This is about social networks. They might lose a good chunk of people that want to play offline, but at the same time they will gain a lot of people who would prefer to play offline, but will play online if it is the only option. By getting people to play online, you get them to continue to play online as it is fundamentally more completive. No one wants to compare their progress or scores to others when the top 5% of the leader board is filled with cheaters, which will happen without a strong verification system. The more people compete, the more opportunities Blizzard has to sell these people more products. And people are far more willing to pay for that +5 bunny of cuteness if they can show it off to their friends than they would be if it was simply DLC (despite having a system from trading item for real money, I don't think Blizzard will sell anything directly that is obtainable in the game itself).
As far as the DRM goes, the icing on the cake, pirating this when its online only will be really, really hard. All the AI code will be on the servers and trying to recreate that will be a daunting task. Also given the fact they will probably have regular updates and new challenges, like an MMO, pirates will never have anything as current, in working order, as what is online.
Warcraft 3 is an RTS, while WoW and diablo II (more so with Diablo 3) are MMORPGs. Yet, Warcraft 3 and Starcraft 2 both have strong modding potential. Blizzard doesn't want people to hack persistent games, but is fine with mods for episodic games.
World of Warcraft recently added in a feature called "War games" where you can set up your own pvp battles with other players on any pvp map. You are free to have uneven teams, and you can all agree on any set of special rules you want to follow. I could see them allowing customization of the map if it proves to be a popular feature (which it really isn't as everyone is reward driven, and when you use war games all rewards are disabled).
As much as a debate we can get into this, tvtropes covers the basics of this question along with providing many examples of fiction that involves this issue:
What Measure Is A Non-Human
I have never seen "police abuse" in even the slightest form from any time I have dealt with the police, or seen the police deal with someone else.
I can remember 4 times in my life (30 years) that I have dealt with the police: 1. Had a nice chat since some of the library guests thought I was stoned. The police officer asked me to come to a room, told me that some people were concerned at my odd behavior, and let me go as he could tell from my physical attributes that I was not stoned. He later said "hi" every time I passed by from that point on, which was a bit creepy. 2. Got pulled over for a broken tail light. Said I had a week to fix it or I would get a ticket. None of this, "you must verify with us that it is fixed" crap. 3. My grandmother who was suffering from altimeters managed to escape her house and ended up at another house in the neighborhood. 4. Most recently, me and my insane apartment mate were play acting some "drama" and were a bit loud. The police came and wanted to check up on us, which we assured them (we were separated by about 10 feet and talked to different officers) that everything was fine. They also asked us if we knew of any "weed" that was around, to which I replied "no," even though it was a lie, since my appeasement mate just 1/2 hour ago wanted to show me his cache.
I've also seen plenty of times the police pulled people over and saw nothing wrong there. Even saw a drug bust (very rare where I am), or at least I assume it was as the police were removing wads of cash from various places on an individual and placing them in a plastic bag.
It is my belief that either these situations of "police abuse" are extremely limited (given how many police there are in the US) or I'm simply living in a part of the country where it doesn't happen.
Getting to level 20 will probably take around 3-4 hours. Once you want to purchase the game, you pay $20 for the game which includes 1 free month. This allows you to level though the classic game (revamped with the latest expansion) and though burning crusade (they made the first expansion part of the base game at the same time they made trials unlimited) which will probably take around 100 hours to complete (even then you can go back and play with 8 other classes, and/or try a different faction for roughly 1/3 different experience). If you want to level past that you will need to buy 2 more expansions in order to get into the more hardcore raiding and pvp at max level.
I don't see why there is an article on slashdot about this. This simply gives people an extra chance to try the game again without having to make a new trial account.
The purpose of this tool is to help make your website not rely on external resources in such a way that it could make your website dangerous if your 3rd party affiliates decide to either exploit your users, or they get their resources hacked into. E.g. you have a form; your form allows custom avatars, someone decides to make a special custom avatar that rewrites the current page to put a custom login area that can steal people's passwords as they log in.
Puzzle Pirates uses a free to play and pay service. The puzzle MMO gives a few puzzles that non-subscribers can play, and allows others to be played on certain days of the week. In order to do a pirate mission you need x number of players doing some kinds of puzzles, the free paying ones will have something to do with other players.
