I think it has more to do with folks realizing that you don't have to pay 14.99 for a CD that maybe has 2-3 good songs (for a good CD) on it, when you can get those say 3 songs for 2.98 from iTunes.
It doesn't take a rocket scientists to realize that CDs have too much filler music, for most releases. Why pay for crap, when you can get what you like.
Even if said album has 10 songs on it, and you love all 10, that's 9.90 for 10 songs, as oppossed to 14.99.
Review sites for electronics and the like are chock full of super-cheesy, almost non-sensical reviews. If you look at reviews, and most of them consist of one or two lines of things that don't really matter, then it's a bogus review. There are so many of them, it becomes what I call "Surround and drown" fake reviews. Firefighters know that if you surround a fire with enough hoses, you can drown it sooner or later. These review sites have the same process, where all negative real reviews are drowned out by the fake ones.
"Timely shipping!" That one is my favorite fake review. Um, you ship via UPS or FedEx Ground. It's 3 days, no matter how you slice it. How can it not be timely?
"Great Customer Service!" Another of my favorites. The person hasn't done anything but buy something, in all likely hood. There hasn't been any customer service up to that point.
"Easy to use website ordering!" Um, yeah, that's the first thing I look for when buying electronics over the web.
If the review doesn't bring up any points, or doesn't provoke any honest thoughts, it is probably fake. Read the actual negative reviews.
Besides, why does this surprise anyone? The same thing can be said for almost every PC/XBox, PS/PS2 magazine or website. They all get such pats on the back from the companies they review, that they don't have an honest review in them. It's the equivelent of letting a lifelong, die-hard Rolling Stones fan review one of their concerts. The review is going to read "Dude, they Rawked!", even if Keith Richards was so stoned he forgot to play his guitar.
From talking to my brother (a musician who sells his own CDs via his website using CDBaby), most musicians hate the DRM crap. They also want to get paid for their hard work. It becomes a Catch-22.
New artists that have just signed their first record deal are not making a ton of money. If you think the record labels take draconian measures to try and stop piracy, you should see what they do to a new artist on a contract. The band usually has little leverage to negotiate with. Even if other labels are sniffing around, they are still not proven over a big market.
So, the new artist desperately wants to get their music heard. And the author of TFA makes a good case for that. A new artist isn't making a ton of money until they really become a name, and often get a new record deal. So if music is getting pirated some, they could care less.
It's when a band has become really successful that the members can say they are making some serious money. That 2nd and future contracts are much more band friendly than before, because the label can't afford to lose that band. And when that happens, the band is a little more interested in getting some of that money.
As the author of TFA mentions, artists often put everything into their music. Once they hit the road, their lives often suck, outside of maybe some groupie action, and until they are big names, they are all skanky looking pieces of shit. Also, many bands write all of their own music (unless they are Country, in which case they write little, and just perform.) So, they want to reap some benefits from that.
If they are a typical musician, they have put most if not all of their eggs into that music career. If it fails or they don't make good money doing it, all they have to look forward to is a life in the fast food industry, or going back to college after leading a life that isn't condusive to studying hard. Not a very attractive outlook.
So, yeah, they want to be heard, and they want to be paid. And it is usually between the 2nd and 3rd album that they finally realize that they aren't being paid that much. Then, they change sides in the file swapping wars.
The author is right about one thing, though. It's better to get a portion of.99 than to get zip. CDs cost too damn much for how much filler music is on most of them.
The solution is one-time use barcodes. It isn't as bad as you'd think for the big box stores. When a skid is received, it has two barcodes on the packing list: first code, last code. The employee scans both (say 1111183.17 and 1111183.234) and the system registers all the item codes and the unique codes. If the register scans a duplicate, there's a problem.
The problem comes in making sure you really keep track of everything. Having to maintain the tracking on all those items, when you have usually poorly trained personel handling said items, is that problems will crop up. Sure, UPS can do it, and many of their truck loaders are complete idiots. But, the computer handles sorting what goes on what truck, etc. If it didn't, 3 day ground would be 3 week "good luck!" For most stores, the overhead and setup might not be worth it.
You talk about big box stores. It's more about high ticket items, and only those items. Why bother having a can of soda have a special barcode? How big will a stick of gum get? Sure, it sounds silly, but that petty theft happens a lot more often than the stealing of an ipod due to a scanner scam. And it adds up fast. Talk to anyone that works for a grocery store company, and they will tell you about it. More dollars worth of stuff is stolen from a grocery store than at most Best Buys each year.
Lastly, barcodes are printed up by the manufacturer. You have to convince THEM to change. It isn't their problem that the items get stolen off the shelves. It is the retailers problem. And no retailer wants the overhead of remarking all of a certain item every time they receive a shipment. Besides, who is going to watch those people responsible for applying the new barcode????
People pulling these barcode scams get caught, and cases like this guy where he didn't get away with it more than once or twice before being busted, are the norm. Most criminals come up with get-rich-quick schemes, and don't look at the details. It's why they get caught so easily.
Barcodes are fairly easy to create using just a PC and a decent quality laser printer.
If they took it to the extreme that you needed to have a certain font card (a nice DIMM or SIMM) to produce any barcode, it would slow folks down a whole lot. When you have to spend a hundred or two to get the font card, the price for entry will slow down the casual twit.
15 day free trial on that program. That part just cracks me up.
Only interesting thing was the gold graph...
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RPGs In The 'Real World'
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The article wasn't "must read". It was pretty much common sense that most folks have figured out long ago. About the only interesting thing in the whole thing was the WoW gold vs. real world price graph, and that was only cool because I won't want to waste my time doing the research necessary to create the darn thing.
