Second's a space overhaul, which is a given considering this is the game's best aspect right now.
Best? It's certainly the stage you'll get the most gameplay out of, since it was designed that way, but I'm not sure I'd go as far as calling it the best stage. I, and most other people I've spoken to, had a lot more fun in the creature stage, and even in the cell phase, which their hype dismissed as just a short intro.
Actually, although the analogy is imperfect, there is some insight to it. You're quite correct to point out that demand in this instance has not vanished. Instead, what's happened here is that supply has become essentially infinite, for all practical intents and purposes. In both cases this means that the supply:demand ratio increases to beyond what is tenable, and the value of the product dwindles as a result. And that is why the analogy is a reasonable one.
What I find most sad about all this is that the only reason there's such a fuss about it at all is because of the overbearingly arrogant attitude of the music industry that they have some sort of divine right to the consumers' cash without first earning it. (And while you might make a similar charge against some pirates, they at least do not resort to fabricating statistics in order to prop up an outdated and failing business model.)
It gets a little bit silly though when they totally undermine the purpose of that error message, by using a different one when it actually is the username that's wrong. Yahoo, for instance, gives the "username or password invalid" error if you get the password wrong. Get the username wrong, on the other hand, and it tells you that the name isn't registered, and would you like to register it now... Makes you wonder if they were actually thinking when they did that.
While you're correct that theorycraft is an inherently scientific endeavour, I too am inclined to disagree with some of the things Steinkuehler says. As indicated by the summary, the paper postulates that people learn scientific method from games, and that games get players to do scientific research. However, the paper's data comes purely from the priest class forum on the official forums. This forum is dedicated to exploring the game mechanics of the priest class, and the only effective way to do that is through research and use of the scientific method. It's only natural that the vast majority of posts there are scientific in nature, but that doesn't mean that the game is teaching players to practice science. If you were to examine the general forum, for example, you'd find it to be entirely devoid of logic or reasoning, and it sees a much higher volume of traffic that all of the individual class forums combined.
This disparity in the levels of reasoning and science exists purely because the class forums attract people who are scientifically minded, not because the game somehow teaches previously unscientific people about the joys of logic and reasoning. Indeed, Steinkuehler concludes "Thus, one might argue that either game forums (like the one studied here) tend to attract individuals with a more nuanced stance toward knowledge or such forums actually foster such a stance." I think the former possibility is a far better supported by the data than the latter. As such, I don't think that games like WoW are going to be some sort of magic bullet to fix any perceived problems in the education system as Steinkuehler hopes.
From the response to a support email I sent to Stardock regarding a CD key that had already been registered:
Unfortunately that serial number had already been registered with another user in France. Most likely he resold his game, and you may have unknowingly purchased this used game.
We at Stardock do have a heart, and since you provided the retail sales receipt, we have generated a new serial number to your account. Please use the following when registering your game;
So in actual fact Stardock do give out new CD keys if you purchase a game whose CD key has already been registered to someone else's account.
As it happens, in this case the game I purchased was not actually a resale. I spoke to one of the Stardock devs on their IRC who informed me that due to a cock-up by their EU distributor there were numerous instances of duplicate CD keys in games. For some games (my copy of GC2) this meant that the same CD key was given out multiple times, and in some games (a friend's copy of SoaSE) one copy of the game contained two CD keys. I was mildly perplexed that their support dude was unaware/unwilling to admit the problem was on their end, especially since I mentioned the IRC conversation in my original support ticket. (Although must admit I was somewhat amused by the proposed scenario that some random dude in France had come all the way to the UK to return a game to my local game store, somehow managed to get them to take it, whereupon they repackaged and resealed the game and then sold it on as new.) But given that the problem was remedied swiftly, I've certainly got no complaints against them. While Stardock may not be a "perfect angel", they do resolve these things sensibly.
"Eke out a few more pennies"? These things cost way more than $6 to make, and that's not even counting the cost of the traning all their customer support staff will need. Players whose accounts have been compromised do cost Blizzard a lot in terms of support, and Blizzard are introducing these things under cost in an attempt to lower their expenditures elsewhere.