There are 3 kinds of servers, the first is a subscription server where if you choose to pay the monthly payment you get access to everything. The other you can buy special currency that is used to buy a license to play certain games for a period of time (the license decays slower when you aren't playing). These licenses and money can be traded or given to other players. This gives the players a choice between selecting a server where all the paying players are on a level playing field, and one that lets you pick and choose what you want. The final server is a hybrid were each paying player gets a monthly allowance of money to spend (the amount paid is fixed). This server is designed for kids and has a strict language/conduct policy.
Thou shall charge only for content: None of this buying +2 sword, or buying money with real world money. Micro transactions are fine, as long as the player gets something they can't get in game . already.
Thou shall let a loser lose: In single player games, tell the player when the situation is hopeless, don't let them struggle trying to win the impossible. In a multiplayer game, you need to give a losing team the chance to catch back up, or just end the game and be done with it. No one likes a hopeless game.
After 2+ years of Wow you will see quite a few game patches. Most that content can see, but you can't really experience since all but the newest expansion is trivial and provided you can get friends to help you, you will blast though it without understanding any of the mechanics and challenge of the fights. As for the most recent stuff, only the most hardcore gamers can truly experience it all. The 'heroic' hard modes of the end tier currently are so challenging that only about 0.1% (if not less) of the players have beat it (at least no one on my server has even come close to seeing it). Also don't think that WoW is just 15$ per month (less if you pay in bulk), you have to factor in the cost of the xpacs which run around $50 every 2 years (they keep saying they will try to put out more faster). With just the base game, you got around 60ish hours of game play, another 20ish for the 2 non-current x-pacs. Without the most current xpac you will have very little to do as hardly no one plays in those areas.
What is WoW: 1. A story and an easy timesink where you level up 10 different classes to maximum level. Each class plays differently. And you can expect to hit around 1/3 of the content every play though (you need to play both sides to really see it all). 2. A way to use the once per day (or in some cases 7 times per week) "chores" which will get your characters better gear, with new gear being available around every 3 months. 3. Join a guild and bang your head 3 hours a day (or more), 3 days a week (or more) doing raids with 10 (or 25) players trying to defeat the really hard challenges. Most of these end game content requires your ability to pay attention, multi-task, communicate, and a bit of problem solving. 4. PvP your brains out in battle grounds, either in random groups or in more serious 10v10 matches (where you have to gather a team yourself). 5. Play the economy with the action house and gathering various materials just to show you can make lots and lots of money, possibly spending them on a few expensive items. 6. An RP community where you talk and role play. If this is the only thing going for you, it won't last.
2nd hard market hurts more than piracy, not because they think more people buy used than pirate, but rather the willingness to pay for the full retail value is higher among people who buy used, vs those who pirate.
The future is DLC, it lets people pay how much they are willing for the game. We will probably see most non-MMO games go to free to play (with possibly ads) with the micro transactions there to those that are willing to pay.
I'm also willing to bet we will soon see DLC for TV as well in the form of bonus scenes.
If this becomes widely enough known, I can see a company forming to provide legal protection against attacks of this kind. Register domain, have the company check your domain name against a list of trademarked names. If its not in the list they could offer you a $5 per year insurance plan which will actively protect your domain against any kind of takedown of this kind (so you are protected even if you go on vacation and miss the window to file a defense), if they can't protect your domain, then you get a payout for compensation.
I can't wait until we reach the day where technology blurs the line between human and non-human. We already have ways to do sex selection and other similar genetic tests before conception. It is only a matter of time before we start tinkering with our own DNA, and as much as the church might condemn such actions, it will happen. The church will have to decide what to do with such modified humans? Do they have souls? Does a non-human animal with human traits have souls? If only "pure" humans have souls then I forsee a new age of slavery; organisms with human level intelligence being treated as non-human slaves; only they are called beasts of burden.
5 games (independent of winning entries) were chosen to be playable for a few minutes during the exhibit. The first two: Pac-Man and Super mario Bros are fine, but: #3 - The secret of Monkey Island - You can hardly understand this game in only a few minutes #4 - Myst - Same with this #5 - World of Warcraft - A few minutes... WTF, how much did Blizzard bribe for this to get setup.