If a game has an economy, folks are going to abuse it. It is almost typical nowadays to covet items in games, instead of wanting to have the satisfaction of earning it. At low levels, it can make sense to slip that new toon a little gold and let them get some better equipment. I've taken my lvl 60 rogue through Deadmines at least a dozen times, getting some nice gear for a new toon I am creating. At high levels though, just go out and earn it. It's why you play the game: to level up, see places, and get better gear.
Many games today are just awful for that. Seeing a new EQ (first version) walking around with nearly maxed out stats because someone threw 50K plat at it was just silly. And, it forces the game creators to modify how they approach the game's future development, as well as forcing them to retro-fit the older portions of the game.
Encounters have to be made harder for lower level areas, because the characters are tougher than they should be. By the time Planes of Power (PoP) came out for EQ, it was extremely difficult to be a new-to-EQ player, unless you had friends that would shower you with gifts. It was even harder than EQ was when it first came out, when a full set of Bronze armor made you feel like you were getting somewhere. Because now, that full set of Bronze wasn't good enough to keep you alive.
But many players don't care about that. We live in the era of entitlization, where folks think they deserve to be able to have a character with godly gear on it from the outset. How dare developers put level limits on gear, and restrict access to places based on levels!
I guess that's why I went back and started playing CoH/CoV again. Sure, it's often repetitive, but no economy to really abuse, so it's quieter.
Where I live, in Denton, TX, they have switched most of the trash trucks and other large vehicles over to bio-diesel. They mentioned that it was cost effective, often cheaper than petroleum diesel. But, they forgot to factor in one point...
Many of the products that go into bio-diesel are subsidized by the government here in the U.S. If the government is subsidizing it, then it isn't as cheap in the big picture. Sure, it's a better concept, but I want to know how much it costs up front, and how much the government (read: our tax dollars) are going to help a company make money.
If it's being made from canola, then don't let the government pay part of the bill, and assist some company in making more money while taxpayers suffer for it. That, or make the producers of canola based bio-diesel rebate the money back to the government for the original subsidization, so farmers aren't the ones being penalized.
I recently went to purchase a Canon Digital Rebel 350XT SLR. I wanted that sucker bad, and since my wife turned up pregnant with our first child (finally!), we wanted to take great pictures of the pregnancy and newborn. So, I did my homework.
I spent a lot of time researching camears first, and then looked at possible vendors. There seemed to be a lot of names I had never heard of before, and that inner voice just kept screaming out "Check these guys out, even if they are $100 less." So, I did.
Fake reviews to bump up a vendor/seller is nothing new. Read the favorable articles, and look for the negatives. That will give you all you a lot of information. The favorable ones will often read like a Blizzard fanboi stroking himself over an announcement that his favorite character class just got a buff!
Typical reviews read like: Timely delivery! Great customer service! I love these guys!
Really, when I want to review a product, do I care about timely delivery? It's being shipped by UPS or FedEx ground or air. Of course it's freakin timely! What you are reading is what is known in the fire service as the "Surround and Drown" technique. If you surround a fire with enough hoses and dump water on it, it WILL go out. Well, the objective is to surround the negative reviews with enough crappy good reviews that the score stays fabulous, much less respectable. (I think I may have just coined a new internet shopper expression: The "surround and drown reviews"!) So, right there, you can throw all those reviews out. Maybe internet rating places should take any review that mentions "timely shipping" and throws it out within a week. ARGH!
And like our intrepet internet shopper finally figured out, you have to read the negative reviews, which are often very well written. Why were they unhappy? Now, if they were written in the same infantile manner as most of those happy-happy reviews, ignore them. But, if they were written well, think about it. Someone took the time to write a decent arguement that the vendor isn't worth shopping at. That speaks volumes as to their disatisfaction.
Me, I finally bought my camera at Dell, which was very competitively priced at the time with a $100 instant rebate. The camera arrived in a (Gasp!) timely fashion! Woo-freakin-hoo! (Sorry, couldn't resist.) But, seriously, I had a good experience with Dell when I bought my wife and I new PCs, and the camera purchase went just as smoothly. It's a name I know, and pretty much trust.
Am I a fanboi of Dell's? No. I tried being a computer manufacturer's fanboi twice. Once with Apple (got tired of no games to play) and once with Gateway (wouldn't even think of looking at my broken PC because I upgraded the OS, even though the AMD processor went dead). Won't happen again. But, they haven't shafted me (yet), either.
You just have to wonder if he is secretly working a deal where polygamy sites will get through, but heaven forbid that he sees a boobie outside of his 15 wives...
I remember back in the early to mid 80's, as a H.S. student, and making copies of software like the original Wizardry for my Apple II+ and the like. I had friends from two different areas that were a group of hackers, and I was the conduit between the 2 groups, meaning my fater had to purchase boxes of 100 5 1/4 diskettes every month or so.
The difference was, back then (and even now, to a large extent), there was an entry level knowledge often needed to do this kind of thing. You couldn't just make a copy, because of the variable disk speeds often written into the games, etc. You had to know how to use certain programs to make it work, and access to folks that had copies of the original wasn't always easy.
10 years ago, as well as today, for music especially, there isn't a great deal of knowledge you need to do it. Windows will rip a CD for you, in fact. You don't need anything more than what your core OS gives you.
