any rate, the mouse was perfectly fast and accurate for that.
So I'm supposed to believe that only against bots is a mouse so slow that the bot has to stand still in the open to be hittable at all? Heh.
Want a more natural controller? How about a lightgun? Those existed for ages, and some of them (e.g., Namco's) had nearly pixel accuracy. They can be moved around with a flick of the wrist, just like the Wii controller. And if holding it like that had any kind of advantage, noone's keeping you from holding some lightguns by the barrel and using the button on the side to shoot.
So, please. The Wii controller may have its advantages, but (like anything else even vaguely computer- or console-related) it also has a bunch of shameless marketroids behind it. Tho'll cheerfully claim any absurdity if it helps sell their snake oil. Use your own brains when reading such patently absurd statements.
The limit was _never_ how fast or accurate the mouse is, but how fast and accurate the player is. And if the AI was dumbed down in a lot of games, I can also tell you why:
1. Because of player skill constraints. It's not that the mouse isn't fast enough, it's that the average gamer in your target market segment _isn't_ Thresh or Fatality. You can't throw 20 perfectly skilled opponents at them and expect the average player to track them all and handily dispatch them all. More importantly, the gameplay isn't a deathmatch where you just respawn when shot either: in most single-player FPS, if you got killed, it's game over and you need to reload. You don't want the casual gamer to _need_ to save before each corner, and reload 5 times before he manages to shoot before the bot headshots him. Because that's just no fun.
So even if you do program the bot to take cover, you still must make it easy enough to kill by a casual gamer. You have to just give the impression that the bot is playing well, not actually have it play well.
Contrary to uneducated belief, making a bot unpredictable and have 100% accurate aim takes no skill at all. The first is just a matter of using a random number generator, and the second is elementary maths: take the bot's position, take the target position, set the gun to point exactly along that vector. There you go: a deadly aim that never misses. That's not what's hard to program. But what you really want it to stand out of cover at regular intervals that the player can learn, and spend several seconds missing, so Joe Average has the time to aim and dispatch him.
2. Even more importantly, because of budget constraints. _The_ reason FPS exploded in the '90 wasn't because everyone wanted to play only that, it was because they were _cheap_ to produce. You could make a profit even if you sold less copies. You could license a 3D graphics engine, hack together a few levels and a couple of skins, and call it a game. Unlike RPGs and adventures which needed lots of scripting, animations, and occasionally AI, a FPS was cheap to produce precisely _because_ it didn't bother with those.
So noone was going to spend more money on one. Definitely not on ellaborate AI and character interactions, and not on the myriad of animations needed for the bots to take cover behind corners, crates, pillars, or upturn tables when nothing else is available.
3. Because of CPU power constraints. Let me tell you how those "minimum requirements" on a game box are born: the marketting guy, yours or the publisher's, comes and tells you: "studies say that 10% of people still have a 286, so our game must be 16 bit and run on a 12 MHz 286." That's an actual q
"So if you use a computer, you're a geek? If you drive a car, you're an auto enthusiast? If you walk, you're a fitness buff?"
How about this?
- if you use a computer, you're a computer user - if you drive a car, you're a driver - if you walk, you're a pedestrian - if you play a game, you're a gamer
It's easy, isn't it?
Let's say we get if we introduced further distinctions like "yeah, he's driving a car, but it's a cheap Fiat, so it's not _really_ a driver. You have to be in a Mercedes or BMW executive class or higher to be _really_ a driver." Because that's the direct equivalent of argument waved around about gamers. ("Yeah, he's playing a game, but it's only Bejewelled, so it doesn't count as a _real_ gamer.") Would we really gain anything by such dividing them into "real drivers" (those in expensive cars) vs "not really drivers" (those in cheap cars)?
"Or did no one notice that when you first meet Rikku in FFX, she's running around topless? You might not notice it because she has no nipples."
Actually, I thought the same first, but she's actually not topless. She just wears a form-fitting costume with those straps around the breasts, presumably to make sure you notice them.
Still, I see your point. The artist there sure worked hard to make sure she looks almost naked.
"These are very clearly games, but to what extent can they be compared to what the average Slashdot user thinks of as games (Halo, Metroid, Final Fantasy, GTA, &c.)?"
As you've said, they're very clearly games anyway, so why is such a distinction important? Yes, we can jolly well go into "only those playing my favourite genres are _really_ gamers, and those playing that other crap aren't really". (After all, all the "yeah, but those writing the same project without EJBs aren't _really_ programmers" or "yeah, but their data centre runs on Windows, so they aren't _really_ admins" holy wars in the other sections are sooo productive. Let's do the same here.)
E.g., let's exclude FPS and RTS for a start, because _I_ don't like those. And, hey, to what extent can you compare a simplistic FPS (it's barely more than a graphics engine, sometimes with some network code) to a complex game like Oblivion? Or how's an online one, _maybe_ supporting 16 players on a small map, even remotely comparable to a complex game like World Of Warcraft?
See how silly can it get? How about we settle for "if you play games, you're a gamer" instead?
The _only_ point I can see in your distinction is if you're trying to determine how much money is in that market. Then it makes sense to elliminate the free ones. But I don't see the article aiming for any kind of dollars per year estimate.
And even then it gets funnier than that. E.g., Anarchy Online is a full-fledged MMO, but you can play it for free, as long as it's without the expansion packs. (Mind you, dunno if they fixed it lately, but based on my experience at launch... well, let's just say: playing it for free, you get exactly your money's worth.)
Then there are games that were bundled with other stuff, e.g., with graphics cards, magazines or in some "Top Games #15" pack. E.g., I have a copy of a Tomb Raider game that came with a graphics card, and a copy of HL2 that came with all ATI cards at that time. I haven't played either and wasn't planning to buy either. Heck, I still have a second version of Daikatana which came with some 15 game pack, and I certainly didn't buy that pack for it. Yet somewhere they're counted in some "number of copies sold" and some marketroids are patting themselves on the back for having such a great selling game.
A funny case of it is Sony's Station Access subscription. If you play more than one of their games, or want some of the extras even for one game, you can get a Station Access subscription. In the process you basically get any other online game of theirs for free. So you could be interested just in, say, Planetside and EQ2, or just want the EQ2 extras, and get SWG and Matrix Online and a few others for free.
I know I have such a subscription and can't even unsubscribe SWG from it, once it's been activated once under that plan, even if I wanted to. So much as I consider it a steaming pile of feces and mostly a textbook example of how _not_ to design a game (and believe me, both are actually understatements: the game is even worse), I'm counted too in some "look how many hundreds of thousands of subscribers we have" statistics.
So basically it can get very hairy once you try to separate free games from commercial ones, because a lot of the commercial copies "sold" were actually in one of the above categories.
So again, let's just leave it as "If you play a game, you're a gamer." Avoids a lot of such complications.
Slashdot Mirror
The funny thing is, both Gates _and_ Wall Street are "right", but they're talking about different things.
From the point of view of whether the PC will disappear and people will start running their corporate software on PDAs (yeah, that would be a "fun" data entry job), Gates is right. The PC isn't going anywhere any time soon.
But I suspect that's not what Wall Street is talking about. Wall Street isn't about having a product or a steady market, but about buying and selling shares. A company which just has a steady product and a steady income isn't that interesting there, because its shares don't go up by that much, if at all. You don't make the big bucks trading those.
What you want ideally is something with seemingly exponential growth. (Even if it can't be sustained much longer, you can probably find an idiot who can be dazzled by graphs showing that in 20 years they'll have their products in 10 billion houses and bogus formulas calculating a fair share value based on that prediction. He'll buy your shares for that price.) You want spectacular announcements driving the share values up. Etc.
Companies just having a steady market and income are boring in that aspect. They may make enough money to stay afloat for ever, but you won't make a mint trading their shares.
Cue investors starting to scream for measures that can help them hype the shares before they dump them, even if they mean gutting the company in the long term. E.g., firing a quarter of the employees in the name of cost savings can create a temporary surge in profits and drive shares up. So it's always a popular thing to demand. It may be unsustainable or outright fatal in the long run (see for example SGI exitting the graphics arena without even a fight back then, and where SGI is now), but in the short run it makes Wall Street very happy.
