For me, convenience is more important than price. Since leaving university and starting work I've moved from time rich / cash poor to being cash rich / time poor (relatively speaking...). I'm more than willing to pay more for something if it's convenient.
Plus I won't pay *anything* for something if it's inconvenient. I haven't ever "bought" DRMed music, and never will. No matter how cheap they make it - even free - it's not worth my time to deal with issues when I want to move the file onto a different music player, or upgrade my computer. Until recently when DRM free tracks became available CDs were still the way to go as I could rip them easily without worrying about DRM and authentication servers going dark.
The US is demanding extradition of a UK citizen over something he did in the UK.
I'm waiting to see if the US will be as eager to send dcoetzee over to the UK... although the US/UK extradition stuff only seems to work one way from what I've seen.
PvP = Player versus Player - ie combat against other players PvE = Player versus Environment - ie fighting against in game monsters
In some games such as World of Warcraft a player has to turn on PvP mode before they can be attacked by players (or choose to play on a PvP server where it's always on). Other games such as Eve have PvP mode always on.
Camping is sitting on a certain point so that you can control some aspect of the game. Often either a weapon/ammo spawn point, or a player respawn point.
In this instance by waiting next to someone's corpse, they'll resurrect right next to you on low health. The effect is an easy kill and the victim having to spend more time travelling back from the graveyard to the corpse and hoping that either you'll have gotten bored and left, or their friends have turned up and chased them away.
For the sake of throwing numbers around, lets assume that player A buys the game card for 300m isk - I have no idea what the current exchange rate is, but that'll do for these purposes.
Player A is doing nothing but generating ISK. Without the market for ISK, he'd normally be spending it on deflating assets (i.e. ships, insurance, munitions). Instead, he's just earning, earning, earning.
Not quite.
Player B will spend the isk on deflating assets instead of A doing so. Also, if A only spends say 500m isk a month, previously there would have been a 500+200=700m isk spend on assets. Now, since we can assume B wants to spend an extra 300m, there will be a 500+500=1bn isk spend on assets. More spending on deflating assets as a result of the RMT not less.
Now, here comes player C. He sees what player A has done, and tries to get in on the act. Next month, they both earn 1.5 billion ISK. Player B is only interested in buying ISK from one of them. Since their choices are to sell, or not sell, how much more ISK will player B get for his RMT next month, and how much more unspent ISK will there be in the game world?
Perhaps you're unclear on the meaning of "inflationary"?
I agree that other players will enter the marketplace on either side, depending on whether they believe the price is high or low. C will enter if he's willing to sell 350m isk for a gamecard, and D will enter if he's willing to accept 250m isk for a gamecard. As players enter/leave the market, equilibrium is reached, but this is nothing to do with inflation.
Inflation is the rate of increase in prices. Generally it's caused by either increasing amount of money, or reducing supply of goods to spend it on (they amount to the same thing essentially). The availability of high end expensive items that players want drives them to spend time generating isk, and work out how to do this efficiently. It is this demand for isk that will drive the increase in isk supply.
Consider the following scenarios where player A needs 1bn isk to buy something nice.
player A spends time generating isk until he has 1bn
player B, a friend of A, has already spent time generating 1bn isk and gives it to him
player C, who runs a RMT website, has spent time generating 1bn isk and gives it to him
(Note the game can't see and doesn't care whether A also gave C cash, goods or services outside of the game in exchange for the isk)
Now, in all three scenarios, the isk supply has increased by 1bn which will lead to a certain amount of inflation. Net effect in the game is identical in all three cases.
However, generally there is a difference caused by efficiency. Player A might spend four weeks generating the isk. Their friend B is a better player and plays for longer, and so generated the isk in only two weeks. Player C however, who is online 24/7 and works very efficiently, can do this in only 1 week. The effect now is that the money supply has increased faster, and thus inflation is higher, in the later scenarios (3 > 2 > 1).
Note that RMTs do not cause inflation. What causes the inflation is the speed of increase in the isk supply. As an example, if player B was in fact able to generate isk faster than the RMT farmer, then the highest inflation would be in scenario 2.
The way to control inflation is therefore for the developer to control how fast isk can be generated - ie keep an eye on any areas where the reward is greater than the risk and lead to rapid wealth generation. However, some inflation is good for an economy - but I'll leave that for another day.