Wait... the passwords/security answers should have been encrypted, so unless they are being overly cautious about someone trying to generate passwords that match every hash (plus salt), or just some they are interested in there is not much to fear. Also the credit card number should not even be on their systems at all, they should have gotten a buyer code from the credit card company which they can simply invalidate (unless they think that someone may have inserted monitoring code in their system, in which case your credit card number is only in danger if you entered into their system recently).
There are 3 basic ways a person can identify themselves:
1. What you know - like a password 2. What you have - like a keycard, or a one time password generator 3. What you are - biometrics
The advantage of 1 is that it can only be stolen when being used. The advantage of 2 is that it can't be easily copied without removing it from the person. The advantage of 3 is that it can't be stolen, but can be copied without being used.
I've seen places like air ports that use all 3. Swipe your card, punch in the pin, and scan your fingerprint. However, it is often not practical to require users to use all 3. A password is easy to give out, but can be easily forgotten. A keycard or password generator is a physical device that has to be issued to the individual. Biometrics requires special hardware that many users don't have, or you can afford to install on your building doors. Having fingerprint readers on your computer won't really help too much against if your computer gets compromised, while #2 can help deter this. On the other hand, if fingerprint readers become standard issue on computers, then many web sites can add it to their log in requirements (your computer would send a hash of your fingerprint based on the certificate of the requesting web site to avoid it being used for another site).
4. Cash takes time to get to the recipient, usually 2 days (The US has a lot of sparely populated land).
Now, #1 and #2 can be mostly mitigated by sending a check. Sending checks in the mail to pay for many items is a very common practice here in the US. It doesn't help #3 and #4, but it avoids the fees involved in using credit cards. Checks are much safer than cash for non-person exchange (the downside of checks is you don't know they are good until you cash them in, which is why many walk in stores don't accept them).
Its not the post office, its the people at both ends.
1. Although it is a federal offense, it is often easy to steal people's mail and thus the money simply by taking mail out of the mail box on either end. 2. Cash isn't traceable, you can't go to court and claim you payed your bills in cash unless you did it in person and got a receipt. 3. Cash needs to be processed manually, if you send cash to a business, someone has to open the mail, count the bills, store the bills, and make a note that the payment was received. People cost money to hire, and people tend to make more mistakes than computers.
I agree, the most suspicious part of the story is that the "cop" stated who he/she was. A real cop doing this kind of thing wouldn't tell anyone who they were until they were in court. I don't even think they would mention the fact when they set up a time to meet.
On second though, this "cop" might have only wanted to scare a few people, not making any arrests, just giving out a few warnings.
One day, some day, the US elementary education system will move to the metric system. But as long as parents expect teachers to teach what they know and use, it will never happen.
Gravity, inertia etc all back up the fact that it is the earth moving about the sun, with the other planets. This statement is not false, and neither is mine. Moving (and rotation) is relative to other objects. If A moves relative to B, then B moves relative to A.
At least in High School, the teachers didn't focus on these "minor details." For instance I was taught the order of the planets, including that Pluto was the last planet, even though at the time it wasn't. They also taught us that the earth does not revolve around the sun, its the other way around, and it was a misconception in history that it did. When in actuality its all a point of view, and all the teachers wanted to do is to convince us that we aren't the center of the universe.
As a second is traditionally defined in terms of a day, it is related. If you were to visit some isolated community in the world and they asked you what a second was (assuming you had no devices on you) you could describe to them in a sufficiently accurate way, that there are 86400 seconds in a day. If they asked you what a day was, you could say its the amount of time it takes for the sun to be directly above from one day to the next, and there would be no confusion.
Isn't a second defined to be 1/60th of a minute which is 1/60th of an hour, which is 1/24th of a day? And a day is the amount of time it takes for the sun to revolve around the earth. For this reason, it won't add up at all since this change will have redefined what a second is.
