No hardship? That include the hard study, hard work, meticulous business practices and relatively modest lifestyle that this family man leads?
This family man chose to live within a reasonable means and built up a giant nest egg that is now going almost totally to charity. Why didn't your family man have the same sense? Should we give him a gold star because he didn't have the acumen or work ethic to achieve success within the system and yield a larger profit for charity?
It's an unreasonable expectation for everyone to be successful even close to the level of Buffet, but it's ludicrous to expect the press not to cover enormous contributions from extraordinarily successful people rather than small contributions from the mediocre.
No single test is going to make or break your career/future. It may mean that you don't get your first choice of college or job, but that probably won't matter 10 years from now.
If there is a company that won't look at you because you have a 3.9 GPA instead of a 4.0, you probably don't want to work there anyway. Far more important are the projects and activities you do outside of class. I know I would rather hire someone with a 3.0 GPA and open source development on their resume, than a 4.0 student who hasn't done anything outside of class.
Bingo. To begin with, life is probabilistic. I'm not talking quantum strangeness or physical uncertainty or anything like that, just that there's no one path to get to where you're going. And where you're going often changes while you're en route, for better or worse, due to circumstances outside of your control.
I slacked in high school but I did very good on the PSATs. So I ended up going to a smaller liberal arts school to pursue my computer science degree, rather than some of the top gun schools I applied to (some of which I got into, but offered me no funding). When I got there, partially because the school's CS program sucked, I ended up in mathematics, which I really love. Because the school was small, I took a semester abroad at a larger school as part of a special math program designed specifically for this purpose, and I got introduced to what has been my favorite part of mathematics so far. There, I networked with an awesome professor who is now funding my first year of grad school.
Had I made the cut initially and attended Carnegie Mellon or MIT, I might still be in computer science, and I would've certainly not spent this semester abroad. I would not have made this contact. I'd be heading down a different path which might be just as good or even better. Or it might be worse. The point is that you put in a reasonable effort to tip the odds in your favor and then take what life throws at you. What helps a lot for me is treating things like tests (not just school tests, but every test in life) as a game or challenge. You're already in the situation and you've prepared as well as you're going to prepare, now it's just up to you to do as well as you can and let the chips fall where they may.
Re:Long-term supplies in Silent Hill
on
Just Let Me Play!
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· Score: 1
If I recall correctly, doesn't the final boss automatically die when you shoot your last bullet?:P
People used to go in with one bullet and win in one shot, hehe.
Hell, I'd go one step further and say it's about the same for everyone. I'm a fatass in reality who's beginning his PhD track in mathematics, but when I play online I can't stand finger wiggling and playing the traditional intellectual archetypes. Gotta be a warrior or rogue of some sort.
Re:Why not lock, instead of unlock?
on
Just Let Me Play!
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· Score: 1
Ammo constraints are boring in most cases. If you start with the uber gun and there's a total of two cases for it the entire game, damn skippy you're not going to be using that thing unless it's "really necessary" -- and the open-endedness of the design dictates that it's never really necessary.
The design theory I've liked of late is that you replace "more powerful" with "more options." If you've ever heard of Planetside (it's a massively-multiplayer first person shooter), ignoring all of its faults, as you "level up" you merely get options to certify more equipment. If a level 5 and a level 20 person were carrying the same kit, which is highly probable in a lot of situations, the level 20 has almost no advantage over the level 5. The advantage comes in that the level 20 can go back to base and reoutfit himself with tools appropriate to the situation.
Instead of starting off with SMG and moving onto Better SMG, let's add attachments that let it adjust Rate of Fire/Accuracy compensations, a thermal scope, some sort of tool to identify weak points, special ammo for punching through armor, etc. There can be all sorts of different grenades. Rockets can become heat seeking at the cost of damage. Heavy armor at the cost of speed, a run implant that drains your health, etc. The skilled player will be able to use these to good advantage, but it's not just adding the no-brainer uber gun. Though let's be honest, uber guns are fun to play with:P
Would definitely work if they handled it properly. Star Wars Galaxies is the worst example of an MMO ever in all sorts of ways. Anarchy Online is really what amounts to a first-gen MMO that has also been mishandled. EVE Online does very well for its profit model, CoH and CoV had great success but then just sorta stagnated so they're basically sitting at a comfortable level.