(And I'm not even gonna go into such abnormal situations as a profitable company being outright valued a negative sum. Seriously. At one point 3Com was seen by investors as being worth _less_ than the shares it owned in Palm Inc. Divisions with real products, market and income were basically worth a negative sum. Cue idiotic investors starting to scream that 3Com should get rid of those.)
From the Wall Street perspective the PC era is over not because the PC market is somehow disappearing, but because the exponential growth is long gone and in fact growth is slowing down. Even the upgrade cycles are slowing down. E.g., I have a 2.26 GHz workstation at work and, well, look at when Intel launched that CPU and how many years ago "Moore's Law" said a 4.5 GHz replacement should have been available... and still isn't. It used to be that a 3 year-old PC would be almost obsolete, whereas nowadays for most businesses and even most home users (hardcore gamers notwithstanding) there's very little reason to buy a new one.
And major hype-worthy announcements are getting fewer and far in between. Vista is taking for ever to come out, and just can't be used to create the same hype as, say, Windows 95's move to 32 bits anyway.
Even if you look at other companies than MS, well, look at the Slashdot headlines form the last year. There just isn't anything sounding like "fast growing company with killer app/hardware/whatever, poised to be worth tens of billions in the long run", so there's nothing to promise making $$$$ fast with their shares. Everywhere it's just small upgrades and incremental tweaks. What passes for a tech headline these days is something like "AMD announces DDR2 support next year".
So I suspect that's what Wall Street means by PC era being over. They see the same turning into a steady industry as Gates sees, but from their perspective tere's a lot less to be excited about that future.
I'm still not following your analogy with cars. Yes, car companies buy each other every year too, and incorporate each other's technology in their own cars.
E.g., when I mentioned VW and Audi, guess what? They actually own Audi. And if you buy a luxurious Bentley or a cheap Skoda, you might find those were bought by Volkswagen some time ago too, and, yes, share engines and even chasis designs between them. E.g., not only you'll find that the Skoda Octavia shares the engine choices with a VW Golf or Audi A4, you'll find it's really the same chasis as in a Golf too. One of them is little more than a relabelled version of the other car.
Or let's imagine Daimler-Benz bought Chrysler... oh, wait, they already did. Guess what? That's some more shared technology between them.
And one less competitor too, yeah. And factories they can use for their own stuff. And other advantages.
And yes, they offer the same warranty for cars with bought technology as on their own designs... same as Creative does with Ensoniq cards. They're not sold under any conspiracy theory conditions to destroy the Ensoniq brand in favour of Creative cards, they're sold under the exact same warranty and drivers (good or bad) as the Creative cards. Since since the SB64 PCI they _are_ the Creative cards. There are no non-Ensoniq Creative cards to get preferrential treatment there.
So the whole "waah!!! Creative is evil because they _buy_ technology" strikes me as... surrealistic. Yeah, and? Everyone does that.
Apple bought NextStep, VIA bought S3's graphics business, etc. (So, yeah, any VIA graphics card or motherboard with integrated graphics, guess what? It has a relabelled S3 graphics core.) And they use the technology they've bought. Whop-de-fucking-do, big surprise and drama there. Not.
As for the whole "kool-aid" and "brainwashed sheep" tantrum... here's one thought of the day for you. The japanese have this saying that life is like a mirror. If you smile at it, it smiles back. Worth giving it some thought. It's surprising to how many people it does apply, and to what extent. From RIAA or BSA drones seeing only dishonest thieves around, to nerds seeing only idiots around them, a lot just see really just what they project into that mirror.
"That's because of marketing, not product quality. Read Creative's forums/newsgroups for all the problems people have with Creative and their products. People have been brainwashed into believing that they *need* a Creative sound card for high-end gaming, but it's just not true any more because Creative has stopped innovating in that area."
/spit on it corpse, WoW style. They buy it because they figure they could actually make more money from it than they paid for the shares.
Dude, let's just put it like this: if you can't hear the difference between some 20-30 dB signal-to-noise on the average Realtek board and over 100 dB SNR on an Audigy 2 (or "only" 96 on an Audigy 1), both actually _measured_... well, then you're deaf. You have my sincere compassion for whatever horrible thing destroyed your ears to that extent. I was originally tempted to make some fun, but it would be mean of me to make fun of someone that crippled.
There's no other way to put it. A difference of 70 dB is a difference of 7 orders of magnitude. That's right, that's a whole 10,000,000 times more noise from those crap on-board solutions, and it goes up to 100,000,000 on the lowest end crap.
At any rate, if that's ok for your damaged ears, fine by me. It's good to know someone actually liked those crap Realtek chips, and it's not just subsidizing a crap company out of my pocket. But do get the clue that there may actually be some actual sound quality we buy those things for.
And that's not even taking other stuff into account, such as the _much_ lower CPU utilization.
"Things started going sharply downhill for me when I bought my SB PCI128 and found out it was just a relabeled Ensoniq card."
And the problem is... what? WTF do you care if a SB has an Ensoniq chip? Did you also boycott the AdLib and earlier SoundBlaster card for having a Yamaha OPL chip for sound synthesis? Do you also boycott Nvidia because a lot of what's in their chips comes from patents bought and engineers taken over from 3DFX and SGI and Matrox?
That's like saying that you bought a VW car and were shocked, nay, outraged, that it has the same engine as an Audi.
Sorry to break it to you, but the age where one manufacturer made everything itself are long gone. And if someone bought another company, well, duh, they're going to use that expertise or their products. Noone (except rarely MS) buys a company just to kill it and
"I don't buy products from either company. Creative markets to the uninformed, and Apple markets to the trendy. Being a socially-retarded computer geek, I fall under neither category."
I was suspecting socially-retarded geek already by the time you got into tirades about brainwashed sheep, and blowing one aspect out of proportion as the only relevant issue about something. It's, sad to say, typical socially-retarded geek. But I do appreciate and respect the honesty of admitting it.
"Soundblaster == Adlib with 8 bit audio playback."
Ah-ha. So they did add something to the Adlib design, didn't they? Sounds like innovation enough to me.
"They just ripped the Adlib design and HWQ interface (which used off the shelf Yamaha OPL FM synth chips, thus no legal issues) and added 8 bit sample playback chip. That was all."
And the difference for the end user was _huge_. It opened possibilities that the AdLib just didn't have. E.g., good luck getting voice-overs synthetised via AdLib's two-tone sound synthesis. No, seriously, try it. Heck, good luck getting an AdLib to even sound like some instrument or effect you didn't already have in some library. So basically the very fact that today you can have the whole spectrum of sounds including voice overs, realistic-sounding orchestra music (e.g., in SW KOTOR), ambient sounds (e.g., dogs barking or wolves howling), etc, are all made possible by the fact that someone gave PC a DAC.
At any rate, that's innovation. That's what it's all about. No matter how easy it is to hand-wave something as trivial in retrospect, the fact is, someone had to do that first step. And if you look around you or at history, some of the inventions and innovations with the farthest reaches and implications started with such a trivial step:
- someone deciding to tie a rope to two valves of a steam piston to make it keep moving on its own (that's how the steam engine got invented),
- bake some mud (ceramics),
- compress a gasoline and air mixture instead of firing it as it is (the Otto engine),
- use a lever and counter-weight to swing a large staff-sling (the trebuchet)
Etc.
Innovation isn't when some corporate PR department hypes the CEO's latest fart, but when some engineer sat down and, yes, figured out "hmm... you know, this thing would be more useful with a DAC on it."
Creative innovated too. Show me who did they copy the original SoundBlaster from, for example. I also think technically they invented the HDD-based MP3 player, _before_ Apple.
And more importantly the tended to offer products that offer a good bang-per-buck balance. Yes, it's easy to do the "bah, but <insert pro card costing 500$> sounded better or had lower latency" sneer, but from a more pragmatic point of view, Creative did an outstanding job of bridging the gap between pro equipment and the utter crap everyone else was selling.
