At BlizzCon every year, Blizzard puts on a SC2 tournament, a WC3 tournament, and a WoW arena tournament. The SC2 tournament is well attended most of the convention, and packed for the big matches (as in, you're not getting close to a chair unless you've been camping one all day). The WC3 tournament would be fairly sparsely attended if it weren't in the same place as the SC2 tournament, so people will be camping out there and either lamenting how boring WC3 is to watch or getting someone to hold their seats so they can go get some food. The WoW arena tournament is... not well attended; there were chairs available for the final (which last year went past the "closing ceremony" so there was literally nothing else going on).
There really is something about a game that makes it more or less watchable. WoW arenas are not all that fun to watch because there's a high density of important things happening at the same time, so it's difficult to understand as a spectator, and unless you're already a fairly high-level player you have no idea what those things are, so that locks out most of your potential spectators. On the other hand, a bronze-level player can understand what's going on in a pro-level SC2 match, even if the pro is chugging along at 200 APM.
Yeah, Blizzard doesn't really do innovation. They take other games' features and add polish. It actually ends up working, because most of the "more creative games" have large gaps somewhere, and if you mash all of them together into one less creative game, you end up with more people playing it than the total of its component parts.
Specifically, the flying thing took so long because they didn't originally design the zones for flying (which CoH did). In the current world there are large stretches of flat textures, perspective tricks (the cathedral in Stormwind), false walls, and so forth. It took them until an expansion that rebuilt most of the old world for them to be able to correct that.
Actually, the part about jumping not recalculating your position until you landed was known to pre-WotLK raiders, for the exact reason you describe. The Death Grip bug just made it more obvious to people who hadn't quite figured out why jumping out of fire was a bad idea.
Well, that, and they just sent out a huge wave of beta invites last week, and all of those people are currently bringing the death knight area/Borean Tundra/Howling Fjord to their knees.
I feel obliged to point out that they never actually announced a November release for Burning Crusade; everyone just assumed that (and they may have stated that they wanted to release it in 2006 but not with any specific date).
The original WoW was released without a couple of the features they wanted to add (obvious example: honor system), but this seems somewhat more drastic than the honor system (which turned out to be a bad idea in the end anyway).
This isn't a new problem. (I went to school in Texas, which has had standardized testing since long before Bush took office as either governor or president.) NCLB just made it worse.
I agree, however, that it is blatantly obvious that a system where your "success" as a school is determined by the percentage of students who pass leads itself to focusing disproportionate amounts of resources on the students who are most likely to fail.
Actually, low level trade goods in WoW are only going up in price, especially on older servers; the only people buying are people who already have 70s to finance their alts. My most recent alt was the first in awhile to actually have enough money for a mount at 40, simply by selling crap you get from mining.
The real WTF is the URL
on
The DIY Tank
·
· Score: 4, Funny
In turn, that helped increase the revenues raised for the U.S. Treasury. I still find it extremely odd that they would mention this as a "good thing" at all. Seeing as how the number of rounds were not fixed (bidding continued until a round occurred with no increases in bids), the bidding strategy they described was not the best way to obtain their stated goals - they should have placed their first bid at the reserve price and then not bid higher until/unless someone else outbid them. Unless they were bidding themselves up above the reserve because had an unstated goal of running up the price for their competitors. It's possible that either the auction rules prohibited you from making large bid increments, or that the bids were anonymous and that if they jumped straight to $4.6b it would be too obvious who they were.
Step 1: Google gets FCC to adopt "openness conditions". These conditions will be dropped if the auction fails to meet the reserve price, so it's in Google's interest to make sure the reserve price is met.
Step 2: Google bids on the auction, but only until the reserve price is met. This ensures that the openness conditions stick, whether they end up winning the auction or not.
Step 3: Google stops bidding, and Verizon outbids them. From Google's perspective, they have what they came for, and actually buying the spectrum isn't relevant.
The confusion is that apparently the auction is sufficiently arcane that Google had to keep the bidding up themselves to get the price above the reserve price (the auction didn't start at the reserve price), but that once it got there Verizon did in fact outbid them.
I assume you've never heard of a test bank. (And yes, we asked the professors before we put their tests in the test bank.) Recall that paper is inherently an archival medium.