As for StarCraft? They've done an MMORPG, how about they become the first company to really do an MMOFPS right:D Zerg Rush KEKE = fast respawn time.
"Man, you're in algebra? I remember that way back in high school. I was really good at algebra. Can't believe you're still doing that though." Yeah, I spent the last couple years researching the parabola. I might move onto the cubic next.
"Geometry. I was awesome at that, like side-angle-side and crap right?"
Given one band, the best they can do is match you up to what other people who like that band also enjoy. The real show is supposed to start when you begin entering more bands you like/dislike into a user profile and it can plug all those bands into its algorithm and spit out something you might enjoy.
I don't even know what oink is, but pitchfork's been turning up in my music searches for years. They're well known on the internet as being a bunch of pretentious music snobs (that also happen to align pretty well with my tastes:P).
There was actually an interesting sorta debate on this point in the community of one of the games I played, Natural-Selection. Mappers would spend lots of time making maps that they thought were aesthetically pleasing and had a certain sorta flow. But then servers took to implementing mods that would do things like advertise their server and its home website with big glowing particle signs inside the lobbies and such. This caused the mappers to hem and haw about people ruining their maps. Of course, nothing was done about it in the end, but I thought it was an interesting little back-and-forth.
You may have hit it on the head and not even realized. You wonder how many in the gamer age group cares about the Olympics? Well this gives them a reason to watch and care. Whoever is in charge takes notes of these things as that will bring in more advertizing revenue!
Exactly, but still pointlessly doomed to be a failure. If you noticed, the olympics (or at least NBC's take on the olympics) has been moving in an OMGEXTREME direction trying to attract youth viewership. Or really, any kind of viewership. The truth of the matter is that people respect olympic athletes, they'll tune in for a couple events, but there are very few people that actually want to watch the olympics. And even less that want to watch "professional gaming." Most professional gamers nauseate me and I really don't get entertained by watching what seem to be the most popular competitive games.
What, you mean the one where the original Everquest, among others, is given an A for accuracy despite using year-old datapoints? Where WoW is rated an A for accuracy? This in spite of the part where he mentions that he chose to disregard the people who use IGRs without a full monthly plan from Lineage because it would skew the results, but doesn't even pay lip service to why he includes the same population he threw out from Lineage in his World of Warcraft numbers.
Lineage actually has a variety of different pricing schemes, and many players access the game via Internet cybercafes rather than a more traditional monthly subscription. The numbers I have chosen to use are the "monthly access" numbers, which I feel are the most directly comparable to other monthly subscription MMOGs.
I did actually read it, which is where these questions come from. I get the sense some people look at big pie charts and start drooling. The man did a neat thing collecting data, but just because he includes an "analysis" section doesn't mean that you accept his numbers at gospel without even considering the analysis.
It's not like counting every single person who dropped a dollar on an arcade game as a fan of that game, because Blizzard does not count every IGR account every created as a subscription.
I meant in the last week, obviously. Can we honestly say the average IGR patron who plays World of Warcraft at least once a week plays it for the 300 hours monthly or ten hours daily that would be required for their subscription to net Blizzard $15 a month (ignoring the initial $45+ discrepancy)?
Say what you will, I can't believe even half of the people there put in 300 hours a month, especially the working professionals who play on their breaks and stuff. I'd more envision it as log on for a couple hours here and there when you've got some free time.
