No, seriously, try Enix's "Valkyrie Profile". That's one video game which is thoroughly good and entertaining and it's based on a religion. Norse religion, to be precise. (As the title might suggest, you actually play as a Valkyrie.)
Now it's not really "well represented" in the sense of being a treatise on it or anything. It's a rather liberal interpretation of the sagas. (E.g., their Valkyrie fights and trains the Einherjar, rather than being just a taxi to Valhalla. E.g., their version of Ragnarok and especially the best ending one, is rather unorthodox.) And they did mix some Japanese stuff into it too.
Well, probably that's why it's a good game. They didn't try to preach or convert you. I doubt that the fine Japanese game designers were even believers in Asatro anyway. They were just trying to make a good game, and the Norse mythology just provided an original setup for that.
"I will go out on a limb a suggest that the only people who promote your point of view are anti-religious zealots."
His point of view was that he doesn't want someone preaching at him and trying to convert him, or at least doesn't count that as entertainment. (And I'll wholeheartedly aggree with him there: if I wanted to hear someone preaching, I'd go to church. When I start a game, I expect entertainment, not preaching.)
So your point is... what? That anyone who isn't an "anti-religious zealot" is just dying to hear you preaching? It might come as a surprise to you, but no, most people really aren't just waiting for you to come enlighten them.
"hypocrite. Look it up."
Ah, good. So if presumably you're not a hypocrite, I suppose you actually like someone coming and trying to convert you to _their_ religion.
Great! Well here's mine:
My religion is that it's all a MMO. (Great graphics, huh?) And we're all the creation of the Game Designer. It all started as a university assignment. (Let's be honest, noone but a student waits until the last 7 days to even start.)
So it took Him a bit of messing with the Transform & Lighting code (Let there be light), physics and such, and finally he even had a working map for it: Eden. Not a big one, and definitely no challenge playing that one, since everything respawned in abbundance. But hey, it's a start, and not a bad one.
And then He had two players. And lo did the Game Designer rejoice, and even let them name the NPCs. (Can be an euphoric day for any MUD admin, so I can understand the guy.)
Except those two abused bugs. That's players for you. You tell them "Stay away from that tree 'cause it's unfinished and still does funny and unbalanced things to your stats" and what do they do? Right. Ask any MUD or MMO admin if that's a surprise. (Well, other than the surprise that He didn't ban their cheating asses.)
So, anyway, to cut a long story short, from there it went on with a player wipe (the flood), implementing a buggy language system and watching it run amok (tower of Babel), and various other such mis-haps. All the way to Jesus pulling a Leroy stunt and aggroing two large groups at the same time, namely the romans and the jews. Noob, really. Any experienced player could have told him you need to pull from large groups, not rush in and aggro the lot of them.
Well, there you go, that's _my_ religion. I don't doubt that since, you aren't a hypocrite, you didn't mean only others should listen to _yours_. That would be hypocrisy. You, undoubtedly, are glad to be enlightened to someone else's religion, right? Glad I could be of service;)
I seem to remember an old (and buggy) Microprose game called Darklands. Based in late medieval Germany, and based on the society, equipment and beliefs of that time. E.g., you didn't cast spells, you prayed to some saint, or mixed explosive potions as an alchemist, or such.
Was a bit _too_ much of a Bible lecture for my taste, but still, it made a nice change from the endless stream of me-too D&D clones. I mean, I'm not against RPG's derived (directly or indirectly) from Tolkien's work, but there are lots of those already. I like something original now and then, and the RL mythology of pretty much any nation can be just as diverse and interesting.
I'd like to see more games like that based on other religions too. For example, how about one based in ancient Egypt? Or ancient Greece? Both had _plenty_ of mythology, beliefs in magic, a primitive science, etc. Should be enough to fill a complex RPG and then some.
"By making it so cheap for the lazy gamer to "level up", who is going to want to try to advance the normal way?"
You make it sound like it's just encouraging the lazy, but presumably the ones who advance the old fashioned way aren't really hampered in any way. If only it was that simple.
Since you link to those auctions for COH and Lineage 2, I'll assume you're familiar with those games. So let's talk about COH.
See, the problem with having lots of people with infinite money (or more money than they can possibly spend on enhancements) is that it sets a new standard against which everyone is judged.
And the difference between that standard and a normal player can be pretty damn huge in COH. E.g., having 1 million influence in COH at level 22, can mean that your fire tank hits the 90% damage-resistance cap _and_ has perma-Hasten _and_ does twice the damage per second. (It costs 1 mil to have all SO enhancements at level 22 as a tank.) A normal player, however, has might be at 70% damage resistance. I.e., from the same enemies he'll take 3 times more damage per second, _and_ take twice as long to kill them.
And again, the problem is that the honest player will be judged against the twinked one. He'll get kicked out of teams, because he doesn't live up to the standards of those running around with infinite money.
I've been in teams where the level 22 fire tank played honestly (i.e., without any extra money, just what that character honestly earned) got killed repeatedly, because some idiot set the difficulty to "invulnerable" on the assumption that surely _everyone_ is at 90% damage resistance. And without getting money from someone else, you just can't possibly be there. Then he obnoxiously lectured the tank along the lines of "you suck if you don't have the best enhancements", and kicked him out of the team.
(At which point I left too and went to group separately with that tank.)
I've seen posts on the boards along the same idea. Along the lines of "God, some of you tanks suck. I had to kick one out of the team yesterday because he couldn't herd on 'invincible'."
Or I've had tells along the lines of "whaaat? you only heal 200 hp?" with my Defender.
That's the real problem. If enough people run around with infinite money, that becomes the new baseline. That's the standard against which you're judged. You start getting insulted or kicked out of the team because you don't measure up to that standard.
Worse yet, that becomes the standard for which the devs balance the games.
E.g., have you tried doing the level 24 Terra Volta respec at level 24, with a team which didn't get any extra money, ever? Try it. It's fun. Even with a martial arts scrapper (+10% to-hit), and _some_ DO accuracy enhancements, I wasn't even hitting the overlapping +3 to +4 level shield generators.
To my shame, I gave up, transferred some money from another character, and tried again with SO enhancements in everything. Went _much_ better.
What got me thinking recently was going back to my old COH account, only to find the game (A) flooded with people running around with 10 times more money than they can possibly earn at that level, and (B) the game increasingly becoming balanced for those. Now generally I like COH, and in COH you don't even need to pay RL money for it. You just need to ask a max level player, or I've even had a few ask me if I wanted any money.
But still, it got me wondering: why not elliminate money at all?
E.g., COH seems to increasingly assume that you've been given an infinite supply of money at any given level. Not literally infinite, but more than enough to buy any enhancements you want. So why not do away with currency and let me just pick any enhancements for free, then?
It seemed to work well in other games.
E.g., in Planetside, you're a soldier. You don't have to _buy_ your own tank, you're just given one. But since you're a soldier, you're not allowed to get any equipment you're not certified for. So the balancing factor becomes (A) the certification points, which you get at level-up, and (B) availability: if you just ran a new tank off the cliff, you get to wait half an hour before someone lets you drive another one. It worked ok in Planetside.
E.g., think about City Of Heroes for a bit. In COH you don't have "equipment" in the sense of armour and weapons like in WoW. Your "superman"-like character doesn't buy a new breastplate or brass knuckles. What you buy in COH are "enhancements" to your power. That superman clone might enhance his punches to hit harder, or be more accurate, or whatever. It's closer to what other games solve via skills, than equipment.
So why have to buy those? The game would work just as well if those improvements were picked when you level up.
Etc.
I'm sure pretty much any game could be transformed into something that doesn't require gold. E.g., in the Warcraft universe you could be a soldier like in Planetside, and be given your equipment based on your level, rank or solved quests.
And it would stop this kind of gold market in one fell swoop. You can't sell gold when doesn't even exist in the game, or weapons when anyone can get the same weapon by just talking to their quartermaster.
A couple of years ago, I had played this crappy buggy web-based pay-to-cheat "strategy" game. Well, if you think paying 200 dollars is too much, there was this guy in that game who allegedly paid over 20,000 US dollars for various in-game equipment and other benefits. Yes, that's not a typo. Over TWENTY THOUSAND dollars.
"Are Mommy and Daddy really not paying that much attention to the credit card?"
Well, that's the thing: games aren't just for kids any more. The guy above allegedly had his own company or something.
Well, here are some reasons why people would want to pay for in-game stuff with their out-of-game credit card:
1. To cheat. That's it: pay to cheat. If that real money can buy an undeserved advantage (as in, an advantage you didn't work for), and especially if it's a massive advantage, some people will pay for it.
E.g., before I use City Of Heroes as an example, let me say that COH _doesn't_ have a real-money market for in-game money. (Ok, "influence.") The economy of COH is such that money is so plentiful at higher levels, that you can get a million off a level 50 player by just asking. (In WoW money, that would be about 100 gold.)
But I'm familiar enough with COH to illustrate the difference that that extra money can make, and why you might want to get that extra money. To fully equip a level 22 Tanker with the best possible equipment ("enhancements" in COH lingo), it costs about 1 million. Make that anywhere between 1.5 and 2 million for some other classes. The problem is that even if you bought nothing since level 1, you'll have made about 200,000 total by then.
And the difference that equipment makes is huge. It can peg your damage resistance at 90% as a tanker, _and_ pretty much double your damage output as any class, _and_ give you a good 50% or so boost to your endurance (think "mana") regeneration, _and_ shorten your travel time. It can make the difference between yawning at a group of 10 enemies and getting summarily executed by 2 of them.
The problem is that that huge disparity in equipment isn't just making it tempting to beg, it's increasingly making it _necessary_. It's a vicious circle. So many people are basically too powerful for their level on money they didn't earn, that the game is increasingly becoming balanced for those. Which encourages more of the rest to go beg too.
