Does it? If you have a pirated product, upgrading it can be a pain at times. Its not streamlined into the program, and often times you have to redownload the newest version. Also if the game has multiplayer, you will have problems connecting to the official server and playing with others. If the game is popular enough there might be private servers doing this, but the player base on those will almost always be lower than the official ones.
You can hide behind Anonymous, but you will not be simply forgotten. What you say may be forgotten more easily than using a more famous id. If you use a non-anonymous id and aren't famous enough that people don't remember what you posted previously, then it will be as if you were anonymous. Personally, I cannot recall any posts you have made in the past. This is most likely the fact that I don't track who posts what, unless they are famous.
I'm not saying what should and should not be. I'm simply stating what I think the courts will do. Tying people in courts using deep pockets is another issue in itself.
I'm not saying that displaying a specific number is disallowed by itself. What is disallowed is if the purpose of displaying the number is to relay Sony's number as "Sony's number". The size of the number doesn't matter. For example, if I say "Sony's PS3 master code is even" I would be infringing, as I am displaying part of the number. However, in that case I'm fairly sure I am protected under fair use.
For the above reason, if a lottery number came up to match that it wouldn't be infringing (unless it was rigged to do so) since its not designed to be Sony's number. Stating that the lottery number that appeared on that date, at that lottery location, is Sony's number would be infringing.
The courts are going to use "good faith" in determining what violates copyright law. Part of the purpose of this flag is to encode Sony's copyrighted number sequence. The flag is for this reason not in good faith. If I published a list of every possible 10 byte number in a random order the courts would not find it violating copyright law. If however, someone said look at number 78654321 on my list, and it happened to be Sony's number, the courts would find that document, not mine infringing, as it is just encoding the number. If I came up with some interesting math question to which that number was the solution, it would be infringing if displayed by itself. The question is: If someone wanted to read that number, could they use your material to find it any easier than if they didn't have it?
The OS can protect your system by having users that don't have full access to your system. Just apply that concept to these processes. You can remove all the safety overhead that Java and Flash provide while still preventing the process from harming any process except itself. By allowing use of C, you allow people to leverage a lot of existing libraries, which avoids the problem of introducing a new language. However, I really have doubts about being cross platform. Flash and Java do this fine (as long as you do all your own painting, instead of relying on a smart GUI that matches the platform).
When I was in high school I was permitted to substitute 1 of my high school classes for a college class. The reason being that I couldn't substitute anymore was that the school last funding on my attendance for subbing out more than 1. I'm wondering if there is a similar issue going on here. Could lack of attendance reduce funding that a school gets for a student?
The contract itself is not part of the code. You can understand the code simply by ignoring all the comments (or having your IDE collapse them). However, you will need to understand the contract system if you want to modify the code, as otherwise you can end up violating them with any changes you make.
Yes, the contracts adds complexity to the language, which is a primary reason that C's preprocessor directives were not included as part of Java.
The problem with D and similar languages is that programmers are too clever for their own good. D doesn't enforce checking, and is only safer than C if you don't use a good chunk of its extra features. All it takes is one library that wanted to make a shortcut and ends up being faulty for the entire application to not work correctly. C# has the best middle of the road approach where you can use unsafe code, but using it anywhere in your project will require you enable the unsafe code switch, so at least you can be sure that your code is unsafe clean pretty easily.
These provide more expressiveness than a typical macro can provide. They also extract the check from your code, so if you find a bug or need to refactor the checking code, you don't need to go though every place you inserted the biolerplate code and change it.
I'm not sure I follow you. Profiling typically refers to determining places in your code that run slow. A static checker would ensure that there is no set of inputs that would violate the contract, and it would produce errors when you compile your code informing you that some condition may not always hold. For example, in Java if all code paths do not assign a local variable before it is referenced, you will get a compiler error.
I'm still waiting for a decent compile time DbC. Runtime checks won't catch an untested control flow, and when the fault does happen you better hope it happens in your lab and not on a client's computer. You can read my analysis of this in my Master's thesis (which focused on unique references that were ensured to be unique at compile time): http://www.worldcat.org/title/applying-uniqueness-to-the-java-language/oclc/701244184&referer=brief_results
You want to make sure your product never gets used without permission. Its simple:
The best DRM is to make an arcade at your head quarters where your games are. However, the arcade system is only the front end for the server that has all the logic. Invite others to use your game while under the careful eye of your security. To be extra sure, do a full search of all users before they interact with the game, along with an extensive background check of the security guards (and the rest of your staff). This way you can not only make the game virtually unpiratable, but also make cheating near impossible.