It's pretty telling that even though virtually any modern motherboard comes with some Realtec or some such sound solution, people still buy SoundBlasters. Because invariably those on-board solutions sound like crap. The signal-to-noise ratio is invariably crap, and often they tend to squeak too whenever anything happened on the bus. Pretty much they amplify any noise and EM interference in the system together with the signal. And having actually tried some, let me assure you that the sound boards based on those Realtek, Cirrus Logic and whatnot chips don't sound any better.
I even went and bought an USB soundcard/headphones combo from Plantronics in my misguided days of trying to boycott Creative, and, honestly, for all the hype about USB being better because of not picking up EM stuff inside the computer, it actually sounded the worst. It was more of a white noise generator than anything else. _And_ it offered _nothing_ except a DAC on the USB bus. There was no way to get any effects out of it, in games or otherwise. There was not even any way to hook it to anything else (e.g., to speakers). Looking back in retrospect, it was just a waste of money, as eventhe lowest end Creative cards cost a lot less and I already had better headphones too.
And a lot of those supposedly better-than-Creative sound cards were just a case of fanboyism and Amiga persecution syndrome. E.g., I've actually had an Aureal Vortex based card -- you know, _the_ one that got everyone up in arms along the lines of "waah!! Creative killed Aureal Vortex!! They're evil!!" -- and frankly it wasn't half as great as it sounded on paper. All that reflection processing and whatnot, sure, sounded like a major technical achievement. In practice most of the time it just made it impossible to tell where the sound is coming from, or WTH did they think it reflected on over there to sound actually louder from there than the original sound. I.e., from the perspective of a gamer who lived or died by hearing the enemy's footsteps or gunfire, it actually was a bigger disadvantage than those no-frills DAC-on-a-card cards.
And so on.
Yes, I know it's slashdot and it's good for your karma to sneer at any corporation -- as long as it's not Apple --, not to mention to rehash variants of the same "alas, the only way to get ahead is to be a monopolist" fatalism and defeatism. But I'll go ahead and say that they (A) innovated plenty, and (B) at least in the sound card market, actually offered good bang/buck.
Where they lost it in the MP3 player market was being utterly clueless about user interfaces and, again, they got beaten in the bang/buck arena. Where Apple got ahead wasn't being the only ones who innovated, but in having an all around good product and placed just right. There were plenty who had ideas before Apple, believe it or not, and there were plenty who had one extra gimmic or advantage over the iPod. Where they failed was invariably having more disadvantages to make up for that. Some were a LOT bigger than an iPod (I still remember some, e.g., Archos ones which were bigger than a 3" hard drive!), some were actually a lot more expensive in the name of some gimmick noone needed, some had a crap user interface, and so on.
Creative's players, for example, tended to be both bigger _and_ have a crap interface, and some had other faults too. It wasn't lack of innovation, it was simply a combination of a flawed perception of the market and flawed execution.
Basically let's st
MS has no problems losing money on something, when it fits their world domination plans in some perverse way.
E.g., they never had a problem giving away IE or MS Media Player, and even arguing in a court of justice that they can't stop giving them away withot breaking the OS completely, if it served some other plan. In both cases the plot was about owning the media format (HTML is a file format too), and in Media Player's case owning the DRM for the next generation of media. There's some real money dumped into developping those, too.
E.g., see the relatively recent (last year?) story about them starting to give away a pretty complete version of their latest compiler, to keep people from getting started on GC and the like.
Etc.
Now they're not the only ones, and I'm not going to argue either pro or against MS there. Just saying it does happen.
In this case, we don't know if MS planned their console to be hackable. Maybe or maybe not. (Relying 100% on DVD drive firmware, and not even trying to authenticate that firmware, seems surprising... _weak_... for a company also trying to push DRM. It could be stupidity not conspiracy, though.) However, it certainly won't be the end of the line for MS. They could:
A) realize that, in fact, piracy makes buggerall difference. E.g., see the Galactic Civilizations 2 game recently which made headlines by being _the_ bestseller for a while in spite of being completely unprotected. Some may even say partially _because_ of being unprotected. I'm a legit buyer and I know _I_ enjoy not searching for the freakin' CD each time I want to play, for a change. Plus there's some peace of mind from knowing I won't lock myself out if I get the CD scratched. (Don't laugh, it has actually happened to me.)
And speaking of consoles, I know people who actually own the games for, say, their PSP (and had the original with them), but preferred to hack the BIOS and play off the memory card anyway. It actually had lower load times. Or I know I've enjoyed subverting some of the stupid region protections to play imported games I have bought. Sure, Sony or whoever may regard that as piracy, but as far as I'm concerned they (A) got my money, and (B) got it for some games they weren't planning to sell in Europe anyway. So if they're gonna complain about my forcing them to take my money, as far as I'm concrned they can STFU and go fuck themselves.
So the equation "lack of protection == big $$$$ lost" isn't even that clear cut. You will lose some users' money, but you will gain other users' money. As Gal Civ 2 showed, it can even out or even work in your favour.
And point in case, look at near history. The PSX and PS2 were trivial to chip, and I don't think Sony made a loss with either of them. The Dreamcast didn't even require any modding: as soon as people figured out how to extract an ISO of those proprietary CDs, you could just burn it on an ordinary CD and the console would cheerfully boot it. Yet the Dreamcast enjoyed a particularly high rate of games sold per console sold. I.e., the average Dreamcast user was actually buying more games, which is pretty much the opposite of the supposed doom-and-gloom effect of piracy on the industry.
B) make a PR win out of it anyway. More consoles sold can be spun into sounding like not only a major console-war win, but as being a huge market for the publishers. God knows the publishers never stopped making PS2 games just because the GameCube is harder to put a pirated game in. Which in turn can further boost sales of consoles, and so on.
C) just care about taking market share from Sony, as usual. Let's face it, I don't think the first XBox actually made a profit on the whole, and that didn't stop MS from making the XBox 360 an even bigger hole to throw money in. MS's plot doesn't seem to be about breaking even, or much less about actually making a profit, but about killing off those who do currently live off their profits in the market. To what end, I couldn't know, but they sure don't seem to mind losing money to that end.
So basically I wouldn't be surprised if they're perfectly OK with the idea of your buying an XBox 360 even only to play, ahem, "backups", as long as that keeps you from getting a PS3.
"Electricity is metered. Water is metered. Hell, even my trash is metered. What makes you think bandwidth will be any different? People need to be prepared to pay, per MB or GB, if they want quality service."
Well, that's just the thing. They're not even trying to do that, they're trying to extort money out of Google and MS instead.
See, it's one of those cases where everyone sold what they can't possibly deliver, and now they're tripping on each other's lies. Everyone promised "FREE UNLIMITED DSL!!!" based on the idea that, nah, you're not actually gonna use it. They figured that, yes, you're gonna see a web site or two, send a couple of emails, maybe even download a MB or two of short pixelated movies, but that on the whole you wouldn't actually _use_ 99.999% of that capacity.
Unfortunately it turns out it's as unsustainable as promising "FREE UNLIMITED ELECTRICITY!!!" and thinking people won't use more of it.
And the problem isn't just one of wishful thinking and creative marketting, but it's always been an outright lie. E.g., there was always some clause hidden in the fine print, or not even there, saying they can kick you out if you use "too much" of that "unlimited" thing you've bought. And for a while it worked to villify those who actually use the unlimited bandwidth they bought, and present them as some predators leeching off the rest of the society, because there were few of them, and everyone else didn't give a rat's arse.
But now it's more and more of them, and there's increasing resistance to buying "FREE UNLIMITED DSL" and then being treated like some kind of heinous criminal if you actually use what you've bought. It worked when those "villains" were some lone nerds running a server at home, but it gets people writing to the relevant authorities when their mom gets mis-treated for spending too much time talking to them on VOIP. Or when they themselves get a nasty letter because little Billy played too much World Of Warcraft. (But more likely, they don't even know why. It just says you've used too much bandwidth.)
No matter how you want to look at it, it's a scam. I'm not even opposed to mettered access as such, but I _am_ opposed to selling something and then villifying the people who use just what they've bought. If they sell something as unlimited, then it damn better be just that. It's like selling monthly bus cards on the explicit claim that you can ride the bus as often as you want to with that card, and then tarring and feathering some retired grandma for riding the bus 6 times a day instead of the 2 times a day your marketroids estimated when they priced that card. It's that sick and dishonest.