It is similar, in a fashion, to how Sony and Verant handled some cheating in EverQuest. There was an application often run on a Linux box called ShowEQ. It would give you relevant data about where mobs were, how much xp they would grant you (approx) and their levels, etc. For the longest time, there was an entry level knowledge required to use it, so Sony didn't go out of it's way to protect it that much. Then folks started selling machines with a pre-built ShowEQ kit on it that automatically updated itself, and too many folks were using it. Sony had to fight back, and did, with much harder encryption as well as other things to make it harder to work. Could it still be done? Yes, but it made it that much harder. The entry level went up.
Basically, that is what these music companies need to do. Make the cost of entry to rip a CD illegally higher than most folks can handle. The problem they have is that they haven't been able to come up with a way to do that. Until they do, they won't fix anything. And with the internet being what it is, as soon as someone figures an easier way to get around what the music companies have done, they will distribute it easily. Today's ease of naer global communication makes the job well nigh impossible.
Conclusion: The music companies can't win this fight. They never could.
After spending 4+hrs almost every night for nearly 5 years playing EverQuest, I don't have any doubts.
In part, these games do a great job in filling the void that was called "television" for those of us that were teens in the 70s or 80s.
A good game has to get under your skin and in your brain to keep you playing. And especially the MMO model, has to be addictive to keep players coming back. With real content updates coming out usually once a year or so, if it wasn't addicting, the players would leave after a certain point. Yet they stick around, doing the same thing over and over again, waiting for more content.
How many folks have a lvl 60 toon in WoW that they hit Molten Core once a week (all you can do by game mechanics) and then either goof off in other places with that 60, or level up another toon, all while waiting for the next week's MC hit? You aren't gaining any experience, your chances in a 40 person group of getting a gear upgrade is limited, so in effect you are playing for a crappy shot at that dangling carrot over and over again. And yet folks do it with a rabid passion. (After 5 years of EQ, the carrot didn't work on me with WoW. I hit 60 and got bored fast.)
So the fact that these games have a brain altering effect doesn't surprise me much. I still have an itch to renew my original EQ account and play, even though there isn't much I wish to do in the game. Other MMOs have been an ok substitute for a while, but since I am bored with WoW, and CoH/V is not bad but repetitive, I am waiting for DDO to hook my I.V. to, and feed my addiction. Kinda like a heroin addict waiting for his methadone fix.
I would hardly call those answers. He gave PR responses.
Sony had one of the biggest names to draw upon, much like Blizzard did with Warcraft. With new Star Wars movies coming out, SW:G could have been king of the world. The fact that it isn't speaks volumes about the quality of the game. The bottom line is that SW:G just wasn't that much fun to play.
Now, if they make it actually fun, how many folks are going to go back, or play the trial? Not a whole heck of a lot. They are all playing WoW, or waiting for DDO, or some other game to come out, but the majority won't waste their time. In a nutshell, you are betatesting for them while having to pay for it (after those 10 days).
Kinda like Blizzard did with WoW. Oh, wait...It's still in beta, right?
I was in the CoH closed beta, and did the same for CoV. While CoV does breath a bunch of fresh air into the CoH game, I see a lot of problems coming up.
First of all, much like Blizzard did, PlayNC apparently changed a lot of powers late in the beta for gold. This leads to the characters not being well balanced. (Not that the beta characters were well balanced. Typical rush to gold MMO scenario...)
Early on, you could easily do missions in the PvP zones and not run into a single other player. That was kind of nice if you didn't want to PvP, but if you did, it was boring.
The classes themselves have a lot of issues. They worked really hard to not have the "Who needs tankers, when Scrappers are so much better" problem with the Stalker class, and in turn, made it really weak. The Mastermind class is very powerful. The Corrupter actually feels weaker than the Defender, even though the power sets are reversed. The Brute is a god while soloing and working with a healer, but get more than a few folks with him, and since he can't taunt to hold aggro, he becomes pathetic. (Higher levels will eventually give taunt, and then watch out!) The Dominator is quite effective, just like the early Controller class was much more powerful than most folks realized.
Sadly, for all that folks playing MMOs bitch because the developers don't listen to class balancing issues, CoH become a lot worse because PlayNC listened TOO much. The nerf bat is coming in CoV, as well...and I dare say the results will be just as bad.
Reptition does set in even in the early game with CoV. Many of the maps are the same, or almost identical. The prevelance of "door missions" makes it nearly impossible to expect that many different maps. This is the one major weakness with the high number of instanced "dungeons" that PlayNC has used for CoH/CoV. It cuts down on lag, but it spawns the repetition factor.
It's too early to tell on the PvP side. I'm not a big fan of PvP, as it seems to generate more "My weenie is bigger than your weenie" bull than it does any sense of fun competition. Unlike WoW, heroes and villians are allowed to talk to one another, though they do need to flip a few options to send tells to one another. Plus, the server cross-talk makes it easy to keep in touch with friends.
I give CoV a B-. It was rushed out before it was ready, as they made that major mistake of doing a last second revision to the classes, without testing them for a week or two to see how it affected gameplay.
But their character generation still blows away every single game on the market. I can still blow off an hour tinkering with a costume, and by the time you hit lvl 20 and can make a revision to it, you feel an itch to fix things you got wrong. I just want to see some other game companies start to really allow us to personalize our characters. And the fact that equipment doesn't define how you look is just a bonus.
The problem with your analogy, to a certain extent, is that even big companies hit the skids all too often. And while many small deli's will go out of business, many of them also thrive on word of mouth, and better quality.
MacDonalds is popular because it is fast and somewhat cheap food. That resturant downtown that has the finest steaks in a 50 mile radius keeps having customers come back and back again. People will pay for more quality, as long as it isn't an inconvience.