2. PvP griefers are a huge segment of this market too. There are people who'll pay ridiculous sums just to harrass a newbie. There are people who not only are insecure enough to only attack people who are 10 levels lower, but also need the absolute best magical armour and weapons to muster the guts to do that.
3. Some people just want to brag about their virtual possessions. ("Yeah, but my UO castle is bigger than yours!")
It's some people for which their character's level, or the value of their equipment in gold coins, is like it's the size of their penis in cm. Not just "reflects" their penis size, but as if phyiscally their RL penis will shrink to half an inch if they start at level 1 like everyone else, or grow to 20 inches long if they're level 50.
Well, ok, maybe that was too strong a metaphor, but you get the idea. For some people it's like their RL worth is measured by their virtual achievements in their game.
And they'll pay for that all right.
4. The tread-mill effect.
See, all MMOs are built on a dope pusher model. Or the boiling a frog alive model, if you wish. (They say that if you drop a frog into hot water, it will jump out. But if you put it in cool water and very slowly raise the temperature, it will stay in until it's boiled alive. The trick is that the change towards the worse must be very slow.)
So let's get back to MMOs. In the beginning you get everything almost for free, travel is short, it's all easy, rewards are plentiful, etc. And a lot of people like that. They're happy as a frog in a pool of cool water.
Then it gradually goes downhill. Gaining a level is no longer a half an hour affair, it becomes several hours, then days, then eventually you're looking at weeks until your next level. It becomes more and more work, and less and less rewards. More and more stick, and less and less carrot.
E.g., look through the older blogs on Penny Arcade for what Tycho thought about COH. Everything he liked about it is everyhing that basically disappears at higher levels. I wonder if he'd have praised so much the lack of penalties for death, if he only knew that it becomes 20k xp debt per death in the 30's
Next up class: we learn elementary reading skills;)
You may notice that there's a major difference between the two phrases you quoted: the word "pre-meditated". That's the keyword there.
The major difference is that one wasn't by mistake, wasn't by impulse, it was _planned_ theft. Let's keep your sandwich shop analogy. There's a difference between someone grabbing a sandwich by accident or impulse and starting munching, and someone who (A) explicitly went through the trouble of looking for an unlocked door until he got into someone's kitchen, and (B) spent _hours_ there helping himself to everything in sight, because, hey, it's free.
You may find that any court in the world would be very uninclined to believe that that's a honest mistake or something done on an impulse. Several hours is well past any reasonable time frame where you've had time to think about wth you're doing.
"The fact is, for most broadband connections, unless the person is file sharing or using VOIP, it's no skin off your nose that they're doing it."
Bullshit. By that reasoning, you shouldn't mind it if I:
- come over and dump my garbage into your bin (hey, you probably didn't use all that space in it anyway), or
- build a billboard on your front lawn (why do you care about a few dollars less property value if you aren't selling it right now?), or
- bring a cow to graze on your front lawn (you didn't really need that grass, right?), or
- come into your house and use your fridge to cool down a can of Pepsi (you weren't using all the space in it anyway) and/or
- use your computer to check my email (you weren't using it at the time anyway, so wtf should you care about it?), and for that matter
- hop into your car at night and drive to a movie, because I'm too cheap to use a taxi (I'll put it back in the garage in the morning, so why would you have a problem with that?)
The fact is, that's not how private property works. What's mine is mine, what's yours is yours. Unless you have an explicit permission to use someone else's property, stay the f-word off it.
"If for some reason, it bothers you to be neighborly"
So if I don't let you trespass and use my property, I'm somehow not neighbourly. Funny how "neighbourly" and "sharing" get to be used to defend theft. (Well, at least we seem to be over the brainfucked "potlatch" and "culture of sharing" euphemisms for stealing. Now those were getting annoying a few years back.)
Get this, "neighbour":
- "sharing" refers to sharing what's _yours_. You can give away, or grant use of, things _you_ own. There is no such thing as neighbourly sharing someone _else's_ property or resources without their consent.
- "neighbourly" or "community" are two-way streets, give-and-take affairs, not an excuse to be a freeloading leech. It's "neighbourly" or "community" if we _both_ do something for each other, or at least theoretically acknowledging that possibility. Unilateral relationships in which you get all the benefits, and I only get to pay the ISP bill for your downloads, isn't neighbourly, it's just me supporting a freeloading parasite. You'll excuse me if I'm less than thrilled by that kind of "neighbourly" relationship.
- And again, it implies consentual stuff. Letting a neighbour use my lawnmower or my internet connection when they _asked_, is one thing. That's neighbourly. Seeing the neighbour just go into my garage and taking the lawnmower without asking, is a tad beyond the line of what "neighbourly" or "community" means. That's when it's time to get un-neighbourly and call the cops.
(Doubly so if it's not even a neighbour, but some unknown bum who thought he's oh-so-smart by coming over to "share" someone else's property.)
Your house or your car too "broadcast" their position to anyone who has eyes, yet that never was construed as an invitation that everyone should help himself to them.
Even in your example with the house, it's _only_ valid if I write an invitation (e.g., yes, "Open House Today") on that sign. If I decide to broadcast anything else on that sign, such as for example "Moraelin's house is here" or "this is a house" or "this is a door", then, nope, it's _not_ an invitation to enter.
And that's all that a hotspot broadcasts. The equivalent of "hi, I'm a hotspot". In fact no even that: what it broadcasts is a handshake signal to other devices, _not_ an invitation (or any other kind of message) to any human. No more, no less, and sure as hell no text to the effect of "this is a public service, please connect here."
So unless that guy's hotspot was explicitly broadcasting something like "open community access point", I'll call bullshit on that. It was _not_ broadcasting an invitation to stay parked in front of his house for hours mooching free internet.
"I don't have a chainlink fence, does that mean my property should become a neighborhood hang out? Or should people know, if I don't own it, then I should not use it?"
The "if you don't own it, you shouldn't use it without permission" idea was what I had in mind.
"Granted, with the internet it is different than in the real world. Cybercrimes are not real crimes, not in the sense like if you stuck a gun in someones ribs and ordered them to give you their money."
There are a lot of real-life crimes or misdemeanors which don't involve sticking a gun to someone's ribs.
"But I would like to think that if I buy a wireless router, I can take it out of the box, plug it in, and not do anything else and it will work. If it broadcasts to the world, that is something the manufacturer did wrong, setting it as default that way. The other end of the spectrum is the people who will get a router with restricted access, and not be able to configure it to work with their computers. What do you do? Does owning a wireless router require someone to read a 100 page manual. How many people read the manual that comes with their car, that tells them what grade of oil to use? Most people say fuck it, and just have the oil change place put in the 10w40, regardless of what is best for their car. "
I don't think it has be one of those extremes. There are lots of ways to make something easy to use _and_ secure, if someone actually cared about that.
E.g., some months ago there was this story right here on/. about using RFID for handshake. You just touch two devices together to establish a logical connection between them. Think about using that for wireless security. The moment they're in touch, they automatically generate and exchange the keys, and everything thereafter is wireless _and_ encrypted. It's easy, it's secure, it doesn't require any technical knowledge, it doesn't require reading an 100 page manual.
And yes, while the original idea was for telephones, ipods and PDAs, it could work just as well for stuff that's desktop computer sized. You just get to use a smaller gadget to handshake with one, then with the other. Or you could include a small card with a RFID chip containing the default unique key with each peripheral sold, on which it's printed, "touch this to your router to activate secure connections."
That's just one example of how it could be done. There are a thousand other ways, probably.
The real problem isn't that it has to be wide open to be easy to use, the problem is that no vendor gives a damn.
And speaking of having to read manuals, bonus points it's a half-arsed waste of time that leaves you no wiser. E.g., my SMC router's docs go on and on for pages just repeating what's already on the screen, without any further explanation. E.g., for a drop-down that says "IGMP Proxy", and the options "Enabled" and "Disabled", the manual's _only_ words on the subject are "Enables or disables the IGMP proxy". (Well, gee, who would have guessed that?) If you don't already know what IGMP is, how it works, and exactly what would proxing it do for/to your netrwork, you're still left just as clueless as to what to choose there.
"The problem with computers, and cyber crimes, will continue to be the balancing act between having products that work and securing computers."
If only it was so. Then you'd have a lot more security _and_ ease of use.
The real balancing however is usually more like between the marketting dept and the legal dept. It just needs to _seem_ easy enough in ads so they can get your money, and just secure enough (or having a good watertight disclaimer in the EULA) to avoid a class action lawsuit. No more, no less.
So this guy in your story basically goes through the first door that happens to be open. It doesn't look like a shop, it doesn't have a price list, it doesn't have a shopkeeper, and generally there's _nothing_ whatsoever that would imply that it's a shop. Could just be someone's home, or it could be that some people were having a party there later and had brought the food in advance. Yet he just assumes that he's allowed to help himself to whatever is there.
Seems to me like a very clear-cut case of theft, by real life standards.
Now let's bring it a little closer to the war-driving example. Let's say your guy _knew_ it wasn't a shop, and had _no_ plans whatsoever to pay for that sandwich. In fact the only reason he was there in the first place, instead of at the real sandwich shop next door, is that he actually _planned_ to get a meal without paying. The mentality all along was "hey, cool, I know this house next door is unlocked, so I'll just go make myself a free sandwich there. It would be stupid of me to pay for something when I can 'share' someone else's food for free instead."
I think by RL standards you have a _very_ clear-cut case of pre-meditated theft.
My take is that it _is_ why "normal" people don't have the same attitude to security (whether it's wireless routers or windows bugs) as nerds have. Real World has worked on completely different principles so far.