And the problem is that now getting out of that losing proposition is a bit of a prisoner's dillema, except the losing move is to confess the truth. Anyone trying to sell a service honestly, a la "ok, guys, it costs X dollars per gigabyte" is losing their customers to those promising "FREE UNLIMITED DSL!!!"
So now the plan is basically "I know!!! Google has money, right? Let's extort some protection money out of Google instead." The ISPs would now like to have their cake and eat it. They'd like to continue to scream "FREE UNLIMITED DSL!!!" all over the place, but be allowed to extort someone else to pay the bill. That's all.
It's not even that Google's search even costs the ISPs that much bandwidth. FFS, it's a simple text page, with no graphics other than the "Gooooogle" letters. Even the Google ads are actually using _much_ less bandwidth than the more traditional ads, which in the meantime have inflated to be hideously huge animated popups or overlays. And certainly Google isn't responsible for P2P file swaps and P2P VOIP traffic.
But Google has money, and the ISP would like to be legally allowed to extort some money from Google. And for that matter, from everyone else doing any business on the Internet.
And the stupidity of it all is that all those sites already paid per gigabyte to their uplink. Having to pay extra so the users of some ISP can see your site -- or can see it without it taking 5 minutes to load -- is nothing short of extortion.
Hmm... I didn't know there already was a theory about it, but then again I should have imagined there must be one after a few centuries of this recurring phenomenon. Thanks for the link.
"In order for dishonesty and greed to work, you need stupidity."
Oh yes, you are right there. Not gonna argue with that. But the interesting part is the perverse way stupidity enters that equation.
Bubbles don't happen because, suddenly, a lot of people just inexplicably become stupid. Well, ok, they do become stupid, but not inexplicably. There's in fact a very simple explanation for it: bubbles happen when people start thinking that everyone else is stupid.
Look at the apex of the last tech bubble, or for that matter at the renaissance Dutch tulip bulb craze, just to illustrate that nothing changed in centuries. It wasn't plain simple stupidity of the "ooh, tech shares or tulips are valuable, I must own some too" kind. It was belief that someone else would be more stupid and buy them at an even higher price. (And in the tulip craze, at one point the idea started being thrown around that the rest of the world would start buying those bulbs too. Basically giving those greedy people an even larger pool of people they could imagine to be that stupid.)
If you do manage to get a bubble started, the bubble _itself_ becomes proof that, indeed, everyone else is stupid and ripe to be scammed by you. You can take 1000 people who, each taken separately, would have never even considered investing in a tulip bulb or in shares of a company with no sales of any kind. But if you manage to get a bubble going, each of them can get their judgment clouded enough by greed to believe that the other 999 are stupid. And each of them thinking that he being the obviously smarter one will have no problem buying something for X dollars and selling it to one of those 999 dolts for at least twice that.
Where the dot-com bubble differed (in a minor way) from the tulip bubble is that the dot-com bubble was a two-stage design. The first stage that got it started was the belief that surely the advertisers are too stupid to notice that they're paying 10x the money for 1/10 the return. The fact that the advertisers were at first slow to react to people doubling or quadrupling the number of ads, and then could be for a while slowed down by smoke-and-mirrors metrics, was taken as proof of that. The belief was formed that basically you can scam them as hard as you want to, and anyone only needs a web site to rake in ridiculous quantities of cash multiplied by their number of users.
So, again, in both stages instrumental wasn't just blind stupidity, but the belief that everyone _else_ is a drooling idiot with money to throw down a rat hole.
You could say that this in itself is a form or manifestation of stupidity, and we could even aggree there very quickly. Yep, it is. Very much so.
But I find it an interesting form anyway, because it's a form where people are basically victims of their own greed and dishonesty. It's not someone else who smooth-talked them to buy a timber mill in Sahara, but their own greed who clouded their judgment enough to think "hmm, there aren't even any bloody trees there, but I bet there are plenty of idiots I could sell that mill to for twice the money." Very interesting phenomenon that, IMHO.
At any rate, I'll make the prediction that that's the way the next bubble will start too. And, sadly, it won't even be that much different from the last one. It might even end up a verbatim rehash.
Nope, it was 400,000 subscriptions. The peak number of concurrent users was about 1/10 that.
The general rule of thumb is around that 10:1 ratio, so if EQ1 ever had 400,000 concurrent users, we'd have heard about it big time. Until WoW it was doubtful that the whole MMO market is 1 million people, so any game reaching 4 million subscribers would have made _headlines_ in a major way. (Like WoW did.)
So, yes, WoW eclipses it by more than a member of magnitude. Even if you don't count China, since EQ1 didn't exist there, it's still an order of magnitude.
Still, as you've said, it doesn't really matter that much since I was talking about the quantity of content. EQ1 eclipsed WoW in that aspect, I'll gladly concede that, but noone else I know of does. That was really the whole point, and I must thank you for filling in the blanks about the timeline and ways of getting that content.
Thing is, the last bubble was a lot more complex than pure stupidity. A lot of it was dishonesty, and a lot of the rest is that special kind of stupidity-from-pure-greed that makes people "invest" in pyramid schemes and the like. The knowledge that, yes, it can't possibly go on for ever, but hoping that it would last just long enough for _you_ to get your pay-off at the expense of others.
E.g., for the greed part, don't assume that all investors were unable to learn that those "internet companies" tend not to last. But that was ok. They didn't plan to hold onto that stock for ever. They planned to buy some "my_cat_photos.com" site at cents per share, hype it to insane values, then sell right before the company crashes and burns and let someone else take the loss.
(And those in the most profitable position were the stock analysts, some of which had no remorse in telling their clients "buy!" while they told their own agents "sell!" I.e., they were in a position to _create_ a bubble around a company, and profit from it.)
A lot of the hyping dot-com stock you may have read fell basically in this category, and partially in the dishonesty one. It's not that those people were too stupid to see that a company without income can't survive. They were hoping _you_ would be stupid enough to believe them and help them pump up the share price. When they proclaimed an income-less and busines-plan-less new economy, well, the money making part of that economy was actually very present in their mind: it was the stock market. Namely hoping that some other dolt would buy the pumped up shares before they crash and burn.
And a lot of the posing, posturing and seemigly illogical behaviour of the dot-coms actually fit that hype-and-dump pattern. Now _some_ of the company owners may have blown money on gazillions of employees, Ferraris and buying football teams just out of stupidity. ("Look, ma! I'm someone! I can throw money out the window just like the rich guys!") But for a lot of them and for some VCs this simply constituted a kind of behaviour they could pump before they dump. It could be hyped as a young, dynamic, fast-growing company that's poised to take over the world. At the rate they're growing, they'll soon be the next Microsoft, and you'll be sorry that you didn't buy their shares when they were cheap! The fact that the only "fast growing" part were the expenses, well, they hoped you wouldn't notice that.
E.g., for the dishonesty part, one of the things that started the bubble was... advertising money. See, in the early day of the Internet web sites had maybe one ad banner on the main page, and some of us even clicked on them. And ad rates were based on this in more than one way. I.e., not only did the advertiser only count on paying for 10,000 or 100,000 views of that ad, but they also counted on the relatively high return on that investment, since people hadn't been yet buried in obnoxious ads and desensitized to them.
But in true "tragedy of the commons" fashion, someone figured that they could rake in twice the money if they put two ads on their site. Or 10x the money if they put an ad banner on each page. Some went as far as to imagine a site which would have a tiny content frame in the middle, while the rest of the screen would be filled by wall-to-wall ads. I know I've actually worked for one.
Some were even less honest than that, and also generously inflated their page view statistics. If you believed them, some sites had millions of pages (and thus ad views) served per month, even though they were barely more than someone's blog site. And not even the blog site of someone famous.
So basically what started the bubble was the idea that "hey, looky, we can make a bunch of cash by defrauding the advertisers!" Except that in the resulting 3-way con-war between websites, ad providers, and the companies paying for the ads (with the ad providers trying hard to cheat _both_ the webmasters and the paying customers), the prices per ad dropped like a rock, making that gold mine a
Let's face it, KOTOR was more of a Bioware game than a Lucas Arts game.