Slashdot Mirror
This is about social networks. They might lose a good chunk of people that want to play offline, but at the same time they will gain a lot of people who would prefer to play offline, but will play online if it is the only option. By getting people to play online, you get them to continue to play online as it is fundamentally more completive. No one wants to compare their progress or scores to others when the top 5% of the leader board is filled with cheaters, which will happen without a strong verification system. The more people compete, the more opportunities Blizzard has to sell these people more products. And people are far more willing to pay for that +5 bunny of cuteness if they can show it off to their friends than they would be if it was simply DLC (despite having a system from trading item for real money, I don't think Blizzard will sell anything directly that is obtainable in the game itself). As far as the DRM goes, the icing on the cake, pirating this when its online only will be really, really hard. All the AI code will be on the servers and trying to recreate that will be a daunting task. Also given the fact they will probably have regular updates and new challenges, like an MMO, pirates will never have anything as current, in working order, as what is online.
No they aren't. Your privates are just what is on your body. It's like claiming that you own your identical twin brother's body parts.
Warcraft 3 is an RTS, while WoW and diablo II (more so with Diablo 3) are MMORPGs. Yet, Warcraft 3 and Starcraft 2 both have strong modding potential. Blizzard doesn't want people to hack persistent games, but is fine with mods for episodic games. World of Warcraft recently added in a feature called "War games" where you can set up your own pvp battles with other players on any pvp map. You are free to have uneven teams, and you can all agree on any set of special rules you want to follow. I could see them allowing customization of the map if it proves to be a popular feature (which it really isn't as everyone is reward driven, and when you use war games all rewards are disabled).
As much as a debate we can get into this, tvtropes covers the basics of this question along with providing many examples of fiction that involves this issue: What Measure Is A Non-Human
I have never seen "police abuse" in even the slightest form from any time I have dealt with the police, or seen the police deal with someone else.
I can remember 4 times in my life (30 years) that I have dealt with the police:
1. Had a nice chat since some of the library guests thought I was stoned. The police officer asked me to come to a room, told me that some people were concerned at my odd behavior, and let me go as he could tell from my physical attributes that I was not stoned. He later said "hi" every time I passed by from that point on, which was a bit creepy.
2. Got pulled over for a broken tail light. Said I had a week to fix it or I would get a ticket. None of this, "you must verify with us that it is fixed" crap.
3. My grandmother who was suffering from altimeters managed to escape her house and ended up at another house in the neighborhood.
4. Most recently, me and my insane apartment mate were play acting some "drama" and were a bit loud. The police came and wanted to check up on us, which we assured them (we were separated by about 10 feet and talked to different officers) that everything was fine. They also asked us if we knew of any "weed" that was around, to which I replied "no," even though it was a lie, since my appeasement mate just 1/2 hour ago wanted to show me his cache.
I've also seen plenty of times the police pulled people over and saw nothing wrong there. Even saw a drug bust (very rare where I am), or at least I assume it was as the police were removing wads of cash from various places on an individual and placing them in a plastic bag.
It is my belief that either these situations of "police abuse" are extremely limited (given how many police there are in the US) or I'm simply living in a part of the country where it doesn't happen.
Getting to level 20 will probably take around 3-4 hours. Once you want to purchase the game, you pay $20 for the game which includes 1 free month. This allows you to level though the classic game (revamped with the latest expansion) and though burning crusade (they made the first expansion part of the base game at the same time they made trials unlimited) which will probably take around 100 hours to complete (even then you can go back and play with 8 other classes, and/or try a different faction for roughly 1/3 different experience). If you want to level past that you will need to buy 2 more expansions in order to get into the more hardcore raiding and pvp at max level.
I don't see why there is an article on slashdot about this. This simply gives people an extra chance to try the game again without having to make a new trial account.
The purpose of this tool is to help make your website not rely on external resources in such a way that it could make your website dangerous if your 3rd party affiliates decide to either exploit your users, or they get their resources hacked into. E.g. you have a form; your form allows custom avatars, someone decides to make a special custom avatar that rewrites the current page to put a custom login area that can steal people's passwords as they log in.
Puzzle Pirates uses a free to play and pay service. The puzzle MMO gives a few puzzles that non-subscribers can play, and allows others to be played on certain days of the week. In order to do a pirate mission you need x number of players doing some kinds of puzzles, the free paying ones will have something to do with other players.
