Actually, I played to level 56 and I agree totally with everything the grandparent says. By the standards of any other MMORPG, WoW's end-game is pitifully limited. Quests like the one you mentioned are few and far between and aren't on the scale of what you find in other games.
This could result in some fun procrastination on slashdot come the next election. Hilary Clinton is still looking like the front-runner to be the 2008 Presidential candidate for the Democratic party. I get the feeling, thinking back to the threads around the time of the November election, that slashdot's US readers are mostly Democrat leaning (at a rough guess, I'd estimate 60% Democrat, 10% Republican, 30% other parties or apathetic). None of the senior Republicans have made any comments like this about violent games to the best of my knowledge, although I'm pretty sure one of the potential Democrat candidates last time (was it Liebermann?) was pretty anti-games as well.
This begs a question...
Would you vote based on self-interest or broader conviction in an election like this? It's not such an issue for me, as were I a US citizen, I'd probably vote Republican and none of the parties here in the UK make much noise about games and actually seem to like the games industry, as it creates wealth and jobs. But if I were in the US, I would worry that having a President who'd made comments like this could result in my hobby being over-regulated, or even banned. Would you vote for Hillary, even knowing that this could happen, because you believed in broader principles her party stood for, or would you vote for the candidate less likely to have a negative effect on your own personal life?
As somebody currently living in South East London, I've got to wonder if we'd actually notice any difference if the legions of hell rose up and sacked the place. Might even be an improvement. I mean, at least demons probably don't drive around in "riced up" Vauxhall Novas with cheesy rap music blaring from the windows at maximum volume.
I bet the demons wouldn't fleece the human survivors for stupid amounts of council tax either...
Clearly some console manufacturers are better at giving sweet lovin' to their third party devs than others. Nintendo seem to be consistently at the back of the pack in this regard. It's their own decision not to encourage third party developers (they occasionally talk the talk on this, but haven't really walked the walk since the days of the SNES)... although personally, I think it's a stupid one.
Besides which, Soul Calibur 2 only broke the usual sales pattern because Nintendo decided to allow some GC-exclusive content (the only instance I'm aware of where this has happened). I suspect this was instrumental in persuading a lot of people who had more than one console to pick the Cube version. With the sheer size of the PS2 installed user-base, if Nintendo aren't willing to do this on a regular basis, they're always going to lose in the sales stakes.
Yes to the first and no to the second. In fact, although I don't want to to get into naming specific Unions here, there are pretty strong reasons why it couldn't do the second.
Not every Union is bad. The problem is that it's the bad unions (who are probably the majority) who tend to attract the press. I've noticed time and time again that the quality of the outputs from a Trade Union are directly linked the quality of the candidates chosen to act as officers. Unions with a lot of full-time officers are almost inevitably bad - full-time Union officers tend to be out-of-touch with the work-place and feel the need to make noise to justify their existance. The noise they make is often harmful to the members of the union and doubly harmful to employees who aren't in the Union. Part-time Union Reps, who also have a "real" job to do are less likely to run away with their own causes.
If you're even in a position where you can influence the choice of officers for a Trade Union, it's worth bearing in mind the following. First, strike out anybody who has political motives. Generally, this means not taking anybody who has links to political organisations or parties that would normally be considered "far left". A reasonable definition of "far left" in this case would be any group generally seen as being to the left of the Democrats in the US or to the left of "New" Labour in the UK. Seriously... it's ok to question candidates about their political backgrounds. Trade Union posts are always going to have political overtones, so you need to be upfront about this.
Next, try to see what the individual is in it for. As I've said, if they're trying to impose a political view, eliminate them immediately. If they themselves have an ongoing personal dispute with management, or one particular manager, be wary. There's a good chance they'll either have a non-constructive chip on the shoulder, or else they'll resolve their own issue and then lose interest. A good Trade Union officer will be somebody from the centre (or centre-left or centre-right) of the political spectrum who believes that employees deserve to get a fair deal. Nothing more than that and nothing less. The ultimate concern of a Union should *always* be its members and the Union should always remember that the job security and wellbeing of its members is directly linked to the wellbeing of the employer. Advancing a political cause, supporting a candidate or campaigning for any issues beyond what has an immediate impact on the working environment should be completely taboo.
Yeah, this is true, although not all Unions are like this. I've certainly been on the management side of disputes over an individual, where a constructive Union has said "yeah, we see why you got rid of this guy, we'll just send through the paperwork and then let it drop". It all boils down to knowing how to pick Union officials who have the sense to know how to pick their battles. If you don't have confidence in the collective ability of yourself and your peers to do this, don't unionise.