Remove the "At your location", and just have the game servers send raw video feeds? What the gamer gains in convince in using your game, along with the reduced hardware you need, you lose in the ability to prevent bots from playing your game instead of people. Graphics are difficult but possible to steal, and music is somewhat easy. However, it would still require a lot of work to pirate.
Keep the server side AI, but let the client manage the game resources? The client can now steal the graphic and music resources easily. You also open yourself to bots that can cheat much more eailsy, and other client side hacks that may try and subvert the communication between the client and the server that would allow the client to cheat. Speed hacks are common at this point. Or even simple bugs in the communication can allow cheating (e.g. Runescape had a bug at one point that allows a modified client to initiate a trade of 0 of a non-stackable item to another player that turned into 1 of that item when the trade was complete).
Let the client have all the data, but only as it needs it, and you open up the possibility that the entire game can be pirated, although it may take a while for hackers to retrieve all the data from the servers, and recreate a fake server that provides it. However, at this point the client no longer suffers latency issues, and your servers don't need to work nearly as hard to provide the game.
While your at it, you can ship the entire game, but have serial number authentication. At this point, the game is trivial to pirate, but pirated copies may have some difficulty in updating the game client. Your servers need only to perform very simple work.
Next, you can just have a serial number without server side authenication. The user now can use your game without ever needing an internet connection, but can easily look up any serial number to give the game after pirating it.
Finally, DRM free, just ship the game without any protection, Easy to pirate, but still difficult to make major modifications.
Take it a step further and provide the source code with your game. Now the users can easily make mods for the game, extending life, for better or for worse. Only the terms of service can protect your game, and that only takes effect if you involve the legal system.
The policy of using custom input devices to play WoW is as follows: Every input into the game must be associated with a user interaction. The device delivering the input must deliver the input as quickly as possible when the user inputs the command, in that delaying input into the game is not allowed. Finally, the device must not analyze the state of the game other than if the game is receiving the input when making decisions on what input command corresponds with the user input (or if the command from the user should be ignored or not).
What you can do is: Set up combos on your input device where a different input is given after inputting the same command, as long as the device doesn't investigate what WoW is doing. Control multiple computers with a single device, and send commands to multiple computers with a single user input.
You get insurance. If they don't cover it then hopefully your contract puts the tenant liable for damage to the house. If the tenant can't pay, well, that's just how the system works, and one of the risks you take as a landlord. But, I'm sure there is some kind of insurance that covers "house must be destroyed due to being a safety hazard," due to the popularity of meth-labs. If it's convenient to check up on your tenant regularly, then you may be safe without that clause.
I fear being forgotten. We strive to be remembered; some do this though writing stories, other though research. Some do it though gaining popularity, or by changing history as it happens. Those who take refuge with God, they hope that He will remember them for all their hard work. For everyone else, there is facebook.
When I was in high school I was in the middle of a ring of kids who were pushing me around and calling me names. With anger building up, I tightly gripped my pencil held below my waist. I was interrupted in my thoughts by a teacher intervening, who dragged me off to the principal's office for my treating actions. Fortunately, my parents intervened and convinced the school that I was no danger.
On a similar note, in High school physics, I broke out in an argument regarding another student not returning a book she borrowed. She ended up stabbing my palm with a mechanical pencil, which she claims no harm would have come to me had I not tried to defend my self. I can still see the pencil's mark tattooed into my to this day.
Wow does have complex game mechanics. The learning curve is not steep however. What I say is hardcore is relative to runescape and games that nearly play themselves like farmville. If you play WoW to the "end" it gets hard. Really insanely hard. The hardest boss in the game, Lich King on hard mode, only a small fraction of the 11 million players have beat. I would venture to guess its below 0.1%. To see his strategy: http://www.wowwiki.com/Lich_King_%28Icecrown_Citadel_tactics%29. You take 25 players with you to try and kill him. Its a 15 minute fight, and anyone dieing can easily mean you try again. Just go to that web page and count the number of ways someone can instantly die for making a single mistake. As an added bonus, you only get 50 unsuccessful tries on him and the 3 wing bosses per week. Yes, many players will use up all 50 of those attempts. Also, he has been "out" for about 8 months now.