The problem you're stating is that people are gaining value from study groups but not learning. While Facebook makes this somewhat more problematic because it's much easier to benefit anonymously (rather than having people notice that you're sitting at the table not speaking), it's not a huge leap, and placing all of the blame on the administrator of the group (rather than the people who are actually posting the infringing solutions) is silly.
Besides, the objective of a university class is to learn. If you aren't learning, the exams should demonstrate that. The problem sets are there to give you feedback on how well you're learning, and it's your responsibility as a student to either ensure that you CAN do the problems (even if you ask someone how to approach it), or accept your bad exam grades as consequences.
Suppose you have hubs in different areas of the country, as most airlines do. Anyone going from one "area" to another can be funneled through a series of hub-to-hub flights, which will nearly always be at full capacity, and then onto smaller planes for the shorter hops. There are other economies of scale in ground operations, as well.
If you just run a whole bunch of point-to-point flights, no one's on them. And you could have smaller hubs to mitigate the "storm in New York snarls all air traffic coast-to-coast", but then you divide the passengers into more pieces, and you're forced to run these intermediate flights less often or less full. The other option is to move back to a multi-stop model the way Southwest does, but for some reason people hate multi-stop flights more than they hate being funneled through their nearest airline hub.
The "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?" example always bothered me. If you watch the show, the contestant had a strong tendency to use Ask the Audience early in the game, and Phone a Friend later. (People trust their friends more than a random studio audience, for better or for worse.) But I can't find a reference that says that the "smart audience" effect still happens when you control for the "level" of the question.
And if you predicted Obama would win the nomination 6 months ago, you'd have made a whole lot of fake money (or in the case of Intrade, real money). Even more so for Huckabee. This isn't much different from a stock market: if you had predicted Enron would tank about 3 months before it happened, you could have sold it short and made a whole boatload of money, or at the very least gotten out early.
From Ring TFA (blasphemy!), it spends more time talking about the Loudness War than it does about MP3s, or at the very least the two seem to have a common theme of just making the whole damn album louder. The Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Californication" is still overcompressed if you rip it to FLAC.
Except that "Turn off chat" does not do the same thing in the new UI that "Standard without chat" did in the old UI. The latter removed the chat box altogether, while the former just signs you out and leaves the box there in case you decide five seconds later to sign in.
I think the numbering system is unfortunate (you can blame O'Reilly Media throwing names at the wall until one stuck), since it's not really analogous to changing from Version 5 of WidgetMaker to Version 6, with Fancy New Widget Making Capabilities. There's no "box" that you can put Web 2.0 in and sell to people. You're absolutely right that BBSes, wikis, Slashdot's comments, and Amazon's reviews all go back to various points in history that the talking heads wouldn't call "Web 2.0".
But really, there's SOMETHING there. I consider it fairly self-evident that the way people use the Web has changed in the last five years or so. Does that mean that the way they're using it is completely unprecedented? Of course not; you've demonstrated that. But there's always a leading edge: the test is whether it gets a large audience, and this idea of social networking has just recently hit that.
Consider a slightly different example: MU*s have been around for decades, but MMOGs (their direct descendants) are just now hitting mainstream appeal. Obviously WoW is all hype because it doesn't do anything that any random hack-and-slash MUD could do...
I'd consider it a set of concepts more than anything: a focus on user-created content, a focus on social networking, a mindset that the Web is about people rather than data, and, yes, Ajax and similar technologies as new platforms and new approaches to Web usability. Yes, this doesn't cover everything that's called "Web 2.0", but I never said there wasn't hype involved here, just that it's not all hype.
The trick is that there are two aspects to Web 2.0. There's Ajax (and things that look or act like Ajax), which does tend to be used badly in many cases. (I would argue that being able to get new data without a page reload is a positive for usability, but you're free to disagree.)
The second aspect is more social: where Web 1.0 focused more on a one-way "I write this page, then you read it" exchange, Web 2.0 encourages multi-way communication, and users contributing content. While this idea isn't exactly new, it's something that's really caught fire recently, and if you actually read the article you'll notice that they're talking about wikis and social networks, which aren't Web 2.0 in an Ajax sense so much as Web 2.0 in a social sense.
So yeah, you can wake up and go look at Wikipedia now.
Valedictorian is increasingly becoming a game to play, just like college admissions (although depending on the school you apply to the human involvement can either increase or decrease the amount of bullshitting you can get away with).
