"It seems the trick is to use a pulse to glitch the hypervisor while it's unmapping memory, leaving a favorable page table entry"
Well shit, when you put it like that it's a wonder this thing wasn't cracked by a kindergartner two and a half years ago.:)
where does an 18-year old get samples of her own intestinal tissue? When I was in biology in high school, we were content to stop at looking up a frog's ass in the name of science.
Something is fishy about this story. Crohn's Disease isn't a rare malady. It's easily diagnosed by any doctor that specializes in digestive disorders. It seems weird to me that it couldn't be identified by a qualified doctor but an 18 year old could figure it out based on what she saw under a microscope in science class...
"Riches chose World of Warcraft over working a legit job, Riches mind became a living video game"
It sounds like he got off light compared to some WOW addicts I've read about:)
Well, yeah, in part. They had a ton of content in at launch. But they also had a franchise that has been a massive mainstream success for many years prior to launch which also helped quite a bit. Warhammer has been around for a long time but unless the mainstream has moved to the table at the back of your local game store on a Tuesday night, they don't have the brand recognition that WOW had to help compensate for the weak launch.
Yeah, NOW they are since they're trying to stick to a release date but how long have you been able to preorder the game at Gamestop, Best Buy, etc... those store starting taking preorders long before a release date is a twinkle in the publisher's eye.
In fairness to the WAR guys, THEY aren't the ones pushing preorders 2 years in advance. That would be the game stores that are taking advantage of the hype and trying to lock in your business way early.
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17549
"You are what you are at launch."
WAR has been postponed a bunch of times. If they're going to launch with severely stunted *basic* content they're essentially crippling the game for the rest of its lifespan. Seriously, when MMOs launch there are always a bunch of bugs that need to be concentrated on in the first few weeks/months of the game's life. If they can't launch 4 of the 6 capital cities, how quickly can we expect to see those FOUR remaining cities given the other demands of the game's launch? Not good for them at all. They've been in development for a while and I'm sure that they have financial realities pressuring them but this isn't going to help the game at all.
You're right that many Asians do play for fun, we've all heard about the cases of Warcraft addiction.
I think the poster was referring to the fact that there are so many gold farmers in those parts of the world, it's actually spawned a small industry and a valid career choice, if you don't mind working long hours performing menial tasks.
I suspect some of those accounts are run 24/7 by rotating shifts so there could be many more than 10m current players. Yeah, I realize what the posters was referring to, it just bugs me that the prevailing feeling amongst the WOW community seems to be Asian player = profiteer. They're serious about their games over there. I think that we (well, American players anyway) don't fully appreciate that.
Besides, if the economics of gold farming or the legal climate were different we shouldn't pretend that there wouldn't be gold farming operations in the US too.
BTW, I have to take issue with the "valid career choice" part of your post. Everything I've seen or read about those gold farming operations indicate that they're basically sweat shops. They're not career choices as much as an option for getting out of rural China and establishing yourself in the bigger cities where you can possibly get a higher paying job. The grunts (non WOW pun intended) that do the actual farming don't make it appear as though they chose gold farming over a desk job at a paper company.
Oh, I have no doubt that WOW is massively profitable and I personally don't have an issue with that. They release big content patches every three to four months roughly and they've only released one retail expansion so far. For all intents and purposes, they've been releasing "free" (as in "at no additional charge") content fairly regularly since launch. The portion of my statement that you quoted is exactly what we're paying for per the terms of service the subscribers agree to: access to their game.
I realize that whether or not they release "free" content is largely a matter of semantics and personal perspective. Personally, I see it a lot like my Netflix account. I pay a monthly fee for access to their library of DVDs. I keep paying monthly, they keep adding new movies. Same with WOW. I keep paying monthly, they keep adding new content periodically.
I'm so tired of people making such statements. You get ZERO new content for FREE. You pay a monthly subscription which funds new development, among other things. You PAID for the new content. It is not free! That depends on how you look at the fees. WOW is a service. We pay for access to the game. There are costs associated with running the game day to day. They could just release expansion packs at retail if they cared to. THAT would be paying for new content. Obviously there are a myriad of reasons why that policy would be a bad idea, but you get the drift and I think that a fair number of people look at it like that too.
No Asian players play for fun? Please. Blizzard's games have been huge in Asia for ages, more successful than they ever have been in the west. Starcraft is practically a religion in some Asian countries.
"World of Warcraft's Subscriber Definition World of Warcraft subscribers include individuals who have paid a subscription fee or have an active prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, as well as those who have purchased the game and are within their free month of access. Internet Game Room players who have accessed the game over the last thirty days are also counted as subscribers. The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired prepaid cards. Subscribers in licensees' territories are defined along the same rules."
