Keep in mind that inflation adjusted this huge unwieldy brick cost ~14k USD in today's currency according to a quick lookup on an inflation calculator.
You can get netbooks/ultrabooks with good battery life for "pocket change" in comparison today or still more portable mobile workstations with additional high capacity battery packs for less than what the first mac portable cost back then.
True, copyright/IP law around here is quite bad, but I wouldn't agree that the courts are in Big Media's pocket (well, except for Hamburg, obviously), the pirate party has been gaining considerable traction causing some rethinking in the bigger parties when it comes to sucking up to the content industry for IP legislation and it doesn't change that this verdict has reasonable chances of getting overturned if appealed considering the stellar track record of the OLG Hamburg when it comes to that.
For what it's worth, this is a copyright case and Hamburg is the preferred location for ridiculous lawsuits by rights holders due to their excessively industry friendly media rights chamber.
The BGH overturns their verdicts with satisfying regularity and the defendant hopefully will appeal that one.
Lack of LAN IS a gameplay flaw. LANs create an immersion environment that cant be replicated any other way.
You can all sit in the same room, on the same network, and play Starcraft 2.
You can just play with each other, you can play lan games.
The only real complaint I'm seeing here is "It's not easy to download copies for all our friends and play together without buying the game"
[...]
Other than that, you can 100% recreate the experience, as long as you have internet access.
And that's where the trouble starts.
Some of my favourite LAN parties in the last decade or so were done in places without direct internet access. - My parent's garage: Adjacent to the house, but no cabling there, 15-20m to the DSL modem and my parents would've killed me if I had to prop open a door for a LAN cable letting flies and mosquitoes into the house all night. - My cousin's garage: 10-20m away from the house and on the opposite side to the location of their DSL modem inside the house. - A mate's backyard party hut (complete with wet bar and pool table): 50+m from the house and any internet access. - A mate's deceased grandmother's vacant house: No phone or internet at all. A WiFi bridge can be dodgy (access points behind multiple walls) and cell phone reception is spotty at best at either of those places which rules out phone tethering and I don't know how well it would work either way, setting up NAT behind a tethered phone that is already behind the service provider's NAT or god forbid, the game wanting to download a patch over a volume limited phone contract with probably mediocre speed.
Lastly, even if you have a place where you have no problems accessing your ordinary internet connection, ISP outages can happen, especially if you live in a rural area where phone cables aren't run underground (takes only one tree falling over during a storm or one drunk driver hitting a phone pole) or one construction worker to accidentally the whole cable if it is underground.
I'll take my classic LAN mode and offline single player every day and games that are not MMO but force you to be logged in/online even for single player or LAN play can fuck right off again and will not see a dime from me.
>Multiplayer Avatar interaction was indefinitely postponed That struck me as odd for an mmo... it sounded like it's a single-player experience. For those of you who, like me, don't know Eve, normally in Eve you only see each other's ships, but it is multi-player.
Correct, I probably should have worded that better. You can interact with other player's spaceships (preferably through violence:D), but your virtual flesh and blood Avatar is currently only accessible in said single player environment (or a portrait).
>It's about the fact that we pay a subscription each month (an expensive one compared to other MMOs, I might add) and we feel that we deserve anything they develop for free.
Like all of those shiny new expansions they release every 6 months for absolutely nothing?
Don't get me wrong, a $60 monocle is total bullshit, but demonizing them for not giving you all of those neat vanity items for free is a little overboard.
Well, there hasn't been an expansion worthy of praise since Apocrypha in 2009...
Incursions wasn't completely horrible because it added High Sec PVE that doesn't make me want to stab my brain out to escape the boredom, but even that was poorly (read: not at all) followed up (risk/reward is seriously skewed in high sec and easily farmed in the lower tier sites for relatively ridiculous/easy ISK per hour) and most likely done with extremely few development resources as most of the individual bits were already in the game in one form or another while the nose candy enthusiasts in Team:AWESOME: pissed away money on the for now indefinitely postponed full Incarna (Establishments etc.).
Oh, and I forgot one other point that was pointed out in another comment:
I'm already bloody paying a premium subscription price for EVE (well, not any more at the moment) and double dipping (or rather attempting to do so) into a customer's wallet like that also offended quite a lot of players in conjunction with the idiotic price points. A couple of EUR/USD for a full set of high tier clothes might have been acceptable to some in that context, but the way it was rolled out, not a chance.
Microtransactions have a place in gaming. That place is Free To Play games or to justify further development time on an already aging one time purchase title (like Team Fortress 2 before it became completely F2P and MT based).