I was 3rd in my high school class (rich white suburban public high school), despite the fact that I got straight As all four years and the valedictorian didn't. Why? Because I took four years of marching band, which didn't count as an honors class, and he took a couple more AP courses instead. But hey, I did much better than he did in college (at the same school), so perhaps it balanced itself out in the end.
Exactly. I've been saying the exact same thing for a couple years now.
As another poster put it, what Blizzard does is refine. There's almost nothing original in all of WoW, but it's well put together and extremely attractive to players of all inclinations. People harp too much on how BC made endgame too easy/too hard/too time-consuming/too hardcore/too casual/too easy to get epics/too hard to get epics/too easy to get PvP epics/too hard to get PvP epics/too little PvP and forget that the reason they have 9 million players and EQ doesn't has a lot to do with the fact that they're damned good at polish.
So with that in mind, you have the two options given in parent.
Most game developers will go for #2 because it's easy: just find the things that WoW failed at (and they exist, certainly, especially if you're talking about 2005 WoW), improve on those, and sell 9 million copies. Right? Wrong. Where are those 9 million players coming from? Are they coming from people who hate WoW and quit beforehand? There aren't that many of them, and they didn't all quit for the same reason. Are they coming from people who currently play WoW? Then you'd better be as polished as Blizzard makes their games, which is a tall order, or else people will play your game for 30 minutes then abandon it. Are they coming from outside the genre entirely? How do you plan on reaching those players and bringing them into the MMOG model?
So if you're going to make a new MMOG, how about #1? Cater to a group which WoW doesn't adequately serve: say, hardcore PvPers. Now your problem is somewhat simpler, since people won't compare you quite as directly to WoW. Polish is still important, making good decisions is important, and reaching out to your chosen playerbase is important, and you sure as hell won't sell 9 million copies with a niche product, but you're already a leg up on Goliath. Again, EVE is an example of this. Guild Wars is another, and Fury is following a similar track.
The unfortunate part is that there's still no one actually innovating in the MMOG space... now, if someone actually managed to do that...
I suppose you've found a better game, then? I haven't been sufficiently impressed with any of the new releases or even upcoming releases to consider jumping ship, and certainly no one's breaking out of the DikuMUD/EQ/WoW model except for EVE, and I'd really like to avoid mining space rocks all day and paying money to a company with some serious PR issues.
Slashdot Mirror
At BlizzCon every year, Blizzard puts on a SC2 tournament, a WC3 tournament, and a WoW arena tournament. The SC2 tournament is well attended most of the convention, and packed for the big matches (as in, you're not getting close to a chair unless you've been camping one all day). The WC3 tournament would be fairly sparsely attended if it weren't in the same place as the SC2 tournament, so people will be camping out there and either lamenting how boring WC3 is to watch or getting someone to hold their seats so they can go get some food. The WoW arena tournament is... not well attended; there were chairs available for the final (which last year went past the "closing ceremony" so there was literally nothing else going on).
There really is something about a game that makes it more or less watchable. WoW arenas are not all that fun to watch because there's a high density of important things happening at the same time, so it's difficult to understand as a spectator, and unless you're already a fairly high-level player you have no idea what those things are, so that locks out most of your potential spectators. On the other hand, a bronze-level player can understand what's going on in a pro-level SC2 match, even if the pro is chugging along at 200 APM.
You've never been in a WoW beta or PTR before, have you?
Yeah, Blizzard doesn't really do innovation. They take other games' features and add polish. It actually ends up working, because most of the "more creative games" have large gaps somewhere, and if you mash all of them together into one less creative game, you end up with more people playing it than the total of its component parts.
Specifically, the flying thing took so long because they didn't originally design the zones for flying (which CoH did). In the current world there are large stretches of flat textures, perspective tricks (the cathedral in Stormwind), false walls, and so forth. It took them until an expansion that rebuilt most of the old world for them to be able to correct that.
Scan Complete!
423,827
Viruses Found!
A New Record!!
"Waaugh! That is not a small number!! That is a big number!!! What'm I gonna do?!"
Actually, the part about jumping not recalculating your position until you landed was known to pre-WotLK raiders, for the exact reason you describe. The Death Grip bug just made it more obvious to people who hadn't quite figured out why jumping out of fire was a bad idea.
Well, that, and they just sent out a huge wave of beta invites last week, and all of those people are currently bringing the death knight area/Borean Tundra/Howling Fjord to their knees.