I've spent a significant part of my career working in HR Policy, albeit outside the IT sector and in the UK. This has given me a lot of exposure to Trade Unions, from the "management" side. I must say I've got very mixed feelings about them.
There are undoubtedly some positives. Unions can be pretty tenacious in defending individuals who have been genuinely wronged by their employer or their immediate manager. In cases of disputes between individual employees (eg. grievance proceedings), the Union can provide a decent independent arbiter. Where Unions have good relationships with management, they can genuinely help improve an organisations effectiveness, by identifying and helping to resolve issues that are having a significant negative impact on morale.
However, these are matched by, and perhaps even outweighed by, a significant number of negatives. The biggest problem is that a lot of Unions tend to get hijacked very quickly by radical left-wingers of often uncertain sanity, whose goal often seems to be nothing more than to ruin generally benevolent employers. There are some Unions which understand the give and take of negotiations with management and there are others which see strike action as the first and only resort whenever management try to stake out some principles of their own. When this happens, it's not just management who lose out. Employees often suffer the most serious privitations. Business partners of the employer are also affected, as are their employees. Customers likewise suffer and if the employer is providing an essential service, the consequences can be very serious indeed. We've seen where this leads fairly recently in the UK, when the Fire Brigade union walked out on Strike. The general public support for the employees evaporated overnight once the strike started and the employees ended up significantly worse off then they would have been with sane representatives, who were more interested in employee wellbeing than advancing a political agenda.
Unions can also highly divisive and discriminatory among the workforce. Fortunately, the worst excesses of the Unions in this area were curbed during the 80s, so the situation is a lot better than it once was, but the most insular unions can really make life hell for their non-union co-workers.
Finally, there is the risk of out-sourcing. This isn't necessarily an inevitable consequence of Unionisation. However, it IS an inevitable consequence of combatative, militant, confrontational Unionisation in fields like IT. Most employers are actually more reasonable that slashdot readers are generally willing to give them credit for. I've only ever met one or two employers (out of dozens), who were not willing to entertain talks with Trade Union representatives and make reasonable adjustments to working practices where a business case could be demonstrated. However, if the Union plays it wrong and takes an overly aggressive line, Management are likely to panic and reach for the big Outsourcing Stick.
In short, Unionisation isn't necessarily the wrong decision here, but games developers need to be damned careful over who they let run their union if they decide to go for it.
Well, so long as you don't mind having no multiplayer on GBA games and no option to do any of the link-up features with the Gamecube. Oh, and as long as you don't want to play original Gameboy or Gameboy Colour games.
Let's face it, Nintendo's implementation of backward-compatibility on the DS is pretty half-arsed.
The simple fact is that for the relatively serious MMORPG player who's willing to put a good bit of time into a game over months/years, there still isn't a better game than FFXI.
I tried World of Warcraft. I played it fairly heavily for a few weeks. I enjoyed most of this time quite a lot. Then I stopped. I was bored. I'd basically exhausted most of the possibilities of the game after just under a month of (admittedly fairly heavy) play. I'd played around with quite a few of the classes, on both Alliance and Horde sides. I'd experimented with the PvP, which left me cold. I'd gotten to a high enough level that I could see that there was just a complete void where the high level content should be. World of Warcraft is very "front loaded". The initial stages of the game feel very fast and exciting; there are a vast number of fairly varid quests to do, which mean you barely need to grind at all. Your character gets a lot of new abilities very quickly. You're exploring a lot of new areas. Then the new stuff just stops coming. By contrast, a lot of FFXI players say that the game doesn't even start properly until you hit level 70 and start doing dynamis, sky raids and HNM hunts. I've also experimented with SW: Galaxies and Everquest 2. Both seemed competent in their own ways, but neither had anything particularly interesting to do. In the mean-time, every single one of my friends in FFXI who quit for WoW has now returned to FFXI, mostly cancelling their WoW subs.
It's not as if Square-Enix have been sitting on their arses since FFXI was released. They've created a vast amount of new content for the game, both in and out of the paid-for expansions. We've had a new PvP system, new missions, boss fights and a whole slew of top-level content. I hadn't noticed gil-selling as a real problem until mid 2004, so while Square's response is a little on the slow side, it's not catastrophic. If Blizzard can maintain their player-base anything like as well as Square-Enix have maintained theirs, in the long run, I'll be very surprised and impressed indeed.