The EVE MT experiment did not just fail because of that, it failed because of a multitude of reasons, most of which a sane person would have seen coming from miles away.
First of all, the NEX Store (the name of this abomination, yes I'm biased against it, deal with it) was released in a vacuum of a completely single player environment. The only place your purchase will be seen in all its glory is in the confines of your own game client in a shabby little hole called the Captain's Quarter (or dismissively, the Captain's Closet). Multiplayer Avatar interaction was indefinitely postponed for now (they finally admitted/realized that they had nothing fun in terms of gameplay value on the drawing board for it, go figure), so the only way your purchase is visible to other players is through the Tiny Avatar portrait (which is one of the reasons why the Monocle was the only item seeing significant sales, the other being trolls buying them to enrage the more easily excited opponents of microtransactions in EVE).
Second, the concept of a market-less (if you ignore the resale), infinite supply item is diametrically opposed to the core concept of EVE's player run economy and sandbox nature. Everything in EVE has a price defined by supply and demand. The price of the Vanity Items is based solely on the current ISK equivalent value of a month's worth of game time. For a more sane approach on that and how it would be at least somewhat acceptable, I made a thread about that on a community forum in the wake of the ingame riots.
Third, even the low-price tier is still retardedly expensive. Even the cheapest items still cost 1000 AUR which amounts to 1/3 of a PLEX (the Gametime Code token which converts to 3000 AUR, clocking in at around 17 USD from a cheap supplier) and a full set of clothes (boots, pants, shirt/jacket, etc) would set you back over 20 bucks worth of PLEX/Gametime.
The reason given in TFA, while certainly not wrong as it really was bloody stupid to launch with almost exclusively high-tier items, compounds with all this and resulted in a huge backlash against CCP over it (and other poor decisions and a backlog of frustration over the last two years of neglect towards the core gameplay) but was definitely not the only or even the main reason for it.
I should probably also point out that the prices of the items in general are also hugely immersion breaking. The ISK equivalent price of a monocle (the highest priced item) is roughly that of a dreadnought. Which is a capital ship. The second largest and expensive tier of ships (after supercapitals). And even the cheapest boots cost as much as a battleship. Admittedly, you apparently buy a lifetime subscription to your clothes as they don't get destroyed upon player death like implants (another decidedly un-EVE feature of the Vanity Items) but that still seems somewhat extreme...
Either way, I don't know why this is surprising except for one fact: That it didn't happen much, much sooner. That's what happens when there's no real world consequences for your behavior (or you think you can avoid them).
That's not surprising. It happened before and it will happen again. EVE has a very rich history of large scale scams, reaching from investment scams like this one to long-planned infiltrations of alliances like the infamous heist by GHSC (who incidentally ripped assets to the tune of 200ish billion ISK off one of the major alliances again just recently).
The only "surprising" and novel bit about this story is that he apparently/supposedly didn't do it for the e-fame or e-gain, but for RMTing the scammed ISK because of real life troubles, which was the reason for his subsequent banning.
The reason eve fails is BECAUSE it replicates the real world too well. When you "play" Eve, one gets the distinct feeling that one is actually not playing a game but doing work. The feeling of the drudgery of work.
Maybe CCP will learn from the financial crisis that a utopian hypercapitalist world is not only a fantasy world, it's not all that fun.
I have to disagree on that one. EVE is what you make out of it. You can do tedious and boring stuff like run an industrial enterprise (aka Spreadsheets Online), mine asteroids (mindnumbingly boring), do PVE (which is admittedly terrible in EVE) combat or you can go the PVP route (be it as a pirate, mercenary, grunt in one of the major power blocks or declaring war on carebear corps for "protection money") and blow up other people's pixels leading to tasty bitter tears for your drinking pleasure (complete loss of whatever you're flying when you get blown up can lead to amusing smack talk).
Or you could do something completely different and do the social engineering and scamming (completely accepted by the TOS as long as you stay within game mechanics) that keeps EVE in the mainstream news.
It's a sandbox, there should be something in it for you to have fun with as long as you can befriend the general gameplay, setting and the UI (which is constantly improving) surrounding it.
Why was this guy tagged as a troll? I mean, despite his borderline vitriol about Microsoft, his concerns about the legitimacy of the website seem pretty sensible to me, if one bothers reading the article and following the link to said website.
Hell yes. Seriously, the site looks like it was designed by a 5 year old downs victim and while I don't like the Microsoft and Asus sites, none of those two are made nearly as bad.