The fact is, even if you locked your door or built a chainlink fence, they're just marking a boundary, not being an unbreakable barrier. Whether you lock it or not, your real defense isn't the door, it's the law. The door is really just a marker that says "my property starts here, if you're caught here, we'll throw your sorry ass in jail." No more.
"I can do it" _never_ equalled "then I'm allowed to do it" in the real world. Anyone can buy/make a lockpick for a lot less money than it takes to buy a laptop and a wireless LAN card, and wiggle your lock open in less time than it takes to war-drive around the neighbourhood and configure your networking to use the neighbour's router. But that was never construed as "then it's your fault for not having an unbreakable lock, and the thief is perfectly within his rights to be on your property and walking away with your TV" in the real world.
And, frankly, I see no reason why we shouldn't apply that RL model to computers. My property starts here, I don't give a damn about how l33t some kid thinks he is, they're just not supposed to be on it. Period.
Placing the onus of securing their property on the victims, and the even more idiotic assumption that if it wasn't 100% physically impossible to get on it, then everyone's _invited_ in, is not how the real world ever worked.
"I'd be open to switching my OS if a new OS did everything that my existing OS did *and* added a bunch of new stuff that made the effort worthwhile."
I've took the liberty of adding the emphasis there.
I think that's the crux of the problem, but also the most mis-understood part. That's the part that OS zealots love to mis-understand.
Let me delve into the semantics a bit, just for the sake of making a point. I'm not picking on your phrasing or anything, I'm just explaining _why_ new OSes fail, and why even Linux is of zero interest to Joe Average.
I don't think you mean literally "if the _OS_ did the same things". The OS taken by itself does actually very little, and is arguably the least important thing on a computer. The OS just loads and runs the applications, and provides some standard libraries and widgets. No more.
It's _easy_ for an OS to provide basically the same functionality of the OS itself, or close enough. Writing a loader, scheduler and some widgets is _easy_, and indeed half the games out there basically come with their own implementation of all three. Anyway, very single alternative OS so far had no problems doing the same things that Windows does. Yet they failed. Because that's not really what matters. You can do only so much with _only_ the OS.
I think what you really meant is "if I could get the same functionality out of my computer", which actually means the applications. E.g., you don't edit your digital photos with the OS core, and not even with MS Paint (that's an app, though), you use some program like PaintShop Pro, Photoshop or, if you're a masochistic cheapskate (yeah, I am one too) with the Gimp.
That's really what you need to do everything you could do with your old OS: an equivalent of the applications too.
That's the real entry barrier in the OS market. Writing a loader, a scheduler, a GUI and exporting some of that as libraries, is the easy part. But that doesn't even come close to letting you get the same use out of your computer. Also providing an equivalent to all the thousands of applications and games that exist for Windows, that's the hard part. That's where they fail.
Even according to the old Sony pricing scheme, a "Platinum" game for the PS/2 was around 20 Euro at EB Games, less in other places. (Even less if you buy it used.) Bear in mind that this includes a rather hefty VAT, before you compare it to US prices.
And on the PC, I can think of old games I bought for 5 Euro. Not used, just 2-3 years old.
So Nintendo charging 30 Euro for its "budget" games, sorta makes me wonder what dictionary they used to define "budget". Did they use the government employee definition, which basically means "I got this big pile of someone else's money and must blow them all in a given time, no matter on what, or I'll get less next year"?;)
So basically what you tell me is that you can't enjoy anything that isn't multiplayer. Almost everything you mention there revolves around having a human opponent. You explicitly state that going to other games is like basically losing your internet connection.
Which, of course, is as good a criterion as any, and a very valid market segment. It's not just you, and you're not alone. There are lots of people who indeed are multiplayer-only.
You have to realize, though, that it's just one segment. Arguably, not even the dominant one. Most of the world's gaming seems to happen in single-player and off-line.
Anyway, there are a lot of us who really _don't_ feel a need to compete with other players. Even in MMORPGs, i.e., something by definition multi-player, there are people who prefer to solo, turning it into SP.
So I'm guessing there is a market for these games too. You're obviously not in that market. But I'd guess others might be.
The problem is that that's _not_ how early hominids evolved, and not how really primitive hunter-gatherer tribes live.
Let's start with the beginning. It started with a small-ish fruit eating ape. Note that there's a difference between eating fruit and eating leaves. Practically any mammal can digest fruit and meat, but extracting the protein from leaves requires either the specialized digestive tract of a herbivore, or cooking them at high enough temperatures. This particular ape hadn't yet invented fire and had _no_ natural weapons to hunt, so it had to live happily on fruit.
Then the climate started changing, and less and less trees and fruit were available. The ape increasingly faced two problems: (A) avoiding predators on the ground, and (B) finding food.
With fruit being less and less available, the only other thing it could eat was meat. But here's the fun part: it lacked natural weapons or the strength to do much hunting.
What it had to do was steal the prey from carnivores, without ending up second course for that carnivore. And no, that didn't involve comic-book-style brave muscular cavemen wrestling sabertooth tigers. It involved stealth and cunning.
That's why what evolved the fastest was the brains. That was what mattered. What got lost in the evolution? Well, you lost all natural weapons for a start, such as the oversized jaws males had in that original ape.
So, no, males did not evolve for adrenaline-high combat. We're talking the vast majority of evolution being a game of Metal Gear Solid, where if you're seen you're dead, rather than a Quake 3 deathmatch.
The ones who enjoyed adrenaline and tried to fight the tiger got eaten. They got themselves out of the gene pool. The ones who survived were the nerds who used their brains.
Let's also look at the relative sizes of males and females. The ape we started with features males about twice as large as the females, and featuring _some_ extra natural weapons. What did it all evolve into? Well, look around you. The evolution constantly diminished the size difference in males and females.
Basically it doesn't support the bullshit theories that males fought tigers, while women stayed and socialized. If that was the case, evolution would have increased the size and muscle mass of males even more compared to females. What actually happened was _equalizing_ them.
So maybe the tasks they had to do and then challenges they had to overcome weren't that different after all.
And indeed if you look at hunter-gatherer tribes, they aren't. Look at the Bushmen sometimes. Fascinating folk.
While the males hunt, yes, it's not adrenaline pumping combat. It's not even close. What it is is still a game of _stealth_ and patience. The trick is to _avoid_ predators, and _sneak_ up to the gazelles to shoot one with an arrow.
And while the females do gather, they still have the exact same challenge of avoiding predators. It's still a game of stealth, with only _marginally_ lower risks. It's _not_ an exercise in sitting around and chattering all day long.
Basically that's the whole problem with these bullshit theories about how evolution made guys natural warriors and made women nothing more than chatterboxes. It's something completely pulled out of the ass, and completely ignoring the ample data that the actual sciences (e.g., anthropology) provide.
I only started with WoW, and doesn't really seem to be my thing so far. So I'll beg your forgiveness if the thing about the mithril breastplate didn't match actual game content or something.
I did play a lot of other games, MMOs included, to know at least _I_ never woke up confused about what happened in a game and what was real life yesterday. I must have sunk a couple of months at least in City Of Heroes, and I still never woke up thinking that I can actually fly or safely jump off bridges.
I played one particular MUD before that for something like 5 years. Never woke up thinking that I've really bashed bandits with a sledgehammer yesterday.
Or what do you mean? It could be that I've completely mis-understood your point.
egotiated contracts for fixed sums are quite a different thing than employment anyway. That's more along the lines of how good you are at negotiating versus how much that thing is worth for them. As long as they did get it for the price in the contract and at that deadline, the contract is fulfilled.
Being employed for 40 hours a week is a bit of a different issue. That contract is not for a fixed piece of work at a fixed price. Or rather: what you're contractually expected to deliver is no more, and no less, than 40 hours a week. Giving you enough work to actually fill those 40 hours seems to me like it's perfectly normal: it's what you signed for.
Basically, again, we really seem to be talking about very different things. What we usually mean by "overtime" is more like "they try to shaft me by trying to get twice as many hours as we signed a contract for." Definitely not along the lines of "it's overtime if they don't let me work only a quarter of the time I signed a contract for." I can see how the latter would be many people's dream, but it's not quite the usual meaning of "overtime".
Either way, if you think you'd do that much better as a sub-contractor, by all means, go ahead and do that. Be prepared though to spend a _lot_ more unpaid time negotiating that stuff: for that 10 hour contract, you might spend 40 hours in meetings to negotiate it. And that's not even counting the time spent on legal matters, accounting, finding contacts, etc.
But anyway, again, if you want that kind of a contract, go ahead and negotiate just that. Because arguing basically "I should have all the safety of a fixed employment contract, but charge 10 hours on the timesheet for every 2 actual worked, like I'd do if I was a sub-contractor" is... well, at the very least it's not what you signed a contract for.
"The value of a share is decided by how much you wish to pay for it.
True for any good or service, concrete or ephemeral."
Nope. Not even close.
If a company buys, say, a truck or a machine tool, there's a completely different kind of value that gets into that calculation: how much money you'll make out of using it. You know, since you claim to have some clue of economics, that's what ROI and ammortization calculations are all about. E.g., when Intel wants to build a new 65nm fab, the question is "how many chips we'll produce with it, at what running costs, and how much we can sell those for?"
There's some actual value produced in there, not a guess whether the price of 65nm equipment will go up or down.
By comparison, the _only_ value one share has is what someone else is willing to pay for it. It never produces anything. To get a 1$ profit on your $25 share, you have to find someone else willing to pay $26 for it.
If you can't see any difference between the two, sorry, I'll have to shoot your wisecrack right back at you: "Go take a course in economics."