Luxuries work very well, and while Apple is not purely a luxury product, it is a higher end product than your average Dell PC. And if more games were made for Macs, what do you think would start happening? Maybe not your most graphically challenging games, but still. I can still fire up almost every game made today on my old P4 1.8HGz machine. I just choose to play them on my more expensive P4 3.4GHz machine. I went for faster, because I wanted to. And I bought an iPod because I wanted the easiest and best MP3 player. That, and iTunes kicks everyone else's butt for a pay music service.
Alienware and others are still in business. Sure, they don't beat Dell's prices, but then again, they often make better systems for those that WANT that better system. You often do get what you pay for.
Though the biggest reason for failure is that most people simply don't need a PDA.
More than half the folks I know that have a PDA only have it as a status symbol. They don't need it, and barely use it. Most of the time they pull it out and start fiddling with it, they are showing off that they have one.
How many IT people are really on the go so damn much that they have to have a PDA? I sit in meetings and most of the people there have their PDA out, and are poking and proding at it once in a while. I'm willing to go out on a limb and say that they are bouncing back and forth between menus, trying to look like they are important.
I could see some flunky of a famous person that keeps appointments and the like needing one. I can't see most IT folks needing one.
And quite frankly, when I walk away from my desk, whether it is to go eat lunch, take a dump, or simply to get some fresh air, I don't want work following me.
I remember back when the Macs first came out. I was about 19 or so at the time, and doing some work where my father was employed, CSC. And an interesting phenomenon started to happen once the office got a few Macs for word processing work.
There were 5 Macs, and over a dozen PCs around, that could be signed up for to do the work. This was prior to everyone having a PC at their desk. Most guys didn't need one there.
The 5 Macs had a waiting list of a few days for doing word processing. You could walk in at any time and use a PC, no worries or hassles over someone else using one. Why?
Because when you used a word processor on a Mac, what you saw on the screen was what you saw on the paper when you printed it. Plain and simple. You could use any word processor on a PC, and it wouldn't be a truetype font, no matter what you used. So, folks started to fight over the use of the Macs to get a proper visual representation of what their document would look like.
That sentimentality really took hold with journalists. They really wanted to see what that article was going to look like, so it went to the editor with a better presentation. And a mindset was born.
Add to that the prevalence that most schools/universites had for Macs through special programs that Apple has/had, and journalists came out of school knowing the Mac more often than they knew the PC outside of gaming. And with the lack of games for the Mac, it carries are more "workplace computer" air than the PC does.
Apple is very good at product placement, too. If you watch any movie that has someone that does writing, they always seem to have a Mac laptop in hand, or a Mac in their office. It's a deliberate ploy by Apple to make sure their computers are viewed as journalist friendly.
Today, you can do all of that with a PC, for sure. But, the mindset of most journalists have been set.
Wait...You talk about how you love Eve-Online, but then you talk about how folks go after macrobots characters? Does anyone else see a conflict of interest? That smells a lot like Lineage II, one of the worst economy games in existence.
If a game allows botting, or makes botting easy, then currency WILL be farmed. And once it is farmed, the game economy is shot, because folks will sell it. And if you can PK another toon to take what they got, then you see the economy further erode.
If you want an effectively non-currency game, play City of Heroes. There isn't really an economy to speak of, and that is one of the most attractive aspects of the game. High level players often GIVE their currency (called Influence) away, because they have nothing to spend it on, and yet having a bottomless pit of currency will only take you so far. Best part is, if you get an Enhancement (power slot upgrade), nobody else in your group knows you got it, unless you decide to tell them. In other words, NO LOOT HASSLES!
I bought platinum in EQ, once. Got 100,000 platinum, and did very little with it. Twinked the crap out of a lot of new toons, but my main? I got very little mileage out of that platinum with him.
There were plenty of folks that farmed in EQ, and sold stuff. There were folks that cornered the market for some items once the Bazaar zone opened, buying all of an item and then jacking the price up. The same thing happens in World of Warcraft, at times.
Finally, remember that Sony decided to create it's own version of selling in game items, for EQ2. Does that tell you how lucrative this facet of MMOs is?
Really, why should I want this? Do we feel handcuffed because one friend likes to chat on Yahoo! and the other likes MSN?
Personally, I love the fact that I have both. I have my work contacts (I work from home) all on MSN, along with a few friends that I know won't just jabber at me constantly as I try to work. My friends are all on my Yahoo!, and they can see me pretty much anytime.
I don't have to have log out of one account to log into the other. I have both.
They have to sue to overturn this. For one very major reason...
Most of the games that feature this stuff, that stuff isn't of major interest to most people playing it.
I mean, the "hot coffee" mod was pretty lame, all things considered. If you were tittilated by the poorly pixilated hanky panky that happened in that mod, you haven't seen a naked chick or had sex, and probably spank your monkey while sitting in a chat room.
It's time to take the government out of parenting. Let the parents screw up if they want. I'm tired of paying babysitter money for brats that aren't mine.
He only won against Ford and Chrysler. The suit against GM was dismissed, as well as against all foreign automakers. The millions he won were largely squandered on more lawsuits.
And those automakers that had the suit dismissed? Never had to stop offering the intermittent wiper.
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I think it has more to do with folks realizing that you don't have to pay 14.99 for a CD that maybe has 2-3 good songs (for a good CD) on it, when you can get those say 3 songs for 2.98 from iTunes.
It doesn't take a rocket scientists to realize that CDs have too much filler music, for most releases. Why pay for crap, when you can get what you like.
Even if said album has 10 songs on it, and you love all 10, that's 9.90 for 10 songs, as oppossed to 14.99.