What, the concept that different people might actually have different preferences is "childish"? The Pidgin developers removed a feature that many people liked (myself included). When it was requested that they at least give an option for it, they outright refused. That is childish. The ability to fork a project if you think you can do better is one of the great strengths of Open Source software, because it means that the software can't get held back or bogged down by one person's vision of how things "must" be. You can't dismiss this strength as "childish" just because you personally don't need it on this one occasion.
While you certainly have a point, I think this all seems more sensible if you try to look at it from the other direction. Yes, they're stuffing all of this new stuff into HTML. But that's because the web itself has become more than purely websites with markup, and HTML does need to catch up with that.
These days the web has become a platform for a much richer experience (ugh, I feel all dirty using horrible marketing phrases like that). I'd rather that experience was grounded solidly in HTML, rather than relying on shitty third-party plugins with unpredictable updates and unreliable cross-platform support. Saying that, I know that HTML isn't suddenly going to banish the horribleness of Flash, or what have you. But I do think this is an interesting first step.
The journalist should be fired if he is incapable of maintaining a proper standard of journalistic integrity. If "people want to read him", maybe he should go start a blog. And the first amendment has literally zero relevance to this situation.
Absolutely, I don't think anyone's saying that the music industry should be responsible for the actions of the consumer. But if you have a vested interest in what happens to your product, and you believe that "education" can best serve your interests, then it certainly isn't anyone else's responsibility to arrange that education. The music industry has absolutely no right to try to force ISPs to do their work for them.
I think you may have a slight misconception about what bots actually do. The complex stat interaction, the 3D map, et al... The bot doesn't actually interact with any of that in any way. The bot follows a set path predetermined by a human operator, and when it encounters a mob it uses a set cycle of abilities predetermined by a human operator. At no point does the bot ever truly play the game at all, let alone play it better than a human player (other than the fact that it can put in more hours, which would be true irrespective of how well the game is designed). A bot is exactly as the name suggests. It's a bot, not an AI. Given that robots can automate tasks in the real world too, is that also indicative of a fundamental flaw in its design?
You'd think that more gold would lead to all sorts of inflation. And yet it has had quite visibly successful results at combatting the problem of gold farmers. As for 4 hours a day, you'd never do that. 25 quests is the maximum you can do, but you'd never need to, nor be expected to. (In fact the limit was just this week raised from its previous value of 10. It's apparently a technical limitation rather than a gameplay limitation.) You can make a tidy profit by doing 2 or 3, and many of them don't even take 10 minutes. It's half an hour tops, only when you feel like doing it, and many of the quests are good fun in their own right (or at the very least, so trivial that they never feel like a chore).
Quite the contrary. It's true that there are a number of free servers for WoW, but the illegitemate nature of these servers means that the quality of your gameplay there is invariably inferior to on the official servers. The major cause for this is that these servers are often run by players of the game who are simply too cheap to shell out for a subscription.
The reason this leads to poor gameplay is that (most) game players make terrible game designers. There was an article I read a while ago (probably linked to from/. although I've had no luck with searching for it so far) that went into great depth about how and why this is so. The general conclusion was that the average gamer (in terms of WoW demographics, at least) invariably wants things that they perceive to be fun, even when these things lead to a negative gameplay experience. Free WoW servers, being run by players rather than designers, frequently fall into this trap.
Add to this the fact that these servers have no customer support for any technical issues that may arise. These servers are often run according to the whims of the few people in charge, and portray situations so ridiculous as to destroy any sense of immersion.
The end result is that the reason you give for paying is actually one of the more minor ones. The old saying that there ain't no such thing as a free lunch is inevitably true, and at the end of the day you get what you pay for.
The music companies want you to believe you have harmed them out of their fair share.
You have. They have entitlements to their fair share, being the ones who have and who are paying for those copyrighted works, and their distribution.