As for the rest of your troll... ok, then you tell me: where do those money come from? I mean, you claim that my theory about the money coming from the shareholders themselves counts as "crack-brained wacko theories". Well then you multiply the number of MSFT shares by their value, and you tell me _who_ did that money come from. From MSFT? Did any company invest 20 to 40 times their peak yearly earnings into the stock market? (Because that's the range supposed to be "normal" in the stock market.)
No, it seems to me like those money, or at least the part of it representing outstanding shares, came from the shareholders. No more, no less, no corporate profits returning to the community. If your shares jumped up by, say, 1$, that's _not_ because actual money from the corporate income making their way back into your pockets, it's simply because some other shareholder was willing to pay 1$ more.
Again, if you have a better, and presumably less "crack-brained wacko" theory, please kindly actually share that info instead of acting like yet another slashdot troll.
Yes, there are some formulas thrown around as to how much money you should dump into a share. Yes, there was some formula waved before some other Jack Investor and Joe Gullible as to why should they pay $26 for a share now. But nevertheless, at the end of the day, that's where the share value increase really came from: from Jack and Joe's pocket, _not_ from the corporation making a profit. And the _only_ reason why that happened or not, is because Jack Investor or Joe Gullible actually reached for their own wallet and put their money where Merril Lynch's mouth was.
But, again, I'm willing to be enlightened. If you have a better theory as to where that money comes from, please do share it.
Well, I'm not opposed to people being rewarded for better work. He should probably be paid better if he does more work in the same time, or anyway see _some_ benefits out of it. Yes. No doubt.
Where I do not aggree with him, however, is when he explicitly calls that saved time his "free time" and any extra work is intruding on his "free time" or being "overtime". That's where he lost me.
If person A can do twice the work of person B in the same 8 hours, he should be better paid, yes. But I don't think capping work per day to that of person B is that great a way to go.
E.g., speaking as a programmer, nowadays we can code a lot more per hour with all the compilers, plugins and tools, than someone could by programming in machine code on punched paper cards in the 60's. There's a lot of work that went just into clerical stuff like counting the bytes for a jump or variable address, that the compiler does automatically for you nowadays. (And even more than it sounds during maintenance or debugging. Inserting a single instruction meant counting the bytes all over again.)
But the course of action that happened and that benefitted society the most is that nowadays we can code bigger and more complex programs, and code them faster. I.e., getting more work done in a day, as opposed to letting everyone go home 6 hours early on account that that's how much they'd have spent on clerical tasks in the 60's.
1. The value of a share is decided by how much you wish to pay for it. It's just a piece of paper with very little intrinsic value, or at least typically _much_ less actual value than its price. The actual price is a gambling and hype game that has _nothing_ to do with that real value of the assets behind it, and where if it came to liquidating the company to recover your money from those assets, you'd be looking at a monumental loss.
The question that determines whether, say, MSFT shares are worth 25$ isn't MSFT's income, isn't MSFT's bank account, it's just literally "well, would you buy one for 25$?" That price is just the equilibrium point at which the number of people want to sell that piece of paper equals those wanting to buy.
The stock market as a whole is basically one big pot that people thrown their money in. It goes up as a whole as long as more people stay convinced to keep throwing more and more money into it.
And when you get down to the individual pots of the various companies and corporations, the same holds true: the only money in the pot are those the shareholders themselves threw into that pot. Corporate profits don't go into that pot. They are just hype to convince people to throw money into this pot instead of that other one.
I.e., if your MSFT stock goes up, it's _not_ because some of MS's income goes directly into that. It's because everyone _but_ MSFT, including people like _you_, threw more money into that pot. That's all. The profits just served to generate hype about which pot to throw money in. No more, no less.
2. But here's really what ticks me off about the whole thing: the fact remains that what a lot of this companies do is basically parasitic behaviour.
A long time ago, the economy used to be about creating value for _both_ parties involved. E.g., if I'm a baker and you're hungry, you buying a loaf of bread from me actually creates value for both. For you that loaf is worth more than the money (or you'd keep your money), and for me the money is worth more than one of the loaves I baked. (Or I wouldn't sell it for that price.)
That's the kind of transaction that actually helps society as a whole.
What some of these fucks do is basically more along parasitic behaviour. Their profits come directly by making a loss to someone else. E.g., if company A demands 140% unpaid overtime from employee B, that's a very unilateral transaction. A makes profit at B's expense, while B gives more and gets nothing in return. In the bakery example it's as if every other day I took your money and didn't give you a loaf. Sure, it will increase my profits, but in a parasitic way: without giving anything in return.
And the "but their stock price does go up" is a piss-poor excuse for tolerating that kind of parasitic behaviour. You're allowing someone to rob society of _billions_ because you receive maybe a few dollars in return on your shares. Again, not even directly from those robbed billions, but more like money that changed hands between you shareholders anyway.
It's like cheering that the bandits robbed your village, but you got a few pennies off another villager by betting that they'll loot more stuff today than last year. And hey, you only had to let them loot and plunder a million times more than you won for that bet to come true.
As far as I can tell, your argument basically seems to be "if I do the same job in 2 hours (yes, via scripts or whatever) that a bad worker does in 8, I should get the rest of 6 hours free". Which is a strange request, seein' as it basically asks to set everyone's job requirements to the slowest possible worker.
It's not how any other job works, nor how progress happened. E.g., the reason we have an abbundance of consumer goods today is that, yes, we can produce in 8 hours _more_, say, cloth than a 16'th century weaver could produce by hand. If the line of thinking had been, "yay, I produced 10 ft worth of cloth in 10 minutes, that someone would have needed all day to make by hand, therefore I can go home after 10 minutes" we'd still be living in the 16'th century kind of poverty. We'd have lots of free time, but wouldn't be an inch closer to having today's standard of living.
Anyway, when the rest of us rant about overtime, we don't mean "waah, but they make me work a whole 8 hours a day." What we mean is more along the lines of having to work 12-14 hour days, 7 days a week.
E.g., since Electronic Arts is mentioned, I can't help remember the recent story (you know, the employee's wife's blog) about EA over-working its employees to the maximum. In fact, until some of them couldn't even focus any more. And they were demanding that kind of hours not because the project was desperately over the deadline or over the budget, but from the start. Just because some greedy fuck figured out some version of "muahahaha, so I can get more than twice the work out of them for the same money. And if they burn out afterwards, who the f-word cares about them?"
I find it inherently abhorrent to read about EA bragging about profits and _reducing_ the number of jobs, while demanding that kind of massive overtime.
Now I can see some excuse in asking for short-term _temporary_ over-time to save a project in the final stages, or until more people can be hired to handle the unforeseen load. But actually planning to _fire_ some more, because, hey, you can overwork the rest to make up for it (and then fire them too when they get burned out), has a certain slimeball quality to it.
Disclaimer: I haven't exploited those, didn't get banned in any MMO, and I'm not against banning people that used exploits. But if I put on my "let's think about security" cap, I find the it laughably unprofessional to put that content there and accessible in the first place.
I mean, for example, stuff like "playtester only" flags, and the corresponding player/playtester/builder/admin/etc permission levels for the characters, have existed on MUDs for ages. I'm not even a game designer, and just off the top of my head, I can come up with stuff like:
- flag a map as incomplete: if the server gets your coordinates there and you don't have the flag that says you're allowed in restricted areas, just get teleported out.
- flag incomplete/unreleased NPCs as such: if you don't have the right permissions flag, you can't attack or interact in any way with such an NPC
- ditto for treasure chests, mineral deposits, and the other interactive objects
- and for that matter, again, check the released/unreleased flag for the whole area where that object is, as a second line of defense in case the devs forgot to flag one item or NPC as such
See, it wasn't even that hard to come up with something more effective at stopping those exploits. Without needing any bans. It just needed some 5 minutes of thinking.
By comparison just placing there an aggressive NPC with an insta-kill attack is an unbelievably _cheap_ hack. It's such a slipshod solution held together with duct tape and band-aid that's outright laughable.
Not to mention the whole putting that content on the live servers and connected to the to start with. They did what? Place test content simply past some body of water and hoped noone will swim/water-walk some 2 miles in that direction? Even as security by obscurity goes, this is _the_ lamest thing I've heard in ages.
Geesh, didn't these guys ever hear of _test_ servers? Or for that matter of having development servers before allowing content even on the test ones? Developping directly on the _production_ servers (and pushing that incomplete stuff to the clients too), is the kind of thing that FFS, even in web stuff is right fully considered the mark of the unprofessional and probably incompetent. In a major MMO, from a major developper and backed by a major publisher, there is _no_ excuse for something this unprofessional happening.
The ISO-standard counter-example to the "fundamentally violent nature of mankind" hypothesis are the Bushmen. Those are literally the perfect commune kind of a community, and if two people have a conflict they can't reconcile, one of them simply moves to another tribe. Which _will_ accept him/her.
Or look at the stone age paintings on cave walls. You'll find plenty about them hunting mammoths, deer, whatever, but I'm not aware of any which were about great military victories against other humans. If there are any, they must be a tiny minority.
The problem is a cultural one. We raise generation after generation with the idea that violence is _cool_ and _manly_. Well, then we don't need to act surprised when they act that way.
What did you learn in history in school, for example? Right. Lots of battles, and how _cool_ we are for beating up them. Yay, we beat up the british! Yay, we shot the indians for their land! Yay, we shot each other and burned our own cities in the Civil War! We're sooo cool for that. Yay, we beat the snot out of Mexico! Etc.
There's a whole indoctrination in the us-vs-them cult, and how violence is _the_ solution. It's _the_ thing we celebrate. It's _the_ thing that gets you remembered in history books. (Try quickly naming one Roman Emperor or a Pharaoh or whatever, which is noted for economic success and not for military campaigns. Right. They don't teach much about _those_ in history class, do they?)