THAT is a subscriber, not your stupid assumption. And you contradict yourself with your own source knucklehead.
This article speaks to that. Even is they aren't bringing in $15 per subscriber per month, they're still doing surprisingly well. WOW is just a phenomenon plain and simple.
It would make for an interesting marketing strategy though.
"We've been working on this day and night for the last 18 months. Frankly, I'm disappointed. GO buy it for $129 and see if you're as underwhelmed as I am.":)
they also blocked trial accounts from being able to send whispers to people who haven't sent them a whisper first or have the trail account name on their friends list. Also, they throttled the rate at which people can send whispers and te amount of text that can be sent per whisper.
A lot of stuff that will make a spammer's life more difficult.
I know that Twilight Princess was developed for GC, but I have to say that it found a great synergy with the Wii and I couldn't imagine it on any other platform. The controller scheme is so natural you forget that you're manipulating the character on screen. After the first initial minutes of play the gestures become so natural you quickly forget about the mechanical stuff. The Wii probably seemed like a gamble to Nintendo when they first started designing it but they really nailed it. The lower end graphics was risky as was the controller scheme since it makes ports a lot less straight forward, but if you play a game well made for the Wii the virtues of the machine are obvious.
All Burning Crusade really did was reset the game to a level 70 cap and make everything accomplished before level 61 irrelevent. I've read this on the WoW boards too. What would you expect to happen with an expansion? If they increase the level cap and give you more quests and things to do, of course the uber lv60 gear you before isn't going to be as super as it was. I recognize that people spent a lot of time gathering up that gear in raids and what not but the game has to go onward and upwards at some point doesn't it?
Yeah, I disagreed with that point in the review also. I like the Blood Elf land better but I don't think the Draenei area feels like an afterthought at all. There are some really fun quests there, the one where you travel over the area learning how to speak furlbog, flying off the cliff, etc... is particularly good. I chalked the differences up to the Blood Elves having lived in their area for centuries vs. the Draenei having just crashed in Azuremyst and made a camp there. Frankly, after having done all the quests in both areas, I was disappointed to go out to the old zones. Their look and the quality of the quests just seems less to me now:)
Good review generally, I just have one point of contention I came across while reading it:
I'm sure that a large part of this decision was to try and cater to the larger "casual" player base and stop the hemorrhage of players they were losing to other games. At what point did WoW start hemorrhaging players? Subscriptions have been on a steady increase since the game launched and I haven't seen any evidence to say otherwise. They hit 7 million subscribers a month or so before Christmas and 8 million afterwards. I'd argue that making the raid content in BC more casual friendly was just a reflection of them understanding their customer base. You can't have 8 million subscribers that are all hard core raider types. If it didn't start out as one, certainly WoW is a mainstream casual friendly game now and they've simply acknowledged that.
This is not troubling for Sony - let's check Xbox 360 last year at this time. Gamasutra [gamasutra.com] reports that last January 2006 Xbox 360 sold approximately 250,000 units, about the same as PS3 this year. That's without a competitor with an excellent games library or a competitor which is the newest fad and phenomenon that outsold you 2:1. In fact, this January the Xbox only sold 40,000 more than last January. And that's without the supply issue that last year's sales displayed. So basically, the 360 isn't exactly red hot either. If the 360 was so amazing, it'd be killing the PS3. As it is, it's barely holding on. Trying to judge real demand for a console this early in its life is a tricky thing to do. Wasn't the XB360 still impossible to find sitting on retail shelves at this time last year? Would it have sold more had they been able to fill the channel with product? The PS3 IS available at retail now and sales are sluggish. You could assume that early XB360 sales would have been stronger had they just had the product available so you comparison isn't quite that clear. Let's compare PS3 sales numbers after a year on the market to the first year sales of the XB360 and see how they stack up for a more level comparison.
Slashdot Mirror
"It seems the trick is to use a pulse to glitch the hypervisor while it's unmapping memory, leaving a favorable page table entry" Well shit, when you put it like that it's a wonder this thing wasn't cracked by a kindergartner two and a half years ago. :)
where does an 18-year old get samples of her own intestinal tissue? When I was in biology in high school, we were content to stop at looking up a frog's ass in the name of science. Something is fishy about this story. Crohn's Disease isn't a rare malady. It's easily diagnosed by any doctor that specializes in digestive disorders. It seems weird to me that it couldn't be identified by a qualified doctor but an 18 year old could figure it out based on what she saw under a microscope in science class...
"Beyond that, everything about it appears to be pure speculation." How about everything including that is pure speculation...