+1 to the questioning legitimacy crew.
Until MS/Asus confirm or deny a participation in this, I will treat is as non-existant.
Nothing to see here, move along.
PS: And if I had mod points atm, I wouldn't have bothered to post this but instead just modded up the grandparent.
Also, if you're into the whole "Free as in speech, not free as in Beer" thing, Ati should be the hardware of choice, even though their proprietary drivers aren't as good as NV's.
And apart from ATI's support for OSS driver projects, NVidia has pulled off some highlyquestionable moves in the recent past, comparable on the moral scale to Microsoft business tactics, effectively making them a no-buy in my book as long as ATI puts out competetively priced and performing products.
It's "just" the chief of the Hessian section of the DPolG, not the Chief on the federal level.
And there's several police unions as well, with the DPolG only being second largest (about half as big as the GdP with a few micro unions not worth mentioning).
Apart from that, it was pretty clear that everyone's gonna scream BANZOR KILLARGAMES after the little fuckwit ganked his old school, so no big surprise there.
What is imo most surprising is how careful and diplomatic Christian Pfeiffer is with his statements. He usually was pretty rabid anti-"Killergame" the last couple years and I expected him to gloat and go "TOLD YA" to his critics, but he actually says stuff like games are not the deciding factor, not the original cause for stuff like that, just a small piece of a big puzzle with social issues being the real problem, etc. I'm confused. It's like if Jack Thompson would go ahead and offer to become BFF with John Carmack.
The best bet if your project is smaller than about 20GB is to buy a box full of ram and use a FAT32 formatted ramdrive. Orders of magnitude faster than even an SSD.
I kinda see a minor nuisance with data loss in case of a power failure unless you have some kind of battery backup or UPS. And it will have to be completely written from/to a non-volatile storage medium everytime you power up/down the workstation.
If you could just configure it to be some kind of an advanced cache that constantly reads and writes to the hard disk and just takes the hit from the I/O spikes off it, I could see it being awesome.
Sovereignty: Control level for a given solar system. Comes in levels 1-4 with levels 1-3 taking each a week to kick in and sov 4 being constellation sovereignty, which I won't try to explain for sake of the mental health of all of us. Sovereignty 3 is needed for Cynojammers and Jump Bridges (which, in a nutshell, allow for faster travel by bypassing the stargate network and getting friendly capital ships into cynojammed systems).
ISK reserves: ISK = Ingame money (InterStellar Kredits), which coincidentially has the same abbreviation as the Icelandic currency (where CCP is based).
cyno-jammers: Capital ships cannot use the ordinary stargates, but have their own jumpdrives that need to calibrate to what military experts call a Cynosural Field. Cyno-Jammers prevent creating cyno fields, effectively making a system immune to surprise visits by hostile capital ships.
capfleet towers: Where's that mentioned?
director level access: The other comment sums it up well, sudo.;o)
This whole incident has nothing to do with Goonswarm infiltrating BoB with spies.
The person responsible was "just" a disgruntled BNC director that wanted to go out with a huge bang and GoonsFleet (The Mittani, to be precise) just gave him advice on how to maximize the damage he'd inflict on his way out.
More importantly, 11.5 million people play WoW. That's a MASSIVE player base and, given that the type of game is a massively multiplayer online game, that "massive" part is kind of important.
And how many of those players play on one same shard? The massive part matters only if I can actually interact with those other players and the biggest US realms have about 35k characters of levels 10+ rolled on it. That's characters only, mind you.
I don't have any numbers on it, but if you could count only actual accounts/players (and/or players logged in at the same time), those numbers would be way less than that, too.
Anyway, if you're gonna go with this argument, EvE Online beats the whole bunch in that department without breaking a sweat. It's where the massively multiplayer aspect is truly massive with a peak of around 45k accounts (probably a bit less if you discard alt accounts) logged in at the same time in one persistent game universe.
Slashdot Mirror
Keep in mind that inflation adjusted this huge unwieldy brick cost ~14k USD in today's currency according to a quick lookup on an inflation calculator.
You can get netbooks/ultrabooks with good battery life for "pocket change" in comparison today or still more portable mobile workstations with additional high capacity battery packs for less than what the first mac portable cost back then.
True, copyright/IP law around here is quite bad, but I wouldn't agree that the courts are in Big Media's pocket (well, except for Hamburg, obviously), the pirate party has been gaining considerable traction causing some rethinking in the bigger parties when it comes to sucking up to the content industry for IP legislation and it doesn't change that this verdict has reasonable chances of getting overturned if appealed considering the stellar track record of the OLG Hamburg when it comes to that.