If you look at what came before KOTOR, you see a lot more of that stuff being _merchandising_ SW stuff than being concerned with making a good game. And I really mean pure merchandising, not unlike selling t-shirts with Darth Vader's head on them: it's not about making a better t-shirt, it's about milking some cash from SW die-hard fans.
E.g., you see stuff like "Episode 1: Pod Racer", which had less content than some minigames in other games, but OMG! You can pilot the same pod that Anakin piloted! Its _only_ merit was merchandising some of the SW franchise. Or, yeah, SWG which was little more than merchandising SW characters and costumes in an otherwise piss-poorly designed and piss-poorly run game. (Again, not unlike selling t-shirts with that stuff on them: you don't count on people buying those because they're a better t-shirt, but just because it has that stuff printed on it.)
It took someone like Bioware to basically have the balls to step out of the Episode 4 to 6 rut, in fact make sure they get as far from it as they can possibly get away with (a few thousands of years, in fact), and finally be concerned with the game and the story, not with merchandising Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker and the gang.
And if you look at what came _after_ Bioware, KOTOR II again started to move back towards peddling the franchise (WTH is an _Imperial_ Destroyer doing there, thousands of years before the empire?) and Lucas's new revisionist vision of the SW universe.
Now they didn't manage to ruin it too much, so I won't say it's crap or anything. But if you look closely you can see the step back it took. If it still stayed a good game it may well be more because it had to stay a sequel of Bioware's game, than because of being a Lucas game. Maybe in fact because the Old Republic setting prevents it from becoming too much of a Lucas game. At any rate, a lot of its being good still is, indirectly, a Bioware thing rather than a Lucas thing.
So, I don't know, if anything I'd take it as confirmation of his theory, rather than "shooting down" his theory. The fact that for your example of great SW games you had to pick a Bioware game, not a Lucas Arts game, I don't know, says something.
Sure, any SW title would sell just because it's SW and, sure, it would be in-character for Lucas to do some more merchandising of his franchise. E.g., to sell you some lightsaber-styled Wii controllers for a hefty mark-up.
But that's not what they've actually said. That's really the whole point.
They haven't said "we're intensely excited about the Wii", they've said "we know about it" and "we're looking into it", which is corporate lingo for saying nothing whatsoever. It doesn't mean any commitment, it doesn't mean that a horde of engineers have been assigned to look into designing that controller, it really doesn't mean anything more than "we're not burning this bridge yet". It can just mean that it's in a FYI memo at their merchandising division, or at the bottom of someone's list of possible things to do, or not even that.
It's like Dell yearly "looking into" getting AMD CPUs. It never meant that they actually were excited about them (they were more excited about getting a big discount from Intel) or that they had engineers designing motherboards for Opterons. In fact, in Dell's case it was more of a veiled threat for their negotiations with Intel than anything else.
In the corporate world, neutral phrases like "we're looking into it", or company A's being present at company B's product launch and shaking hands on stage, don't really mean _anything_. You can even get stuff IBM shaking hands and giving canned endorsements at an AMD launch, only to then go and invest 100 million dollars (literally) into their X3 chipset to make Intel computers more competitive with AMD's offerings.
Basically until you see an actual product announcement, simply getting a canned "we're looking into it" means exactly nothing. It's just a more PR-friendly way of saying "no comment."
Yes, we can all argue that Lucas would be stupid not to milk this thing for every penny, but then we're talking our own guesses, and not what was actually said. (And also let's remember that people have argued that Lucas would be stupid to not make a Sam And Max 2, yet that was cancelled.)
"Sure it's easy to say "Blizzard can't make infinite content" but other MMOs have a lot more quests and things to do than WoW."
Having actually played other MMOs too, I'd actually challenge that.
E.g., COH/COV? COH launched with a _much_ smaller world than WoW, and it's still smaller. And it _still_ doesn't really have that many different quests. Sure, it has a lot of them, but they're all variation of the same dozen or so mission templates, and all inside maps are made of the same large building blocks arranged differently. (Yay for another instance of the exact same room I've seen since level 1, only placed in another position in the maze.) Plus, it doesn't even actually _have_ endgame content. It survived for more than a year on the Hamidon raid as the _only_ endgame mission. You can do it again and again if you want to, but that's about it.
E.g., EQ2? It launched again with an even smaller world (but to make up for it, it was divided into tiny zones and you had massive zoning times... several times even to get from Qeynos South to Greystone Yard, the equivalent of getting from the Stormwind gates to the dwarven quarter), fewer quests, massive balance issues, and problems like whole level ranges where there was not much to do or nothing soloable. Sony did in the meantime hire a huge team to churn out quests in wholesale quantities to catch up, but ended up with a lot of copy-and-paste ones or outright illogical ones.
(E.g., to find a manuscript, I have to first kill deer to see if the deer have the manuscript. Then wolves. Then bears. Then finally my character comes at the idea of killing forest wardens to see if they found the manuscript. A direct equivalent would be a WoW Alliance character killing the woodcutters in Eastvale to see if they found a manuscript. Not stole or anyhthing punishable by death, but to see if they found a lost manuscript. That stupid. WTH happened to asking? And that's just one in a hundred or more quests that defy any logic or suspension of disbelief.)
E.g., AO? Heh. Now that one was launched with _only_ randomly generated quests, and at that only reruns of the same "go there, kill all NPCs in the building" quest. No, seriously. Even if the quest text said you must "infiltrate", "spy", or use stealth, you wouldn't get the token unless you hunted down every single NPC on the map.
E.g., SWG? Whole classes, e.g., Entertainers, _still_ don't actually have any content for their class. (And can't do the combat quests either.) Or Smugglers can't actually smuggle, Bounty Hunters are at best some weird assassins, etc. The few quests it actually has that aren't automatically generated crap are little more than exercising in merchandising the SW characters. And again it doesn't even actually _have_ endgame content. Once you've hit level 80 (which until NGE everyone did by macroing anyway), it doesn't actually have either raids or anything else for you to do. You can just go PvP with that character, just for the sake of PvP, or retire it, or that's about it.
Just about the only thing it does have is a larger world size, but even that's mostly empty space for the players to build houses on. And it was even sadder than that at launch, where whole areas weren't even populated with either quests or NPCs. They'd be either literally empty computer-generated terrain, or someone had placed some houses there to make it look like a ghost town. Keywords: ghost town. There were no actual NPCs, quests, or anything there. It was in fact very little more than a placeholder.
Etc.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that those games suck or anything. (Well, maybe except for SWG.) I'm playing COH again myself, if nothing else, because it's still better than waiting 3 hours for a raid group in WoW. But let's not pretend that they're a cornucopia of unique quests and massive amounts of content, because they aren't. Sadly enough WoW does have more quests, and (sad as it may seem, knowing the WoW quests) more varied ones.
The only one which might give WoW a run for its money is EQ1 with all the expansion packs. But then it took how many years to get all that content?
Believe it or not, Blizzard doesn't have infinite funds, nor infinite manpower. They can't _possibly_ provide an endless stream of new content, so your level 60 character can go through a dozen new quests per hour like you did at level 1 in Northshire Abbey. Even if they had 10 times the total content in WoW, you'd still run out of it in a couple of months at that rate. Then what?
So they developped as much content they could afford, and messed with how much they give you at each level. If you plotted a graph with the time along X and the percent of content you've seen as Y, let's just say it would look like very much an asymptote. It starts by going up pretty quickly, but then it slows down, and it takes more and more time to get closer to that covetted 100% spot. By the end of it, huge amounts of time are required to make even the tiniest of progress.
I fondly call it the "boiling a frog alive model". They say that if you put a frog in hot water, it will just jump out. But if you put it in cool water and slowly heat it up, it will stay in and get boiled alive. Now I don't know if that's true with frogs, but it's certainly true with about half the WoW players. Because that's what Blizzard does.
In the beginning you're not up against any major challenge, farming or grinding is entirely unnecessary, travel times are 1-2 minutes, and you get to do new quests and see new content all the time. And you're as happy as a frog in a pool of cool water. (Some people may whine that it's cooking pot shaped, but you're sure it's only whiners/fanboys/whatever.)