It's good to see Blizzard taking real action on this. Hopefully, WoW hasn't been around long enough for there to have been serious damage to the economy already.
Most of what I'm about to say is based on my experiences in FFXI, where there have also been well-publicised problems with money-selling and recent attempts by the GMs to crack down on it (yes, I tried WoW, but I didn't like it, so I went straight back). However, it should hold true for any MMORPG where you have to "farm" (be it by killing monsters, crafting items, fishing or whatever) to make in-game cash. Basically, the selling of in-game cash is one of the biggest cons I've ever encountered. Two basic reasons for this:
First of all, as many posters have remarked in previous threads on this subject, all the gold/gil-sellers are selling you is a quantity of a virtual resource which has no independant physical or legal status. If Blizzard or Square-Enix go broke, the money you spent is lost. Ok, this isn't very likely. However... let's just say that the GMs decide to "evaporate" all the large sums of money that were transferred out of the characters who were suspended for selling money. This is one of the perfectly plausible responses they may choose to make. It'd be perfectly legal for them to do this, as it wouldn't be "real" money they were taking away and the player who bought the in-game money wouldn't have a leg to stand on, as he would have been in violation of the Terms of Service by buying the game-cash to begin with.
The second reason why it's a huge con is more subtle. As many FFXI players have noticed, gil-sellers attempt monopolise some of the scarcer (yet still essential) items in the game. By doing so, they drive up inflation across the game. Chances are that a lot of the people who buy money from gil-sellers are people who feel (wrongly) that they need to buy the money in order to not get left behind this inflationary trend. In other words, gil-sellers often have to create a problem before they can milk it. If they didn't exist, the "need" for them would be greatly reduced. If you're wondering about the effect that gil-seller driven inflation has had on FFXI, it's instructive to keep an eye on the prices at www.ige.com (link provided for instructional purposes only, please don't buy anything and support them), who are the largest of the MMORPG-cash-and-items traders. I started watching these in October (and yes, I admit that this was largely due to wanting to gloat over how much my legitimately-obtained gear would sell for in real life). At that time, 1 million gil cost around $160 dollars. Today, you could buy 1 million gil for £36. The irony here is that the people who bought gil back in October essentially wasted their money and, if the trend continues, the same goes for people who buy it today.
In short, the game-cash-for-real-money trade sucks. Don't do it and don't support it. Please.
This is rubbish. Blizzard could make money off gold sales if they wanted. After all, WoW gold is nothing more than an insubstantial product that exists on servers that Blizzard themselves run. If Blizzard wanted, it would be an absolute doddle for them to set up a "buy some gold" button on each player's subscription page. Players give money to Blizzard and Blizzard creates some gold out of thin air to give to the player. I'm pretty sure one of the MMORPGs out there (sorry, can't remember which) is already moving in this direction.
Sorry to burst your little bubble, but this almost certainly about Blizzard wanting to enforce a level playing field.
There's no reason why a game developed by Bioware, Rare or even one of the Electronic Arts studios should be any worse than a game developed by Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo.
What I'm suggesting isn't conformity, it's common sense. What Nintendo are increasingly doing these days is insisting on driving a car with rectangular wheels and calling it "innovation".
Nintendo are sure doing their best to scare people off the Cube. It's true that RE4 won't look as good on the PS2, when the port comes out, but the X-Box version will no doubt look just as good. The other two consoles have the advantages of widely-adopted online support and similar controller layouts (why do you think there's never been a GTA3 game on the Cube), which make them both more tempting for developers. Nintendo need to realise that the market can't be forced to follow their own, strange whims any more. If the Revolution is going to succeed, Nintendo need to get their act in gear with regards to online play and at least give the option of using a controller with similar button-count and layout to the next gen consoles from MS and Sony. I wouldn't hold your breath, though.
Well, World of Warcraft just about scraped a slightly larger player base than FFXI... two years after FFXI's launch. I wouldn't write that off as a thorough trouncing by any stretch of the imagination. For a long time, FFXI was the largest non-Korean MMORPG around, comfortably ahead of the nearest rival, Everquest.
I'm a regular FFXI player. I just noticed an announcement regarding the suspension of accounts of known violators of the TOS on PlayOnline (the DRM-client-thingy that FFXI runs through). So I log in, do a few searches and not one of the usual known gil-sellers on my server is online. I wonder how badly this is going to hurt their margins.