For what it's worth, this is a copyright case and Hamburg is the preferred location for ridiculous lawsuits by rights holders due to their excessively industry friendly media rights chamber.
The BGH overturns their verdicts with satisfying regularity and the defendant hopefully will appeal that one.
HO2? >_>
(You meant to say Dihydrogen Monoxide)
>
Lack of LAN IS a gameplay flaw. LANs create an immersion environment that cant be replicated any other way.
You can all sit in the same room, on the same network, and play Starcraft 2.
You can just play with each other, you can play lan games.
The only real complaint I'm seeing here is "It's not easy to download copies for all our friends and play together without buying the game"
[...]
Other than that, you can 100% recreate the experience, as long as you have internet access.
And that's where the trouble starts.
Some of my favourite LAN parties in the last decade or so were done in places without direct internet access.
- My parent's garage: Adjacent to the house, but no cabling there, 15-20m to the DSL modem and my parents would've killed me if I had to prop open a door for a LAN cable letting flies and mosquitoes into the house all night.
- My cousin's garage: 10-20m away from the house and on the opposite side to the location of their DSL modem inside the house.
- A mate's backyard party hut (complete with wet bar and pool table): 50+m from the house and any internet access.
- A mate's deceased grandmother's vacant house: No phone or internet at all.
A WiFi bridge can be dodgy (access points behind multiple walls) and cell phone reception is spotty at best at either of those places which rules out phone tethering and I don't know how well it would work either way, setting up NAT behind a tethered phone that is already behind the service provider's NAT or god forbid, the game wanting to download a patch over a volume limited phone contract with probably mediocre speed.
Lastly, even if you have a place where you have no problems accessing your ordinary internet connection, ISP outages can happen, especially if you live in a rural area where phone cables aren't run underground (takes only one tree falling over during a storm or one drunk driver hitting a phone pole) or one construction worker to accidentally the whole cable if it is underground.
If you don't think this is an issue, you've probably never been on the receiving end of an internet outage during your recreational time, as an internet outage is exactly when I tend to fire up a good singleplayer game.
I'll take my classic LAN mode and offline single player every day and games that are not MMO but force you to be logged in/online even for single player or LAN play can fuck right off again and will not see a dime from me.
>Multiplayer Avatar interaction was indefinitely postponed
That struck me as odd for an mmo... it sounded like it's a single-player experience.
For those of you who, like me, don't know Eve, normally in Eve you only see each other's ships, but it is multi-player.
Correct, I probably should have worded that better. You can interact with other player's spaceships (preferably through violence :D), but your virtual flesh and blood Avatar is currently only accessible in said single player environment (or a portrait).
>It's about the fact that we pay a subscription each month (an expensive one compared to other MMOs, I might add) and we feel that we deserve anything they develop for free.
Like all of those shiny new expansions they release every 6 months for absolutely nothing?
Don't get me wrong, a $60 monocle is total bullshit, but demonizing them for not giving you all of those neat vanity items for free is a little overboard.
Well, there hasn't been an expansion worthy of praise since Apocrypha in 2009...
Incursions wasn't completely horrible because it added High Sec PVE that doesn't make me want to stab my brain out to escape the boredom, but even that was poorly (read: not at all) followed up (risk/reward is seriously skewed in high sec and easily farmed in the lower tier sites for relatively ridiculous/easy ISK per hour) and most likely done with extremely few development resources as most of the individual bits were already in the game in one form or another while the nose candy enthusiasts in Team :AWESOME: pissed away money on the for now indefinitely postponed full Incarna (Establishments etc.).
Oh, and I forgot one other point that was pointed out in another comment:
I'm already bloody paying a premium subscription price for EVE (well, not any more at the moment) and double dipping (or rather attempting to do so) into a customer's wallet like that also offended quite a lot of players in conjunction with the idiotic price points. A couple of EUR/USD for a full set of high tier clothes might have been acceptable to some in that context, but the way it was rolled out, not a chance.
Microtransactions have a place in gaming. That place is Free To Play games or to justify further development time on an already aging one time purchase title (like Team Fortress 2 before it became completely F2P and MT based).
The EVE MT experiment did not just fail because of that, it failed because of a multitude of reasons, most of which a sane person would have seen coming from miles away.
