Actually, there still is an aftermarket in Magic cards, it's just not as insane as it once was--it's stablized. Cards accrue value based on their scarcity and gameplay value now, not based on speculation. It's still possible, even in the newest sets, to pull a card that will go for $40-$50 out of a $3.20 pack. Of course, this is only possible since Wizards introduced foil cards (the card in this example would be the foil version of a popular rare). Also, many of those old cards have maintained their monetary value, as they still have game value in versions of the game where they are still legal, and they are only getting rarer.
Of course, all bets are off the moment Wizards/Hasbro quits dropping $1,000,000 per year in prize money into the tournament scene...
btw, Serra came back in 7th, after being out for two editions. New art, though.
People take there high level characters and kill things at a much lower level just for the items. This is called farming.
When this happens it takes away from the people who need that item for game play. There are whole guilds that just farm, and camp the monster with the items and don't allow anyone else to fight that monster, even if its neccesary for the continuation of the game.
This is actually not a problem. You don't want other characters coming in a killing the level boss while you're playing? Simple, create a new game, password protect it, and only let in other players that you know. Voila.
And keep in mind that each item is rolled up randomly at the time that you find it, so if some other high level character find a super-rare, it does not change the odds that you will find the same rare. Blizzard doesn't have a limited supply of these items, they are all created on the spot during gameplay.
Also, what alternative way would you suggest that Blizzard solve the problem "programmatically", seeing as they already have (refer to above).
Close, but not absolutely true:
"Watterson has granted only two interviews - one to the Los Angeles Times in the early days of his fame (April 1987), and one to The Comics Journal (#127, March 1989). " -- from http://www.citeweb.net/calvinandhobbes/articles/co micopia.htm
I have the Comics Journal issue around here somewhere. It's a pretty extensive interview, and in it he talks about his strict no-licensing policy (particularly ironic given all the "pissing Calvin" stickers you'll see on the cars of people with no taste who don't know any better). He also seems to think there's no venue for solid comic strips with good art and room for storytelling. While this is true in the newspapers, he doesn't seem to realize that comic books are a viable alternative, as something like _Bone_ proves.
Why not allow your agent(s) to learn from your playing and then play for you _as_ you while you sleep? I find the idea of a game world with a full population that is going all the time kind of enticing. You could train an agent to act a certain way and then set them loose permanently and see how they do, while moving on to create another one. Granted, training AI would probably need to improve substantially, but I'm sure it's doable.
Which has definite pluses and minuses. It's a thing called DLXOS, running on the DLX simulated processor. You can learn all about it here:
http://www.cse.ucsc.edu/~elm
Anyway, the obvious plus was that the instructor could answer any questions you needed answered about it. The minus was that it was still a bit buggy, and a bug in the custom gcc compiler about stove in our heads on one of the assignments. We implemented monitors, traps for input and output to a user program, a keyboard buffer, a shell, 2-level page tables, virtual memory, and a custom filesystem. The preexisting code wasn't always as self-explanatory or well-commented as it could have been, but it was nice to be actually writing this stuff and not just plugging the holes like we would have been in NACHOS. And it was in C, whiche we were plenty comfortable with.
Their analysts probably pointed out that last year X% of their revenue was lost to etoy.com. This lead to the formulation of a strategy to bring etoy.com down over this year's Christmas season. Wheels turn, cogs rotate, and the lawyers get called. I keep seeing people say this and I don't understand how it could possibly be true. etoy.com doesn't sell toys. It is impossible for any revenue potentially garnered by etoys.com to be lost to etoy.com. The only thing they have is a potential confusion by the consumer if they type "etoy.com", but this confusion will happen whether the etoy.com address is valid or pulled by Network Solutions. Either way the consumer simply has to retype the domain name to spend money at etoys.com.
Think about this: Many (probably more than 50%) of the items on eBay only get zero to two bids during their entire lifetime. A rough guess would be that an average item of this stripe has 10-20 hits on its page, total, perhaps less. That's an average for the unpopular items of let's say 15 hits over the course of 7 days. Compare that to the hits these same items would get if an auction indexer hit them once an hour to keep its index updated. 7 days * 24 hours = 168 hits on items that would only have normally seen 15. This is just a rough estimate, but you can see what kind of impact it could have on eBay's system. I don't think there would be enough of a commessurate decrease in hits on more popular items, either, because even though a copy might be stored at the indexer's site, once someone has made a bid they are going to tend to go directly to eBay for the most current updates.