The PSP really is looking quite tempting now. Thing is, I know it's expensive and I know I probably wouldn't use it much. I don't really have space in my life for a handheld any more, since I moved and brought my commute down from 90 minutes to less than 30. My GBA was bought 2 years ago on a whim and has probably had less than 24 hours play time since then.
But god damn it if the PSP doesn't look nice. The thought of being able to show off by pulling out what's basically a miniature PS2, with that lovely big screen on the front is far too nice to resist. I'm sure the DS is ok, but it doesn't really grab me at all. Damn you Sony and your sleek, pretty and eminently I-want-to-own-one-able gadgets.
Actually, WoW has still only managed about 2/3rds of FFXI's subscriber base, which, contrary to one of the other replies to grandparent, is bigger than ever since the EU release. That WoW has attracted so much attention is just indicative of the level of US-centricity in the gaming press.
It's a slight pity that a piece of marketing hype was linked to as news. However, I'd agree with the main thrust of the story. 2004 was certainly the year of the X-Box.
It's interesting to note how the perceptions of the X-Box have changed since it was launched. Originally, it was mocked, reviled and no serious gamer would touch one. Nowadays, it's only the die-hard Nintendo fanboys who cling to this view. The X-Box gets virtually all of the cross-platform console titles and the X-Box versions of these games are usually the best, due in part, although not entirely, to features such as the HDD and customisable soundtracks. It also gets most of the "big name" PC action games, although MS hasn't quite got the confidence yet to insist on pure "X-Box only" releases for games such as the Halo and KOTOR series.
The last stats I saw showed that the X-Box had out-sold the PS and the Gamecube by a considerable margin during the 2004 Christmas period. With the PS2, you don't have to look far to find the reason; it's achieved near total market saturation and there just aren't many customers left. However, the presence of big exclusives like Halo 2 and a multitude of cross-platform titles such as Burnout 3 and Silent Hill 4 has allowed it to extend a real lead over the Gamecube for the first time.
Of course, we shouldn't ignore the fact that the X-Box did take a long time to come into its own. MS certainly has a fight on its hands to carry over its current success into the next round of the console wars.
Re:The acutal effect is likely a bit different.
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Editors Get an Earful
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I used to believe this, but the more I've thought about things, the more I'm inclined towards a slightly more benign conclusion.
When I first started reading gaming mags in the late 80s/early 90s, genuinely bad reviews were pretty common. Games getting 20% or less weren't exactly common, but nor were they rare. Plenty got less than 50%. Obviously, this isn't the case today.
However, when you stop and think about it, it's rare that you actually get a genuinely bad commercial game these days. It's true. I looked up some videos of the game in question and, from what I can see, it's an average, underwhelming early-PS2 action game. Yes, it's nothing like as good as any number of other games you could have bought at the time. It no doubt had a frustrating control system, poor level design and repetative gameplay. However, if you'd never seen Halo, Kingdom Hearts, Zelda, Metal Gear Solid or, indeed, any other modern video game before, you'd probably be pretty impressed by this. At worst, you can play through the game from beginning to end and probably not want to stab yourself in the eyes with a pair of scissors.
The commercial games development world has just moved on too far to produce truly bad games. Virtually all games go through at least some QA before launch. Indeed, if you want to release on one of the big three consoles, you have to convince Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo that your game is worthy of launch and won't be an embarrassment to their system.
Of course, the occasional utter stinker does still happen, particularly on the PC. Budget developers like Valusoft don't always have the same standards as the rest of the industry. I remember there was a truck racing game a few months ago which actually made a slashdot news story just because it was so sheer bloody awful. All the reviews of this game were sub-20%.
So, where does this leave the reviewer? In a bit of a quandry, to be honest. He has to be fair to the games he's reviewing and shouldn't call them truly bad unless they actually are. However, he also has a duty to let his customers know whether the game he's looking at is worth their cash. I suspect this is why we see so many reviews where the score is in the 60% range but the review text makes it clear that the game shouldn't be purchased.
You've been able to play games of any region on the Gamecube for a long, long time now, using a software-only hack. If it weren't for this, I suspect Nintendo Europe's sales would still be "0", given how the region gets treated by them.
Pirating GC games is never really going to take off, due to the difficulties involved with the media.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I played to level 56 and I agree totally with everything the grandparent says. By the standards of any other MMORPG, WoW's end-game is pitifully limited. Quests like the one you mentioned are few and far between and aren't on the scale of what you find in other games.