I feel obliged to point out that they never actually announced a November release for Burning Crusade; everyone just assumed that (and they may have stated that they wanted to release it in 2006 but not with any specific date).
The original WoW was released without a couple of the features they wanted to add (obvious example: honor system), but this seems somewhat more drastic than the honor system (which turned out to be a bad idea in the end anyway).
This isn't a new problem. (I went to school in Texas, which has had standardized testing since long before Bush took office as either governor or president.) NCLB just made it worse.
I agree, however, that it is blatantly obvious that a system where your "success" as a school is determined by the percentage of students who pass leads itself to focusing disproportionate amounts of resources on the students who are most likely to fail.
Actually, low level trade goods in WoW are only going up in price, especially on older servers; the only people buying are people who already have 70s to finance their alts. My most recent alt was the first in awhile to actually have enough money for a mount at 40, simply by selling crap you get from mining.
http://blog.mlive.com/flintjournal/newsnow/2008/04/post_moto_kid_death_story_here.html
Note the last part. The Flint Journal must be extremely confident in how road-safe this tank is.
Step 1: Google gets FCC to adopt "openness conditions". These conditions will be dropped if the auction fails to meet the reserve price, so it's in Google's interest to make sure the reserve price is met.
Step 2: Google bids on the auction, but only until the reserve price is met. This ensures that the openness conditions stick, whether they end up winning the auction or not.
Step 3: Google stops bidding, and Verizon outbids them. From Google's perspective, they have what they came for, and actually buying the spectrum isn't relevant.
The confusion is that apparently the auction is sufficiently arcane that Google had to keep the bidding up themselves to get the price above the reserve price (the auction didn't start at the reserve price), but that once it got there Verizon did in fact outbid them.
I assume you've never heard of a test bank. (And yes, we asked the professors before we put their tests in the test bank.) Recall that paper is inherently an archival medium.
The problem you're stating is that people are gaining value from study groups but not learning. While Facebook makes this somewhat more problematic because it's much easier to benefit anonymously (rather than having people notice that you're sitting at the table not speaking), it's not a huge leap, and placing all of the blame on the administrator of the group (rather than the people who are actually posting the infringing solutions) is silly.
Besides, the objective of a university class is to learn. If you aren't learning, the exams should demonstrate that. The problem sets are there to give you feedback on how well you're learning, and it's your responsibility as a student to either ensure that you CAN do the problems (even if you ask someone how to approach it), or accept your bad exam grades as consequences.
At the same time, the hub system has advantages.
Suppose you have hubs in different areas of the country, as most airlines do. Anyone going from one "area" to another can be funneled through a series of hub-to-hub flights, which will nearly always be at full capacity, and then onto smaller planes for the shorter hops. There are other economies of scale in ground operations, as well.
If you just run a whole bunch of point-to-point flights, no one's on them. And you could have smaller hubs to mitigate the "storm in New York snarls all air traffic coast-to-coast", but then you divide the passengers into more pieces, and you're forced to run these intermediate flights less often or less full. The other option is to move back to a multi-stop model the way Southwest does, but for some reason people hate multi-stop flights more than they hate being funneled through their nearest airline hub.
The "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?" example always bothered me. If you watch the show, the contestant had a strong tendency to use Ask the Audience early in the game, and Phone a Friend later. (People trust their friends more than a random studio audience, for better or for worse.) But I can't find a reference that says that the "smart audience" effect still happens when you control for the "level" of the question.
And if you predicted Obama would win the nomination 6 months ago, you'd have made a whole lot of fake money (or in the case of Intrade, real money). Even more so for Huckabee. This isn't much different from a stock market: if you had predicted Enron would tank about 3 months before it happened, you could have sold it short and made a whole boatload of money, or at the very least gotten out early.
From Ring TFA (blasphemy!), it spends more time talking about the Loudness War than it does about MP3s, or at the very least the two seem to have a common theme of just making the whole damn album louder. The Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Californication" is still overcompressed if you rip it to FLAC.
Except that "Turn off chat" does not do the same thing in the new UI that "Standard without chat" did in the old UI. The latter removed the chat box altogether, while the former just signs you out and leaves the box there in case you decide five seconds later to sign in.
100% of terrorist attacks are perpetrated by people who ingest dihydrongen monoxide. Ban DHMO!