But have you really? The cost to copy and distribute a digital copy is essentially zero, or close to it. Otherwise everybody and their granny wouldn't be able to get everything they want off bittorrent in the first place. Any share of zero, fair or otherwise, is neccessarily still zero. These companies are trying to claim a non-zero "share" out of a zero-sized pie. It just can't work.
Now, if you'd said that the content producers, the artists themselves, were being denied their fair share then you'd be right. But lets face it, the artists have already been denied their fair share by the very companies that are supposed to represent them. That's why they make most of their money from concerts and whatnot. They're the ones that deserve some money.
I'm not trying to justify the flagrant copyright breaches that do take place. But it certainly isn't stealing, because there simply isn't anything to steal.
I know that the (original) french version of the game allowed you to do exactly that. I'm hoping that this feature will eventually be introduced to the international version too, because as you say, people spamming these shitty links is really quite annoying.
Reading this, I just realised something. There's a fairly large forum that I frequent that has recently put an ad banner at the top of their pages. I didn't even think of blocking the ads. And when I say that, I don't mean that I thought to myself 'Well, I owe these guys for the great website that they provide', I mean I actually had not even conceived of the possibility of clicking on Adblock and getting rid of them, because the ads were relevant and interesting.
I think if webmasters do a little bit of thinking and research about the ads they allow to be displayed on their website, and especially if advertisers stop being such arseholes about how intrusive their ads are, both will find that there is a viable business model in there somewhere. Provide ads that are relevant to the website, and people will not only tolerate those ads, they will come to see them as a normal and integral part of the website that they came to see.
I think the problem with WoW's expansion items may be overstated a little bit. Sure sometimes I think that it's a shame that old items aren't more useful. But the obsolescence of these items is not something new that the expansion has brought. WoW has always been a game about character progression via gear. (It kinda had to be, since levelling in WoW is trivial.) It is a rare player in WoW who can truly say that they have the best gear they can possibly have. And even then, that gear is acquired with the understanding that it will not still be the best a few months down the line. I think the system works quite well.
Let's face it, fellow WoW players, the game is *too easy*. I know of 6 and 7 year olds who've solo'ed and played their way to level 70 in WoW without any serious difficulties.
Tbh, I think you're comparing apples to oranges. Yes, it is extremely easy to reach the max level in WoW, but it's intentionally so. Levelling in WoW is all about teaching you the basics of your class. It's not until you reach the level cap that the game really begins, which is why much of group-based content requires you to be at or near the cap.
At which point some genius would start complaining that they were forced to buy this USB drive that they didn't want, just to play a game. C'mon, you know that people will complain about anything. Better by far to do it the way they have done. If your machine doesn't meet the minimum specs, simply don't play the game.
I take it that you have some meaningful explanation of why a university should protect students from consequences of a currently unlawful activity.
If by "currently unlawful activity" you mean trying to extort money from students, then I submit that it is up to you to provide a reason why they should not be protected, rather than the other way around.
It's worth noting that Blizzard have recently renewed their trademark on Blackthorne. Trademarks on other Blizzard games from that era appear to remain untouched.
You can't exactly force them to acknowledge something that isn't true. If the terms of the licensing agreement state that they retain ownership of all in-game property, then you don't own the in-game property. Yes, some people do try to sell it anyway. Yes, that income should be taxable. No, that doesn't mean that it's ok to sell in-game property that isn't yours, and it doesn't mean that you can force the game publisher to give away that property. TFA made the analogy of knocking off a liquor store, or embezzling from your employer. Apparently those things are already taxable. (Learn something new every day, huh.) That doesn't mean that it's ok to do either of those things, and it especially doesn't mean that the government should force the liquor store owner to acknowledge that the stolen liquor rightfully belongs to the thief, which is what you're suggesting.
As I understand it, that particular provision only applies if you claim to own the copyright on material that you do not. In this case the guy was claiming to represent ABC, who does own the copyright, so they can't actually get him. Of course I'm sure that there's some ground on which somebody could get him, but I don't believe that one applies.
Too bad; you should have put restrictions up to select who can use your bandwidth.