Do the math.
Review sites for electronics and the like are chock full of super-cheesy, almost non-sensical reviews. If you look at reviews, and most of them consist of one or two lines of things that don't really matter, then it's a bogus review. There are so many of them, it becomes what I call "Surround and drown" fake reviews. Firefighters know that if you surround a fire with enough hoses, you can drown it sooner or later. These review sites have the same process, where all negative real reviews are drowned out by the fake ones.
"Timely shipping!" That one is my favorite fake review. Um, you ship via UPS or FedEx Ground. It's 3 days, no matter how you slice it. How can it not be timely?
"Great Customer Service!" Another of my favorites. The person hasn't done anything but buy something, in all likely hood. There hasn't been any customer service up to that point.
"Easy to use website ordering!" Um, yeah, that's the first thing I look for when buying electronics over the web.
If the review doesn't bring up any points, or doesn't provoke any honest thoughts, it is probably fake. Read the actual negative reviews.
Besides, why does this surprise anyone? The same thing can be said for almost every PC/XBox, PS/PS2 magazine or website. They all get such pats on the back from the companies they review, that they don't have an honest review in them. It's the equivelent of letting a lifelong, die-hard Rolling Stones fan review one of their concerts. The review is going to read "Dude, they Rawked!", even if Keith Richards was so stoned he forgot to play his guitar.
From talking to my brother (a musician who sells his own CDs via his website using CDBaby), most musicians hate the DRM crap. They also want to get paid for their hard work. It becomes a Catch-22.
.99 than to get zip. CDs cost too damn much for how much filler music is on most of them.
New artists that have just signed their first record deal are not making a ton of money. If you think the record labels take draconian measures to try and stop piracy, you should see what they do to a new artist on a contract. The band usually has little leverage to negotiate with. Even if other labels are sniffing around, they are still not proven over a big market.
So, the new artist desperately wants to get their music heard. And the author of TFA makes a good case for that. A new artist isn't making a ton of money until they really become a name, and often get a new record deal. So if music is getting pirated some, they could care less.
It's when a band has become really successful that the members can say they are making some serious money. That 2nd and future contracts are much more band friendly than before, because the label can't afford to lose that band. And when that happens, the band is a little more interested in getting some of that money.
As the author of TFA mentions, artists often put everything into their music. Once they hit the road, their lives often suck, outside of maybe some groupie action, and until they are big names, they are all skanky looking pieces of shit. Also, many bands write all of their own music (unless they are Country, in which case they write little, and just perform.) So, they want to reap some benefits from that.
If they are a typical musician, they have put most if not all of their eggs into that music career. If it fails or they don't make good money doing it, all they have to look forward to is a life in the fast food industry, or going back to college after leading a life that isn't condusive to studying hard. Not a very attractive outlook.
So, yeah, they want to be heard, and they want to be paid. And it is usually between the 2nd and 3rd album that they finally realize that they aren't being paid that much. Then, they change sides in the file swapping wars.
The author is right about one thing, though. It's better to get a portion of
The solution is one-time use barcodes. It isn't as bad as you'd think for the big box stores. When a skid is received, it has two barcodes on the packing list: first code, last code. The employee scans both (say 1111183.17 and 1111183.234) and the system registers all the item codes and the unique codes. If the register scans a duplicate, there's a problem.
The problem comes in making sure you really keep track of everything. Having to maintain the tracking on all those items, when you have usually poorly trained personel handling said items, is that problems will crop up. Sure, UPS can do it, and many of their truck loaders are complete idiots. But, the computer handles sorting what goes on what truck, etc. If it didn't, 3 day ground would be 3 week "good luck!" For most stores, the overhead and setup might not be worth it.
You talk about big box stores. It's more about high ticket items, and only those items. Why bother having a can of soda have a special barcode? How big will a stick of gum get? Sure, it sounds silly, but that petty theft happens a lot more often than the stealing of an ipod due to a scanner scam. And it adds up fast. Talk to anyone that works for a grocery store company, and they will tell you about it. More dollars worth of stuff is stolen from a grocery store than at most Best Buys each year.
Lastly, barcodes are printed up by the manufacturer. You have to convince THEM to change. It isn't their problem that the items get stolen off the shelves. It is the retailers problem. And no retailer wants the overhead of remarking all of a certain item every time they receive a shipment. Besides, who is going to watch those people responsible for applying the new barcode????
People pulling these barcode scams get caught, and cases like this guy where he didn't get away with it more than once or twice before being busted, are the norm. Most criminals come up with get-rich-quick schemes, and don't look at the details. It's why they get caught so easily.
Barcodes are fairly easy to create using just a PC and a decent quality laser printer.
If they took it to the extreme that you needed to have a certain font card (a nice DIMM or SIMM) to produce any barcode, it would slow folks down a whole lot. When you have to spend a hundred or two to get the font card, the price for entry will slow down the casual twit.
15 day free trial on that program. That part just cracks me up.
The article wasn't "must read". It was pretty much common sense that most folks have figured out long ago. About the only interesting thing in the whole thing was the WoW gold vs. real world price graph, and that was only cool because I won't want to waste my time doing the research necessary to create the darn thing.
If a game has an economy, folks are going to abuse it. It is almost typical nowadays to covet items in games, instead of wanting to have the satisfaction of earning it. At low levels, it can make sense to slip that new toon a little gold and let them get some better equipment. I've taken my lvl 60 rogue through Deadmines at least a dozen times, getting some nice gear for a new toon I am creating. At high levels though, just go out and earn it. It's why you play the game: to level up, see places, and get better gear.
