It's a credit card, has a VISA/Mastercard logo, and pulls money straight out of a HELO as opposed to a dedicated credit card account. I don't have one. Their only advantage over a regular CC is the lower interest rate.
By the very definition it IS a credit card as it is NOT a debit card. Any purchases you put on the card, or money withdrawn using the card are borrowed and subject to an interest rate which may or may not rise depending on the terms of your HELO.
First of all - what the fuck is wrong with you that you compare this to rape?
Second, in general all online scams involve something that is too good to be true. They require the victim to cooperate by suspending all logic. Nobody forced the man to send money.
Chances are that this "victim" fell for a woman who was stunning in every way imaginable - a woman who he must have been able to realize was out of his league. (If she was not, he'd pursue such a woman offline.)
He is no more a "victim" than someone who buys an overpriced set of brittle dull steak knives from a late night infomercial because they showed them cutting through bricks and he fell for it.
I could pull about 75k out of my credit cards. I could also get a HELO backed "creditcard", I keep getting offers for HELOs for anywhere from 100k to 250k.
So really it'd not be that hard for me to pull out 200k from a "credit card".
Not one of the things you listed was why APB failed. As someone who did play APB I can tell you that it failed due to these issues:
Massive cheating. At least 1/3rd of the players used bots. This is actually a low estimate. The number grew to the point where nearly everyone was botting in the end. RTW was unable to catch or ban cheaters. There was no plan to handle cheaters at release, PunkBusters was implemented late almost right before release and could not be turned on without causing massive game breaking server wide lag spikes. In short, everyone who could, cheated, everyone else quit.
Repetitive game play, few maps, few weapons. There are only two maps, both are fairly poor quality with lots of exploitable areas, as in places where you have a tremendous advantage over anyone trying to kill you. The game play was highly repetitive and all the missions could be broken down to several simple objectives unless players on both teams were evenly balanced and could make things a little exciting - but this almost never happened because of cheating and...
Massive balance issues. The game would pair team vs team, and it would try to do so based on the performance of the team on other missions, so if you won 10 missions in a row, you were considered a high threat player and would be teamed against someone else high threat. If someone else high threat was not available, you would be teamed against a larger number of lower threat players. On paper, this may have worked. Unfortunately because as a player you are able to turn down a match, the low threat players almost always turned down the high threat player match. End result, 2 high threat players get matched against 4 low threat players, 2 of the low threat players turn down the match, the other 2 accept and get destroyed by the 2 high threat players who outrank them.
Horribly broken economy. During the first few weeks of release, you could make 112k APB$ by standing in front of a customization kiosk for 10 hours. Everyone did this. As a result all money was worthless. When the kiosks were fixed, there were still plenty AFK exploits and witnessing exploits. The AFK exploit being the worst of the two as it involved a macroed player sitting in an active zone accepting every single mission. So now not only were you matched against cheaters but one of your teammates was a macro.
Poor combat dynamics. Guns did not feel right, this is hard to explain but everyone who played the game will agree. All guns had hardcoded maximum range and as a result some guns were made 'situational' to the point of being useless. In short everyone used a medium range gun, and the botters used SMGs as with a bot you had 100% accuracy anyway...
Driving lag. Personally I am on a 50/50 FIOS connection so I thought the driving was ok - until I played the game on a regular 1.5m cable line. The driving on a slow connection was unmanagble with up to a 2 second delay in car response. This paired with the fact that some of the car physics was simply broken, as in some cars had almost no weight and were unable to get any traction, made driving impossible for many if not most. I pretty much always had to be the driver as the one with the best connection. (Of course when punkbusters was turned on, the 3-5 seconds of lag still resulted in me plowing into the wall at full speed, catching the car on fire, and the lag disappearing just in time for us to blow up.)
In short, this game was just not done. Had it been done well, I'd still play it.
The reason your 2 year old PC can still play "modern" games is that there has not been a major leap forward in graphics since Vista introduced DX 10.
There has not been a single 'revolutionary' chipset since the 8800. The current nvidia line is unimpressive and offers minor gains over the past TWO generations.
The video card market revolved around being able to sell a bunch of bleeding edge $800 cards followed by a ton of $200-400 ones. You cannot sell $800 video cards in this market.