He did. He used a.htaccess rule to restrict access to the image on his server. Ok, so he only did it after the fact, but that's irrelevant. It's still his bandwidth, and his image, and he can choose to add restrictions whenever he wants. Your "either it's free or it's restricted" argument completely ignores the fact that things can change. Your "no freedom without responsibility" line however is quite correct, although not in the way you intended it, perhaps. McCain had the freedom to use this image. But he had the responsibility not to abuse is. He failed in that responsibility, and got pwned as a result.
Slashdot Mirror
Best? It's certainly the stage you'll get the most gameplay out of, since it was designed that way, but I'm not sure I'd go as far as calling it the best stage. I, and most other people I've spoken to, had a lot more fun in the creature stage, and even in the cell phase, which their hype dismissed as just a short intro.
Actually, although the analogy is imperfect, there is some insight to it. You're quite correct to point out that demand in this instance has not vanished. Instead, what's happened here is that supply has become essentially infinite, for all practical intents and purposes. In both cases this means that the supply:demand ratio increases to beyond what is tenable, and the value of the product dwindles as a result. And that is why the analogy is a reasonable one.
What I find most sad about all this is that the only reason there's such a fuss about it at all is because of the overbearingly arrogant attitude of the music industry that they have some sort of divine right to the consumers' cash without first earning it. (And while you might make a similar charge against some pirates, they at least do not resort to fabricating statistics in order to prop up an outdated and failing business model.)
It gets a little bit silly though when they totally undermine the purpose of that error message, by using a different one when it actually is the username that's wrong. Yahoo, for instance, gives the "username or password invalid" error if you get the password wrong. Get the username wrong, on the other hand, and it tells you that the name isn't registered, and would you like to register it now... Makes you wonder if they were actually thinking when they did that.
While you're correct that theorycraft is an inherently scientific endeavour, I too am inclined to disagree with some of the things Steinkuehler says. As indicated by the summary, the paper postulates that people learn scientific method from games, and that games get players to do scientific research. However, the paper's data comes purely from the priest class forum on the official forums. This forum is dedicated to exploring the game mechanics of the priest class, and the only effective way to do that is through research and use of the scientific method. It's only natural that the vast majority of posts there are scientific in nature, but that doesn't mean that the game is teaching players to practice science. If you were to examine the general forum, for example, you'd find it to be entirely devoid of logic or reasoning, and it sees a much higher volume of traffic that all of the individual class forums combined.
This disparity in the levels of reasoning and science exists purely because the class forums attract people who are scientifically minded, not because the game somehow teaches previously unscientific people about the joys of logic and reasoning. Indeed, Steinkuehler concludes "Thus, one might argue that either game forums (like the one studied here) tend to attract individuals with a more nuanced stance toward knowledge or such forums actually foster such a stance." I think the former possibility is a far better supported by the data than the latter. As such, I don't think that games like WoW are going to be some sort of magic bullet to fix any perceived problems in the education system as Steinkuehler hopes.
From the response to a support email I sent to Stardock regarding a CD key that had already been registered:
So in actual fact Stardock do give out new CD keys if you purchase a game whose CD key has already been registered to someone else's account.
As it happens, in this case the game I purchased was not actually a resale. I spoke to one of the Stardock devs on their IRC who informed me that due to a cock-up by their EU distributor there were numerous instances of duplicate CD keys in games. For some games (my copy of GC2) this meant that the same CD key was given out multiple times, and in some games (a friend's copy of SoaSE) one copy of the game contained two CD keys. I was mildly perplexed that their support dude was unaware/unwilling to admit the problem was on their end, especially since I mentioned the IRC conversation in my original support ticket. (Although must admit I was somewhat amused by the proposed scenario that some random dude in France had come all the way to the UK to return a game to my local game store, somehow managed to get them to take it, whereupon they repackaged and resealed the game and then sold it on as new.) But given that the problem was remedied swiftly, I've certainly got no complaints against them. While Stardock may not be a "perfect angel", they do resolve these things sensibly.