This could result in some fun procrastination on slashdot come the next election. Hilary Clinton is still looking like the front-runner to be the 2008 Presidential candidate for the Democratic party. I get the feeling, thinking back to the threads around the time of the November election, that slashdot's US readers are mostly Democrat leaning (at a rough guess, I'd estimate 60% Democrat, 10% Republican, 30% other parties or apathetic). None of the senior Republicans have made any comments like this about violent games to the best of my knowledge, although I'm pretty sure one of the potential Democrat candidates last time (was it Liebermann?) was pretty anti-games as well.
This begs a question...
Would you vote based on self-interest or broader conviction in an election like this? It's not such an issue for me, as were I a US citizen, I'd probably vote Republican and none of the parties here in the UK make much noise about games and actually seem to like the games industry, as it creates wealth and jobs. But if I were in the US, I would worry that having a President who'd made comments like this could result in my hobby being over-regulated, or even banned. Would you vote for Hillary, even knowing that this could happen, because you believed in broader principles her party stood for, or would you vote for the candidate less likely to have a negative effect on your own personal life?
As somebody currently living in South East London, I've got to wonder if we'd actually notice any difference if the legions of hell rose up and sacked the place. Might even be an improvement. I mean, at least demons probably don't drive around in "riced up" Vauxhall Novas with cheesy rap music blaring from the windows at maximum volume.
I bet the demons wouldn't fleece the human survivors for stupid amounts of council tax either...
Clearly some console manufacturers are better at giving sweet lovin' to their third party devs than others. Nintendo seem to be consistently at the back of the pack in this regard. It's their own decision not to encourage third party developers (they occasionally talk the talk on this, but haven't really walked the walk since the days of the SNES)... although personally, I think it's a stupid one.
Besides which, Soul Calibur 2 only broke the usual sales pattern because Nintendo decided to allow some GC-exclusive content (the only instance I'm aware of where this has happened). I suspect this was instrumental in persuading a lot of people who had more than one console to pick the Cube version. With the sheer size of the PS2 installed user-base, if Nintendo aren't willing to do this on a regular basis, they're always going to lose in the sales stakes.
Yes to the first and no to the second. In fact, although I don't want to to get into naming specific Unions here, there are pretty strong reasons why it couldn't do the second.
Not every Union is bad. The problem is that it's the bad unions (who are probably the majority) who tend to attract the press. I've noticed time and time again that the quality of the outputs from a Trade Union are directly linked the quality of the candidates chosen to act as officers. Unions with a lot of full-time officers are almost inevitably bad - full-time Union officers tend to be out-of-touch with the work-place and feel the need to make noise to justify their existance. The noise they make is often harmful to the members of the union and doubly harmful to employees who aren't in the Union. Part-time Union Reps, who also have a "real" job to do are less likely to run away with their own causes.
If you're even in a position where you can influence the choice of officers for a Trade Union, it's worth bearing in mind the following. First, strike out anybody who has political motives. Generally, this means not taking anybody who has links to political organisations or parties that would normally be considered "far left". A reasonable definition of "far left" in this case would be any group generally seen as being to the left of the Democrats in the US or to the left of "New" Labour in the UK. Seriously... it's ok to question candidates about their political backgrounds. Trade Union posts are always going to have political overtones, so you need to be upfront about this.
Next, try to see what the individual is in it for. As I've said, if they're trying to impose a political view, eliminate them immediately. If they themselves have an ongoing personal dispute with management, or one particular manager, be wary. There's a good chance they'll either have a non-constructive chip on the shoulder, or else they'll resolve their own issue and then lose interest. A good Trade Union officer will be somebody from the centre (or centre-left or centre-right) of the political spectrum who believes that employees deserve to get a fair deal. Nothing more than that and nothing less. The ultimate concern of a Union should *always* be its members and the Union should always remember that the job security and wellbeing of its members is directly linked to the wellbeing of the employer. Advancing a political cause, supporting a candidate or campaigning for any issues beyond what has an immediate impact on the working environment should be completely taboo.
Yeah, this is true, although not all Unions are like this. I've certainly been on the management side of disputes over an individual, where a constructive Union has said "yeah, we see why you got rid of this guy, we'll just send through the paperwork and then let it drop". It all boils down to knowing how to pick Union officials who have the sense to know how to pick their battles. If you don't have confidence in the collective ability of yourself and your peers to do this, don't unionise.