First of all, the NEX Store (the name of this abomination, yes I'm biased against it, deal with it) was released in a vacuum of a completely single player environment. The only place your purchase will be seen in all its glory is in the confines of your own game client in a shabby little hole called the Captain's Quarter (or dismissively, the Captain's Closet). Multiplayer Avatar interaction was indefinitely postponed for now (they finally admitted/realized that they had nothing fun in terms of gameplay value on the drawing board for it, go figure), so the only way your purchase is visible to other players is through the Tiny Avatar portrait (which is one of the reasons why the Monocle was the only item seeing significant sales, the other being trolls buying them to enrage the more easily excited opponents of microtransactions in EVE).
Second, the concept of a market-less (if you ignore the resale), infinite supply item is diametrically opposed to the core concept of EVE's player run economy and sandbox nature. Everything in EVE has a price defined by supply and demand. The price of the Vanity Items is based solely on the current ISK equivalent value of a month's worth of game time.
For a more sane approach on that and how it would be at least somewhat acceptable, I made a thread about that on a community forum in the wake of the ingame riots.
Third, even the low-price tier is still retardedly expensive. Even the cheapest items still cost 1000 AUR which amounts to 1/3 of a PLEX (the Gametime Code token which converts to 3000 AUR, clocking in at around 17 USD from a cheap supplier) and a full set of clothes (boots, pants, shirt/jacket, etc) would set you back over 20 bucks worth of PLEX/Gametime.
The reason given in TFA, while certainly not wrong as it really was bloody stupid to launch with almost exclusively high-tier items, compounds with all this and resulted in a huge backlash against CCP over it (and other poor decisions and a backlog of frustration over the last two years of neglect towards the core gameplay) but was definitely not the only or even the main reason for it.
I should probably also point out that the prices of the items in general are also hugely immersion breaking. The ISK equivalent price of a monocle (the highest priced item) is roughly that of a dreadnought. Which is a capital ship. The second largest and expensive tier of ships (after supercapitals).
And even the cheapest boots cost as much as a battleship.
Admittedly, you apparently buy a lifetime subscription to your clothes as they don't get destroyed upon player death like implants (another decidedly un-EVE feature of the Vanity Items) but that still seems somewhat extreme...
I expected Heroin/Crack dispensers reading the headline.
Left disappointed.
Either way, I don't know why this is surprising except for one fact: That it didn't happen much, much sooner. That's what happens when there's no real world consequences for your behavior (or you think you can avoid them).
That's not surprising. It happened before and it will happen again.
EVE has a very rich history of large scale scams, reaching from investment scams like this one to long-planned infiltrations of alliances like the infamous heist by GHSC (who incidentally ripped assets to the tune of 200ish billion ISK off one of the major alliances again just recently).
The only "surprising" and novel bit about this story is that he apparently/supposedly didn't do it for the e-fame or e-gain, but for RMTing the scammed ISK because of real life troubles, which was the reason for his subsequent banning.
Aye, i get tired of boarding trade vessels and ransoming the crew's lives for cash to pay off my debts. I do enough of that in the real world!
Am I the only one that had to think about Somalian pirates peacefully mining in High Sec after reading this post? :)
I thought EVE already allowed you to convert ISK into USD through them at a fixed exchange rate...
Nope. Second Life does that, AFAIK.
The reason eve fails is BECAUSE it replicates the real world too well. When you "play" Eve, one gets the distinct feeling that one is actually not playing a game but doing work. The feeling of the drudgery of work.
Maybe CCP will learn from the financial crisis that a utopian hypercapitalist world is not only a fantasy world, it's not all that fun.
I have to disagree on that one. EVE is what you make out of it. You can do tedious and boring stuff like run an industrial enterprise (aka Spreadsheets Online), mine asteroids (mindnumbingly boring), do PVE (which is admittedly terrible in EVE) combat or you can go the PVP route (be it as a pirate, mercenary, grunt in one of the major power blocks or declaring war on carebear corps for "protection money") and blow up other people's pixels leading to tasty bitter tears for your drinking pleasure (complete loss of whatever you're flying when you get blown up can lead to amusing smack talk).
Or you could do something completely different and do the social engineering and scamming (completely accepted by the TOS as long as you stay within game mechanics) that keeps EVE in the mainstream news.
It's a sandbox, there should be something in it for you to have fun with as long as you can befriend the general gameplay, setting and the UI (which is constantly improving) surrounding it.
If it gets more people interested in the game who cares that Slashdot is a month behind the curve?
Nobody. I just felt like pointing it out.
Because for EVE veterans a scam hardly qualifies as "news". ;)
CCP already has something like that in place in EVE Online.