Maybe you've stopped playing, but runescape is a game aimed at middle school and high school kids. Its simple, has a free ad supported version along with a low cost subscription non-ad version. It can be played from public computers without needing to install any software right in your browser. It provides the standard grind for rewards (with skill points you get to keep forever).
With runescape you get a good deal for what you pay for. It is falls in that nice nitch between causal (farmville) and hardcore (WoW) MMO gamers.
I guess I wasn't clear on how the point system work: There is a large number of gear items that will cover most of your gear slots available Justice points with quality of 1 level less than the latest released raid. You gain these points though doing level appropriate dungeons, or level appropriate raids that are not the most current. There is no limit to how often you can do these dungeons. These items can only be purchased with points, but similar items are in the dungeons and older raids, with varying levels of quality. There is a similar list of items available with quality equal to gear from bosses in the current raid for Valor points. You gain Valor points by defeating bosses in the currently released raid (each boss can be done once per week) and by doing a random dungeon once per day (for the same number of points you get for doing 1 boss in 10 player mode, a bit more for 25 player mode). There is a weekly limit of the number of Valor points you can gain. Gear from bosses of the current raid on hard mode is better than any other gear (there are no higher level points). Once a new dungeon is released, all your valor points are converted to justice points, and all items for sale from valor points now become available for justice points. A new set of valor point items become available. Depending on how long it takes to release (hopefully once per 3-4 months) the next set of dungeons, if you don't do any raids at all you will probably have just enough time to collect all the valor point items for sale before the gear bar gets moved up.
Most gear you gain is bind when pick up and cannot be traded to other players. For a rather large amount of materials that can be gained though solo play combined with an item that can be bought and trade with valor points you can make a tradable gear item of equal quality to that of valor items. About 1/2 of your gear slots can be filled up this way. The player market value of these items is amazing expensive right when a new raid is released and goes down in price the longer the content is around. The longer the content is around the sooner new content will be released, and the faster your new shiny gear will become obsolete.
Like most games, there is a limited amount of content. If you are at the end of solo content, you can do repeatable daily quests for rewards.
The dungeon finder system allows players that have no friends or connections to do small 5 man dungeons with randomly chosen players. The dungeons are easy, as total party kills are rare (and when they occur you can continue where you left off). It rewards better gear than solo. Do it enough and you get points to buy good gear. Once per day you can get points to buy great gear. And its a stepping stone to find groups to do the big group raids. You can then ask around to do the hard content (10 or 25 player raids) and get great gear fast.
Heroic mode raids give the best gear. Heroic modes are designed to give the really, truly serious players a challenge. They are not for everyone, and you aren't missing much "content" if all you are missing is trying bosses on their hard setting.
The system in fair so far as not giving advantages to those that spend more money. Those that have more time have an advantage as they can make more attempts to get bosses down, this is blunted by the fact you can only get gear for defeating a boss for gear once per week. And when new content is released, new more powerful gear is available to everyone.
The system does not reward veterans with power, only vanity (titles, mounts, achievements). Someone who has played for 1 year, but not within the last 3 months is going to typically be less powerful than someone who has just started playing 3 months ago.
The system rewards skill and dedication. Dedication is playing for 2 hours a day, 5 days a week for a month. Playing for 12 hours a day, 7 days a week for two weeks is less dedication. Skill is being able to work and communicate with others (make sure important things get said), devising a strategy and doing your job within that strategy (boss does x,y,z, which can be countered with a,b,c), knowing and utilizing your class mechanics (the optimal set of buttons to press to maximize damage, threat or healing), and demonstrating situational awareness (don't stand in fire).
Part of WoW's fair play model is putting a level playing field for everybody. Once you pay for the expansions there is nothing (aside from trying to dual box) that you can use out of game money to boost your in game abilities, and conquencitly you know that you have an equal opportunity to advance as everyone else. They do sell collector's editions, and a few vanity items with real money. Trading in-game items for real money is against the ToS.
Under their philosophy, You can't sell parts of the game, unless its completely separate from the main game, as otherwise anything you can acquire in those sub areas would give those players willing to spend more money an advantage. The Arena realm is separate from the main game, and it costs extra to participate.
Try this - Turn on your TV and enable Closed captioning. Count how many ads have CC.
My experience is that about 10% do. Most of those 10% are either for hearing aids, or they are targeting senior citizens. Those that don't fit into those categories often don't do CC as well as they could. I saw an Intel commercial a while back that had CC for every thing, including repeating text that was already on the screen, and informing the viewer that the Intel sound bit was played.