It's a _great_ game at that level. And it had to be like that, because that's what gets people addicted.
But unfortunately they can't afford to keep it like that for ever. They just don't have the funds, the manpower or the infrastructure for the insane quantities of content that would be required.
So from there it goes slowly downhill, and more and more time-sinks are worked in. Gradually you need more time spent travelling, more time farming for your next weapon or recipe, more time waiting for a good group for that instance, etc. But still, you work your way slowly towards that 100% point.
Until eventually there are only 2-3 instances left total, and that's it. That's all that separates you from finishing the game, getting bored, and cancelling your account. You've consumed everything else already. So all they can do to keep you busy (and paying the monthly fee) is to make you do those over and over again for months.
That's, in a nutshell, why it becomes repetitive.
Why does it require large groups too? Well, for various reasons. Among others, because:
- it's viral marketting. It's a way to make people beg their friends to keep playing. In other games it was just the thought of "oh man, but all my online 'friends' are in this game" that kept you playing. But in this one said friends _need_ you. They start sending you tells or even emails that you're _needed_ for that 1000'th MC raid. You may even feel like you've failed your friends if you can't log on for that raid. It can make it very hard for some people to cancel their account, even long after they stopped having any fun in WoW.
- to further dillute the rewards. Even if you hit that 1% jackpot and the boss drops that item you were after, too bad, you're one of maybe 8-12 people rolling for it. (Or even more fun, you may know from the start that you're not going to get it, because your guild implemented some "contribution points" system. So you can know from the start that although you've played for 8 hours a day, someone else who's played 16 hours a day is ahead of you, and you'll only get that item if they don't want it.) Time to do it again next week.
Or maybe that boss doesn't even drop anything you need, but you're helping someone else get it. So hopefully they'll reciprocate and help you get yours. Well, that's even better. That's some hours for each of you which didn't get you any closer to your own goal. You're still as far from th
"People in western countries, and in the United States in paticular, have, for reasons inexplicable, a huge problem with sex."
While you're right about parts of the US (and even then: parts), I'd challenge your blanket extrapolation about "people in western countries."
E.g., I'm pretty damn sure that here in Germany noone makes a big fuss about it. You can see various degrees of nudity (or lemme qualify that: it's complete nudity, but the girl might or might not have her arms crossed over her breasts or be photographed from the back or such) right on billboards on the road side. Or on magazine covers proudly displayed on supermarket aisles and various other shops. Here the censorship craze (e.g., in video games or movies) is about violence, not about sex. And certainly noone villifies normal sex relations, nor argues to keep kids ignorant of what a clitoris is. Au contraire.
But lemme challenge it a bit further: "People in western countries"? As opposed to what? As opposed to people in Eastern countries, presumably? Well, which ones?
E.g., I'm pretty sure that China for example proudly waves the "protecting people from pornography" banner each time it justifies its Great Firewall Of China. I also happen to know that it has some hideous prison penalties for trafficking pornography in any form or shape. And we're talking Chinese prisons, which in Western world terms are no better than concentration camps. And, yes, it has already sent a bunch of people to prison even for some mild softcore stuff. There goes most of far east from that list.
E.g., the middle-east arab countries perchance? Well, no, I'm pretty sure most Islamic countries frown upon pornography more than the USA ever did. And then there are the islamist ones, who'd find it obscene to even see a woman's face or legs, or anything other than her eyes unless you're her husband. Displaying her completely naked or, to borrow Bill Hick's expression, "wearing a cock up the ass. They wear them like that in Europe", can be a case for all the way up to death penalty. I'm sure even the USA never went that far.
That actually doesn't include only the arab peninsula, btw, but also extends to some asian muslim nations. Afghanistan comes to mind, for example.
Eastern Europe, maybe? Well, I don't know how it's evolved since the 90's, but let me assure you that during communism they didn't quite promote a sexual freedom kind of culture. The official party doctrines and propaganda made the family the alpha and the omega, and relentlessly condemned anything that could come in the way of that. And while not many gave a damn about party ideals as such, it didn't quite exert any pressure to change early 1900's views. At any rate, if you moved outside the circle of some students or intellectuals who didn't give a damn, you'd have found that most of the population, especially the lowest classes, was still... well, let's just say more conservative about it than the worst USA Bible Belt example you can dig up.
Etc.
So if you're going to single out and sneer at "western countries" as a whole, then better be prepared to document in which way everyone else is better. Because from where I stand, the vast majority of the rest of the world is actually quite far behind Western Europe in terms of open-mindedness for sex.
And to go on a tangent: in many cases in any kind of open-mindedness. In most of those countries racism runs rampant, religious intollerance is par for the course, etc.
So in which way _are_ western countries worse off than the rest of the world?
"I haven't played but working in IT everyone I work with plays it incessantly and all admit that it's reached apoint where they can't stop and yet they don't see any point in continuing. I don't need to use cocaine to know it's addictive and has no real finite purpose."
Some people get addicted to it, yes. But then people get addicted to anything else. Including:
- counterstrike
- BSD/Linux/Amiga/obscure-programming-language debates
- Everquest2 (and unlike EQ1, I can't even really see what a couple of co-workers even see in EQ2, since it's mostly just a mediocre idea and badly executed)
- sex
- porn (see people who end up unable to stop browsing for it even at work, and then sue the employer for firing them)
- karma-whoring on Slashdot
Etc, etc, etc.
The problem isn't as much the game, as the people. Some people are the kind that just has to find refuge in something and, unsurprisingly, a good game will collect more of them than a bad one. So, yes, you're more likely to find them in WoW than in crap games like Anarchy Online or SWG.
And some people basically have an Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder, so they can't leave anything they haven't 100% finished. They _must_ have opened every single chest, killed every single boss and collected every single armour piece, before they can consider a game finished and move on. I can see how some MMOs would trap them, because they're games designed so you can't really finish them. The end-game grind in WoW is there precisely so you'd need at _least_ a year of doing the same thing over and over again before you're finally "finished".
Again, I'd "blame" the people not the game. (Well, not as much "blame" as have some compassion.) The same personality types do the exact same in other games too. E.g., I had a friend who simply _had_ to find every single chest, secret door and quest in such games as "Betrayal At Krondor". I remember that game particularly because he's explicitly fumed about not being sure if he covered 100% of an area, and there could be some chest he's missed. Or in games like Panzer General he'd save before moving each and every single unit, and reload if the dice-driven result was anything less than _perfect_. (Meaning his unit had to take exactly zero damage, and the enemy had to take exactly the maximum attack value of his unit.) Not because he couldn't have finished it otherwise, but because it _had_ to be perfect, if he could help it.
At any rate, I'd venture a guess that it's not really the game which turned them into that.
Is it just addiction and carrot-on-a-stick for everyone? I'd say I'm proof enough that it isn't, seein' as I'm not even playing it any more. Can't recall any withdrawal syndrome either. If you _don't_ approach it with some silly idea that it's like a marriage for life, or that you _must_ finish everything before you give up, giving it up is actually pretty darn easy. It's just a game. You've seen as much content as was enjoyable, and when it starts being consistently unenjoyable, it's goodbye and good riddance.
As for my comments about "trolling" or "noise drowning the signal", they're not about your having an opinion. It's about your passing a harsh judgment on something you just don't have the data to judge. Knowing one IT guy who's a WoW addict doesn't make you an expert in WoW, and, no, doesn't give you enough data to extrapolate about why everyone else is playing it. It's like knowing that some terrorist was from South America and did drugs, and deciding that surely all people in South America are terrorists and junkies. It's that uninformed a judgment. That's all.
"Seriously do any of you WoW players see the string that is tied around that ever-fleeting carrot?
Having never played I can speak down upon your addiction with impunity but I do feel for you all...please get well soon."
So, you've never actually played something, you have no first-hand experience with it, but you feel qualified anyway to pass judgment upon it and compare it with a carrot in the stick. Pray tell, on what do you base that judgment, then?
