Huh? Plenty leave WoW to start over elsewhere- because with WoW so much of the content is up front. Once you've leveled, there is not a lot left to do. To keep getting the fix, people head to other games where they can level again. Even Eve, which uses non-grind leveling and you have to play a month or so to even get a decent idea of what all is in there to do, and really could play for years, has a median paid subscription time of about 7-8 months IIRC (and yes, I do know that that implies half keep playing longer- but half have moved on).
Personally, I've been hooked at a few games- and played them fairly avidly for a while- and it has cut down on playing non-multiplayer stuff. But they fade to occasional plays rather than frantic plays. CoH for example I'm perfectly satisfied these days to only play when they send me the occasional free weekend to try to lure me back. Eve on the other hand still gets several hours in a week. Qualitatively, MMOG is lot more like when I did a lot of PBEM Diplomacy than solo video games in playtime dynamic. So I can buy that there are some addictive qualities, but I think it's more to genre than to paritcular game, so long as the player makes that first step of trying another game in the genre when they start to burn out on the first one they try.
I'd like to partially correct some misperceptions possible from your post, as well as mention what perceptions are true.
You do NOT have to mine to get started. I didn't make my initial stake mining, and whenever I train folks in my corp I encourage them to avoid it and teach them how (people are welcome to Evemail me ingame for help there, same moniker as here). Making a living by Trading, which is one of the options, does indeed lead to long travel times- you tend to fly slow ships over long distances. That is a natural result of the fact that if you choose to trade for a living, you're competing with everyone else who does, and so short routes may get jumped on quick leaving the long ones. You picked some of the (while profitable enough) most boring professions in the game in my opinion- so that you got bored doing it is natural:).
Another way to get started is to run missions and blow up NPCs. It pays decently, and more importantly is interesting and a good way to learn the combat mechanics. The skills you learn to improve it are to a large degree useful for PVP as well, unlike mining skills which are basically useless outside mining.
Now the ability to make money while doing something else is a nice thing about the game, but I wouldn't spend my dedicated game time doing it. Letting your ship run a big trade work, or an industrial to eat a big asteroid, while at work is fine, since it takes very little real world time, but it's only one of several possible means to an end. What is that end? Well, you choose your own goals in the game.
There are lots of people who make money the way you do, and lots of people who make money the way I do, and lots who make money a variety of other ways. Different ways appeal to different people. Do what appeals- and if you find nothing that appeals, find another game. But if you do the trial, and part is boring, try something else:).
It was an interesting ad to land in the middle of that article, given that as MMO games go Eve leaves a whole lot more in the players hands than most. The devs seem to be taking the approach of giving the players the tools to develop their own stories out on the rim- while neglecting the "official" stuff considerably of late (my Emperor has been dead for half a year, and no updates on empire leadership since shortly after his death).
While the text does limit things somewhat, MUDs and such have lived with text interfaces for quite a while, and some do RP quite well. I agree that Teamspeak doesn't seem a big improvement though on the RP side in any of the games I've tried.
Shattered Galaxy might be fun. It's basically a tactical combat game where a bunch of people on each side controling squads fight it out for 15 minutes to control a map area- so it fits your short time online criteria. Nonpayers can play for free, though if you wind up liking it paying the $10/month once every 3 months still meets your $5 limit while letting you avoid a lot of the pitfalls of not paying. It is more fun to be in a regiment with others, but not required, and in any case there are regiments with enough people that you'll both find population at any time, and not get in trouble for not being on much.
Drawbacks- it's old, it's slowly decreasing in users (though there's still enough to have fun), and there are are just as many incoherent people as there are in more popular games. The tutorial is terrible, you'll want to get help from other players, preferably on the vetran planet Morgana Prime, reading up at SG City can help too.
And back when they broke 20,000 on at once, they had 85,000 current paid subscriptions and another 15,000 currently active trial accounts (trials last 2 weeks). These are rather more solid than when a site claims to have a certain number of "registered users" who could have registered anytime. Heck, I registered on Anarchy Online once for the free year thing, and didn't finish character creation:).
Of course, there are a lot of games with more total paid users. But for measuring how much a player will interact with, it's probably best to compare how many users one may ever interact with (directly or indirectly via their affect on the shared world). As such, one would want the numbers for other game's largest shards.
Here's the real problem. If someone figures out where the honeypots are, and they want to kill some non-virus program, they send the honeypots the non-virus in a way that makes it look like a virus. Bingo, everyone relying on the system has their non-virus program treated like a virus.
Now as to the "security" of the dedicated network, the trick is to notice the virus while not getting infected by it. So they should use "secure" as in "doesn't run windows" when trying to find windows viruses for the machines on the network- they can then have some windows boxes they can farm the virus to if they want to see what it does, but those should be unable to spread the virus back to the rest of the world, or do anything else nasty.