I log into my current MMOG about nine hours a week for raids, which would cost me a whopping $2 monthly in an IGR. I'd also be counted right alongside people with my gameplay pattern in the U.S. and Europe where they're putting out a lot more money for unlimited gametime. I know tons of people in the U.S. who would still log on at least once a week if they could just pay a low fee for a couple hours at a time.
The only point I'm making is that you need to put on your thinking caps to actually interpret this data. Do game populations in the Asian market (any game, WoW is just the most popular example) correlate to populations in the western market on a 1:1 ratio? I'd say no.
That's neat, I don't really care either way, I'm not trying to defend games, I'm just mentioning that there's something called analysis that needs to be done. Things up to and including the vastly different Asian market, statistics that are almost a year old at this point presented alongside current statistics, that kind of thing.
No shit, sherlock, if you read my post I specifically mentioned that. Would you consider someone who paid under $4.00 for their account and drops a nickel an hour on it the equivalent of someone who paid $50 for the box and spends $15 a month? Let alone someone who may have *only* played the account for an hour and is then counted for the next seven days.
It's like counting every single person who dropped a dollar on an arcade game as being part of its loyal fanbase. It just ain't so.
That was some good detective work, though. Next time read the actual post you're responding to and you'll get a gold star.
It seems to me the best way to chart these games would be some sort of income model rather than just raw population, and you could still compare how much money a game with a monthly fee has made compared to one without it. I wonder if the data's out there. Raw game population doesn't mean much when you take into account the vastly different pricing schemes, especially in different parts of the world, across all of these MMOs.
As for GW, if DDO is on there you can't rule out Guild Wars by just gameplay, and I'd suggest that a good way to track players are people who bought the box in the last month or two (which equates to the free trial periods on other games) and people who have purchased one of the expansions the company's selling in the past couple weeks. Of course, logons in the last week or two would work best if that information is out there.
SWG is actually rated as a C on his numbers page for accuracy, some "inside source" told him they had 120k subscribers without station access or time cards, and he just artificially bumped it up. Truth be told I know a lot of station access people including myself who don't actually even log into SWG and I don't imagine they have time cards flying off the shelves. That 120k might either be a lie or a lot of accounts that simply haven't expired yet. I know more people in SWG that multiboxed than in any other game I've played, so that might be it too.
One very important thing to note is that the last data point for a ton of the games on his list is June 2005 -- one example being Everquest 2.
The other thing to note is tabulating subscribers. In some of the Asian markets (can't tell you which ones in specific as I just looked this up myself) the Internet Game Rooms are very popular. You go in and buy an account that you then add points to on an hourly basis. Anyone who logs into one of those is counted for seven full days afterward by Blizzard as a paying subscriber. I'm sure there's lots of people who don't spend $15 American monthly on World of Warcraft but are counted as equal subscribers among their monthly-account-paying European and American brethren. Just as a reference it's about $3.73 to buy an account that you can spend points on and it costs a nickel an hour after that for gametime in WoW China, as per a Blizzard press release and Google's money translation calculator.
It's interesting to see what the Asian market means in terms of body count, but it makes me wonder what the relative revenue situations are like.
EQ2 is a game with, basically, no death penalty that has almost nothing in the way of camping and encounter locking to prevent most possible griefing. Travel time is incredibly light. EXP comes fast. It may be harder in the sense of gameplay mechanics but I can't imagine how WoW could possibly be more friendly except to give you levels for free.
I'd imagine MIT grads are a lot like grads from other schools. They have a couple advantages: the reputation and difficulty of courses that they passed, and the environment. Being surrounded by people as talented and enthusiastic as you works wonders.
However, what's vastly more important than simply getting good grades for the top jobs and especially graduate work is demonstrating your ability. Come out of any halfway respectable school having published a paper in a decent journal (or at least written a good paper), done some sort of other neat research, written (and sold!) some great programs, etc, and you have a huge advantage over someone who's merely got the grades and the school rep.