You can buy a GTC (Game Time Code) and directly sell it to other players for ISK (ingame money) through a secured official system on the website or convert it into a in-game tradeable item called Pilot License EXtension (PLEX).
It happened early June already, though it apparently took quite a while for it to propagate to the mainstream news.
Why was this guy tagged as a troll? I mean, despite his borderline vitriol about Microsoft, his concerns about the legitimacy of the website seem pretty sensible to me, if one bothers reading the article and following the link to said website.
Hell yes. Seriously, the site looks like it was designed by a 5 year old downs victim and while I don't like the Microsoft and Asus sites, none of those two are made nearly as bad.
+1 to the questioning legitimacy crew.
Until MS/Asus confirm or deny a participation in this, I will treat is as non-existant.
Nothing to see here, move along.
PS: And if I had mod points atm, I wouldn't have bothered to post this but instead just modded up the grandparent.
Also, if you're into the whole "Free as in speech, not free as in Beer" thing, Ati should be the hardware of choice, even though their proprietary drivers aren't as good as NV's.
And apart from ATI's support for OSS driver projects, NVidia has pulled off some highly questionable moves in the recent past, comparable on the moral scale to Microsoft business tactics, effectively making them a no-buy in my book as long as ATI puts out competetively priced and performing products.
Crappy journalistic research.
It's "just" the chief of the Hessian section of the DPolG, not the Chief on the federal level.
And there's several police unions as well, with the DPolG only being second largest (about half as big as the GdP with a few micro unions not worth mentioning).
Apart from that, it was pretty clear that everyone's gonna scream BANZOR KILLARGAMES after the little fuckwit ganked his old school, so no big surprise there.
What is imo most surprising is how careful and diplomatic Christian Pfeiffer is with his statements. He usually was pretty rabid anti-"Killergame" the last couple years and I expected him to gloat and go "TOLD YA" to his critics, but he actually says stuff like games are not the deciding factor, not the original cause for stuff like that, just a small piece of a big puzzle with social issues being the real problem, etc.
I'm confused. It's like if Jack Thompson would go ahead and offer to become BFF with John Carmack.
The best bet if your project is smaller than about 20GB is to buy a box full of ram and use a FAT32 formatted ramdrive. Orders of magnitude faster than even an SSD.
I kinda see a minor nuisance with data loss in case of a power failure unless you have some kind of battery backup or UPS. And it will have to be completely written from/to a non-volatile storage medium everytime you power up/down the workstation.
If you could just configure it to be some kind of an advanced cache that constantly reads and writes to the hard disk and just takes the hit from the I/O spikes off it, I could see it being awesome.
Sovereignty: Control level for a given solar system. Comes in levels 1-4 with levels 1-3 taking each a week to kick in and sov 4 being constellation sovereignty, which I won't try to explain for sake of the mental health of all of us. Sovereignty 3 is needed for Cynojammers and Jump Bridges (which, in a nutshell, allow for faster travel by bypassing the stargate network and getting friendly capital ships into cynojammed systems).
ISK reserves: ISK = Ingame money (InterStellar Kredits), which coincidentially has the same abbreviation as the Icelandic currency (where CCP is based).
cyno-jammers: Capital ships cannot use the ordinary stargates, but have their own jumpdrives that need to calibrate to what military experts call a Cynosural Field. Cyno-Jammers prevent creating cyno fields, effectively making a system immune to surprise visits by hostile capital ships.
capfleet towers: Where's that mentioned?
director level access: The other comment sums it up well, sudo. ;o)
This whole incident has nothing to do with Goonswarm infiltrating BoB with spies.
The person responsible was "just" a disgruntled BNC director that wanted to go out with a huge bang and GoonsFleet (The Mittani, to be precise) just gave him advice on how to maximize the damage he'd inflict on his way out.
More importantly, 11.5 million people play WoW. That's a MASSIVE player base and, given that the type of game is a massively multiplayer online game, that "massive" part is kind of important.
And how many of those players play on one same shard? The massive part matters only if I can actually interact with those other players and the biggest US realms have about 35k characters of levels 10+ rolled on it. That's characters only, mind you.
I don't have any numbers on it, but if you could count only actual accounts/players (and/or players logged in at the same time), those numbers would be way less than that, too.
Anyway, if you're gonna go with this argument, EvE Online beats the whole bunch in that department without breaking a sweat. It's where the massively multiplayer aspect is truly massive with a peak of around 45k accounts (probably a bit less if you discard alt accounts) logged in at the same time in one persistent game universe.