_How_, pray tell, do you know then whether WoW is good or bad, and what do those players find in it? Maybe, just maybe, it's not just illogical addiction, but paying for a game that's every bit comparable to Oblivion as both complexity and fun factor go. In fact, to about 10-12 Oblivions, since it has a _lot_ more content to explore and enjoy.
WoW has its own issues, later, much later in the game. You need to play pretty damn intensively for a month or more before you get anywhere near the level where it becomes a carrot-on-a-stick exercise. Or more if you try playing more than one character. At which point you got more content for your money out of it than out of any SP RPG you can get for love or money nowadays.
Still, yes, it has them. But you've never experienced them. So even then I'll rather hear about them from other players who _do_ know first hand what they're talking about. Do you even know what the carrot _is_ in that metaphor you sling about? What do you bring to the table, other than some more noise to drown the useful signal with?
So, yeah, I feel for you. Get well soon. Talk to a competent psychiatrist about getting your head removed from your ass. And maybe, just maybe, try talking about stuff you have any clue about next time. Might keep you from looking like a trolling retard, for a change. Because even as trolling goes, this has got to be the most retarded form of it.
Well, that's exactly the thing: it creates more problems than it solves.
If I'm allowed an awfully long metaphor: There's one thing you get to learn early in Go (and presumably most other game boards) and that is not to lose good pieces trying to save bad pieces. At some point you have to look at a group of your pieces on the board and recognize that they're dead. That's it. It may take another 1 or 100 moves to actually get them encircled and removed from the board, but that's it, there's no way to save them. The newbie mistake, leading to some spectacular defeats, is to try to anyway, and lose more "good pieces" trying to save those who can't possibly be saved. The only good course of action is to abandon them and resign to the idea that they're already lost.
The same applies here IMHO: adding even more bad (if "realistic") ideas to save previous bad ideas, is IMHO the wrong way to go about it. At some point you have to look at it and admit that it was a dead end, and prolonging the suffering with even more bad ideas won't save it.
E.g., your solutions not only create more problems than they solve (as you yourself have correctly noted), but also don't solve the real problem. If stashing the iron swords in the banks won't break the economy, then players will stash them somewhere else and still break the economy. E.g., create 20 mule characters each, which exist only to store a few dozen swords each in their backpacks.
What next? Have NPCs rob random characters which aren't even logged on? Surely that's a way to piss off most of the player base, who didn't take part in the scam in the first place.
It can easily become an arm race, or an equivalent of Go's "ladder" formation, that leads nowhere. You end up piling even more "fixes" to the problems created by the previous "fix", until it breaks or it loses most players' interest.
So while I'll aggree that "a game really needs to be designed to minimize the impact of the 0.1% of the assholes that will play it", as you aptly put it, I'll disaggree that such an arms race is the way. Sometimes the right solution is to discard a previous bad idea, not to keep "fixing" the wrong "fix".
In UO's case, the solution was to simply get rid of that iron-tracking silliness. It removed both the problem _and_ the consequences of the assholes' actions in one fell swoop. The game works perfectly well without it, and a hundred or so other MMOs never needed it either. There are other, better, ways of regulating an economy, or even better: of letting it regulate itself.
I hope you realize that:
1. You don't actually need an eco-system to create the illusion you describe. If all the reproduction happens behind the scenes anyway, and the most a user ever witnesses is the baby badgers crawling out of a hole in the ground, then you don't actually need parent badgers in that hole. The hole itself can be just a monster generator (a concept that existed for two decades) which spawns badgers crawling out of it. The player is free to imagine that some parent badgers must exist in that hole, but they don't actually have to exist as entities in the game world.
It's even used in a lot of games. E.g., in City Of Heroes a lot of the enemies come out of some door or elevator, and the rescued victims disappear by running to the nearest door or elevator. Problem solved, and it offers enough answer to "where do they come from?" or "where do they go to?" to keep the suspension of disbelief going. As a player you're free to use your own imagination (e.g., maybe that NPC actually lives in that building) and that's a very powerful tool in maintaining suspension of disbelief.
The moral of the story is: never go for something horribly complicated when a simple illusion works just as well. Or to put it a lot less nicely, that's the difference between newbies and pros. The newbies get stuck trying to immitate the real world... badly.
2. Origin did try hard to make their idiotic "realism" ideas work, and they had the funding, the motivation and the programmers to do so. It tried really hard to have a "realistic" world, not only including the creature spawns, but also stuff like ore distribution, or trying to force players to create their own in-character justice to deal with griefers. They tried for _years_ and tweaked each such concept in dozens of different ways, even if it pissed off their player base. (In fact, much of UO's decline and losing the crown in the genre it created, can be traced back to its never giving a damn about what their players wanted, and being stuck on trying "realistic" stuff that noone wanted.)
Basically if any of those ideas had an obvious way to make it work, I do believe they'd have eventually stumbled upon it. Don't assume that they missed the blatantly obvious, and only you can tell them how it's done. Or not unless you're prepared to show a comparable game where that works.
The problem of simulating RL isn't trivial when you have 10 to 100 players per acre of virtual world, and they're all hell-bent on exterminating everything in sight. And more importantly, where some will deliberately try to break the game, just because they can.
E.g., players or whole guilds can decide to exterminate every single badger in your world. If those badgers actually have a simulated biology, it doesn't matter if you gave them holes to hide in: the players _will_ be willing to camp day and night in front of the hole, until the mama and papa badger get hungry and come out. So you want to put them on top of a cliff? So player mages will bombard that cliff with AOE (area of effect) spells like fireballs, and player rangers will rain arrows upon it, until they finally manage to exterminate the last breeders.
So you want to regulate reproduction rates? Players will only take it as a challenge in the attempt to ruin the world.
E.g., this is an actual UO example, Origin tried to have a self-regulating economy by limiting the amount of available ore. To prevent the market from being flooded by 10 times as many weapons and armours as players are, their idea was that there'd be a fixed quantity of iron in the world. New ore would only be spawned when existing iron items broke down or were otherwise destroyed. Sounds smart, right?
Well, as soon as the players understood this, enough of them started working hard to take metal items out of the game. They'd stash hundreds of swords and breastplates in their bank, or in the banks of characters they didn't even play actively, until mining and smithing did grind to a painful halt.
And just to qualify it again: there was no plan to corner the market to make a profit selling them later. The whole plan was to _destroy_ the economy, just because they could.
Most worlds are unsustainable and utterly unrealistic because... they've been designed that way. Not because some imperfect AI decided to put his fortress half-way into a hill, where people can walk over the wall. Most worlds are designed as just "levels" for the player to conquer, and no thought is given to what would that town do when the player isn't around.
But here's my take: it's not actually necessary for the NPCs to actually _do_ that stuff while the player isn't around. I don't really care if an NPC has been sleeping, sweeping his floor, and restocking his shop when I'm not around, or if he just got spawned in the right point for that time of day when I entered the level.
Games are just about creating an illusion, and an illusion is perfectly good for me. What's missing is any attempt to even bother about that illusion.
E.g., if a tribe is presented as having fought for grazing land (e.g., the Tauren in WoW), I want them to either be able to graze themselves or have cattle. I want their culture, their myths, etc, to reflect that. There are (not-so-subtle) differences between a hunter-gatherer society and an agriculture/animal-husbandry society, so a tribe that fought for grazing land for their cattle damn better not act like they're hunters-gatherers. I want their towns or settlements to have stables. I want their economy and their quests to reflect that. (E.g., while mystical and ancestor worship concernns are good and fine, surely a lot of their peasants would worry about more mundane stuff like cattle thieves or wolves or land conflicts, because they're a more immediate threat to their livelyhood.)
E.g., in Morrowind if a town has built city walls, then I want someone to sit and think what did the citizens try to solve with that. Building and maintaining a city wall was a _huge_ expense, so noone would do it just for decoration sake. So I want it to be a functional defense. Maybe it would actually need city gates too, not just some wide arches that either enemies or wild animals can just walk through. Maybe it would need ramparts, towers, or other suitable places for the defenders on that wall. (An undefended wall, anyone can just prop a ladder against and climb over.)