Here at Washington State University, the download of any file ending in ".torrenet" over http/ftp is blocked. Furthermore, attempting to use bittorrenet anyways simply doesn't work, you get no connections. Updating World of Warcraft simply causes it to default to the HTTP download instead of P2P. Their stance on the issue, is that there are non-P2P ways to get pretty much any piece of legal software, use those instead.
You can use IKVM to run most Java libraries in the c# (mono or.NET) environment.
I like that c# is progressing much faster than Java is. Java has been stuck in version 6 for quite a while now; version 6 only has a few slight language changes from 5.
However, I think c# goes a bit too fast; it has some language bloat where there is not a clear direction on where things are going. Many non-intuitive language features make understanding code more difficult. The core library is the worst offender, as it has a lot of Microsoft specific features that were not made very extensible. Many library functions can change the way the language operates and compiles, making it harder to build robust libraries and code that works well with the unknown.
<p>What's next? Retails QQing about WoW: Cataclysm is being offered as a direct sale from Blizzard with the benefit of no-installation, retail per-order lines, etc? The only thing you miss is: a) CE editions and b) the "party" a store might throw.</p><p>In other words, if a game store says "We're not going to sell Warcraft if you offer direct sales!" do you really think WoW players will notice? They'll get their game one way or another. </p></quote>
MMOs can't be sold as unused anyways due to their nature. The value of those disks after the CD key has been used is the same as the trial CDs that are sold for $2. MMOs pretty much have the ultimate DRM, as unlike almost any other game, the AI is not included. The behavior of all the NPCs is done on the server side, which is very difficult for crackers to get past. Other games (with a single player component) can't get away with this kind of DRM, since it adds a significant cost to maintain the games, and it artificially introduces latency.
I can only imagine the outcry of gamers should a DRM be used in this way for a single player game.
Slashdot Mirror
DRM only punishes the "honest customer".
Does it? If you have a pirated product, upgrading it can be a pain at times. Its not streamlined into the program, and often times you have to redownload the newest version. Also if the game has multiplayer, you will have problems connecting to the official server and playing with others. If the game is popular enough there might be private servers doing this, but the player base on those will almost always be lower than the official ones.
You can hide behind Anonymous, but you will not be simply forgotten. What you say may be forgotten more easily than using a more famous id. If you use a non-anonymous id and aren't famous enough that people don't remember what you posted previously, then it will be as if you were anonymous. Personally, I cannot recall any posts you have made in the past. This is most likely the fact that I don't track who posts what, unless they are famous.
I'm not saying what should and should not be. I'm simply stating what I think the courts will do. Tying people in courts using deep pockets is another issue in itself.
I'm not saying that displaying a specific number is disallowed by itself. What is disallowed is if the purpose of displaying the number is to relay Sony's number as "Sony's number". The size of the number doesn't matter. For example, if I say "Sony's PS3 master code is even" I would be infringing, as I am displaying part of the number. However, in that case I'm fairly sure I am protected under fair use.
For the above reason, if a lottery number came up to match that it wouldn't be infringing (unless it was rigged to do so) since its not designed to be Sony's number. Stating that the lottery number that appeared on that date, at that lottery location, is Sony's number would be infringing.
The courts are going to use "good faith" in determining what violates copyright law. Part of the purpose of this flag is to encode Sony's copyrighted number sequence. The flag is for this reason not in good faith. If I published a list of every possible 10 byte number in a random order the courts would not find it violating copyright law. If however, someone said look at number 78654321 on my list, and it happened to be Sony's number, the courts would find that document, not mine infringing, as it is just encoding the number. If I came up with some interesting math question to which that number was the solution, it would be infringing if displayed by itself. The question is: If someone wanted to read that number, could they use your material to find it any easier than if they didn't have it?
The OS can protect your system by having users that don't have full access to your system. Just apply that concept to these processes. You can remove all the safety overhead that Java and Flash provide while still preventing the process from harming any process except itself. By allowing use of C, you allow people to leverage a lot of existing libraries, which avoids the problem of introducing a new language. However, I really have doubts about being cross platform. Flash and Java do this fine (as long as you do all your own painting, instead of relying on a smart GUI that matches the platform).