He used it at the beginning of his movie "First Strike".
I'm afraid what you have ahold of there is Armor of God II: Operation Condor. That also had the wind tunnel fight scene at the end, another big-time geek toy experience.
This correction posted as a public service for those who would rent First Strike exclusively for the Zorb, and not for the slam bang Jackie Chan action.
I shouldn't have said worthless. What I meant was inexpensive. The cards cost Nintendo almost nothing to produce, so the profit margin is quite impressive.
Er, you gotta see the difference between the primary and secondary market here. When Wizards of the Coast prints Pokemon cards and sells them, they see around $0.10 per card and make their profit from that. That's it for them. It is people who then resell that card to someone else who decides that (to them) it is worth $100 who makes the huge profit. It's illegal for a manufacturer to get involved in the secondary market, so Wizards stays well away from it.
I think when you get down to it that the reason a suit like this will be unsuccessful is that the only intrinsic value of any of these cards is the original wholesale (or retail at $0.20/card) price, and that the manufacturer makes no claim about any one card being more valuable than any other card.
Wizards makes Pokemon cards, under license from Nintendo, and I believe the article mentions them as being named in the suit. The success of Pokemon has led to some of the worst behavior of Wizards coporate recently, like rushing their original bread and butter off the presses to print more Pokemon, and giving places like the Gap priority distribution of Pokemon over the cardshops that have always sold Magic and made the company millions in the first place. Personally, I otherwise like Wizards because auctioning off Magic cards pays my rent (oh, and the game's still a lot of fun), but it dissapoints me to see a company get huge and begin ignoring those who made it what it is.
The badges are worn on a lanyard with the Pepsi logo on it. The badge has a photo of the student, the school name, the student's name, and a barcode which represents the Social Security number.
My reading of this is that the Pepsi logo is on the lanyard, not the card. Nothing says you can't substitute a different lanyard. Or even maybe some fashionable shoelaces. Also, someone else posted the ID card rules from the school's web site, and they only require that the card be in the owner's possession, not that they must wear it. Of course, the administrators might browbeat kids that don't fall in and wear the generously provided corporate accessory. I don't think I'm in favor of putting the SSN on the card or being forced to wear it, but it otherwise doesn't sound terrible. I mean, I'm a responsible adult in college and I have school ID card. I do agree that it seems to have little relevance to the recent school violence. -->ben
Slashdot Mirror
Why would you use a .tv TLD for a radio station?
I think you mean steganography. Unless your secretary is writing the MP3 data out by hand.
Of course, all bets are off the moment Wizards/Hasbro quits dropping $1,000,000 per year in prize money into the tournament scene...
btw, Serra came back in 7th, after being out for two editions. New art, though.
When this happens it takes away from the people who need that item for game play. There are whole guilds that just farm, and camp the monster with the items and don't allow anyone else to fight that monster, even if its neccesary for the continuation of the game.
This is actually not a problem. You don't want other characters coming in a killing the level boss while you're playing? Simple, create a new game, password protect it, and only let in other players that you know. Voila.
And keep in mind that each item is rolled up randomly at the time that you find it, so if some other high level character find a super-rare, it does not change the odds that you will find the same rare. Blizzard doesn't have a limited supply of these items, they are all created on the spot during gameplay.
Also, what alternative way would you suggest that Blizzard solve the problem "programmatically", seeing as they already have (refer to above).
Topazes.
Close, but not absolutely true:o micopia.htm
"Watterson has granted only two interviews - one to the Los Angeles Times in the early days of his fame (April 1987), and one to The Comics Journal (#127, March 1989). " -- from http://www.citeweb.net/calvinandhobbes/articles/c
I have the Comics Journal issue around here somewhere. It's a pretty extensive interview, and in it he talks about his strict no-licensing policy (particularly ironic given all the "pissing Calvin" stickers you'll see on the cars of people with no taste who don't know any better). He also seems to think there's no venue for solid comic strips with good art and room for storytelling. While this is true in the newspapers, he doesn't seem to realize that comic books are a viable alternative, as something like _Bone_ proves.