I've spent a significant part of my career working in HR Policy, albeit outside the IT sector and in the UK. This has given me a lot of exposure to Trade Unions, from the "management" side. I must say I've got very mixed feelings about them.
There are undoubtedly some positives. Unions can be pretty tenacious in defending individuals who have been genuinely wronged by their employer or their immediate manager. In cases of disputes between individual employees (eg. grievance proceedings), the Union can provide a decent independent arbiter. Where Unions have good relationships with management, they can genuinely help improve an organisations effectiveness, by identifying and helping to resolve issues that are having a significant negative impact on morale.
However, these are matched by, and perhaps even outweighed by, a significant number of negatives. The biggest problem is that a lot of Unions tend to get hijacked very quickly by radical left-wingers of often uncertain sanity, whose goal often seems to be nothing more than to ruin generally benevolent employers. There are some Unions which understand the give and take of negotiations with management and there are others which see strike action as the first and only resort whenever management try to stake out some principles of their own. When this happens, it's not just management who lose out. Employees often suffer the most serious privitations. Business partners of the employer are also affected, as are their employees. Customers likewise suffer and if the employer is providing an essential service, the consequences can be very serious indeed. We've seen where this leads fairly recently in the UK, when the Fire Brigade union walked out on Strike. The general public support for the employees evaporated overnight once the strike started and the employees ended up significantly worse off then they would have been with sane representatives, who were more interested in employee wellbeing than advancing a political agenda.
Unions can also highly divisive and discriminatory among the workforce. Fortunately, the worst excesses of the Unions in this area were curbed during the 80s, so the situation is a lot better than it once was, but the most insular unions can really make life hell for their non-union co-workers.
Finally, there is the risk of out-sourcing. This isn't necessarily an inevitable consequence of Unionisation. However, it IS an inevitable consequence of combatative, militant, confrontational Unionisation in fields like IT. Most employers are actually more reasonable that slashdot readers are generally willing to give them credit for. I've only ever met one or two employers (out of dozens), who were not willing to entertain talks with Trade Union representatives and make reasonable adjustments to working practices where a business case could be demonstrated. However, if the Union plays it wrong and takes an overly aggressive line, Management are likely to panic and reach for the big Outsourcing Stick.
In short, Unionisation isn't necessarily the wrong decision here, but games developers need to be damned careful over who they let run their union if they decide to go for it.
Well, so long as you don't mind having no multiplayer on GBA games and no option to do any of the link-up features with the Gamecube. Oh, and as long as you don't want to play original Gameboy or Gameboy Colour games.
Let's face it, Nintendo's implementation of backward-compatibility on the DS is pretty half-arsed.
Well... I could, but...
The simple fact is that for the relatively serious MMORPG player who's willing to put a good bit of time into a game over months/years, there still isn't a better game than FFXI.
I tried World of Warcraft. I played it fairly heavily for a few weeks. I enjoyed most of this time quite a lot. Then I stopped. I was bored. I'd basically exhausted most of the possibilities of the game after just under a month of (admittedly fairly heavy) play. I'd played around with quite a few of the classes, on both Alliance and Horde sides. I'd experimented with the PvP, which left me cold. I'd gotten to a high enough level that I could see that there was just a complete void where the high level content should be. World of Warcraft is very "front loaded". The initial stages of the game feel very fast and exciting; there are a vast number of fairly varid quests to do, which mean you barely need to grind at all. Your character gets a lot of new abilities very quickly. You're exploring a lot of new areas. Then the new stuff just stops coming. By contrast, a lot of FFXI players say that the game doesn't even start properly until you hit level 70 and start doing dynamis, sky raids and HNM hunts. I've also experimented with SW: Galaxies and Everquest 2. Both seemed competent in their own ways, but neither had anything particularly interesting to do. In the mean-time, every single one of my friends in FFXI who quit for WoW has now returned to FFXI, mostly cancelling their WoW subs.
It's not as if Square-Enix have been sitting on their arses since FFXI was released. They've created a vast amount of new content for the game, both in and out of the paid-for expansions. We've had a new PvP system, new missions, boss fights and a whole slew of top-level content. I hadn't noticed gil-selling as a real problem until mid 2004, so while Square's response is a little on the slow side, it's not catastrophic. If Blizzard can maintain their player-base anything like as well as Square-Enix have maintained theirs, in the long run, I'll be very surprised and impressed indeed.
It's good to see Blizzard taking real action on this. Hopefully, WoW hasn't been around long enough for there to have been serious damage to the economy already.