There are 3 kinds of servers, the first is a subscription server where if you choose to pay the monthly payment you get access to everything. The other you can buy special currency that is used to buy a license to play certain games for a period of time (the license decays slower when you aren't playing). These licenses and money can be traded or given to other players. This gives the players a choice between selecting a server where all the paying players are on a level playing field, and one that lets you pick and choose what you want. The final server is a hybrid were each paying player gets a monthly allowance of money to spend (the amount paid is fixed). This server is designed for kids and has a strict language/conduct policy.
Disclaimer: Never played this game.
Thou shall charge only for content:
None of this buying +2 sword, or buying money with real world money. Micro transactions are fine, as long as the player gets something they can't get in game .
already.
Thou shall let a loser lose:
In single player games, tell the player when the situation is hopeless, don't let them struggle trying to win the impossible. In a multiplayer game, you need to give a losing team the chance to catch back up, or just end the game and be done with it. No one likes a hopeless game.
After 2+ years of Wow you will see quite a few game patches. Most that content can see, but you can't really experience since all but the newest expansion is trivial and provided you can get friends to help you, you will blast though it without understanding any of the mechanics and challenge of the fights. As for the most recent stuff, only the most hardcore gamers can truly experience it all. The 'heroic' hard modes of the end tier currently are so challenging that only about 0.1% (if not less) of the players have beat it (at least no one on my server has even come close to seeing it). Also don't think that WoW is just 15$ per month (less if you pay in bulk), you have to factor in the cost of the xpacs which run around $50 every 2 years (they keep saying they will try to put out more faster). With just the base game, you got around 60ish hours of game play, another 20ish for the 2 non-current x-pacs. Without the most current xpac you will have very little to do as hardly no one plays in those areas.
What is WoW:
1. A story and an easy timesink where you level up 10 different classes to maximum level. Each class plays differently. And you can expect to hit around 1/3 of the content every play though (you need to play both sides to really see it all).
2. A way to use the once per day (or in some cases 7 times per week) "chores" which will get your characters better gear, with new gear being available around every 3 months.
3. Join a guild and bang your head 3 hours a day (or more), 3 days a week (or more) doing raids with 10 (or 25) players trying to defeat the really hard challenges. Most of these end game content requires your ability to pay attention, multi-task, communicate, and a bit of problem solving.
4. PvP your brains out in battle grounds, either in random groups or in more serious 10v10 matches (where you have to gather a team yourself).
5. Play the economy with the action house and gathering various materials just to show you can make lots and lots of money, possibly spending them on a few expensive items.
6. An RP community where you talk and role play. If this is the only thing going for you, it won't last.
2nd hard market hurts more than piracy, not because they think more people buy used than pirate, but rather the willingness to pay for the full retail value is higher among people who buy used, vs those who pirate.
The future is DLC, it lets people pay how much they are willing for the game. We will probably see most non-MMO games go to free to play (with possibly ads) with the micro transactions there to those that are willing to pay.
I'm also willing to bet we will soon see DLC for TV as well in the form of bonus scenes.
If this becomes widely enough known, I can see a company forming to provide legal protection against attacks of this kind. Register domain, have the company check your domain name against a list of trademarked names. If its not in the list they could offer you a $5 per year insurance plan which will actively protect your domain against any kind of takedown of this kind (so you are protected even if you go on vacation and miss the window to file a defense), if they can't protect your domain, then you get a payout for compensation.
I can't wait until we reach the day where technology blurs the line between human and non-human. We already have ways to do sex selection and other similar genetic tests before conception. It is only a matter of time before we start tinkering with our own DNA, and as much as the church might condemn such actions, it will happen. The church will have to decide what to do with such modified humans? Do they have souls? Does a non-human animal with human traits have souls? If only "pure" humans have souls then I forsee a new age of slavery; organisms with human level intelligence being treated as non-human slaves; only they are called beasts of burden.