"Riches chose World of Warcraft over working a legit job, Riches mind became a living video game" It sounds like he got off light compared to some WOW addicts I've read about :)
?
Well, yeah, in part. They had a ton of content in at launch. But they also had a franchise that has been a massive mainstream success for many years prior to launch which also helped quite a bit. Warhammer has been around for a long time but unless the mainstream has moved to the table at the back of your local game store on a Tuesday night, they don't have the brand recognition that WOW had to help compensate for the weak launch.
Yeah, NOW they are since they're trying to stick to a release date but how long have you been able to preorder the game at Gamestop, Best Buy, etc... those store starting taking preorders long before a release date is a twinkle in the publisher's eye.
In fairness to the WAR guys, THEY aren't the ones pushing preorders 2 years in advance. That would be the game stores that are taking advantage of the hype and trying to lock in your business way early.
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17549 "You are what you are at launch." WAR has been postponed a bunch of times. If they're going to launch with severely stunted *basic* content they're essentially crippling the game for the rest of its lifespan. Seriously, when MMOs launch there are always a bunch of bugs that need to be concentrated on in the first few weeks/months of the game's life. If they can't launch 4 of the 6 capital cities, how quickly can we expect to see those FOUR remaining cities given the other demands of the game's launch? Not good for them at all. They've been in development for a while and I'm sure that they have financial realities pressuring them but this isn't going to help the game at all.
So it's like a disco up your ass? If you're getting an endoscopy, a party up your butt is likely the last thing you want to see.
LOL. At least I know who the mod was :-)
Oh, I have no doubt that WOW is massively profitable and I personally don't have an issue with that. They release big content patches every three to four months roughly and they've only released one retail expansion so far. For all intents and purposes, they've been releasing "free" (as in "at no additional charge") content fairly regularly since launch. The portion of my statement that you quoted is exactly what we're paying for per the terms of service the subscribers agree to: access to their game. I realize that whether or not they release "free" content is largely a matter of semantics and personal perspective. Personally, I see it a lot like my Netflix account. I pay a monthly fee for access to their library of DVDs. I keep paying monthly, they keep adding new movies. Same with WOW. I keep paying monthly, they keep adding new content periodically.
Posting a comment that links to an article with actual facts earns me a troll tag? Nice moderator power trip.
I love this argument. It's entirely based on speculation and personal bias.
No Asian players play for fun? Please. Blizzard's games have been huge in Asia for ages, more successful than they ever have been in the west. Starcraft is practically a religion in some Asian countries.
You need to learn to read:
"World of Warcraft's Subscriber Definition
World of Warcraft subscribers include individuals who have paid a subscription fee or have an active prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, as well as those who have purchased the game and are within their free month of access. Internet Game Room players who have accessed the game over the last thirty days are also counted as subscribers. The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired prepaid cards. Subscribers in licensees' territories are defined along the same rules."
THAT is a subscriber, not your stupid assumption. And you contradict yourself with your own source knucklehead.
Actually, if analysts are correct, Blizzard's average revenue per subscriber is still quite high, even with Asian players factored in.
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=16519
This article speaks to that. Even is they aren't bringing in $15 per subscriber per month, they're still doing surprisingly well. WOW is just a phenomenon plain and simple.
It would make for an interesting marketing strategy though.
:)
"We've been working on this day and night for the last 18 months. Frankly, I'm disappointed. GO buy it for $129 and see if you're as underwhelmed as I am."
they also blocked trial accounts from being able to send whispers to people who haven't sent them a whisper first or have the trail account name on their friends list. Also, they throttled the rate at which people can send whispers and te amount of text that can be sent per whisper.
A lot of stuff that will make a spammer's life more difficult.
I know that Twilight Princess was developed for GC, but I have to say that it found a great synergy with the Wii and I couldn't imagine it on any other platform. The controller scheme is so natural you forget that you're manipulating the character on screen. After the first initial minutes of play the gestures become so natural you quickly forget about the mechanical stuff. The Wii probably seemed like a gamble to Nintendo when they first started designing it but they really nailed it. The lower end graphics was risky as was the controller scheme since it makes ports a lot less straight forward, but if you play a game well made for the Wii the virtues of the machine are obvious.
Yeah, I disagreed with that point in the review also. I like the Blood Elf land better but I don't think the Draenei area feels like an afterthought at all. There are some really fun quests there, the one where you travel over the area learning how to speak furlbog, flying off the cliff, etc... is particularly good. I chalked the differences up to the Blood Elves having lived in their area for centuries vs. the Draenei having just crashed in Azuremyst and made a camp there. Frankly, after having done all the quests in both areas, I was disappointed to go out to the old zones. Their look and the quality of the quests just seems less to me now :)