Most of what I'm about to say is based on my experiences in FFXI, where there have also been well-publicised problems with money-selling and recent attempts by the GMs to crack down on it (yes, I tried WoW, but I didn't like it, so I went straight back). However, it should hold true for any MMORPG where you have to "farm" (be it by killing monsters, crafting items, fishing or whatever) to make in-game cash. Basically, the selling of in-game cash is one of the biggest cons I've ever encountered. Two basic reasons for this:
First of all, as many posters have remarked in previous threads on this subject, all the gold/gil-sellers are selling you is a quantity of a virtual resource which has no independant physical or legal status. If Blizzard or Square-Enix go broke, the money you spent is lost. Ok, this isn't very likely. However... let's just say that the GMs decide to "evaporate" all the large sums of money that were transferred out of the characters who were suspended for selling money. This is one of the perfectly plausible responses they may choose to make. It'd be perfectly legal for them to do this, as it wouldn't be "real" money they were taking away and the player who bought the in-game money wouldn't have a leg to stand on, as he would have been in violation of the Terms of Service by buying the game-cash to begin with.
The second reason why it's a huge con is more subtle. As many FFXI players have noticed, gil-sellers attempt monopolise some of the scarcer (yet still essential) items in the game. By doing so, they drive up inflation across the game. Chances are that a lot of the people who buy money from gil-sellers are people who feel (wrongly) that they need to buy the money in order to not get left behind this inflationary trend. In other words, gil-sellers often have to create a problem before they can milk it. If they didn't exist, the "need" for them would be greatly reduced. If you're wondering about the effect that gil-seller driven inflation has had on FFXI, it's instructive to keep an eye on the prices at www.ige.com (link provided for instructional purposes only, please don't buy anything and support them), who are the largest of the MMORPG-cash-and-items traders. I started watching these in October (and yes, I admit that this was largely due to wanting to gloat over how much my legitimately-obtained gear would sell for in real life). At that time, 1 million gil cost around $160 dollars. Today, you could buy 1 million gil for £36. The irony here is that the people who bought gil back in October essentially wasted their money and, if the trend continues, the same goes for people who buy it today.
In short, the game-cash-for-real-money trade sucks. Don't do it and don't support it. Please.
This is rubbish. Blizzard could make money off gold sales if they wanted. After all, WoW gold is nothing more than an insubstantial product that exists on servers that Blizzard themselves run. If Blizzard wanted, it would be an absolute doddle for them to set up a "buy some gold" button on each player's subscription page. Players give money to Blizzard and Blizzard creates some gold out of thin air to give to the player. I'm pretty sure one of the MMORPGs out there (sorry, can't remember which) is already moving in this direction.
Sorry to burst your little bubble, but this almost certainly about Blizzard wanting to enforce a level playing field.
Hey, if it works, don't knock it...
There's no reason why a game developed by Bioware, Rare or even one of the Electronic Arts studios should be any worse than a game developed by Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo.
What I'm suggesting isn't conformity, it's common sense. What Nintendo are increasingly doing these days is insisting on driving a car with rectangular wheels and calling it "innovation".
Nintendo are sure doing their best to scare people off the Cube. It's true that RE4 won't look as good on the PS2, when the port comes out, but the X-Box version will no doubt look just as good. The other two consoles have the advantages of widely-adopted online support and similar controller layouts (why do you think there's never been a GTA3 game on the Cube), which make them both more tempting for developers. Nintendo need to realise that the market can't be forced to follow their own, strange whims any more. If the Revolution is going to succeed, Nintendo need to get their act in gear with regards to online play and at least give the option of using a controller with similar button-count and layout to the next gen consoles from MS and Sony. I wouldn't hold your breath, though.
Well, World of Warcraft just about scraped a slightly larger player base than FFXI... two years after FFXI's launch. I wouldn't write that off as a thorough trouncing by any stretch of the imagination. For a long time, FFXI was the largest non-Korean MMORPG around, comfortably ahead of the nearest rival, Everquest.
Yeah, but if those independent contractors all get banned, the money flowing through IGE will dry up and so will their margins.
I'm a regular FFXI player. I just noticed an announcement regarding the suspension of accounts of known violators of the TOS on PlayOnline (the DRM-client-thingy that FFXI runs through). So I log in, do a few searches and not one of the usual known gil-sellers on my server is online. I wonder how badly this is going to hurt their margins.
Yeah, and look how it killed the PS2. You have to feel sorry for Sony, with that being such a collossal flop and everything.