Many games today are just awful for that. Seeing a new EQ (first version) walking around with nearly maxed out stats because someone threw 50K plat at it was just silly. And, it forces the game creators to modify how they approach the game's future development, as well as forcing them to retro-fit the older portions of the game.
Encounters have to be made harder for lower level areas, because the characters are tougher than they should be. By the time Planes of Power (PoP) came out for EQ, it was extremely difficult to be a new-to-EQ player, unless you had friends that would shower you with gifts. It was even harder than EQ was when it first came out, when a full set of Bronze armor made you feel like you were getting somewhere. Because now, that full set of Bronze wasn't good enough to keep you alive.
But many players don't care about that. We live in the era of entitlization, where folks think they deserve to be able to have a character with godly gear on it from the outset. How dare developers put level limits on gear, and restrict access to places based on levels!
I guess that's why I went back and started playing CoH/CoV again. Sure, it's often repetitive, but no economy to really abuse, so it's quieter.
Where I live, in Denton, TX, they have switched most of the trash trucks and other large vehicles over to bio-diesel. They mentioned that it was cost effective, often cheaper than petroleum diesel. But, they forgot to factor in one point...
Many of the products that go into bio-diesel are subsidized by the government here in the U.S. If the government is subsidizing it, then it isn't as cheap in the big picture. Sure, it's a better concept, but I want to know how much it costs up front, and how much the government (read: our tax dollars) are going to help a company make money.
If it's being made from canola, then don't let the government pay part of the bill, and assist some company in making more money while taxpayers suffer for it. That, or make the producers of canola based bio-diesel rebate the money back to the government for the original subsidization, so farmers aren't the ones being penalized.
You know, some people just seem to ask for it.
I recently went to purchase a Canon Digital Rebel 350XT SLR. I wanted that sucker bad, and since my wife turned up pregnant with our first child (finally!), we wanted to take great pictures of the pregnancy and newborn. So, I did my homework.
I spent a lot of time researching camears first, and then looked at possible vendors. There seemed to be a lot of names I had never heard of before, and that inner voice just kept screaming out "Check these guys out, even if they are $100 less." So, I did.
Fake reviews to bump up a vendor/seller is nothing new. Read the favorable articles, and look for the negatives. That will give you all you a lot of information. The favorable ones will often read like a Blizzard fanboi stroking himself over an announcement that his favorite character class just got a buff!
Typical reviews read like: Timely delivery! Great customer service! I love these guys!
Really, when I want to review a product, do I care about timely delivery? It's being shipped by UPS or FedEx ground or air. Of course it's freakin timely! What you are reading is what is known in the fire service as the "Surround and Drown" technique. If you surround a fire with enough hoses and dump water on it, it WILL go out. Well, the objective is to surround the negative reviews with enough crappy good reviews that the score stays fabulous, much less respectable. (I think I may have just coined a new internet shopper expression: The "surround and drown reviews"!) So, right there, you can throw all those reviews out. Maybe internet rating places should take any review that mentions "timely shipping" and throws it out within a week. ARGH!
And like our intrepet internet shopper finally figured out, you have to read the negative reviews, which are often very well written. Why were they unhappy? Now, if they were written in the same infantile manner as most of those happy-happy reviews, ignore them. But, if they were written well, think about it. Someone took the time to write a decent arguement that the vendor isn't worth shopping at. That speaks volumes as to their disatisfaction.
Me, I finally bought my camera at Dell, which was very competitively priced at the time with a $100 instant rebate. The camera arrived in a (Gasp!) timely fashion! Woo-freakin-hoo! (Sorry, couldn't resist.) But, seriously, I had a good experience with Dell when I bought my wife and I new PCs, and the camera purchase went just as smoothly. It's a name I know, and pretty much trust.
Am I a fanboi of Dell's? No. I tried being a computer manufacturer's fanboi twice. Once with Apple (got tired of no games to play) and once with Gateway (wouldn't even think of looking at my broken PC because I upgraded the OS, even though the AMD processor went dead). Won't happen again. But, they haven't shafted me (yet), either.
You just have to wonder if he is secretly working a deal where polygamy sites will get through, but heaven forbid that he sees a boobie outside of his 15 wives...
I remember back in the early to mid 80's, as a H.S. student, and making copies of software like the original Wizardry for my Apple II+ and the like. I had friends from two different areas that were a group of hackers, and I was the conduit between the 2 groups, meaning my fater had to purchase boxes of 100 5 1/4 diskettes every month or so.
The difference was, back then (and even now, to a large extent), there was an entry level knowledge often needed to do this kind of thing. You couldn't just make a copy, because of the variable disk speeds often written into the games, etc. You had to know how to use certain programs to make it work, and access to folks that had copies of the original wasn't always easy.
10 years ago, as well as today, for music especially, there isn't a great deal of knowledge you need to do it. Windows will rip a CD for you, in fact. You don't need anything more than what your core OS gives you.
It is similar, in a fashion, to how Sony and Verant handled some cheating in EverQuest. There was an application often run on a Linux box called ShowEQ. It would give you relevant data about where mobs were, how much xp they would grant you (approx) and their levels, etc. For the longest time, there was an entry level knowledge required to use it, so Sony didn't go out of it's way to protect it that much. Then folks started selling machines with a pre-built ShowEQ kit on it that automatically updated itself, and too many folks were using it. Sony had to fight back, and did, with much harder encryption as well as other things to make it harder to work. Could it still be done? Yes, but it made it that much harder. The entry level went up.