If/when the economy recovers and people are once again willing to cough up money on video cards and entertainment, there will be major advancement in the video card market. Until then, it simply does not make any sense to develop and release the new cards when they will not be bought. It's far more profitable to concentrate on cost cutting with the current generation and releasing the same chips but for less.
It's the economy. With us in what is a rather nasty depression, unemployment at record highs and consumer confidence down to nothing who exactly is going to buy an $900 BFG video card?
Yeah 4 years ago I did buy a pair of $900 BFG watercooled cards. Yes they still work and are in use. Would I be willing to do it again in this economy? NO.
You've clearly not been on a modern aircraft carrier. They'll stay afloat just fine after several hits with WW2 weapons. Does not matter if the shell blows through several compartments. They will all be sealed and the flooding will be contained. This is largely due to WW2 weapons being totally insignificant compared to today's weapons.
Modern day warships are designed to deal with anti ship missiles like the Harpoon which packs just under 500lbs of modern explosives. For reference a Mark 48 torpedo carries 650lbs. This is enough to blow a ship in two pieces and no amount of armoring will help with that.
I'm always a little surprised when I'm on a ship and they are doing combat drills. You see then pretend that they got incoming missile and put out a call to "brace for impact". I saw a guy get reprimanded for not "bracing well". It was very much like watching kids be told to climb under their desks in case of a nuclear attack.
My point is that ships today are actually a little tougher than WW2 ships. Sure they do not have deck armor and are designed to withstand very different type of damage, but they are better compartmentalized and while the rare direct torpedo hit will cause a ship to break, it will still remain in large chunks. There is little chance of a ship being so damaged that any reactor material becomes exposed.
Even the US nuclear subs that went down due to faulty torpedoes exploding in their chambers did not result in exposed nuclear material.
Well you got me beat on the 30 years of gaming. But while I'm only now getting close to 30 years of being alive - I've had APB preordered.
In fact, preordering games that have had demos, open betas etc has been the norm for me.
I've played a lot of games, more than enough to know what I look for in a game and to be able to tell if I will like it or not based on demos, honest previews or betas.
I have stopped trusting game reviews a long time ago.
Do you REALLY honestly think that it's still "kids" who play games that daddy and mommy bought for them?
This isn't Wii we are talking about here.
You're talking about a PC game. Most people who play it ARE technically savy. Hell when was the last time you could play a game without some technical expertise to get it working?
You guys are all missing the elephant in the room.
Here is the BIG difference between APB gametime purchasing system and say WOW.
APB has a currency called RTW points. You can buy RTW points for $. You can buy gametime with RTW points. You can buy and SELL items in game for RTW points.
Do you understand what this means?
You can play the game without EVER spending another dollar after purchasing the box.
If anyone of you ever played EVE online, this is a familiar concept.
In EVE you could buy time codes for $$ and sell them for EVE in game currency. I had 4 accounts in EVE and did not pay for any of them with actual money.
Being able to buy gametime by playing a game is a fantastic concept.
They pay programmers better in India relative to other jobs there. Yes they get paid less in India than they do in the US. But your buying power with that income is far greater in India than it is in the US.
An Indian friend of mine went back to India for that very reason. His standard of living is quite higher now than it was in the US. No more living in a tiny studio apt. He has a house and a car and plenty of money left over.
Look this may be hard to understand, it's just some people aren't selfish and actually LIKE and ENJOY helping other. We do not need to be paid for it, the warm fuzzy feeling is enough, not that you'd know anything about that...
"devaluating your means of earning a living"? You're kidding right? You realize most places that would WANT your service on a volunteer basis do so because they flat out couldn't afford you.
Claiming that volunteerism devaluates professional labor is like RIAA saying that each download is a lost sale.
Yes you risk burn out, a burn out from volunteering. I've burned out volunteering several times. It's no big deal, you take a break, do your thing and maybe get back to volunteering again.
Oh he will ruin Star Trek Online - just play the beta.
Speaking as someone with a "liftime" subscription to Hellgate London, the game really had a lot of potential. It felt like an early beta that just needed a few more months of polishing.