Professors in college are mainly there to teach you how to properly teach yourself and give you the fundamentals in the field you've finally chosen. As long as you got a couple professors who know what it is to research and work in industry that aren't total bums, they should be able to impart all the necessary wisdom to you. Being instructed by Nobel Laureate Professor X. Winnar or Fields Medalist Q. Bert Hawtsauce is nice for letters of recommendation, I'll give them that, but in my experience hasn't shown much of a difference as far as undergrad learning.
To make up for the environment at my smaller and less tech-oriented school, I spent semesters and summers abroad at programs targeted to people in my situation. Going to those programs were invaluable, they were funded by the government, and they gave me a chance to really get immersed in my subject with students who felt as passionately about it as I did. It also gave me some amazing contacts in terms of notable names in my field, one of whom has offered to fund my grad studies.
So really, like most other things, it's your talent, the effort you put in, and lots of plain dumb luck. Had I chosen a more highly ranked school I would've come out of undergrad with amazing amounts of debt, and I don't know if I would've really improved on my grad outlook. This way, I have something like $10k in low-interest government loans and I'm getting fully funded with a very nice stipend at a good grad school.
It sounds good in theory, but first off is that you need something besides that one epic event. Lots and lots of somethings besides it, or people are going to be getting bored. So either you manage the impossible and find some way to populate a game world with all events like this or there's going to be some instancing at the very least (a la Guild Wars).
Secondly, players when faced with a challenge like this devote scary amounts of time to it. Unless you insert an artificial time delay into rescuing said princess, the event's going to be over in a matter of hours. And even then as soon as the window opens it'll be completed amazingly fast.
Which leads to the third complaint, that lots of people will miss out on the event. Ostensibly you have 1000+ people on a server at any given time, a couple hundred get to actually participate in this event. Everyone else gets jealous and hears about it second-hand.
The only game with dynamic events like this where players changed the world to my knowledge was Horizons, and their implementation (to avoid the above pitfalls) was to make it take a holy hell of a lot of tedious crafting and walking time. So it just became another big grind.
SoE has highs and lows. Everquest had a couple very lackluster expansions, but I think they've recovered recently. Everquest 2 is my favorite MMO and they've had great devs who have mostly made very good decisions and rectified many of the mistakes they made with EQ. SWG is a steaming pile of crap that they managed to revise into even worse and worse forms.
I think the problems with SWG were (1) shitty devteam, (2) shitty management deadlines, (3) too many restrictions with LucasEtc looking over their shoulders. Vanguard and EQ2 have different devteams, a very different managerial approach (they are given lots of resources and allowed to delay very frequently it seems), and don't have any IP holding them back. Although SWG could've still done great work with the IP restrictions they had if they had been smarter about timelines.
Beta testing is not just stress testing and bugs, it's also feedback on gameplay mechanics. That's why devs invite uber guilds in and set them up to fight raids, to test the gameplay mechanics. Not just for exploits but for fine tuning. Devs often display a substantial lack of knowledge about gameplay mechanics compared to the players who play those classes for hours on end, and if a class isn't fun or powerful, or a gameplay mechanic is boring to most people, I can't help but think it's helpful to them to know.
It's nostalgia and people tiring of the MMO model as a whole. They think going back to the roots is going to make a good game because they remember having fun back in the day.
I rerolled on EQ1 recently just for shits and giggles after a year and a half of EQ2. It was fun and really cool taking a look back at my favorite zones -- some of them are really well designed. But on the whole I found that the zones are not as big as I remember, nor nearly as interesting. Gameplay is boring as hell. Levels take for freaking ever. Then I levelled up high enough that the corpse penalties kicked in and suddenly I remembered corpse runs and EXP loss.
Don't get me wrong, I hope Vanguard's really good and everyone has fun with it including myself. It proposes a lot of features that look like they might be great on paper. I think reintroducing long travel times might be fun, boat exploration, all that stuff. It just seems all the positive feedback I'm getting are from people that actually haven't seen the product, so I'm a bit skeptical (NDA or not, I usually at least hear from friends).