The PSP really is looking quite tempting now. Thing is, I know it's expensive and I know I probably wouldn't use it much. I don't really have space in my life for a handheld any more, since I moved and brought my commute down from 90 minutes to less than 30. My GBA was bought 2 years ago on a whim and has probably had less than 24 hours play time since then.
But god damn it if the PSP doesn't look nice. The thought of being able to show off by pulling out what's basically a miniature PS2, with that lovely big screen on the front is far too nice to resist. I'm sure the DS is ok, but it doesn't really grab me at all. Damn you Sony and your sleek, pretty and eminently I-want-to-own-one-able gadgets.
Still not encountered a cheater on X-Box Live, after over a year of fairly regular play. Lots of lamers and screaming 13 year olds, but no cheaters.
Actually, WoW has still only managed about 2/3rds of FFXI's subscriber base, which, contrary to one of the other replies to grandparent, is bigger than ever since the EU release. That WoW has attracted so much attention is just indicative of the level of US-centricity in the gaming press.
It's a slight pity that a piece of marketing hype was linked to as news. However, I'd agree with the main thrust of the story. 2004 was certainly the year of the X-Box.
It's interesting to note how the perceptions of the X-Box have changed since it was launched. Originally, it was mocked, reviled and no serious gamer would touch one. Nowadays, it's only the die-hard Nintendo fanboys who cling to this view. The X-Box gets virtually all of the cross-platform console titles and the X-Box versions of these games are usually the best, due in part, although not entirely, to features such as the HDD and customisable soundtracks. It also gets most of the "big name" PC action games, although MS hasn't quite got the confidence yet to insist on pure "X-Box only" releases for games such as the Halo and KOTOR series.
The last stats I saw showed that the X-Box had out-sold the PS and the Gamecube by a considerable margin during the 2004 Christmas period. With the PS2, you don't have to look far to find the reason; it's achieved near total market saturation and there just aren't many customers left. However, the presence of big exclusives like Halo 2 and a multitude of cross-platform titles such as Burnout 3 and Silent Hill 4 has allowed it to extend a real lead over the Gamecube for the first time.
Of course, we shouldn't ignore the fact that the X-Box did take a long time to come into its own. MS certainly has a fight on its hands to carry over its current success into the next round of the console wars.
I used to believe this, but the more I've thought about things, the more I'm inclined towards a slightly more benign conclusion.
When I first started reading gaming mags in the late 80s/early 90s, genuinely bad reviews were pretty common. Games getting 20% or less weren't exactly common, but nor were they rare. Plenty got less than 50%. Obviously, this isn't the case today.
However, when you stop and think about it, it's rare that you actually get a genuinely bad commercial game these days. It's true. I looked up some videos of the game in question and, from what I can see, it's an average, underwhelming early-PS2 action game. Yes, it's nothing like as good as any number of other games you could have bought at the time. It no doubt had a frustrating control system, poor level design and repetative gameplay. However, if you'd never seen Halo, Kingdom Hearts, Zelda, Metal Gear Solid or, indeed, any other modern video game before, you'd probably be pretty impressed by this. At worst, you can play through the game from beginning to end and probably not want to stab yourself in the eyes with a pair of scissors.
The commercial games development world has just moved on too far to produce truly bad games. Virtually all games go through at least some QA before launch. Indeed, if you want to release on one of the big three consoles, you have to convince Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo that your game is worthy of launch and won't be an embarrassment to their system.
Of course, the occasional utter stinker does still happen, particularly on the PC. Budget developers like Valusoft don't always have the same standards as the rest of the industry. I remember there was a truck racing game a few months ago which actually made a slashdot news story just because it was so sheer bloody awful. All the reviews of this game were sub-20%.
So, where does this leave the reviewer? In a bit of a quandry, to be honest. He has to be fair to the games he's reviewing and shouldn't call them truly bad unless they actually are. However, he also has a duty to let his customers know whether the game he's looking at is worth their cash. I suspect this is why we see so many reviews where the score is in the 60% range but the review text makes it clear that the game shouldn't be purchased.
And remember, if the fanboys mod down enough posts which attack Nintendo, they single-handedly save the company and get a cookie!
You've been able to play games of any region on the Gamecube for a long, long time now, using a software-only hack. If it weren't for this, I suspect Nintendo Europe's sales would still be "0", given how the region gets treated by them. Pirating GC games is never really going to take off, due to the difficulties involved with the media.