It's actually alive and well in Korea, the company that took it over has added pvp CTF and pvp domination. In short, they finished it.
It saddens me that Flagship didn't hang on and complete Hellgate London because I really think it could have been a fantastic game.
Frankly I just pulled the number out of my ass, maybe 1C would work better. I just based it on what I perceived to be good value to me. But then I don't read nearly as many articles in a paper as some people - this is primarily why I've never maintained subscriptions.
But if I wanted to read an article, I wouldn't hesitate paying 5C for it. It's cheaper than a text message...
Well it lasts till you are banned - which isn't hard. Nor does it cover things like PM, archive access, title, etc
It works for SA because the content is user generated. NYT couldn't work with a ontime fee unless it was huge. But hey if you were willing to offer $500 "liftime subscription" I'm sure they'd get at least a handful of buyers.
"Fair Price" is exactly what will determine if this fails or succeeds.
NY Times Select would have been ok if it was say $12 a year instead of $50.
The problem is that the media seems to be happy to perpetuate the image that "people do not pay for media online". It's just not true.
How many people here pay for Pandora or Slacker? What about Fark? What about the new Ars subscriptions? What about forum accounts from SomethingAwful?
Frankly, what I really want would be a micro-transaction sort of system. I would be happy to pay 5 cents per article I read on NY times. Sounds tiny right? I'd say I read at least 5 articles on a week day. That's a quarter a day, $5 a month. More than the $50 they ask for.
Yet I'm sure more people would be attracted to the 5C per article model vs the $50 upfront subscription.
In short. Your wife is an ignorant idiot and the guy's doctor chose to misinform his patient instead of spending some time giving an accurate explanation.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a credit card, has a VISA/Mastercard logo, and pulls money straight out of a HELO as opposed to a dedicated credit card account.
I don't have one. Their only advantage over a regular CC is the lower interest rate.
By the very definition it IS a credit card as it is NOT a debit card. Any purchases you put on the card, or money withdrawn using the card are borrowed and subject to an interest rate which may or may not rise depending on the terms of your HELO.
First of all - what the fuck is wrong with you that you compare this to rape?
Second, in general all online scams involve something that is too good to be true. They require the victim to cooperate by suspending all logic. Nobody forced the man to send money.
Chances are that this "victim" fell for a woman who was stunning in every way imaginable - a woman who he must have been able to realize was out of his league. (If she was not, he'd pursue such a woman offline.)
He is no more a "victim" than someone who buys an overpriced set of brittle dull steak knives from a late night infomercial because they showed them cutting through bricks and he fell for it.
Actually it's not as absurd as you may think.
I could pull about 75k out of my credit cards. I could also get a HELO backed "creditcard", I keep getting offers for HELOs for anywhere from 100k to 250k.
So really it'd not be that hard for me to pull out 200k from a "credit card".
Not one of the things you listed was why APB failed. As someone who did play APB I can tell you that it failed due to these issues:
Massive cheating. At least 1/3rd of the players used bots. This is actually a low estimate. The number grew to the point where nearly everyone was botting in the end. RTW was unable to catch or ban cheaters. There was no plan to handle cheaters at release, PunkBusters was implemented late almost right before release and could not be turned on without causing massive game breaking server wide lag spikes. In short, everyone who could, cheated, everyone else quit.
Repetitive game play, few maps, few weapons. There are only two maps, both are fairly poor quality with lots of exploitable areas, as in places where you have a tremendous advantage over anyone trying to kill you. The game play was highly repetitive and all the missions could be broken down to several simple objectives unless players on both teams were evenly balanced and could make things a little exciting - but this almost never happened because of cheating and...
Massive balance issues. The game would pair team vs team, and it would try to do so based on the performance of the team on other missions, so if you won 10 missions in a row, you were considered a high threat player and would be teamed against someone else high threat. If someone else high threat was not available, you would be teamed against a larger number of lower threat players. On paper, this may have worked. Unfortunately because as a player you are able to turn down a match, the low threat players almost always turned down the high threat player match. End result, 2 high threat players get matched against 4 low threat players, 2 of the low threat players turn down the match, the other 2 accept and get destroyed by the 2 high threat players who outrank them.