Basically, that is what these music companies need to do. Make the cost of entry to rip a CD illegally higher than most folks can handle. The problem they have is that they haven't been able to come up with a way to do that. Until they do, they won't fix anything. And with the internet being what it is, as soon as someone figures an easier way to get around what the music companies have done, they will distribute it easily. Today's ease of naer global communication makes the job well nigh impossible.
Conclusion: The music companies can't win this fight. They never could.
Why didn't he cast invulnerability, like the other kid that jumped? Oh, he was only a warrior? What a moron!
These kids today... They just don't read the game manual and class abilities in game.
Maybe it was a Chinese translation error?
After spending 4+hrs almost every night for nearly 5 years playing EverQuest, I don't have any doubts.
In part, these games do a great job in filling the void that was called "television" for those of us that were teens in the 70s or 80s.
A good game has to get under your skin and in your brain to keep you playing. And especially the MMO model, has to be addictive to keep players coming back. With real content updates coming out usually once a year or so, if it wasn't addicting, the players would leave after a certain point. Yet they stick around, doing the same thing over and over again, waiting for more content.
How many folks have a lvl 60 toon in WoW that they hit Molten Core once a week (all you can do by game mechanics) and then either goof off in other places with that 60, or level up another toon, all while waiting for the next week's MC hit? You aren't gaining any experience, your chances in a 40 person group of getting a gear upgrade is limited, so in effect you are playing for a crappy shot at that dangling carrot over and over again. And yet folks do it with a rabid passion. (After 5 years of EQ, the carrot didn't work on me with WoW. I hit 60 and got bored fast.)
So the fact that these games have a brain altering effect doesn't surprise me much. I still have an itch to renew my original EQ account and play, even though there isn't much I wish to do in the game. Other MMOs have been an ok substitute for a while, but since I am bored with WoW, and CoH/V is not bad but repetitive, I am waiting for DDO to hook my I.V. to, and feed my addiction. Kinda like a heroin addict waiting for his methadone fix.
I agree. Or that there is more ongoing maintenance with Windows, due to the dangerously flawed security setups.
Most IT guys would rather it take longer to set up, but run smoothly with low maintenance, than to have an easy setup and lots of maintenance.
I would hardly call those answers. He gave PR responses.
Sony had one of the biggest names to draw upon, much like Blizzard did with Warcraft. With new Star Wars movies coming out, SW:G could have been king of the world. The fact that it isn't speaks volumes about the quality of the game. The bottom line is that SW:G just wasn't that much fun to play.
Now, if they make it actually fun, how many folks are going to go back, or play the trial? Not a whole heck of a lot. They are all playing WoW, or waiting for DDO, or some other game to come out, but the majority won't waste their time. In a nutshell, you are betatesting for them while having to pay for it (after those 10 days).
Kinda like Blizzard did with WoW. Oh, wait...It's still in beta, right?
I was in the CoH closed beta, and did the same for CoV. While CoV does breath a bunch of fresh air into the CoH game, I see a lot of problems coming up.
First of all, much like Blizzard did, PlayNC apparently changed a lot of powers late in the beta for gold. This leads to the characters not being well balanced. (Not that the beta characters were well balanced. Typical rush to gold MMO scenario...)
Early on, you could easily do missions in the PvP zones and not run into a single other player. That was kind of nice if you didn't want to PvP, but if you did, it was boring.
The classes themselves have a lot of issues. They worked really hard to not have the "Who needs tankers, when Scrappers are so much better" problem with the Stalker class, and in turn, made it really weak. The Mastermind class is very powerful. The Corrupter actually feels weaker than the Defender, even though the power sets are reversed. The Brute is a god while soloing and working with a healer, but get more than a few folks with him, and since he can't taunt to hold aggro, he becomes pathetic. (Higher levels will eventually give taunt, and then watch out!) The Dominator is quite effective, just like the early Controller class was much more powerful than most folks realized.
Sadly, for all that folks playing MMOs bitch because the developers don't listen to class balancing issues, CoH become a lot worse because PlayNC listened TOO much. The nerf bat is coming in CoV, as well...and I dare say the results will be just as bad.
Reptition does set in even in the early game with CoV. Many of the maps are the same, or almost identical. The prevelance of "door missions" makes it nearly impossible to expect that many different maps. This is the one major weakness with the high number of instanced "dungeons" that PlayNC has used for CoH/CoV. It cuts down on lag, but it spawns the repetition factor.
It's too early to tell on the PvP side. I'm not a big fan of PvP, as it seems to generate more "My weenie is bigger than your weenie" bull than it does any sense of fun competition. Unlike WoW, heroes and villians are allowed to talk to one another, though they do need to flip a few options to send tells to one another. Plus, the server cross-talk makes it easy to keep in touch with friends.
I give CoV a B-. It was rushed out before it was ready, as they made that major mistake of doing a last second revision to the classes, without testing them for a week or two to see how it affected gameplay.
But their character generation still blows away every single game on the market. I can still blow off an hour tinkering with a costume, and by the time you hit lvl 20 and can make a revision to it, you feel an itch to fix things you got wrong. I just want to see some other game companies start to really allow us to personalize our characters. And the fact that equipment doesn't define how you look is just a bonus.
The problem with your analogy, to a certain extent, is that even big companies hit the skids all too often. And while many small deli's will go out of business, many of them also thrive on word of mouth, and better quality.
MacDonalds is popular because it is fast and somewhat cheap food. That resturant downtown that has the finest steaks in a 50 mile radius keeps having customers come back and back again. People will pay for more quality, as long as it isn't an inconvience.