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No hardship? That include the hard study, hard work, meticulous business practices and relatively modest lifestyle that this family man leads?
This family man chose to live within a reasonable means and built up a giant nest egg that is now going almost totally to charity. Why didn't your family man have the same sense? Should we give him a gold star because he didn't have the acumen or work ethic to achieve success within the system and yield a larger profit for charity?
It's an unreasonable expectation for everyone to be successful even close to the level of Buffet, but it's ludicrous to expect the press not to cover enormous contributions from extraordinarily successful people rather than small contributions from the mediocre.
No single test is going to make or break your career/future. It may mean that you don't get your first choice of college or job, but that probably won't matter 10 years from now.
If there is a company that won't look at you because you have a 3.9 GPA instead of a 4.0, you probably don't want to work there anyway. Far more important are the projects and activities you do outside of class. I know I would rather hire someone with a 3.0 GPA and open source development on their resume, than a 4.0 student who hasn't done anything outside of class.
Bingo. To begin with, life is probabilistic. I'm not talking quantum strangeness or physical uncertainty or anything like that, just that there's no one path to get to where you're going. And where you're going often changes while you're en route, for better or worse, due to circumstances outside of your control.
I slacked in high school but I did very good on the PSATs. So I ended up going to a smaller liberal arts school to pursue my computer science degree, rather than some of the top gun schools I applied to (some of which I got into, but offered me no funding). When I got there, partially because the school's CS program sucked, I ended up in mathematics, which I really love. Because the school was small, I took a semester abroad at a larger school as part of a special math program designed specifically for this purpose, and I got introduced to what has been my favorite part of mathematics so far. There, I networked with an awesome professor who is now funding my first year of grad school.
Had I made the cut initially and attended Carnegie Mellon or MIT, I might still be in computer science, and I would've certainly not spent this semester abroad. I would not have made this contact. I'd be heading down a different path which might be just as good or even better. Or it might be worse. The point is that you put in a reasonable effort to tip the odds in your favor and then take what life throws at you. What helps a lot for me is treating things like tests (not just school tests, but every test in life) as a game or challenge. You're already in the situation and you've prepared as well as you're going to prepare, now it's just up to you to do as well as you can and let the chips fall where they may.
If I recall correctly, doesn't the final boss automatically die when you shoot your last bullet? :P
People used to go in with one bullet and win in one shot, hehe.
Hell, I'd go one step further and say it's about the same for everyone. I'm a fatass in reality who's beginning his PhD track in mathematics, but when I play online I can't stand finger wiggling and playing the traditional intellectual archetypes. Gotta be a warrior or rogue of some sort.
Ammo constraints are boring in most cases. If you start with the uber gun and there's a total of two cases for it the entire game, damn skippy you're not going to be using that thing unless it's "really necessary" -- and the open-endedness of the design dictates that it's never really necessary.
:P
The design theory I've liked of late is that you replace "more powerful" with "more options." If you've ever heard of Planetside (it's a massively-multiplayer first person shooter), ignoring all of its faults, as you "level up" you merely get options to certify more equipment. If a level 5 and a level 20 person were carrying the same kit, which is highly probable in a lot of situations, the level 20 has almost no advantage over the level 5. The advantage comes in that the level 20 can go back to base and reoutfit himself with tools appropriate to the situation.
Instead of starting off with SMG and moving onto Better SMG, let's add attachments that let it adjust Rate of Fire/Accuracy compensations, a thermal scope, some sort of tool to identify weak points, special ammo for punching through armor, etc. There can be all sorts of different grenades. Rockets can become heat seeking at the cost of damage. Heavy armor at the cost of speed, a run implant that drains your health, etc. The skilled player will be able to use these to good advantage, but it's not just adding the no-brainer uber gun. Though let's be honest, uber guns are fun to play with
Would definitely work if they handled it properly. Star Wars Galaxies is the worst example of an MMO ever in all sorts of ways. Anarchy Online is really what amounts to a first-gen MMO that has also been mishandled. EVE Online does very well for its profit model, CoH and CoV had great success but then just sorta stagnated so they're basically sitting at a comfortable level.