I've built a spreadsheet that I type my shopping list into. It looks up the aisle number, and then the aisle order based on the route I take around my local tesco and then sorts. As an added bonus my popular recipes are entered as well so I can choose a recipe, type in the number of people to make it for and the items get added to the list automatically. Means I can take a print round the shop and get out fast.
Now if I had a GPS locator as well, I could try loading it all onto a roomba or something so I can stay at home with a beer!
As a reader from the UK, I'd like to thank the World Privacy Forum for living up to their name and not just listing information pertaining to just one country.
You are right in that it's about whether the fastest rate of gain can be achieved through fighting low or high level opponents, but just because the numbers you picked don't work doesn't mean the system doesn't work.
The idea is that the gain/loss from playing each match is related to the probability of winning. In your example, killing noobs gets you 24 points a minute, while the PvP session gets you 2.4 and thus your example is unbalanced. People will grief as the reward per minute is higher.
In reality the score would be set up so that your expected gains from fighting the low levels is no higher than the expected gains from high levels, and should be less.
Thus say in 10 minutes you could find and kill 10 noobs each with a 99% success rate. If each kill gets you 1 point and each loss loses 50 then you're looking at an expected increase of 0.49 points per noob (0.99*1+0.01*-100), or 4.9 points per 10 minute session.
Now in 10 minutes, maybe you could find and attack 2 people of a more comparable level. Your chance of success with these guys is only 70%, but now you're getting 10 points for a kill, and losing 15 for a death (still losing more than gaining since chance of winning is greater than 50%). You now expect 2.5 points per person (0.7*10+0.3*-15), or 5 points per 10 minutes.
The system is then balanced and you should be neutral between griefing noobs or fighting more challenging opponents. If we then tweak the rewards slightly we can create a level slope whereby the expected gains per minute from noob griefing is less than the gains per minute of doing comparable level fights. You could even tweak the rewards such that the expected return from fighting noobs is negative, even though each win is an increase. If above it was a 100 point loss on losing to a noob, your expeced increase would be -0.01 (0.99*1+0.01*-100).
Now the system means that while you can get points from griefing, you won't get more points than someone who is fighting higher level opponents. Thus if you want to be #1 you need to be gaining points faster than the current #1 and so you won't grief.
I normally rewrite to avoid putting the emoticon next to a close bracket or, if that would end up too convoluted, go with your second approach and add a space.
As has been said, you need to get him to want to learn. For me, the thing in particular which did that was fractals. Being mathematically inclined I used to build programs to solve problems, but the thing which spurred me on was drawing fractals. Of course, doing this in BASIC on a spectrum meant leaving it on overnight to run but then that just taught me about O(n) etc programs and optimisation.
Secondly, you need him to be able to produce fun things easily. For BASIC on the spectrum it was pretty easy to draw on screen and make things move. With directx and C++ it's a whole lot harder and less fun. It's all very well outputting text results but I reckon graphics will be essential in keeping him interested.
Python sounds good, or maybe something like DarkBASIC?
Basically ou want him to learn the ethos of programming but unless he's driven and finds what he's doing fun it'll be an uphill struggle.
Keeping no genetic testing for insurance policies will damage the industry.
First up, a brief description of how insurance premiums are calculated. The insurer works out the probability of the event happening (eg contracting a debilitating illness) to be say 5%. They then calculate the cost of medical expenses, say $100,000. The expected cost they need to take in in premiums for each person is therefore 5% x $100,000 = $5,000. They will increase this if they don't know the probability accurately, maybe charging $6,000 in case the probability is really 6%. They also add a bit for their own expenses and profits.
The end result is that if you know the probability accurately, then they don't need to bump up their estimate "just in case". If they are able to genetically test, then they can calculate each person's probability more accurately and charge a premium which represents the true cost of providing cover to that person.
Currently neither the insurer or the individual can get testing done to determine the true percentage, so each side has to estimate. This means each side has (essentially) the same information and a fair price can be determined.
If in future, the insurers aren't allowed to test then they will have to continue estimating the probability and adding a bit for prudence in case of bad experience. The individuals however will be able to get private testing done and so will know their true cost. Consider two people, Alan whose test gives him a 1% change of falling ill, and Bob who has a 20% chance. Alan would expect to pay 1%*$100,000 = $1,000 for his cover, and Bob would expect to pay 20%*$100,000=$20,000. Now, since the insurer is charging $6,000 then Alan might decide he'd rather keep his money. Bob on the other hand will smell a bargain and buy the policy. Now the insurer is in a problem - it's only taking in enough money to pay out claims assuming that 6% of people at the most fall ill, but thanks to Bob, 20% of their policyholders are going to fall ill. They will end up paying out more money than they take in and will go insolvent.