E.g., if the Imperials there built a fortress, what did they try to achieve with it? Maybe placing it on _top_ of a hill would server that goal better than placing it between two hills and half-way into one of them. If anyone can climb an easy slope to the top of the hill and rain arrows _downwards_ into the fortress, then wth purpose do those walls serve? Doubly so if continuing to walk over the hill gets one neatly over the walls and into the fortress.
Or what are the logistics of such a place? If you read for example Sun Tzu, armies used to cost a _lot_ and could even break an economy. Maybe they'd need to be regularly supplied, for example? There'd be a whole economy supplying a nearby fortress with wood, weapons, food, ore and coal if they have their own smith, etc. Which is why IRL even a small castrum often evolved into a major city. A whole economy basically evolved around it and in turn depended on it for protection. Important or wealthy merchants would eventually be granted or bought the right to have a house _in_ the fortress, either for the services they provided or just because they were willing to pay for it.
And so on. Basically, again, I don't care if the NPCs actually do anything when I'm not around. All I want is an illusion that those places _could_ realistically function as places for the NPCs to live in, and not just as levels for me to conquer.
The fact is, a mouse allows perfectly good aiming to snipe a player circle strafing and ducking behind cover, and some of them have damn good reflexes. In my CS and UT days I had no problems turning and accurately headshotting a player crouched behind some crates in a split second, and I'm nowhere near the best player out there. Or I haven't heard of anyone having problems with the bots in Noone Lives Forever, which _do_ take cover. At any rate, the mouse was perfectly fast and accurate for that.
So I'm supposed to believe that only against bots is a mouse so slow that the bot has to stand still in the open to be hittable at all? Heh.
Want a more natural controller? How about a lightgun? Those existed for ages, and some of them (e.g., Namco's) had nearly pixel accuracy. They can be moved around with a flick of the wrist, just like the Wii controller. And if holding it like that had any kind of advantage, noone's keeping you from holding some lightguns by the barrel and using the button on the side to shoot.
So, please. The Wii controller may have its advantages, but (like anything else even vaguely computer- or console-related) it also has a bunch of shameless marketroids behind it. Tho'll cheerfully claim any absurdity if it helps sell their snake oil. Use your own brains when reading such patently absurd statements.
The limit was _never_ how fast or accurate the mouse is, but how fast and accurate the player is. And if the AI was dumbed down in a lot of games, I can also tell you why:
1. Because of player skill constraints. It's not that the mouse isn't fast enough, it's that the average gamer in your target market segment _isn't_ Thresh or Fatality. You can't throw 20 perfectly skilled opponents at them and expect the average player to track them all and handily dispatch them all. More importantly, the gameplay isn't a deathmatch where you just respawn when shot either: in most single-player FPS, if you got killed, it's game over and you need to reload. You don't want the casual gamer to _need_ to save before each corner, and reload 5 times before he manages to shoot before the bot headshots him. Because that's just no fun.
So even if you do program the bot to take cover, you still must make it easy enough to kill by a casual gamer. You have to just give the impression that the bot is playing well, not actually have it play well.
Contrary to uneducated belief, making a bot unpredictable and have 100% accurate aim takes no skill at all. The first is just a matter of using a random number generator, and the second is elementary maths: take the bot's position, take the target position, set the gun to point exactly along that vector. There you go: a deadly aim that never misses. That's not what's hard to program. But what you really want it to stand out of cover at regular intervals that the player can learn, and spend several seconds missing, so Joe Average has the time to aim and dispatch him.
2. Even more importantly, because of budget constraints. _The_ reason FPS exploded in the '90 wasn't because everyone wanted to play only that, it was because they were _cheap_ to produce. You could make a profit even if you sold less copies. You could license a 3D graphics engine, hack together a few levels and a couple of skins, and call it a game. Unlike RPGs and adventures which needed lots of scripting, animations, and occasionally AI, a FPS was cheap to produce precisely _because_ it didn't bother with those.
So noone was going to spend more money on one. Definitely not on ellaborate AI and character interactions, and not on the myriad of animations needed for the bots to take cover behind corners, crates, pillars, or upturn tables when nothing else is available.
3. Because of CPU power constraints. Let me tell you how those "minimum requirements" on a game box are born: the marketting guy, yours or the publisher's, comes and tells you: "studies say that 10% of people still have a 286, so our game must be 16 bit and run on a 12 MHz 286." That's an actual q
"So if you use a computer, you're a geek? If you drive a car, you're an auto enthusiast? If you walk, you're a fitness buff?"
How about this?
- if you use a computer, you're a computer user
- if you drive a car, you're a driver
- if you walk, you're a pedestrian
- if you play a game, you're a gamer
It's easy, isn't it?
Let's say we get if we introduced further distinctions like "yeah, he's driving a car, but it's a cheap Fiat, so it's not _really_ a driver. You have to be in a Mercedes or BMW executive class or higher to be _really_ a driver." Because that's the direct equivalent of argument waved around about gamers. ("Yeah, he's playing a game, but it's only Bejewelled, so it doesn't count as a _real_ gamer.") Would we really gain anything by such dividing them into "real drivers" (those in expensive cars) vs "not really drivers" (those in cheap cars)?
"Or did no one notice that when you first meet Rikku in FFX, she's running around topless? You might not notice it because she has no nipples."
Actually, I thought the same first, but she's actually not topless. She just wears a form-fitting costume with those straps around the breasts, presumably to make sure you notice them.
Still, I see your point. The artist there sure worked hard to make sure she looks almost naked.
"These are very clearly games, but to what extent can they be compared to what the average Slashdot user thinks of as games (Halo, Metroid, Final Fantasy, GTA, &c.)?"
As you've said, they're very clearly games anyway, so why is such a distinction important? Yes, we can jolly well go into "only those playing my favourite genres are _really_ gamers, and those playing that other crap aren't really". (After all, all the "yeah, but those writing the same project without EJBs aren't _really_ programmers" or "yeah, but their data centre runs on Windows, so they aren't _really_ admins" holy wars in the other sections are sooo productive. Let's do the same here.)
E.g., let's exclude FPS and RTS for a start, because _I_ don't like those. And, hey, to what extent can you compare a simplistic FPS (it's barely more than a graphics engine, sometimes with some network code) to a complex game like Oblivion? Or how's an online one, _maybe_ supporting 16 players on a small map, even remotely comparable to a complex game like World Of Warcraft?
See how silly can it get? How about we settle for "if you play games, you're a gamer" instead?
The _only_ point I can see in your distinction is if you're trying to determine how much money is in that market. Then it makes sense to elliminate the free ones. But I don't see the article aiming for any kind of dollars per year estimate.
And even then it gets funnier than that. E.g., Anarchy Online is a full-fledged MMO, but you can play it for free, as long as it's without the expansion packs. (Mind you, dunno if they fixed it lately, but based on my experience at launch... well, let's just say: playing it for free, you get exactly your money's worth.)
Then there are games that were bundled with other stuff, e.g., with graphics cards, magazines or in some "Top Games #15" pack. E.g., I have a copy of a Tomb Raider game that came with a graphics card, and a copy of HL2 that came with all ATI cards at that time. I haven't played either and wasn't planning to buy either. Heck, I still have a second version of Daikatana which came with some 15 game pack, and I certainly didn't buy that pack for it. Yet somewhere they're counted in some "number of copies sold" and some marketroids are patting themselves on the back for having such a great selling game.
A funny case of it is Sony's Station Access subscription. If you play more than one of their games, or want some of the extras even for one game, you can get a Station Access subscription. In the process you basically get any other online game of theirs for free. So you could be interested just in, say, Planetside and EQ2, or just want the EQ2 extras, and get SWG and Matrix Online and a few others for free.
I know I have such a subscription and can't even unsubscribe SWG from it, once it's been activated once under that plan, even if I wanted to. So much as I consider it a steaming pile of feces and mostly a textbook example of how _not_ to design a game (and believe me, both are actually understatements: the game is even worse), I'm counted too in some "look how many hundreds of thousands of subscribers we have" statistics.
So basically it can get very hairy once you try to separate free games from commercial ones, because a lot of the commercial copies "sold" were actually in one of the above categories.
So again, let's just leave it as "If you play a game, you're a gamer." Avoids a lot of such complications.