Why not allow your agent(s) to learn from your playing and then play for you _as_ you while you sleep? I find the idea of a game world with a full population that is going all the time kind of enticing. You could train an agent to act a certain way and then set them loose permanently and see how they do, while moving on to create another one. Granted, training AI would probably need to improve substantially, but I'm sure it's doable.
http://www.cse.ucsc.edu/~elm
Anyway, the obvious plus was that the instructor could answer any questions you needed answered about it. The minus was that it was still a bit buggy, and a bug in the custom gcc compiler about stove in our heads on one of the assignments. We implemented monitors, traps for input and output to a user program, a keyboard buffer, a shell, 2-level page tables, virtual memory, and a custom filesystem. The preexisting code wasn't always as self-explanatory or well-commented as it could have been, but it was nice to be actually writing this stuff and not just plugging the holes like we would have been in NACHOS. And it was in C, whiche we were plenty comfortable with.
Their analysts probably pointed out that last year X% of their revenue was lost to etoy.com. This lead to the formulation of a strategy to bring etoy.com down over this year's Christmas season. Wheels turn, cogs rotate, and the lawyers get called.
I keep seeing people say this and I don't understand how it could possibly be true. etoy.com doesn't sell toys. It is impossible for any revenue potentially garnered by etoys.com to be lost to etoy.com. The only thing they have is a potential confusion by the consumer if they type "etoy.com", but this confusion will happen whether the etoy.com address is valid or pulled by Network Solutions. Either way the consumer simply has to retype the domain name to spend money at etoys.com.
Think about this: Many (probably more than 50%) of the items on eBay only get zero to two bids during their entire lifetime. A rough guess would be that an average item of this stripe has 10-20 hits on its page, total, perhaps less. That's an average for the unpopular items of let's say 15 hits over the course of 7 days. Compare that to the hits these same items would get if an auction indexer hit them once an hour to keep its index updated. 7 days * 24 hours = 168 hits on items that would only have normally seen 15. This is just a rough estimate, but you can see what kind of impact it could have on eBay's system. I don't think there would be enough of a commessurate decrease in hits on more popular items, either, because even though a copy might be stored at the indexer's site, once someone has made a bid they are going to tend to go directly to eBay for the most current updates.
I'm afraid what you have ahold of there is Armor of God II: Operation Condor. That also had the wind tunnel fight scene at the end, another big-time geek toy experience.
This correction posted as a public service for those who would rent First Strike exclusively for the Zorb, and not for the slam bang Jackie Chan action.
I shouldn't have said worthless. What I meant was inexpensive. The cards cost Nintendo almost nothing to produce, so the profit margin is quite impressive.
Er, you gotta see the difference between the primary and secondary market here. When Wizards of the Coast prints Pokemon cards and sells them, they see around $0.10 per card and make their profit from that. That's it for them. It is people who then resell that card to someone else who decides that (to them) it is worth $100 who makes the huge profit. It's illegal for a manufacturer to get involved in the secondary market, so Wizards stays well away from it.
I think when you get down to it that the reason a suit like this will be unsuccessful is that the only intrinsic value of any of these cards is the original wholesale (or retail at $0.20/card) price, and that the manufacturer makes no claim about any one card being more valuable than any other card.
1. Wizard of the Coast for Magic cards
Wizards makes Pokemon cards, under license from Nintendo, and I believe the article mentions them as being named in the suit. The success of Pokemon has led to some of the worst behavior of Wizards coporate recently, like rushing their original bread and butter off the presses to print more Pokemon, and giving places like the Gap priority distribution of Pokemon over the cardshops that have always sold Magic and made the company millions in the first place. Personally, I otherwise like Wizards because auctioning off Magic cards pays my rent (oh, and the game's still a lot of fun), but it dissapoints me to see a company get huge and begin ignoring those who made it what it is.
The badges are worn on a lanyard with the Pepsi logo on it. The badge has a photo of the student, the school name, the student's name, and a barcode which represents the Social Security number.
My reading of this is that the Pepsi logo is on the lanyard, not the card. Nothing says you can't substitute a different lanyard. Or even maybe some fashionable shoelaces. Also, someone else posted the ID card rules from the school's web site, and they only require that the card be in the owner's possession, not that they must wear it. Of course, the administrators might browbeat kids that don't fall in and wear the generously provided corporate accessory. I don't think I'm in favor of putting the SSN on the card or being forced to wear it, but it otherwise doesn't sound terrible. I mean, I'm a responsible adult in college and I have school ID card. I do agree that it seems to have little relevance to the recent school violence. -->ben