5 games (independent of winning entries) were chosen to be playable for a few minutes during the exhibit. The first two: Pac-Man and Super mario Bros are fine, but:
#3 - The secret of Monkey Island - You can hardly understand this game in only a few minutes
#4 - Myst - Same with this
#5 - World of Warcraft - A few minutes... WTF, how much did Blizzard bribe for this to get setup.
Wait... the passwords/security answers should have been encrypted, so unless they are being overly cautious about someone trying to generate passwords that match every hash (plus salt), or just some they are interested in there is not much to fear. Also the credit card number should not even be on their systems at all, they should have gotten a buyer code from the credit card company which they can simply invalidate (unless they think that someone may have inserted monitoring code in their system, in which case your credit card number is only in danger if you entered into their system recently).
There are 3 basic ways a person can identify themselves:
1. What you know - like a password
2. What you have - like a keycard, or a one time password generator
3. What you are - biometrics
The advantage of 1 is that it can only be stolen when being used.
The advantage of 2 is that it can't be easily copied without removing it from the person.
The advantage of 3 is that it can't be stolen, but can be copied without being used.
I've seen places like air ports that use all 3. Swipe your card, punch in the pin, and scan your fingerprint. However, it is often not practical to require users to use all 3. A password is easy to give out, but can be easily forgotten. A keycard or password generator is a physical device that has to be issued to the individual. Biometrics requires special hardware that many users don't have, or you can afford to install on your building doors. Having fingerprint readers on your computer won't really help too much against if your computer gets compromised, while #2 can help deter this. On the other hand, if fingerprint readers become standard issue on computers, then many web sites can add it to their log in requirements (your computer would send a hash of your fingerprint based on the certificate of the requesting web site to avoid it being used for another site).
4. Cash takes time to get to the recipient, usually 2 days (The US has a lot of sparely populated land).
Now, #1 and #2 can be mostly mitigated by sending a check. Sending checks in the mail to pay for many items is a very common practice here in the US. It doesn't help #3 and #4, but it avoids the fees involved in using credit cards. Checks are much safer than cash for non-person exchange (the downside of checks is you don't know they are good until you cash them in, which is why many walk in stores don't accept them).
Its not the post office, its the people at both ends.
1. Although it is a federal offense, it is often easy to steal people's mail and thus the money simply by taking mail out of the mail box on either end.
2. Cash isn't traceable, you can't go to court and claim you payed your bills in cash unless you did it in person and got a receipt.
3. Cash needs to be processed manually, if you send cash to a business, someone has to open the mail, count the bills, store the bills, and make a note that the payment was received. People cost money to hire, and people tend to make more mistakes than computers.
I agree, the most suspicious part of the story is that the "cop" stated who he/she was. A real cop doing this kind of thing wouldn't tell anyone who they were until they were in court. I don't even think they would mention the fact when they set up a time to meet.
On second though, this "cop" might have only wanted to scare a few people, not making any arrests, just giving out a few warnings.
One day, some day, the US elementary education system will move to the metric system. But as long as parents expect teachers to teach what they know and use, it will never happen.
Gravity, inertia etc all back up the fact that it is the earth moving about the sun, with the other planets.
This statement is not false, and neither is mine. Moving (and rotation) is relative to other objects. If A moves relative to B, then B moves relative to A.
At least in High School, the teachers didn't focus on these "minor details." For instance I was taught the order of the planets, including that Pluto was the last planet, even though at the time it wasn't. They also taught us that the earth does not revolve around the sun, its the other way around, and it was a misconception in history that it did. When in actuality its all a point of view, and all the teachers wanted to do is to convince us that we aren't the center of the universe.
As a second is traditionally defined in terms of a day, it is related. If you were to visit some isolated community in the world and they asked you what a second was (assuming you had no devices on you) you could describe to them in a sufficiently accurate way, that there are 86400 seconds in a day. If they asked you what a day was, you could say its the amount of time it takes for the sun to be directly above from one day to the next, and there would be no confusion.
The earth revolves around the sun, the sun revolves around the earth. Both statements are true, its all point of view.
Isn't a second defined to be 1/60th of a minute which is 1/60th of an hour, which is 1/24th of a day? And a day is the amount of time it takes for the sun to revolve around the earth. For this reason, it won't add up at all since this change will have redefined what a second is.