I think the numbering system is unfortunate (you can blame O'Reilly Media throwing names at the wall until one stuck), since it's not really analogous to changing from Version 5 of WidgetMaker to Version 6, with Fancy New Widget Making Capabilities. There's no "box" that you can put Web 2.0 in and sell to people. You're absolutely right that BBSes, wikis, Slashdot's comments, and Amazon's reviews all go back to various points in history that the talking heads wouldn't call "Web 2.0".
But really, there's SOMETHING there. I consider it fairly self-evident that the way people use the Web has changed in the last five years or so. Does that mean that the way they're using it is completely unprecedented? Of course not; you've demonstrated that. But there's always a leading edge: the test is whether it gets a large audience, and this idea of social networking has just recently hit that.
Consider a slightly different example: MU*s have been around for decades, but MMOGs (their direct descendants) are just now hitting mainstream appeal. Obviously WoW is all hype because it doesn't do anything that any random hack-and-slash MUD could do...
I'd consider it a set of concepts more than anything: a focus on user-created content, a focus on social networking, a mindset that the Web is about people rather than data, and, yes, Ajax and similar technologies as new platforms and new approaches to Web usability. Yes, this doesn't cover everything that's called "Web 2.0", but I never said there wasn't hype involved here, just that it's not all hype.
The trick is that there are two aspects to Web 2.0. There's Ajax (and things that look or act like Ajax), which does tend to be used badly in many cases. (I would argue that being able to get new data without a page reload is a positive for usability, but you're free to disagree.)
The second aspect is more social: where Web 1.0 focused more on a one-way "I write this page, then you read it" exchange, Web 2.0 encourages multi-way communication, and users contributing content. While this idea isn't exactly new, it's something that's really caught fire recently, and if you actually read the article you'll notice that they're talking about wikis and social networks, which aren't Web 2.0 in an Ajax sense so much as Web 2.0 in a social sense.
So yeah, you can wake up and go look at Wikipedia now.
Valedictorian is increasingly becoming a game to play, just like college admissions (although depending on the school you apply to the human involvement can either increase or decrease the amount of bullshitting you can get away with).
I was 3rd in my high school class (rich white suburban public high school), despite the fact that I got straight As all four years and the valedictorian didn't. Why? Because I took four years of marching band, which didn't count as an honors class, and he took a couple more AP courses instead. But hey, I did much better than he did in college (at the same school), so perhaps it balanced itself out in the end.
Exactly. I've been saying the exact same thing for a couple years now.
As another poster put it, what Blizzard does is refine. There's almost nothing original in all of WoW, but it's well put together and extremely attractive to players of all inclinations. People harp too much on how BC made endgame too easy/too hard/too time-consuming/too hardcore/too casual/too easy to get epics/too hard to get epics/too easy to get PvP epics/too hard to get PvP epics/too little PvP and forget that the reason they have 9 million players and EQ doesn't has a lot to do with the fact that they're damned good at polish.
So with that in mind, you have the two options given in parent.
Most game developers will go for #2 because it's easy: just find the things that WoW failed at (and they exist, certainly, especially if you're talking about 2005 WoW), improve on those, and sell 9 million copies. Right? Wrong. Where are those 9 million players coming from? Are they coming from people who hate WoW and quit beforehand? There aren't that many of them, and they didn't all quit for the same reason. Are they coming from people who currently play WoW? Then you'd better be as polished as Blizzard makes their games, which is a tall order, or else people will play your game for 30 minutes then abandon it. Are they coming from outside the genre entirely? How do you plan on reaching those players and bringing them into the MMOG model?
So if you're going to make a new MMOG, how about #1? Cater to a group which WoW doesn't adequately serve: say, hardcore PvPers. Now your problem is somewhat simpler, since people won't compare you quite as directly to WoW. Polish is still important, making good decisions is important, and reaching out to your chosen playerbase is important, and you sure as hell won't sell 9 million copies with a niche product, but you're already a leg up on Goliath. Again, EVE is an example of this. Guild Wars is another, and Fury is following a similar track.
The unfortunate part is that there's still no one actually innovating in the MMOG space... now, if someone actually managed to do that...
That crap has far more production value than the crap Nintendo was trying to avoid.
I suppose you've found a better game, then? I haven't been sufficiently impressed with any of the new releases or even upcoming releases to consider jumping ship, and certainly no one's breaking out of the DikuMUD/EQ/WoW model except for EVE, and I'd really like to avoid mining space rocks all day and paying money to a company with some serious PR issues.