Slashdot Mirror
No, seriously, try Enix's "Valkyrie Profile". That's one video game which is thoroughly good and entertaining and it's based on a religion. Norse religion, to be precise. (As the title might suggest, you actually play as a Valkyrie.)
Now it's not really "well represented" in the sense of being a treatise on it or anything. It's a rather liberal interpretation of the sagas. (E.g., their Valkyrie fights and trains the Einherjar, rather than being just a taxi to Valhalla. E.g., their version of Ragnarok and especially the best ending one, is rather unorthodox.) And they did mix some Japanese stuff into it too.
Well, probably that's why it's a good game. They didn't try to preach or convert you. I doubt that the fine Japanese game designers were even believers in Asatro anyway. They were just trying to make a good game, and the Norse mythology just provided an original setup for that.
"I will go out on a limb a suggest that the only people who promote your point of view are anti-religious zealots."
;)
His point of view was that he doesn't want someone preaching at him and trying to convert him, or at least doesn't count that as entertainment. (And I'll wholeheartedly aggree with him there: if I wanted to hear someone preaching, I'd go to church. When I start a game, I expect entertainment, not preaching.)
So your point is... what? That anyone who isn't an "anti-religious zealot" is just dying to hear you preaching? It might come as a surprise to you, but no, most people really aren't just waiting for you to come enlighten them.
"hypocrite. Look it up."
Ah, good. So if presumably you're not a hypocrite, I suppose you actually like someone coming and trying to convert you to _their_ religion.
Great! Well here's mine:
My religion is that it's all a MMO. (Great graphics, huh?) And we're all the creation of the Game Designer. It all started as a university assignment. (Let's be honest, noone but a student waits until the last 7 days to even start.)
So it took Him a bit of messing with the Transform & Lighting code (Let there be light), physics and such, and finally he even had a working map for it: Eden. Not a big one, and definitely no challenge playing that one, since everything respawned in abbundance. But hey, it's a start, and not a bad one.
And then He had two players. And lo did the Game Designer rejoice, and even let them name the NPCs. (Can be an euphoric day for any MUD admin, so I can understand the guy.)
Except those two abused bugs. That's players for you. You tell them "Stay away from that tree 'cause it's unfinished and still does funny and unbalanced things to your stats" and what do they do? Right. Ask any MUD or MMO admin if that's a surprise. (Well, other than the surprise that He didn't ban their cheating asses.)
So, anyway, to cut a long story short, from there it went on with a player wipe (the flood), implementing a buggy language system and watching it run amok (tower of Babel), and various other such mis-haps. All the way to Jesus pulling a Leroy stunt and aggroing two large groups at the same time, namely the romans and the jews. Noob, really. Any experienced player could have told him you need to pull from large groups, not rush in and aggro the lot of them.
Well, there you go, that's _my_ religion. I don't doubt that since, you aren't a hypocrite, you didn't mean only others should listen to _yours_. That would be hypocrisy. You, undoubtedly, are glad to be enlightened to someone else's religion, right? Glad I could be of service
I seem to remember an old (and buggy) Microprose game called Darklands. Based in late medieval Germany, and based on the society, equipment and beliefs of that time. E.g., you didn't cast spells, you prayed to some saint, or mixed explosive potions as an alchemist, or such.
Was a bit _too_ much of a Bible lecture for my taste, but still, it made a nice change from the endless stream of me-too D&D clones. I mean, I'm not against RPG's derived (directly or indirectly) from Tolkien's work, but there are lots of those already. I like something original now and then, and the RL mythology of pretty much any nation can be just as diverse and interesting.
I'd like to see more games like that based on other religions too. For example, how about one based in ancient Egypt? Or ancient Greece? Both had _plenty_ of mythology, beliefs in magic, a primitive science, etc. Should be enough to fill a complex RPG and then some.
"By making it so cheap for the lazy gamer to "level up", who is going to want to try to advance the normal way?"
You make it sound like it's just encouraging the lazy, but presumably the ones who advance the old fashioned way aren't really hampered in any way. If only it was that simple.
Since you link to those auctions for COH and Lineage 2, I'll assume you're familiar with those games. So let's talk about COH.
See, the problem with having lots of people with infinite money (or more money than they can possibly spend on enhancements) is that it sets a new standard against which everyone is judged.
And the difference between that standard and a normal player can be pretty damn huge in COH. E.g., having 1 million influence in COH at level 22, can mean that your fire tank hits the 90% damage-resistance cap _and_ has perma-Hasten _and_ does twice the damage per second. (It costs 1 mil to have all SO enhancements at level 22 as a tank.) A normal player, however, has might be at 70% damage resistance. I.e., from the same enemies he'll take 3 times more damage per second, _and_ take twice as long to kill them.
And again, the problem is that the honest player will be judged against the twinked one. He'll get kicked out of teams, because he doesn't live up to the standards of those running around with infinite money.
I've been in teams where the level 22 fire tank played honestly (i.e., without any extra money, just what that character honestly earned) got killed repeatedly, because some idiot set the difficulty to "invulnerable" on the assumption that surely _everyone_ is at 90% damage resistance. And without getting money from someone else, you just can't possibly be there. Then he obnoxiously lectured the tank along the lines of "you suck if you don't have the best enhancements", and kicked him out of the team.
(At which point I left too and went to group separately with that tank.)
I've seen posts on the boards along the same idea. Along the lines of "God, some of you tanks suck. I had to kick one out of the team yesterday because he couldn't herd on 'invincible'."
Or I've had tells along the lines of "whaaat? you only heal 200 hp?" with my Defender.
That's the real problem. If enough people run around with infinite money, that becomes the new baseline. That's the standard against which you're judged. You start getting insulted or kicked out of the team because you don't measure up to that standard.
Worse yet, that becomes the standard for which the devs balance the games.
E.g., have you tried doing the level 24 Terra Volta respec at level 24, with a team which didn't get any extra money, ever? Try it. It's fun. Even with a martial arts scrapper (+10% to-hit), and _some_ DO accuracy enhancements, I wasn't even hitting the overlapping +3 to +4 level shield generators.
To my shame, I gave up, transferred some money from another character, and tried again with SO enhancements in everything. Went _much_ better.
What got me thinking recently was going back to my old COH account, only to find the game (A) flooded with people running around with 10 times more money than they can possibly earn at that level, and (B) the game increasingly becoming balanced for those. Now generally I like COH, and in COH you don't even need to pay RL money for it. You just need to ask a max level player, or I've even had a few ask me if I wanted any money.
But still, it got me wondering: why not elliminate money at all?
E.g., COH seems to increasingly assume that you've been given an infinite supply of money at any given level. Not literally infinite, but more than enough to buy any enhancements you want. So why not do away with currency and let me just pick any enhancements for free, then?
It seemed to work well in other games.
E.g., in Planetside, you're a soldier. You don't have to _buy_ your own tank, you're just given one. But since you're a soldier, you're not allowed to get any equipment you're not certified for. So the balancing factor becomes (A) the certification points, which you get at level-up, and (B) availability: if you just ran a new tank off the cliff, you get to wait half an hour before someone lets you drive another one. It worked ok in Planetside.
E.g., think about City Of Heroes for a bit. In COH you don't have "equipment" in the sense of armour and weapons like in WoW. Your "superman"-like character doesn't buy a new breastplate or brass knuckles. What you buy in COH are "enhancements" to your power. That superman clone might enhance his punches to hit harder, or be more accurate, or whatever. It's closer to what other games solve via skills, than equipment.
So why have to buy those? The game would work just as well if those improvements were picked when you level up.
Etc.
I'm sure pretty much any game could be transformed into something that doesn't require gold. E.g., in the Warcraft universe you could be a soldier like in Planetside, and be given your equipment based on your level, rank or solved quests.
And it would stop this kind of gold market in one fell swoop. You can't sell gold when doesn't even exist in the game, or weapons when anyone can get the same weapon by just talking to their quartermaster.
So why don't more people do just that?
A couple of years ago, I had played this crappy buggy web-based pay-to-cheat "strategy" game. Well, if you think paying 200 dollars is too much, there was this guy in that game who allegedly paid over 20,000 US dollars for various in-game equipment and other benefits. Yes, that's not a typo. Over TWENTY THOUSAND dollars.
"Are Mommy and Daddy really not paying that much attention to the credit card?"
Well, that's the thing: games aren't just for kids any more. The guy above allegedly had his own company or something.
Well, here are some reasons why people would want to pay for in-game stuff with their out-of-game credit card:
1. To cheat. That's it: pay to cheat. If that real money can buy an undeserved advantage (as in, an advantage you didn't work for), and especially if it's a massive advantage, some people will pay for it.
E.g., before I use City Of Heroes as an example, let me say that COH _doesn't_ have a real-money market for in-game money. (Ok, "influence.") The economy of COH is such that money is so plentiful at higher levels, that you can get a million off a level 50 player by just asking. (In WoW money, that would be about 100 gold.)
But I'm familiar enough with COH to illustrate the difference that that extra money can make, and why you might want to get that extra money. To fully equip a level 22 Tanker with the best possible equipment ("enhancements" in COH lingo), it costs about 1 million. Make that anywhere between 1.5 and 2 million for some other classes. The problem is that even if you bought nothing since level 1, you'll have made about 200,000 total by then.
And the difference that equipment makes is huge. It can peg your damage resistance at 90% as a tanker, _and_ pretty much double your damage output as any class, _and_ give you a good 50% or so boost to your endurance (think "mana") regeneration, _and_ shorten your travel time. It can make the difference between yawning at a group of 10 enemies and getting summarily executed by 2 of them.
The problem is that that huge disparity in equipment isn't just making it tempting to beg, it's increasingly making it _necessary_. It's a vicious circle. So many people are basically too powerful for their level on money they didn't earn, that the game is increasingly becoming balanced for those. Which encourages more of the rest to go beg too.