"Eke out a few more pennies"? These things cost way more than $6 to make, and that's not even counting the cost of the traning all their customer support staff will need. Players whose accounts have been compromised do cost Blizzard a lot in terms of support, and Blizzard are introducing these things under cost in an attempt to lower their expenditures elsewhere.
What, the concept that different people might actually have different preferences is "childish"? The Pidgin developers removed a feature that many people liked (myself included). When it was requested that they at least give an option for it, they outright refused. That is childish. The ability to fork a project if you think you can do better is one of the great strengths of Open Source software, because it means that the software can't get held back or bogged down by one person's vision of how things "must" be. You can't dismiss this strength as "childish" just because you personally don't need it on this one occasion.
While you certainly have a point, I think this all seems more sensible if you try to look at it from the other direction. Yes, they're stuffing all of this new stuff into HTML. But that's because the web itself has become more than purely websites with markup, and HTML does need to catch up with that.
These days the web has become a platform for a much richer experience (ugh, I feel all dirty using horrible marketing phrases like that). I'd rather that experience was grounded solidly in HTML, rather than relying on shitty third-party plugins with unpredictable updates and unreliable cross-platform support. Saying that, I know that HTML isn't suddenly going to banish the horribleness of Flash, or what have you. But I do think this is an interesting first step.
The journalist should be fired if he is incapable of maintaining a proper standard of journalistic integrity. If "people want to read him", maybe he should go start a blog. And the first amendment has literally zero relevance to this situation.
Absolutely, I don't think anyone's saying that the music industry should be responsible for the actions of the consumer. But if you have a vested interest in what happens to your product, and you believe that "education" can best serve your interests, then it certainly isn't anyone else's responsibility to arrange that education. The music industry has absolutely no right to try to force ISPs to do their work for them.
I think you may have a slight misconception about what bots actually do. The complex stat interaction, the 3D map, et al... The bot doesn't actually interact with any of that in any way. The bot follows a set path predetermined by a human operator, and when it encounters a mob it uses a set cycle of abilities predetermined by a human operator. At no point does the bot ever truly play the game at all, let alone play it better than a human player (other than the fact that it can put in more hours, which would be true irrespective of how well the game is designed). A bot is exactly as the name suggests. It's a bot, not an AI. Given that robots can automate tasks in the real world too, is that also indicative of a fundamental flaw in its design?
You'd think that more gold would lead to all sorts of inflation. And yet it has had quite visibly successful results at combatting the problem of gold farmers. As for 4 hours a day, you'd never do that. 25 quests is the maximum you can do, but you'd never need to, nor be expected to. (In fact the limit was just this week raised from its previous value of 10. It's apparently a technical limitation rather than a gameplay limitation.) You can make a tidy profit by doing 2 or 3, and many of them don't even take 10 minutes. It's half an hour tops, only when you feel like doing it, and many of the quests are good fun in their own right (or at the very least, so trivial that they never feel like a chore).
Quite the contrary. It's true that there are a number of free servers for WoW, but the illegitemate nature of these servers means that the quality of your gameplay there is invariably inferior to on the official servers. The major cause for this is that these servers are often run by players of the game who are simply too cheap to shell out for a subscription.
/. although I've had no luck with searching for it so far) that went into great depth about how and why this is so. The general conclusion was that the average gamer (in terms of WoW demographics, at least) invariably wants things that they perceive to be fun, even when these things lead to a negative gameplay experience. Free WoW servers, being run by players rather than designers, frequently fall into this trap.
The reason this leads to poor gameplay is that (most) game players make terrible game designers. There was an article I read a while ago (probably linked to from
Add to this the fact that these servers have no customer support for any technical issues that may arise. These servers are often run according to the whims of the few people in charge, and portray situations so ridiculous as to destroy any sense of immersion.
The end result is that the reason you give for paying is actually one of the more minor ones. The old saying that there ain't no such thing as a free lunch is inevitably true, and at the end of the day you get what you pay for.
Whoosh!