To fight against this the insurers will have to do two things: - increase their estimate of the probability of falling ill, since only those who test positive will buy the policy - increase their margin against poor experience, since they have less information that other market participants (ie individuals buying policies)
Both of these things will drive up the cost of insurance and mean that those whose test gives them a low probability of falling ill will only be able to buy insurance at a high rate, since the insurer has to assume that they have a high probability.
Essentially, preventing the insurers from genetic testing will cause an information imbalance which will damage the industry.
Note that just because you have a high probability of falling ill does NOT mean that insurers will not take you on. The insurers make their profits from the additional loading on premiums, and from investment income. If you know for definite that you have an 80% chance of falling ill, then they will charge you 80%*$100,000 = $80,000. This may be high, but it is the expected cost. On the flip side the insurer won't have to load the cost for variability, since you know for definite that the chance is 80%.
The best way to do things to my mind is to allow insurers to do genetic testing, and the results of any tests would have to be shared with the individual concerned. The insurer would not be allowed to turn anyone away as a result of testing, but they would be allowed to charge an appropriate premium. That way the insurance industry isn't forced to choose between charging everyone massively high premiums or going insovent.
The only way an insurer would be willing to charge a "normal" premium without genetic testing would be if it was a group policy where the individuals had no choice over joining - for example a national scheme, or even employer wide schemes. That way they would get a representati
It is odd the way all the news articles about MMORPGS bang on about SL, when WoW is so much larger. I guess it's easier and more mainstream-acceptable to write about people making a living selling clothes and converting it into USD than writing about the latest guild to down Ragnaros and the latest PvP rankings. Multiple servers don't help there I guess.
I did remember that there was a BBC story once where the correspondant logged in as a dwarf or a gnome and promised to give updates on his progress. Never heard anything else - maybe a wolf ate him.
Slashdot Mirror
For me, convenience is more important than price. Since leaving university and starting work I've moved from time rich / cash poor to being cash rich / time poor (relatively speaking ...). I'm more than willing to pay more for something if it's convenient.
Plus I won't pay *anything* for something if it's inconvenient. I haven't ever "bought" DRMed music, and never will. No matter how cheap they make it - even free - it's not worth my time to deal with issues when I want to move the file onto a different music player, or upgrade my computer. Until recently when DRM free tracks became available CDs were still the way to go as I could rip them easily without worrying about DRM and authentication servers going dark.
That's pretty arrogant of you! (Assuming you're American of course)
How long till Alzheimers patients start getting sued for breach of copyright?
Perhaps he means it as in:
DRM is dead!
Long live DRM!
You might want to ask Gary McKinnon about that.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7839338.stm
The US is demanding extradition of a UK citizen over something he did in the UK.
I'm waiting to see if the US will be as eager to send dcoetzee over to the UK ... although the US/UK extradition stuff only seems to work one way from what I've seen.
PvP = Player versus Player - ie combat against other players
PvE = Player versus Environment - ie fighting against in game monsters
In some games such as World of Warcraft a player has to turn on PvP mode before they can be attacked by players (or choose to play on a PvP server where it's always on). Other games such as Eve have PvP mode always on.
Camping is sitting on a certain point so that you can control some aspect of the game. Often either a weapon/ammo spawn point, or a player respawn point.
In this instance by waiting next to someone's corpse, they'll resurrect right next to you on low health. The effect is an easy kill and the victim having to spend more time travelling back from the graveyard to the corpse and hoping that either you'll have gotten bored and left, or their friends have turned up and chased them away.
For the sake of throwing numbers around, lets assume that player A buys the game card for 300m isk - I have no idea what the current exchange rate is, but that'll do for these purposes.
Player A is doing nothing but generating ISK. Without the market for ISK, he'd normally be spending it on deflating assets (i.e. ships, insurance, munitions). Instead, he's just earning, earning, earning.
Not quite.
Player B will spend the isk on deflating assets instead of A doing so. Also, if A only spends say 500m isk a month, previously there would have been a 500+200=700m isk spend on assets. Now, since we can assume B wants to spend an extra 300m, there will be a 500+500=1bn isk spend on assets. More spending on deflating assets as a result of the RMT not less.