Horribly broken economy. During the first few weeks of release, you could make 112k APB$ by standing in front of a customization kiosk for 10 hours. Everyone did this. As a result all money was worthless. When the kiosks were fixed, there were still plenty AFK exploits and witnessing exploits. The AFK exploit being the worst of the two as it involved a macroed player sitting in an active zone accepting every single mission. So now not only were you matched against cheaters but one of your teammates was a macro.
Poor combat dynamics. Guns did not feel right, this is hard to explain but everyone who played the game will agree. All guns had hardcoded maximum range and as a result some guns were made 'situational' to the point of being useless. In short everyone used a medium range gun, and the botters used SMGs as with a bot you had 100% accuracy anyway...
Driving lag. Personally I am on a 50/50 FIOS connection so I thought the driving was ok - until I played the game on a regular 1.5m cable line. The driving on a slow connection was unmanagble with up to a 2 second delay in car response. This paired with the fact that some of the car physics was simply broken, as in some cars had almost no weight and were unable to get any traction, made driving impossible for many if not most. I pretty much always had to be the driver as the one with the best connection. (Of course when punkbusters was turned on, the 3-5 seconds of lag still resulted in me plowing into the wall at full speed, catching the car on fire, and the lag disappearing just in time for us to blow up.)
In short, this game was just not done. Had it been done well, I'd still play it.
Of course people would play it for free.
The important question is if they'll pay for the services.
The reason your 2 year old PC can still play "modern" games is that there has not been a major leap forward in graphics since Vista introduced DX 10.
There has not been a single 'revolutionary' chipset since the 8800. The current nvidia line is unimpressive and offers minor gains over the past TWO generations.
The video card market revolved around being able to sell a bunch of bleeding edge $800 cards followed by a ton of $200-400 ones. You cannot sell $800 video cards in this market.
If/when the economy recovers and people are once again willing to cough up money on video cards and entertainment, there will be major advancement in the video card market. Until then, it simply does not make any sense to develop and release the new cards when they will not be bought. It's far more profitable to concentrate on cost cutting with the current generation and releasing the same chips but for less.
Actually this has nothing to do with consoles.
It's the economy. With us in what is a rather nasty depression, unemployment at record highs and consumer confidence down to nothing who exactly is going to buy an $900 BFG video card?
Yeah 4 years ago I did buy a pair of $900 BFG watercooled cards. Yes they still work and are in use. Would I be willing to do it again in this economy? NO.
Wow you umm sure proved SandTiger right...
You've clearly not been on a modern aircraft carrier. They'll stay afloat just fine after several hits with WW2 weapons. Does not matter if the shell blows through several compartments. They will all be sealed and the flooding will be contained. This is largely due to WW2 weapons being totally insignificant compared to today's weapons.
Modern day warships are designed to deal with anti ship missiles like the Harpoon which packs just under 500lbs of modern explosives. For reference a Mark 48 torpedo carries 650lbs. This is enough to blow a ship in two pieces and no amount of armoring will help with that.
I'm always a little surprised when I'm on a ship and they are doing combat drills. You see then pretend that they got incoming missile and put out a call to "brace for impact". I saw a guy get reprimanded for not "bracing well". It was very much like watching kids be told to climb under their desks in case of a nuclear attack.
My point is that ships today are actually a little tougher than WW2 ships. Sure they do not have deck armor and are designed to withstand very different type of damage, but they are better compartmentalized and while the rare direct torpedo hit will cause a ship to break, it will still remain in large chunks. There is little chance of a ship being so damaged that any reactor material becomes exposed.
Even the US nuclear subs that went down due to faulty torpedoes exploding in their chambers did not result in exposed nuclear material.
Well you got me beat on the 30 years of gaming.
But while I'm only now getting close to 30 years of being alive - I've had APB preordered.
In fact, preordering games that have had demos, open betas etc has been the norm for me.
I've played a lot of games, more than enough to know what I look for in a game and to be able to tell if I will like it or not based on demos, honest previews or betas.
I have stopped trusting game reviews a long time ago.
You're so misguided it's not even funny.
Do you REALLY honestly think that it's still "kids" who play games that daddy and mommy bought for them?