2. PvP griefers are a huge segment of this market too. There are people who'll pay ridiculous sums just to harrass a newbie. There are people who not only are insecure enough to only attack people who are 10 levels lower, but also need the absolute best magical armour and weapons to muster the guts to do that.
3. Some people just want to brag about their virtual possessions. ("Yeah, but my UO castle is bigger than yours!")
It's some people for which their character's level, or the value of their equipment in gold coins, is like it's the size of their penis in cm. Not just "reflects" their penis size, but as if phyiscally their RL penis will shrink to half an inch if they start at level 1 like everyone else, or grow to 20 inches long if they're level 50.
Well, ok, maybe that was too strong a metaphor, but you get the idea. For some people it's like their RL worth is measured by their virtual achievements in their game.
And they'll pay for that all right.
4. The tread-mill effect.
See, all MMOs are built on a dope pusher model. Or the boiling a frog alive model, if you wish. (They say that if you drop a frog into hot water, it will jump out. But if you put it in cool water and very slowly raise the temperature, it will stay in until it's boiled alive. The trick is that the change towards the worse must be very slow.)
So let's get back to MMOs. In the beginning you get everything almost for free, travel is short, it's all easy, rewards are plentiful, etc. And a lot of people like that. They're happy as a frog in a pool of cool water.
Then it gradually goes downhill. Gaining a level is no longer a half an hour affair, it becomes several hours, then days, then eventually you're looking at weeks until your next level. It becomes more and more work, and less and less rewards. More and more stick, and less and less carrot.
E.g., look through the older blogs on Penny Arcade for what Tycho thought about COH. Everything he liked about it is everyhing that basically disappears at higher levels. I wonder if he'd have praised so much the lack of penalties for death, if he only knew that it becomes 20k xp debt per death in the 30's
Next up class: we learn elementary reading skills ;)
You may notice that there's a major difference between the two phrases you quoted: the word "pre-meditated". That's the keyword there.
The major difference is that one wasn't by mistake, wasn't by impulse, it was _planned_ theft. Let's keep your sandwich shop analogy. There's a difference between someone grabbing a sandwich by accident or impulse and starting munching, and someone who (A) explicitly went through the trouble of looking for an unlocked door until he got into someone's kitchen, and (B) spent _hours_ there helping himself to everything in sight, because, hey, it's free.
You may find that any court in the world would be very uninclined to believe that that's a honest mistake or something done on an impulse. Several hours is well past any reasonable time frame where you've had time to think about wth you're doing.
"The fact is, for most broadband connections, unless the person is file sharing or using VOIP, it's no skin off your nose that they're doing it."
Bullshit. By that reasoning, you shouldn't mind it if I:
- come over and dump my garbage into your bin (hey, you probably didn't use all that space in it anyway), or
- build a billboard on your front lawn (why do you care about a few dollars less property value if you aren't selling it right now?), or
- bring a cow to graze on your front lawn (you didn't really need that grass, right?), or
- come into your house and use your fridge to cool down a can of Pepsi (you weren't using all the space in it anyway) and/or
- use your computer to check my email (you weren't using it at the time anyway, so wtf should you care about it?), and for that matter
- hop into your car at night and drive to a movie, because I'm too cheap to use a taxi (I'll put it back in the garage in the morning, so why would you have a problem with that?)
The fact is, that's not how private property works. What's mine is mine, what's yours is yours. Unless you have an explicit permission to use someone else's property, stay the f-word off it.
"If for some reason, it bothers you to be neighborly"
So if I don't let you trespass and use my property, I'm somehow not neighbourly. Funny how "neighbourly" and "sharing" get to be used to defend theft. (Well, at least we seem to be over the brainfucked "potlatch" and "culture of sharing" euphemisms for stealing. Now those were getting annoying a few years back.)
Get this, "neighbour":
- "sharing" refers to sharing what's _yours_. You can give away, or grant use of, things _you_ own. There is no such thing as neighbourly sharing someone _else's_ property or resources without their consent.
- "neighbourly" or "community" are two-way streets, give-and-take affairs, not an excuse to be a freeloading leech. It's "neighbourly" or "community" if we _both_ do something for each other, or at least theoretically acknowledging that possibility. Unilateral relationships in which you get all the benefits, and I only get to pay the ISP bill for your downloads, isn't neighbourly, it's just me supporting a freeloading parasite. You'll excuse me if I'm less than thrilled by that kind of "neighbourly" relationship.
- And again, it implies consentual stuff. Letting a neighbour use my lawnmower or my internet connection when they _asked_, is one thing. That's neighbourly. Seeing the neighbour just go into my garage and taking the lawnmower without asking, is a tad beyond the line of what "neighbourly" or "community" means. That's when it's time to get un-neighbourly and call the cops.
(Doubly so if it's not even a neighbour, but some unknown bum who thought he's oh-so-smart by coming over to "share" someone else's property.)
Your house or your car too "broadcast" their position to anyone who has eyes, yet that never was construed as an invitation that everyone should help himself to them.
Even in your example with the house, it's _only_ valid if I write an invitation (e.g., yes, "Open House Today") on that sign. If I decide to broadcast anything else on that sign, such as for example "Moraelin's house is here" or "this is a house" or "this is a door", then, nope, it's _not_ an invitation to enter.
And that's all that a hotspot broadcasts. The equivalent of "hi, I'm a hotspot". In fact no even that: what it broadcasts is a handshake signal to other devices, _not_ an invitation (or any other kind of message) to any human. No more, no less, and sure as hell no text to the effect of "this is a public service, please connect here."
So unless that guy's hotspot was explicitly broadcasting something like "open community access point", I'll call bullshit on that. It was _not_ broadcasting an invitation to stay parked in front of his house for hours mooching free internet.
"I don't have a chainlink fence, does that mean my property should become a neighborhood hang out? Or should people know, if I don't own it, then I should not use it?"
/. about using RFID for handshake. You just touch two devices together to establish a logical connection between them. Think about using that for wireless security. The moment they're in touch, they automatically generate and exchange the keys, and everything thereafter is wireless _and_ encrypted. It's easy, it's secure, it doesn't require any technical knowledge, it doesn't require reading an 100 page manual.
The "if you don't own it, you shouldn't use it without permission" idea was what I had in mind.
"Granted, with the internet it is different than in the real world. Cybercrimes are not real crimes, not in the sense like if you stuck a gun in someones ribs and ordered them to give you their money."
There are a lot of real-life crimes or misdemeanors which don't involve sticking a gun to someone's ribs.
"But I would like to think that if I buy a wireless router, I can take it out of the box, plug it in, and not do anything else and it will work. If it broadcasts to the world, that is something the manufacturer did wrong, setting it as default that way. The other end of the spectrum is the people who will get a router with restricted access, and not be able to configure it to work with their computers. What do you do? Does owning a wireless router require someone to read a 100 page manual. How many people read the manual that comes with their car, that tells them what grade of oil to use? Most people say fuck it, and just have the oil change place put in the 10w40, regardless of what is best for their car. "
I don't think it has be one of those extremes. There are lots of ways to make something easy to use _and_ secure, if someone actually cared about that.
E.g., some months ago there was this story right here on
And yes, while the original idea was for telephones, ipods and PDAs, it could work just as well for stuff that's desktop computer sized. You just get to use a smaller gadget to handshake with one, then with the other. Or you could include a small card with a RFID chip containing the default unique key with each peripheral sold, on which it's printed, "touch this to your router to activate secure connections."
That's just one example of how it could be done. There are a thousand other ways, probably.
The real problem isn't that it has to be wide open to be easy to use, the problem is that no vendor gives a damn.
And speaking of having to read manuals, bonus points it's a half-arsed waste of time that leaves you no wiser. E.g., my SMC router's docs go on and on for pages just repeating what's already on the screen, without any further explanation. E.g., for a drop-down that says "IGMP Proxy", and the options "Enabled" and "Disabled", the manual's _only_ words on the subject are "Enables or disables the IGMP proxy". (Well, gee, who would have guessed that?) If you don't already know what IGMP is, how it works, and exactly what would proxing it do for/to your netrwork, you're still left just as clueless as to what to choose there.
"The problem with computers, and cyber crimes, will continue to be the balancing act between having products that work and securing computers."
If only it was so. Then you'd have a lot more security _and_ ease of use.
The real balancing however is usually more like between the marketting dept and the legal dept. It just needs to _seem_ easy enough in ads so they can get your money, and just secure enough (or having a good watertight disclaimer in the EULA) to avoid a class action lawsuit. No more, no less.
So this guy in your story basically goes through the first door that happens to be open. It doesn't look like a shop, it doesn't have a price list, it doesn't have a shopkeeper, and generally there's _nothing_ whatsoever that would imply that it's a shop. Could just be someone's home, or it could be that some people were having a party there later and had brought the food in advance. Yet he just assumes that he's allowed to help himself to whatever is there.
Seems to me like a very clear-cut case of theft, by real life standards.
Now let's bring it a little closer to the war-driving example. Let's say your guy _knew_ it wasn't a shop, and had _no_ plans whatsoever to pay for that sandwich. In fact the only reason he was there in the first place, instead of at the real sandwich shop next door, is that he actually _planned_ to get a meal without paying. The mentality all along was "hey, cool, I know this house next door is unlocked, so I'll just go make myself a free sandwich there. It would be stupid of me to pay for something when I can 'share' someone else's food for free instead."
I think by RL standards you have a _very_ clear-cut case of pre-meditated theft.
My take is that it _is_ why "normal" people don't have the same attitude to security (whether it's wireless routers or windows bugs) as nerds have. Real World has worked on completely different principles so far.