Now, here comes player C. He sees what player A has done, and tries to get in on the act. Next month, they both earn 1.5 billion ISK. Player B is only interested in buying ISK from one of them. Since their choices are to sell, or not sell, how much more ISK will player B get for his RMT next month, and how much more unspent ISK will there be in the game world?
Perhaps you're unclear on the meaning of "inflationary"?
I agree that other players will enter the marketplace on either side, depending on whether they believe the price is high or low. C will enter if he's willing to sell 350m isk for a gamecard, and D will enter if he's willing to accept 250m isk for a gamecard. As players enter/leave the market, equilibrium is reached, but this is nothing to do with inflation.
Inflation is the rate of increase in prices. Generally it's caused by either increasing amount of money, or reducing supply of goods to spend it on (they amount to the same thing essentially). The availability of high end expensive items that players want drives them to spend time generating isk, and work out how to do this efficiently. It is this demand for isk that will drive the increase in isk supply.
Consider the following scenarios where player A needs 1bn isk to buy something nice.
(Note the game can't see and doesn't care whether A also gave C cash, goods or services outside of the game in exchange for the isk)
Now, in all three scenarios, the isk supply has increased by 1bn which will lead to a certain amount of inflation. Net effect in the game is identical in all three cases.
However, generally there is a difference caused by efficiency. Player A might spend four weeks generating the isk. Their friend B is a better player and plays for longer, and so generated the isk in only two weeks. Player C however, who is online 24/7 and works very efficiently, can do this in only 1 week. The effect now is that the money supply has increased faster, and thus inflation is higher, in the later scenarios (3 > 2 > 1).
Note that RMTs do not cause inflation. What causes the inflation is the speed of increase in the isk supply. As an example, if player B was in fact able to generate isk faster than the RMT farmer, then the highest inflation would be in scenario 2.
The way to control inflation is therefore for the developer to control how fast isk can be generated - ie keep an eye on any areas where the reward is greater than the risk and lead to rapid wealth generation. However, some inflation is good for an economy - but I'll leave that for another day.
I've built a spreadsheet that I type my shopping list into. It looks up the aisle number, and then the aisle order based on the route I take around my local tesco and then sorts. As an added bonus my popular recipes are entered as well so I can choose a recipe, type in the number of people to make it for and the items get added to the list automatically. Means I can take a print round the shop and get out fast.
Now if I had a GPS locator as well, I could try loading it all onto a roomba or something so I can stay at home with a beer!
As a reader from the UK, I'd like to thank the World Privacy Forum for living up to their name and not just listing information pertaining to just one country.
Now, back to watching the World Series Baseball.
You are right in that it's about whether the fastest rate of gain can be achieved through fighting low or high level opponents, but just because the numbers you picked don't work doesn't mean the system doesn't work.
The idea is that the gain/loss from playing each match is related to the probability of winning. In your example, killing noobs gets you 24 points a minute, while the PvP session gets you 2.4 and thus your example is unbalanced. People will grief as the reward per minute is higher.
In reality the score would be set up so that your expected gains from fighting the low levels is no higher than the expected gains from high levels, and should be less.
Thus say in 10 minutes you could find and kill 10 noobs each with a 99% success rate. If each kill gets you 1 point and each loss loses 50 then you're looking at an expected increase of 0.49 points per noob (0.99*1+0.01*-100), or 4.9 points per 10 minute session.
Now in 10 minutes, maybe you could find and attack 2 people of a more comparable level. Your chance of success with these guys is only 70%, but now you're getting 10 points for a kill, and losing 15 for a death (still losing more than gaining since chance of winning is greater than 50%). You now expect 2.5 points per person (0.7*10+0.3*-15), or 5 points per 10 minutes.
The system is then balanced and you should be neutral between griefing noobs or fighting more challenging opponents. If we then tweak the rewards slightly we can create a level slope whereby the expected gains per minute from noob griefing is less than the gains per minute of doing comparable level fights. You could even tweak the rewards such that the expected return from fighting noobs is negative, even though each win is an increase. If above it was a 100 point loss on losing to a noob, your expeced increase would be -0.01 (0.99*1+0.01*-100).
Now the system means that while you can get points from griefing, you won't get more points than someone who is fighting higher level opponents. Thus if you want to be #1 you need to be gaining points faster than the current #1 and so you won't grief.
Lessons learned in video games may transcend computers, PlayStations and Wiis.
Phew! I'm safe with my xBox360 then?