:D Zerg Rush KEKE = fast respawn time.
As for StarCraft? They've done an MMORPG, how about they become the first company to really do an MMOFPS right
"Man, you're in algebra? I remember that way back in high school. I was really good at algebra. Can't believe you're still doing that though." Yeah, I spent the last couple years researching the parabola. I might move onto the cubic next.
"Geometry. I was awesome at that, like side-angle-side and crap right?"
Given one band, the best they can do is match you up to what other people who like that band also enjoy. The real show is supposed to start when you begin entering more bands you like/dislike into a user profile and it can plug all those bands into its algorithm and spit out something you might enjoy.
I don't even know what oink is, but pitchfork's been turning up in my music searches for years. They're well known on the internet as being a bunch of pretentious music snobs (that also happen to align pretty well with my tastes :P).
There was actually an interesting sorta debate on this point in the community of one of the games I played, Natural-Selection. Mappers would spend lots of time making maps that they thought were aesthetically pleasing and had a certain sorta flow. But then servers took to implementing mods that would do things like advertise their server and its home website with big glowing particle signs inside the lobbies and such. This caused the mappers to hem and haw about people ruining their maps. Of course, nothing was done about it in the end, but I thought it was an interesting little back-and-forth.
You may have hit it on the head and not even realized. You wonder how many in the gamer age group cares about the Olympics? Well this gives them a reason to watch and care. Whoever is in charge takes notes of these things as that will bring in more advertizing revenue!
Exactly, but still pointlessly doomed to be a failure. If you noticed, the olympics (or at least NBC's take on the olympics) has been moving in an OMGEXTREME direction trying to attract youth viewership. Or really, any kind of viewership. The truth of the matter is that people respect olympic athletes, they'll tune in for a couple events, but there are very few people that actually want to watch the olympics. And even less that want to watch "professional gaming." Most professional gamers nauseate me and I really don't get entertained by watching what seem to be the most popular competitive games.
What, you mean the one where the original Everquest, among others, is given an A for accuracy despite using year-old datapoints? Where WoW is rated an A for accuracy? This in spite of the part where he mentions that he chose to disregard the people who use IGRs without a full monthly plan from Lineage because it would skew the results, but doesn't even pay lip service to why he includes the same population he threw out from Lineage in his World of Warcraft numbers.
Lineage actually has a variety of different pricing schemes, and many players access the game via Internet cybercafes rather than a more traditional monthly subscription. The numbers I have chosen to use are the "monthly access" numbers, which I feel are the most directly comparable to other monthly subscription MMOGs.
I did actually read it, which is where these questions come from. I get the sense some people look at big pie charts and start drooling. The man did a neat thing collecting data, but just because he includes an "analysis" section doesn't mean that you accept his numbers at gospel without even considering the analysis.
It's not like counting every single person who dropped a dollar on an arcade game as a fan of that game, because Blizzard does not count every IGR account every created as a subscription.
I meant in the last week, obviously. Can we honestly say the average IGR patron who plays World of Warcraft at least once a week plays it for the 300 hours monthly or ten hours daily that would be required for their subscription to net Blizzard $15 a month (ignoring the initial $45+ discrepancy)?
Say what you will, I can't believe even half of the people there put in 300 hours a month, especially the working professionals who play on their breaks and stuff. I'd more envision it as log on for a couple hours here and there when you've got some free time.
I log into my current MMOG about nine hours a week for raids, which would cost me a whopping $2 monthly in an IGR. I'd also be counted right alongside people with my gameplay pattern in the U.S. and Europe where they're putting out a lot more money for unlimited gametime. I know tons of people in the U.S. who would still log on at least once a week if they could just pay a low fee for a couple hours at a time.