This isn't Wii we are talking about here.
You're talking about a PC game. Most people who play it ARE technically savy. Hell when was the last time you could play a game without some technical expertise to get it working?
Umm. There isn't a single MMO on the face of this planet in which items are not already sold for currency.
You guys are all missing the elephant in the room.
Here is the BIG difference between APB gametime purchasing system and say WOW.
APB has a currency called RTW points.
You can buy RTW points for $.
You can buy gametime with RTW points.
You can buy and SELL items in game for RTW points.
Do you understand what this means?
You can play the game without EVER spending another dollar after purchasing the box.
If anyone of you ever played EVE online, this is a familiar concept.
In EVE you could buy time codes for $$ and sell them for EVE in game currency. I had 4 accounts in EVE and did not pay for any of them with actual money.
Being able to buy gametime by playing a game is a fantastic concept.
The framework made writing PC games relatively easy. Direct 3D did away with propriety 3D drivers. Direct Sound did the same for sound cards.
Without Direct X gaming on the PC would not mean "Windows Games".
Maybe that's not a good thing, but DirectX has had more effect on the PC Games industry than any other product.
They pay programmers better in India relative to other jobs there. Yes they get paid less in India than they do in the US. But your buying power with that income is far greater in India than it is in the US.
An Indian friend of mine went back to India for that very reason. His standard of living is quite higher now than it was in the US. No more living in a tiny studio apt. He has a house and a car and plenty of money left over.
Unless you're in India.
Clearly you've never volunteered.
Look this may be hard to understand, it's just some people aren't selfish and actually LIKE and ENJOY helping other. We do not need to be paid for it, the warm fuzzy feeling is enough, not that you'd know anything about that...
Clearly you're missing the point of volunteering.
"devaluating your means of earning a living"? You're kidding right? You realize most places that would WANT your service on a volunteer basis do so because they flat out couldn't afford you.
Claiming that volunteerism devaluates professional labor is like RIAA saying that each download is a lost sale.
Yes you risk burn out, a burn out from volunteering. I've burned out volunteering several times. It's no big deal, you take a break, do your thing and maybe get back to volunteering again.
Oh he will ruin Star Trek Online - just play the beta.
Speaking as someone with a "liftime" subscription to Hellgate London, the game really had a lot of potential. It felt like an early beta that just needed a few more months of polishing.
It's actually alive and well in Korea, the company that took it over has added pvp CTF and pvp domination. In short, they finished it.
It saddens me that Flagship didn't hang on and complete Hellgate London because I really think it could have been a fantastic game.
Frankly I just pulled the number out of my ass, maybe 1C would work better. I just based it on what I perceived to be good value to me. But then I don't read nearly as many articles in a paper as some people - this is primarily why I've never maintained subscriptions.
But if I wanted to read an article, I wouldn't hesitate paying 5C for it. It's cheaper than a text message...
Well it lasts till you are banned - which isn't hard. Nor does it cover things like PM, archive access, title, etc
It works for SA because the content is user generated. NYT couldn't work with a ontime fee unless it was huge. But hey if you were willing to offer $500 "liftime subscription" I'm sure they'd get at least a handful of buyers.
"Fair Price" is exactly what will determine if this fails or succeeds.
NY Times Select would have been ok if it was say $12 a year instead of $50.
The problem is that the media seems to be happy to perpetuate the image that "people do not pay for media online". It's just not true.
How many people here pay for Pandora or Slacker? What about Fark? What about the new Ars subscriptions? What about forum accounts from SomethingAwful?
Frankly, what I really want would be a micro-transaction sort of system. I would be happy to pay 5 cents per article I read on NY times. Sounds tiny right? I'd say I read at least 5 articles on a week day. That's a quarter a day, $5 a month. More than the $50 they ask for.
Yet I'm sure more people would be attracted to the 5C per article model vs the $50 upfront subscription.
Umm. Lets gets one thing straight first.
Counter Strike IS a mod.
In short. Your wife is an ignorant idiot and the guy's doctor chose to misinform his patient instead of spending some time giving an accurate explanation.
http://kotaku.com/5446301/bioware-confirms-spring-2011-release-window-for-the-old-republic