Luxuries work very well, and while Apple is not purely a luxury product, it is a higher end product than your average Dell PC. And if more games were made for Macs, what do you think would start happening? Maybe not your most graphically challenging games, but still. I can still fire up almost every game made today on my old P4 1.8HGz machine. I just choose to play them on my more expensive P4 3.4GHz machine. I went for faster, because I wanted to. And I bought an iPod because I wanted the easiest and best MP3 player. That, and iTunes kicks everyone else's butt for a pay music service.
Alienware and others are still in business. Sure, they don't beat Dell's prices, but then again, they often make better systems for those that WANT that better system. You often do get what you pay for.
I mean, if they send electronic pulses over a wire, wouldn't that have a charge?
Doesn't sound neutral to me, damnit!
I agree.
Though the biggest reason for failure is that most people simply don't need a PDA.
More than half the folks I know that have a PDA only have it as a status symbol. They don't need it, and barely use it. Most of the time they pull it out and start fiddling with it, they are showing off that they have one.
How many IT people are really on the go so damn much that they have to have a PDA? I sit in meetings and most of the people there have their PDA out, and are poking and proding at it once in a while. I'm willing to go out on a limb and say that they are bouncing back and forth between menus, trying to look like they are important.
I could see some flunky of a famous person that keeps appointments and the like needing one. I can't see most IT folks needing one.
And quite frankly, when I walk away from my desk, whether it is to go eat lunch, take a dump, or simply to get some fresh air, I don't want work following me.
I remember back when the Macs first came out. I was about 19 or so at the time, and doing some work where my father was employed, CSC. And an interesting phenomenon started to happen once the office got a few Macs for word processing work.
There were 5 Macs, and over a dozen PCs around, that could be signed up for to do the work. This was prior to everyone having a PC at their desk. Most guys didn't need one there.
The 5 Macs had a waiting list of a few days for doing word processing. You could walk in at any time and use a PC, no worries or hassles over someone else using one. Why?
Because when you used a word processor on a Mac, what you saw on the screen was what you saw on the paper when you printed it. Plain and simple. You could use any word processor on a PC, and it wouldn't be a truetype font, no matter what you used. So, folks started to fight over the use of the Macs to get a proper visual representation of what their document would look like.
That sentimentality really took hold with journalists. They really wanted to see what that article was going to look like, so it went to the editor with a better presentation. And a mindset was born.
Add to that the prevalence that most schools/universites had for Macs through special programs that Apple has/had, and journalists came out of school knowing the Mac more often than they knew the PC outside of gaming. And with the lack of games for the Mac, it carries are more "workplace computer" air than the PC does.
Apple is very good at product placement, too. If you watch any movie that has someone that does writing, they always seem to have a Mac laptop in hand, or a Mac in their office. It's a deliberate ploy by Apple to make sure their computers are viewed as journalist friendly.
Today, you can do all of that with a PC, for sure. But, the mindset of most journalists have been set.
Really?
I think they got the wrong guy. I have gotten more spam in the last 2 weeks than I have the previous month. I don't see that they made a dent.
Now, let me go talk to this chick that says she has a webcam. She sounds hot!
Wait...You talk about how you love Eve-Online, but then you talk about how folks go after macrobots characters? Does anyone else see a conflict of interest? That smells a lot like Lineage II, one of the worst economy games in existence.
If a game allows botting, or makes botting easy, then currency WILL be farmed. And once it is farmed, the game economy is shot, because folks will sell it. And if you can PK another toon to take what they got, then you see the economy further erode.
If you want an effectively non-currency game, play City of Heroes. There isn't really an economy to speak of, and that is one of the most attractive aspects of the game. High level players often GIVE their currency (called Influence) away, because they have nothing to spend it on, and yet having a bottomless pit of currency will only take you so far. Best part is, if you get an Enhancement (power slot upgrade), nobody else in your group knows you got it, unless you decide to tell them. In other words, NO LOOT HASSLES!
I bought platinum in EQ, once. Got 100,000 platinum, and did very little with it. Twinked the crap out of a lot of new toons, but my main? I got very little mileage out of that platinum with him.
There were plenty of folks that farmed in EQ, and sold stuff. There were folks that cornered the market for some items once the Bazaar zone opened, buying all of an item and then jacking the price up. The same thing happens in World of Warcraft, at times.
Finally, remember that Sony decided to create it's own version of selling in game items, for EQ2. Does that tell you how lucrative this facet of MMOs is?
Really, why should I want this? Do we feel handcuffed because one friend likes to chat on Yahoo! and the other likes MSN?
Personally, I love the fact that I have both. I have my work contacts (I work from home) all on MSN, along with a few friends that I know won't just jabber at me constantly as I try to work. My friends are all on my Yahoo!, and they can see me pretty much anytime.
I don't have to have log out of one account to log into the other. I have both.
And I like it that way.
Does it come with it's own sharks?
They have to sue to overturn this. For one very major reason...
Most of the games that feature this stuff, that stuff isn't of major interest to most people playing it.
I mean, the "hot coffee" mod was pretty lame, all things considered. If you were tittilated by the poorly pixilated hanky panky that happened in that mod, you haven't seen a naked chick or had sex, and probably spank your monkey while sitting in a chat room.
It's time to take the government out of parenting. Let the parents screw up if they want. I'm tired of paying babysitter money for brats that aren't mine.
He only won against Ford and Chrysler. The suit against GM was dismissed, as well as against all foreign automakers. The millions he won were largely squandered on more lawsuits.
And those automakers that had the suit dismissed? Never had to stop offering the intermittent wiper.