The fact is, even if you locked your door or built a chainlink fence, they're just marking a boundary, not being an unbreakable barrier. Whether you lock it or not, your real defense isn't the door, it's the law. The door is really just a marker that says "my property starts here, if you're caught here, we'll throw your sorry ass in jail." No more.
"I can do it" _never_ equalled "then I'm allowed to do it" in the real world. Anyone can buy/make a lockpick for a lot less money than it takes to buy a laptop and a wireless LAN card, and wiggle your lock open in less time than it takes to war-drive around the neighbourhood and configure your networking to use the neighbour's router. But that was never construed as "then it's your fault for not having an unbreakable lock, and the thief is perfectly within his rights to be on your property and walking away with your TV" in the real world.
And, frankly, I see no reason why we shouldn't apply that RL model to computers. My property starts here, I don't give a damn about how l33t some kid thinks he is, they're just not supposed to be on it. Period.
Placing the onus of securing their property on the victims, and the even more idiotic assumption that if it wasn't 100% physically impossible to get on it, then everyone's _invited_ in, is not how the real world ever worked.
"I'd be open to switching my OS if a new OS did everything that my existing OS did *and* added a bunch of new stuff that made the effort worthwhile."
I've took the liberty of adding the emphasis there.
I think that's the crux of the problem, but also the most mis-understood part. That's the part that OS zealots love to mis-understand.
Let me delve into the semantics a bit, just for the sake of making a point. I'm not picking on your phrasing or anything, I'm just explaining _why_ new OSes fail, and why even Linux is of zero interest to Joe Average.
I don't think you mean literally "if the _OS_ did the same things". The OS taken by itself does actually very little, and is arguably the least important thing on a computer. The OS just loads and runs the applications, and provides some standard libraries and widgets. No more.
It's _easy_ for an OS to provide basically the same functionality of the OS itself, or close enough. Writing a loader, scheduler and some widgets is _easy_, and indeed half the games out there basically come with their own implementation of all three. Anyway, very single alternative OS so far had no problems doing the same things that Windows does. Yet they failed. Because that's not really what matters. You can do only so much with _only_ the OS.
I think what you really meant is "if I could get the same functionality out of my computer", which actually means the applications. E.g., you don't edit your digital photos with the OS core, and not even with MS Paint (that's an app, though), you use some program like PaintShop Pro, Photoshop or, if you're a masochistic cheapskate (yeah, I am one too) with the Gimp.
That's really what you need to do everything you could do with your old OS: an equivalent of the applications too.
That's the real entry barrier in the OS market. Writing a loader, a scheduler, a GUI and exporting some of that as libraries, is the easy part. But that doesn't even come close to letting you get the same use out of your computer. Also providing an equivalent to all the thousands of applications and games that exist for Windows, that's the hard part. That's where they fail.
Even according to the old Sony pricing scheme, a "Platinum" game for the PS/2 was around 20 Euro at EB Games, less in other places. (Even less if you buy it used.) Bear in mind that this includes a rather hefty VAT, before you compare it to US prices.
;)
And on the PC, I can think of old games I bought for 5 Euro. Not used, just 2-3 years old.
So Nintendo charging 30 Euro for its "budget" games, sorta makes me wonder what dictionary they used to define "budget". Did they use the government employee definition, which basically means "I got this big pile of someone else's money and must blow them all in a given time, no matter on what, or I'll get less next year"?
So basically what you tell me is that you can't enjoy anything that isn't multiplayer. Almost everything you mention there revolves around having a human opponent. You explicitly state that going to other games is like basically losing your internet connection.
Which, of course, is as good a criterion as any, and a very valid market segment. It's not just you, and you're not alone. There are lots of people who indeed are multiplayer-only.
You have to realize, though, that it's just one segment. Arguably, not even the dominant one. Most of the world's gaming seems to happen in single-player and off-line.
Anyway, there are a lot of us who really _don't_ feel a need to compete with other players. Even in MMORPGs, i.e., something by definition multi-player, there are people who prefer to solo, turning it into SP.
So I'm guessing there is a market for these games too. You're obviously not in that market. But I'd guess others might be.
The problem is that that's _not_ how early hominids evolved, and not how really primitive hunter-gatherer tribes live.
Let's start with the beginning. It started with a small-ish fruit eating ape. Note that there's a difference between eating fruit and eating leaves. Practically any mammal can digest fruit and meat, but extracting the protein from leaves requires either the specialized digestive tract of a herbivore, or cooking them at high enough temperatures. This particular ape hadn't yet invented fire and had _no_ natural weapons to hunt, so it had to live happily on fruit.
Then the climate started changing, and less and less trees and fruit were available. The ape increasingly faced two problems: (A) avoiding predators on the ground, and (B) finding food.
With fruit being less and less available, the only other thing it could eat was meat. But here's the fun part: it lacked natural weapons or the strength to do much hunting.
What it had to do was steal the prey from carnivores, without ending up second course for that carnivore. And no, that didn't involve comic-book-style brave muscular cavemen wrestling sabertooth tigers. It involved stealth and cunning.
That's why what evolved the fastest was the brains. That was what mattered. What got lost in the evolution? Well, you lost all natural weapons for a start, such as the oversized jaws males had in that original ape.
So, no, males did not evolve for adrenaline-high combat. We're talking the vast majority of evolution being a game of Metal Gear Solid, where if you're seen you're dead, rather than a Quake 3 deathmatch.
The ones who enjoyed adrenaline and tried to fight the tiger got eaten. They got themselves out of the gene pool. The ones who survived were the nerds who used their brains.
Let's also look at the relative sizes of males and females. The ape we started with features males about twice as large as the females, and featuring _some_ extra natural weapons. What did it all evolve into? Well, look around you. The evolution constantly diminished the size difference in males and females.
Basically it doesn't support the bullshit theories that males fought tigers, while women stayed and socialized. If that was the case, evolution would have increased the size and muscle mass of males even more compared to females. What actually happened was _equalizing_ them.
So maybe the tasks they had to do and then challenges they had to overcome weren't that different after all.
And indeed if you look at hunter-gatherer tribes, they aren't. Look at the Bushmen sometimes. Fascinating folk.
While the males hunt, yes, it's not adrenaline pumping combat. It's not even close. What it is is still a game of _stealth_ and patience. The trick is to _avoid_ predators, and _sneak_ up to the gazelles to shoot one with an arrow.
And while the females do gather, they still have the exact same challenge of avoiding predators. It's still a game of stealth, with only _marginally_ lower risks. It's _not_ an exercise in sitting around and chattering all day long.
Basically that's the whole problem with these bullshit theories about how evolution made guys natural warriors and made women nothing more than chatterboxes. It's something completely pulled out of the ass, and completely ignoring the ample data that the actual sciences (e.g., anthropology) provide.
I only started with WoW, and doesn't really seem to be my thing so far. So I'll beg your forgiveness if the thing about the mithril breastplate didn't match actual game content or something.
I did play a lot of other games, MMOs included, to know at least _I_ never woke up confused about what happened in a game and what was real life yesterday. I must have sunk a couple of months at least in City Of Heroes, and I still never woke up thinking that I can actually fly or safely jump off bridges.
I played one particular MUD before that for something like 5 years. Never woke up thinking that I've really bashed bandits with a sledgehammer yesterday.
Or what do you mean? It could be that I've completely mis-understood your point.
egotiated contracts for fixed sums are quite a different thing than employment anyway. That's more along the lines of how good you are at negotiating versus how much that thing is worth for them. As long as they did get it for the price in the contract and at that deadline, the contract is fulfilled.
Being employed for 40 hours a week is a bit of a different issue. That contract is not for a fixed piece of work at a fixed price. Or rather: what you're contractually expected to deliver is no more, and no less, than 40 hours a week. Giving you enough work to actually fill those 40 hours seems to me like it's perfectly normal: it's what you signed for.
Basically, again, we really seem to be talking about very different things. What we usually mean by "overtime" is more like "they try to shaft me by trying to get twice as many hours as we signed a contract for." Definitely not along the lines of "it's overtime if they don't let me work only a quarter of the time I signed a contract for." I can see how the latter would be many people's dream, but it's not quite the usual meaning of "overtime".
Either way, if you think you'd do that much better as a sub-contractor, by all means, go ahead and do that. Be prepared though to spend a _lot_ more unpaid time negotiating that stuff: for that 10 hour contract, you might spend 40 hours in meetings to negotiate it. And that's not even counting the time spent on legal matters, accounting, finding contacts, etc.
But anyway, again, if you want that kind of a contract, go ahead and negotiate just that. Because arguing basically "I should have all the safety of a fixed employment contract, but charge 10 hours on the timesheet for every 2 actual worked, like I'd do if I was a sub-contractor" is... well, at the very least it's not what you signed a contract for.
" The value of a share is decided by how much you wish to pay for it.
True for any good or service, concrete or ephemeral."
Nope. Not even close.
If a company buys, say, a truck or a machine tool, there's a completely different kind of value that gets into that calculation: how much money you'll make out of using it. You know, since you claim to have some clue of economics, that's what ROI and ammortization calculations are all about. E.g., when Intel wants to build a new 65nm fab, the question is "how many chips we'll produce with it, at what running costs, and how much we can sell those for?"
There's some actual value produced in there, not a guess whether the price of 65nm equipment will go up or down.
By comparison, the _only_ value one share has is what someone else is willing to pay for it. It never produces anything. To get a 1$ profit on your $25 share, you have to find someone else willing to pay $26 for it.
If you can't see any difference between the two, sorry, I'll have to shoot your wisecrack right back at you: "Go take a course in economics."