The only point I'm making is that you need to put on your thinking caps to actually interpret this data. Do game populations in the Asian market (any game, WoW is just the most popular example) correlate to populations in the western market on a 1:1 ratio? I'd say no.
That's neat, I don't really care either way, I'm not trying to defend games, I'm just mentioning that there's something called analysis that needs to be done. Things up to and including the vastly different Asian market, statistics that are almost a year old at this point presented alongside current statistics, that kind of thing.
No shit, sherlock, if you read my post I specifically mentioned that. Would you consider someone who paid under $4.00 for their account and drops a nickel an hour on it the equivalent of someone who paid $50 for the box and spends $15 a month? Let alone someone who may have *only* played the account for an hour and is then counted for the next seven days.
It's like counting every single person who dropped a dollar on an arcade game as being part of its loyal fanbase. It just ain't so.
That was some good detective work, though. Next time read the actual post you're responding to and you'll get a gold star.
It seems to me the best way to chart these games would be some sort of income model rather than just raw population, and you could still compare how much money a game with a monthly fee has made compared to one without it. I wonder if the data's out there. Raw game population doesn't mean much when you take into account the vastly different pricing schemes, especially in different parts of the world, across all of these MMOs.
As for GW, if DDO is on there you can't rule out Guild Wars by just gameplay, and I'd suggest that a good way to track players are people who bought the box in the last month or two (which equates to the free trial periods on other games) and people who have purchased one of the expansions the company's selling in the past couple weeks. Of course, logons in the last week or two would work best if that information is out there.
SWG is actually rated as a C on his numbers page for accuracy, some "inside source" told him they had 120k subscribers without station access or time cards, and he just artificially bumped it up. Truth be told I know a lot of station access people including myself who don't actually even log into SWG and I don't imagine they have time cards flying off the shelves. That 120k might either be a lie or a lot of accounts that simply haven't expired yet. I know more people in SWG that multiboxed than in any other game I've played, so that might be it too.
One very important thing to note is that the last data point for a ton of the games on his list is June 2005 -- one example being Everquest 2.
The other thing to note is tabulating subscribers. In some of the Asian markets (can't tell you which ones in specific as I just looked this up myself) the Internet Game Rooms are very popular. You go in and buy an account that you then add points to on an hourly basis. Anyone who logs into one of those is counted for seven full days afterward by Blizzard as a paying subscriber. I'm sure there's lots of people who don't spend $15 American monthly on World of Warcraft but are counted as equal subscribers among their monthly-account-paying European and American brethren. Just as a reference it's about $3.73 to buy an account that you can spend points on and it costs a nickel an hour after that for gametime in WoW China, as per a Blizzard press release and Google's money translation calculator.
It's interesting to see what the Asian market means in terms of body count, but it makes me wonder what the relative revenue situations are like.
EQ2 is a game with, basically, no death penalty that has almost nothing in the way of camping and encounter locking to prevent most possible griefing. Travel time is incredibly light. EXP comes fast. It may be harder in the sense of gameplay mechanics but I can't imagine how WoW could possibly be more friendly except to give you levels for free.
I was there when the parent found out just how short.
I'd imagine MIT grads are a lot like grads from other schools. They have a couple advantages: the reputation and difficulty of courses that they passed, and the environment. Being surrounded by people as talented and enthusiastic as you works wonders.
However, what's vastly more important than simply getting good grades for the top jobs and especially graduate work is demonstrating your ability. Come out of any halfway respectable school having published a paper in a decent journal (or at least written a good paper), done some sort of other neat research, written (and sold!) some great programs, etc, and you have a huge advantage over someone who's merely got the grades and the school rep.