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Huh? Plenty leave WoW to start over elsewhere- because with WoW so much of the content is up front. Once you've leveled, there is not a lot left to do. To keep getting the fix, people head to other games where they can level again. Even Eve, which uses non-grind leveling and you have to play a month or so to even get a decent idea of what all is in there to do, and really could play for years, has a median paid subscription time of about 7-8 months IIRC (and yes, I do know that that implies half keep playing longer- but half have moved on). Personally, I've been hooked at a few games- and played them fairly avidly for a while- and it has cut down on playing non-multiplayer stuff. But they fade to occasional plays rather than frantic plays. CoH for example I'm perfectly satisfied these days to only play when they send me the occasional free weekend to try to lure me back. Eve on the other hand still gets several hours in a week. Qualitatively, MMOG is lot more like when I did a lot of PBEM Diplomacy than solo video games in playtime dynamic. So I can buy that there are some addictive qualities, but I think it's more to genre than to paritcular game, so long as the player makes that first step of trying another game in the genre when they start to burn out on the first one they try.
I'd like to partially correct some misperceptions possible from your post, as well as mention what perceptions are true.
You do NOT have to mine to get started. I didn't make my initial stake mining, and whenever I train folks in my corp I encourage them to avoid it and teach them how (people are welcome to Evemail me ingame for help there, same moniker as here). Making a living by Trading, which is one of the options, does indeed lead to long travel times- you tend to fly slow ships over long distances. That is a natural result of the fact that if you choose to trade for a living, you're competing with everyone else who does, and so short routes may get jumped on quick leaving the long ones. You picked some of the (while profitable enough) most boring professions in the game in my opinion- so that you got bored doing it is natural:).
Another way to get started is to run missions and blow up NPCs. It pays decently, and more importantly is interesting and a good way to learn the combat mechanics. The skills you learn to improve it are to a large degree useful for PVP as well, unlike mining skills which are basically useless outside mining.
Now the ability to make money while doing something else is a nice thing about the game, but I wouldn't spend my dedicated game time doing it. Letting your ship run a big trade work, or an industrial to eat a big asteroid, while at work is fine, since it takes very little real world time, but it's only one of several possible means to an end. What is that end? Well, you choose your own goals in the game.
There are lots of people who make money the way you do, and lots of people who make money the way I do, and lots who make money a variety of other ways. Different ways appeal to different people. Do what appeals- and if you find nothing that appeals, find another game. But if you do the trial, and part is boring, try something else:).
It was an interesting ad to land in the middle of that article, given that as MMO games go Eve leaves a whole lot more in the players hands than most. The devs seem to be taking the approach of giving the players the tools to develop their own stories out on the rim- while neglecting the "official" stuff considerably of late (my Emperor has been dead for half a year, and no updates on empire leadership since shortly after his death).
While the text does limit things somewhat, MUDs and such have lived with text interfaces for quite a while, and some do RP quite well. I agree that Teamspeak doesn't seem a big improvement though on the RP side in any of the games I've tried.
Shattered Galaxy might be fun. It's basically a tactical combat game where a bunch of people on each side controling squads fight it out for 15 minutes to control a map area- so it fits your short time online criteria. Nonpayers can play for free, though if you wind up liking it paying the $10/month once every 3 months still meets your $5 limit while letting you avoid a lot of the pitfalls of not paying. It is more fun to be in a regiment with others, but not required, and in any case there are regiments with enough people that you'll both find population at any time, and not get in trouble for not being on much. Drawbacks- it's old, it's slowly decreasing in users (though there's still enough to have fun), and there are are just as many incoherent people as there are in more popular games. The tutorial is terrible, you'll want to get help from other players, preferably on the vetran planet Morgana Prime, reading up at SG City can help too.
And back when they broke 20,000 on at once, they had 85,000 current paid subscriptions and another 15,000 currently active trial accounts (trials last 2 weeks). These are rather more solid than when a site claims to have a certain number of "registered users" who could have registered anytime. Heck, I registered on Anarchy Online once for the free year thing, and didn't finish character creation :).
Of course, there are a lot of games with more total paid users. But for measuring how much a player will interact with, it's probably best to compare how many users one may ever interact with (directly or indirectly via their affect on the shared world). As such, one would want the numbers for other game's largest shards.
Here's the real problem. If someone figures out where the honeypots are, and they want to kill some non-virus program, they send the honeypots the non-virus in a way that makes it look like a virus. Bingo, everyone relying on the system has their non-virus program treated like a virus.
Now as to the "security" of the dedicated network, the trick is to notice the virus while not getting infected by it. So they should use "secure" as in "doesn't run windows" when trying to find windows viruses for the machines on the network- they can then have some windows boxes they can farm the virus to if they want to see what it does, but those should be unable to spread the virus back to the rest of the world, or do anything else nasty.