I normally rewrite to avoid putting the emoticon next to a close bracket or, if that would end up too convoluted, go with your second approach and add a space.
As has been said, you need to get him to want to learn. For me, the thing in particular which did that was fractals. Being mathematically inclined I used to build programs to solve problems, but the thing which spurred me on was drawing fractals. Of course, doing this in BASIC on a spectrum meant leaving it on overnight to run but then that just taught me about O(n) etc programs and optimisation. Secondly, you need him to be able to produce fun things easily. For BASIC on the spectrum it was pretty easy to draw on screen and make things move. With directx and C++ it's a whole lot harder and less fun. It's all very well outputting text results but I reckon graphics will be essential in keeping him interested. Python sounds good, or maybe something like DarkBASIC? Basically ou want him to learn the ethos of programming but unless he's driven and finds what he's doing fun it'll be an uphill struggle.
Keeping no genetic testing for insurance policies will damage the industry.
First up, a brief description of how insurance premiums are calculated. The insurer works out the probability of the event happening (eg contracting a debilitating illness) to be say 5%. They then calculate the cost of medical expenses, say $100,000. The expected cost they need to take in in premiums for each person is therefore 5% x $100,000 = $5,000. They will increase this if they don't know the probability accurately, maybe charging $6,000 in case the probability is really 6%. They also add a bit for their own expenses and profits.
The end result is that if you know the probability accurately, then they don't need to bump up their estimate "just in case". If they are able to genetically test, then they can calculate each person's probability more accurately and charge a premium which represents the true cost of providing cover to that person.
Currently neither the insurer or the individual can get testing done to determine the true percentage, so each side has to estimate. This means each side has (essentially) the same information and a fair price can be determined.
If in future, the insurers aren't allowed to test then they will have to continue estimating the probability and adding a bit for prudence in case of bad experience. The individuals however will be able to get private testing done and so will know their true cost. Consider two people, Alan whose test gives him a 1% change of falling ill, and Bob who has a 20% chance. Alan would expect to pay 1%*$100,000 = $1,000 for his cover, and Bob would expect to pay 20%*$100,000=$20,000. Now, since the insurer is charging $6,000 then Alan might decide he'd rather keep his money. Bob on the other hand will smell a bargain and buy the policy. Now the insurer is in a problem - it's only taking in enough money to pay out claims assuming that 6% of people at the most fall ill, but thanks to Bob, 20% of their policyholders are going to fall ill. They will end up paying out more money than they take in and will go insolvent.
To fight against this the insurers will have to do two things:
- increase their estimate of the probability of falling ill, since only those who test positive will buy the policy
- increase their margin against poor experience, since they have less information that other market participants (ie individuals buying policies)
Both of these things will drive up the cost of insurance and mean that those whose test gives them a low probability of falling ill will only be able to buy insurance at a high rate, since the insurer has to assume that they have a high probability.
Essentially, preventing the insurers from genetic testing will cause an information imbalance which will damage the industry.
Note that just because you have a high probability of falling ill does NOT mean that insurers will not take you on. The insurers make their profits from the additional loading on premiums, and from investment income. If you know for definite that you have an 80% chance of falling ill, then they will charge you 80%*$100,000 = $80,000. This may be high, but it is the expected cost. On the flip side the insurer won't have to load the cost for variability, since you know for definite that the chance is 80%.
The best way to do things to my mind is to allow insurers to do genetic testing, and the results of any tests would have to be shared with the individual concerned. The insurer would not be allowed to turn anyone away as a result of testing, but they would be allowed to charge an appropriate premium. That way the insurance industry isn't forced to choose between charging everyone massively high premiums or going insovent.
The only way an insurer would be willing to charge a "normal" premium without genetic testing would be if it was a group policy where the individuals had no choice over joining - for example a national scheme, or even employer wide schemes. That way they would get a representati
It is odd the way all the news articles about MMORPGS bang on about SL, when WoW is so much larger. I guess it's easier and more mainstream-acceptable to write about people making a living selling clothes and converting it into USD than writing about the latest guild to down Ragnaros and the latest PvP rankings. Multiple servers don't help there I guess. I did remember that there was a BBC story once where the correspondant logged in as a dwarf or a gnome and promised to give updates on his progress. Never heard anything else - maybe a wolf ate him.
Which means it'll be out around Spring 2007 in Europe :(
...
So long to wait until the Xbox 360 drops in price