Professors in college are mainly there to teach you how to properly teach yourself and give you the fundamentals in the field you've finally chosen. As long as you got a couple professors who know what it is to research and work in industry that aren't total bums, they should be able to impart all the necessary wisdom to you. Being instructed by Nobel Laureate Professor X. Winnar or Fields Medalist Q. Bert Hawtsauce is nice for letters of recommendation, I'll give them that, but in my experience hasn't shown much of a difference as far as undergrad learning.
To make up for the environment at my smaller and less tech-oriented school, I spent semesters and summers abroad at programs targeted to people in my situation. Going to those programs were invaluable, they were funded by the government, and they gave me a chance to really get immersed in my subject with students who felt as passionately about it as I did. It also gave me some amazing contacts in terms of notable names in my field, one of whom has offered to fund my grad studies.
So really, like most other things, it's your talent, the effort you put in, and lots of plain dumb luck. Had I chosen a more highly ranked school I would've come out of undergrad with amazing amounts of debt, and I don't know if I would've really improved on my grad outlook. This way, I have something like $10k in low-interest government loans and I'm getting fully funded with a very nice stipend at a good grad school.
It sounds good in theory, but first off is that you need something besides that one epic event. Lots and lots of somethings besides it, or people are going to be getting bored. So either you manage the impossible and find some way to populate a game world with all events like this or there's going to be some instancing at the very least (a la Guild Wars).
Secondly, players when faced with a challenge like this devote scary amounts of time to it. Unless you insert an artificial time delay into rescuing said princess, the event's going to be over in a matter of hours. And even then as soon as the window opens it'll be completed amazingly fast.
Which leads to the third complaint, that lots of people will miss out on the event. Ostensibly you have 1000+ people on a server at any given time, a couple hundred get to actually participate in this event. Everyone else gets jealous and hears about it second-hand.
The only game with dynamic events like this where players changed the world to my knowledge was Horizons, and their implementation (to avoid the above pitfalls) was to make it take a holy hell of a lot of tedious crafting and walking time. So it just became another big grind.
SoE has highs and lows. Everquest had a couple very lackluster expansions, but I think they've recovered recently. Everquest 2 is my favorite MMO and they've had great devs who have mostly made very good decisions and rectified many of the mistakes they made with EQ. SWG is a steaming pile of crap that they managed to revise into even worse and worse forms.
I think the problems with SWG were (1) shitty devteam, (2) shitty management deadlines, (3) too many restrictions with LucasEtc looking over their shoulders. Vanguard and EQ2 have different devteams, a very different managerial approach (they are given lots of resources and allowed to delay very frequently it seems), and don't have any IP holding them back. Although SWG could've still done great work with the IP restrictions they had if they had been smarter about timelines.
Beta testing is not just stress testing and bugs, it's also feedback on gameplay mechanics. That's why devs invite uber guilds in and set them up to fight raids, to test the gameplay mechanics. Not just for exploits but for fine tuning. Devs often display a substantial lack of knowledge about gameplay mechanics compared to the players who play those classes for hours on end, and if a class isn't fun or powerful, or a gameplay mechanic is boring to most people, I can't help but think it's helpful to them to know.
It's nostalgia and people tiring of the MMO model as a whole. They think going back to the roots is going to make a good game because they remember having fun back in the day.
I rerolled on EQ1 recently just for shits and giggles after a year and a half of EQ2. It was fun and really cool taking a look back at my favorite zones -- some of them are really well designed. But on the whole I found that the zones are not as big as I remember, nor nearly as interesting. Gameplay is boring as hell. Levels take for freaking ever. Then I levelled up high enough that the corpse penalties kicked in and suddenly I remembered corpse runs and EXP loss.
Don't get me wrong, I hope Vanguard's really good and everyone has fun with it including myself. It proposes a lot of features that look like they might be great on paper. I think reintroducing long travel times might be fun, boat exploration, all that stuff. It just seems all the positive feedback I'm getting are from people that actually haven't seen the product, so I'm a bit skeptical (NDA or not, I usually at least hear from friends).