But have you really? The cost to copy and distribute a digital copy is essentially zero, or close to it. Otherwise everybody and their granny wouldn't be able to get everything they want off bittorrent in the first place. Any share of zero, fair or otherwise, is neccessarily still zero. These companies are trying to claim a non-zero "share" out of a zero-sized pie. It just can't work.
Now, if you'd said that the content producers, the artists themselves, were being denied their fair share then you'd be right. But lets face it, the artists have already been denied their fair share by the very companies that are supposed to represent them. That's why they make most of their money from concerts and whatnot. They're the ones that deserve some money.
I'm not trying to justify the flagrant copyright breaches that do take place. But it certainly isn't stealing, because there simply isn't anything to steal.
I know that the (original) french version of the game allowed you to do exactly that. I'm hoping that this feature will eventually be introduced to the international version too, because as you say, people spamming these shitty links is really quite annoying.
Reading this, I just realised something. There's a fairly large forum that I frequent that has recently put an ad banner at the top of their pages. I didn't even think of blocking the ads. And when I say that, I don't mean that I thought to myself 'Well, I owe these guys for the great website that they provide', I mean I actually had not even conceived of the possibility of clicking on Adblock and getting rid of them, because the ads were relevant and interesting.
I think if webmasters do a little bit of thinking and research about the ads they allow to be displayed on their website, and especially if advertisers stop being such arseholes about how intrusive their ads are, both will find that there is a viable business model in there somewhere. Provide ads that are relevant to the website, and people will not only tolerate those ads, they will come to see them as a normal and integral part of the website that they came to see.
I think the problem with WoW's expansion items may be overstated a little bit. Sure sometimes I think that it's a shame that old items aren't more useful. But the obsolescence of these items is not something new that the expansion has brought. WoW has always been a game about character progression via gear. (It kinda had to be, since levelling in WoW is trivial.) It is a rare player in WoW who can truly say that they have the best gear they can possibly have. And even then, that gear is acquired with the understanding that it will not still be the best a few months down the line. I think the system works quite well.
Tbh, I think you're comparing apples to oranges. Yes, it is extremely easy to reach the max level in WoW, but it's intentionally so. Levelling in WoW is all about teaching you the basics of your class. It's not until you reach the level cap that the game really begins, which is why much of group-based content requires you to be at or near the cap.
At which point some genius would start complaining that they were forced to buy this USB drive that they didn't want, just to play a game. C'mon, you know that people will complain about anything. Better by far to do it the way they have done. If your machine doesn't meet the minimum specs, simply don't play the game.
It's worth noting that Blizzard have recently renewed their trademark on Blackthorne. Trademarks on other Blizzard games from that era appear to remain untouched.
You can't exactly force them to acknowledge something that isn't true. If the terms of the licensing agreement state that they retain ownership of all in-game property, then you don't own the in-game property. Yes, some people do try to sell it anyway. Yes, that income should be taxable. No, that doesn't mean that it's ok to sell in-game property that isn't yours, and it doesn't mean that you can force the game publisher to give away that property. TFA made the analogy of knocking off a liquor store, or embezzling from your employer. Apparently those things are already taxable. (Learn something new every day, huh.) That doesn't mean that it's ok to do either of those things, and it especially doesn't mean that the government should force the liquor store owner to acknowledge that the stolen liquor rightfully belongs to the thief, which is what you're suggesting.
As I understand it, that particular provision only applies if you claim to own the copyright on material that you do not. In this case the guy was claiming to represent ABC, who does own the copyright, so they can't actually get him. Of course I'm sure that there's some ground on which somebody could get him, but I don't believe that one applies.
He did. He used a .htaccess rule to restrict access to the image on his server. Ok, so he only did it after the fact, but that's irrelevant. It's still his bandwidth, and his image, and he can choose to add restrictions whenever he wants. Your "either it's free or it's restricted" argument completely ignores the fact that things can change. Your "no freedom without responsibility" line however is quite correct, although not in the way you intended it, perhaps. McCain had the freedom to use this image. But he had the responsibility not to abuse is. He failed in that responsibility, and got pwned as a result.