As for the rest of your troll... ok, then you tell me: where do those money come from? I mean, you claim that my theory about the money coming from the shareholders themselves counts as "crack-brained wacko theories". Well then you multiply the number of MSFT shares by their value, and you tell me _who_ did that money come from. From MSFT? Did any company invest 20 to 40 times their peak yearly earnings into the stock market? (Because that's the range supposed to be "normal" in the stock market.)
No, it seems to me like those money, or at least the part of it representing outstanding shares, came from the shareholders. No more, no less, no corporate profits returning to the community. If your shares jumped up by, say, 1$, that's _not_ because actual money from the corporate income making their way back into your pockets, it's simply because some other shareholder was willing to pay 1$ more.
Again, if you have a better, and presumably less "crack-brained wacko" theory, please kindly actually share that info instead of acting like yet another slashdot troll.
Yes, there are some formulas thrown around as to how much money you should dump into a share. Yes, there was some formula waved before some other Jack Investor and Joe Gullible as to why should they pay $26 for a share now. But nevertheless, at the end of the day, that's where the share value increase really came from: from Jack and Joe's pocket, _not_ from the corporation making a profit. And the _only_ reason why that happened or not, is because Jack Investor or Joe Gullible actually reached for their own wallet and put their money where Merril Lynch's mouth was.
But, again, I'm willing to be enlightened. If you have a better theory as to where that money comes from, please do share it.
Well, I'm not opposed to people being rewarded for better work. He should probably be paid better if he does more work in the same time, or anyway see _some_ benefits out of it. Yes. No doubt.
Where I do not aggree with him, however, is when he explicitly calls that saved time his "free time" and any extra work is intruding on his "free time" or being "overtime". That's where he lost me.
If person A can do twice the work of person B in the same 8 hours, he should be better paid, yes. But I don't think capping work per day to that of person B is that great a way to go.
E.g., speaking as a programmer, nowadays we can code a lot more per hour with all the compilers, plugins and tools, than someone could by programming in machine code on punched paper cards in the 60's. There's a lot of work that went just into clerical stuff like counting the bytes for a jump or variable address, that the compiler does automatically for you nowadays. (And even more than it sounds during maintenance or debugging. Inserting a single instruction meant counting the bytes all over again.)
But the course of action that happened and that benefitted society the most is that nowadays we can code bigger and more complex programs, and code them faster. I.e., getting more work done in a day, as opposed to letting everyone go home 6 hours early on account that that's how much they'd have spent on clerical tasks in the 60's.
1. The value of a share is decided by how much you wish to pay for it. It's just a piece of paper with very little intrinsic value, or at least typically _much_ less actual value than its price. The actual price is a gambling and hype game that has _nothing_ to do with that real value of the assets behind it, and where if it came to liquidating the company to recover your money from those assets, you'd be looking at a monumental loss.
The question that determines whether, say, MSFT shares are worth 25$ isn't MSFT's income, isn't MSFT's bank account, it's just literally "well, would you buy one for 25$?" That price is just the equilibrium point at which the number of people want to sell that piece of paper equals those wanting to buy.
The stock market as a whole is basically one big pot that people thrown their money in. It goes up as a whole as long as more people stay convinced to keep throwing more and more money into it.
And when you get down to the individual pots of the various companies and corporations, the same holds true: the only money in the pot are those the shareholders themselves threw into that pot. Corporate profits don't go into that pot. They are just hype to convince people to throw money into this pot instead of that other one.
I.e., if your MSFT stock goes up, it's _not_ because some of MS's income goes directly into that. It's because everyone _but_ MSFT, including people like _you_, threw more money into that pot. That's all. The profits just served to generate hype about which pot to throw money in. No more, no less.
2. But here's really what ticks me off about the whole thing: the fact remains that what a lot of this companies do is basically parasitic behaviour.
A long time ago, the economy used to be about creating value for _both_ parties involved. E.g., if I'm a baker and you're hungry, you buying a loaf of bread from me actually creates value for both. For you that loaf is worth more than the money (or you'd keep your money), and for me the money is worth more than one of the loaves I baked. (Or I wouldn't sell it for that price.)
That's the kind of transaction that actually helps society as a whole.
What some of these fucks do is basically more along parasitic behaviour. Their profits come directly by making a loss to someone else. E.g., if company A demands 140% unpaid overtime from employee B, that's a very unilateral transaction. A makes profit at B's expense, while B gives more and gets nothing in return. In the bakery example it's as if every other day I took your money and didn't give you a loaf. Sure, it will increase my profits, but in a parasitic way: without giving anything in return.
And the "but their stock price does go up" is a piss-poor excuse for tolerating that kind of parasitic behaviour. You're allowing someone to rob society of _billions_ because you receive maybe a few dollars in return on your shares. Again, not even directly from those robbed billions, but more like money that changed hands between you shareholders anyway.
It's like cheering that the bandits robbed your village, but you got a few pennies off another villager by betting that they'll loot more stuff today than last year. And hey, you only had to let them loot and plunder a million times more than you won for that bet to come true.
As far as I can tell, your argument basically seems to be "if I do the same job in 2 hours (yes, via scripts or whatever) that a bad worker does in 8, I should get the rest of 6 hours free". Which is a strange request, seein' as it basically asks to set everyone's job requirements to the slowest possible worker.
It's not how any other job works, nor how progress happened. E.g., the reason we have an abbundance of consumer goods today is that, yes, we can produce in 8 hours _more_, say, cloth than a 16'th century weaver could produce by hand. If the line of thinking had been, "yay, I produced 10 ft worth of cloth in 10 minutes, that someone would have needed all day to make by hand, therefore I can go home after 10 minutes" we'd still be living in the 16'th century kind of poverty. We'd have lots of free time, but wouldn't be an inch closer to having today's standard of living.
Anyway, when the rest of us rant about overtime, we don't mean "waah, but they make me work a whole 8 hours a day." What we mean is more along the lines of having to work 12-14 hour days, 7 days a week.
E.g., since Electronic Arts is mentioned, I can't help remember the recent story (you know, the employee's wife's blog) about EA over-working its employees to the maximum. In fact, until some of them couldn't even focus any more. And they were demanding that kind of hours not because the project was desperately over the deadline or over the budget, but from the start. Just because some greedy fuck figured out some version of "muahahaha, so I can get more than twice the work out of them for the same money. And if they burn out afterwards, who the f-word cares about them?"
I find it inherently abhorrent to read about EA bragging about profits and _reducing_ the number of jobs, while demanding that kind of massive overtime.
Now I can see some excuse in asking for short-term _temporary_ over-time to save a project in the final stages, or until more people can be hired to handle the unforeseen load. But actually planning to _fire_ some more, because, hey, you can overwork the rest to make up for it (and then fire them too when they get burned out), has a certain slimeball quality to it.
Disclaimer: I haven't exploited those, didn't get banned in any MMO, and I'm not against banning people that used exploits. But if I put on my "let's think about security" cap, I find the it laughably unprofessional to put that content there and accessible in the first place.
I mean, for example, stuff like "playtester only" flags, and the corresponding player/playtester/builder/admin/etc permission levels for the characters, have existed on MUDs for ages. I'm not even a game designer, and just off the top of my head, I can come up with stuff like:
- flag a map as incomplete: if the server gets your coordinates there and you don't have the flag that says you're allowed in restricted areas, just get teleported out.
- flag incomplete/unreleased NPCs as such: if you don't have the right permissions flag, you can't attack or interact in any way with such an NPC
- ditto for treasure chests, mineral deposits, and the other interactive objects
- and for that matter, again, check the released/unreleased flag for the whole area where that object is, as a second line of defense in case the devs forgot to flag one item or NPC as such
See, it wasn't even that hard to come up with something more effective at stopping those exploits. Without needing any bans. It just needed some 5 minutes of thinking.
By comparison just placing there an aggressive NPC with an insta-kill attack is an unbelievably _cheap_ hack. It's such a slipshod solution held together with duct tape and band-aid that's outright laughable.
Not to mention the whole putting that content on the live servers and connected to the to start with. They did what? Place test content simply past some body of water and hoped noone will swim/water-walk some 2 miles in that direction? Even as security by obscurity goes, this is _the_ lamest thing I've heard in ages.
Geesh, didn't these guys ever hear of _test_ servers? Or for that matter of having development servers before allowing content even on the test ones? Developping directly on the _production_ servers (and pushing that incomplete stuff to the clients too), is the kind of thing that FFS, even in web stuff is right fully considered the mark of the unprofessional and probably incompetent. In a major MMO, from a major developper and backed by a major publisher, there is _no_ excuse for something this unprofessional happening.
The ISO-standard counter-example to the "fundamentally violent nature of mankind" hypothesis are the Bushmen. Those are literally the perfect commune kind of a community, and if two people have a conflict they can't reconcile, one of them simply moves to another tribe. Which _will_ accept him/her.
Or look at the stone age paintings on cave walls. You'll find plenty about them hunting mammoths, deer, whatever, but I'm not aware of any which were about great military victories against other humans. If there are any, they must be a tiny minority.
The problem is a cultural one. We raise generation after generation with the idea that violence is _cool_ and _manly_. Well, then we don't need to act surprised when they act that way.
What did you learn in history in school, for example? Right. Lots of battles, and how _cool_ we are for beating up them. Yay, we beat up the british! Yay, we shot the indians for their land! Yay, we shot each other and burned our own cities in the Civil War! We're sooo cool for that. Yay, we beat the snot out of Mexico! Etc.
There's a whole indoctrination in the us-vs-them cult, and how violence is _the_ solution. It's _the_ thing we celebrate. It's _the_ thing that gets you remembered in history books. (Try quickly naming one Roman Emperor or a Pharaoh or whatever, which is noted for economic success and not for military campaigns. Right. They don't teach much about _those_ in history class, do they?)
So maybe it's the culture that needs to be fixed.