When I was in high school I was permitted to substitute 1 of my high school classes for a college class. The reason being that I couldn't substitute anymore was that the school last funding on my attendance for subbing out more than 1. I'm wondering if there is a similar issue going on here. Could lack of attendance reduce funding that a school gets for a student?
The contract itself is not part of the code. You can understand the code simply by ignoring all the comments (or having your IDE collapse them). However, you will need to understand the contract system if you want to modify the code, as otherwise you can end up violating them with any changes you make.
Yes, the contracts adds complexity to the language, which is a primary reason that C's preprocessor directives were not included as part of Java.
The problem with D and similar languages is that programmers are too clever for their own good. D doesn't enforce checking, and is only safer than C if you don't use a good chunk of its extra features. All it takes is one library that wanted to make a shortcut and ends up being faulty for the entire application to not work correctly. C# has the best middle of the road approach where you can use unsafe code, but using it anywhere in your project will require you enable the unsafe code switch, so at least you can be sure that your code is unsafe clean pretty easily.
These provide more expressiveness than a typical macro can provide. They also extract the check from your code, so if you find a bug or need to refactor the checking code, you don't need to go though every place you inserted the biolerplate code and change it.
I'm not sure I follow you. Profiling typically refers to determining places in your code that run slow. A static checker would ensure that there is no set of inputs that would violate the contract, and it would produce errors when you compile your code informing you that some condition may not always hold. For example, in Java if all code paths do not assign a local variable before it is referenced, you will get a compiler error.
I'm still waiting for a decent compile time DbC. Runtime checks won't catch an untested control flow, and when the fault does happen you better hope it happens in your lab and not on a client's computer. You can read my analysis of this in my Master's thesis (which focused on unique references that were ensured to be unique at compile time):
http://www.worldcat.org/title/applying-uniqueness-to-the-java-language/oclc/701244184&referer=brief_results
You want to make sure your product never gets used without permission. Its simple:
The best DRM is to make an arcade at your head quarters where your games are. However, the arcade system is only the front end for the server that has all the logic. Invite others to use your game while under the careful eye of your security. To be extra sure, do a full search of all users before they interact with the game, along with an extensive background check of the security guards (and the rest of your staff). This way you can not only make the game virtually unpiratable, but also make cheating near impossible.
Remove the "At your location", and just have the game servers send raw video feeds? What the gamer gains in convince in using your game, along with the reduced hardware you need, you lose in the ability to prevent bots from playing your game instead of people. Graphics are difficult but possible to steal, and music is somewhat easy. However, it would still require a lot of work to pirate.
Keep the server side AI, but let the client manage the game resources? The client can now steal the graphic and music resources easily. You also open yourself to bots that can cheat much more eailsy, and other client side hacks that may try and subvert the communication between the client and the server that would allow the client to cheat. Speed hacks are common at this point. Or even simple bugs in the communication can allow cheating (e.g. Runescape had a bug at one point that allows a modified client to initiate a trade of 0 of a non-stackable item to another player that turned into 1 of that item when the trade was complete).
Let the client have all the data, but only as it needs it, and you open up the possibility that the entire game can be pirated, although it may take a while for hackers to retrieve all the data from the servers, and recreate a fake server that provides it. However, at this point the client no longer suffers latency issues, and your servers don't need to work nearly as hard to provide the game.
While your at it, you can ship the entire game, but have serial number authentication. At this point, the game is trivial to pirate, but pirated copies may have some difficulty in updating the game client. Your servers need only to perform very simple work.
Next, you can just have a serial number without server side authenication. The user now can use your game without ever needing an internet connection, but can easily look up any serial number to give the game after pirating it.
Finally, DRM free, just ship the game without any protection, Easy to pirate, but still difficult to make major modifications.
Take it a step further and provide the source code with your game. Now the users can easily make mods for the game, extending life, for better or for worse. Only the terms of service can protect your game, and that only takes effect if you involve the legal system.
The policy of using custom input devices to play WoW is as follows:
Every input into the game must be associated with a user interaction. The device delivering the input must deliver the input as quickly as possible when the user inputs the command, in that delaying input into the game is not allowed. Finally, the device must not analyze the state of the game other than if the game is receiving the input when making decisions on what input command corresponds with the user input (or if the command from the user should be ignored or not).
What you can do is:
Set up combos on your input device where a different input is given after inputting the same command, as long as the device doesn't investigate what WoW is doing.
Control multiple computers with a single device, and send commands to multiple computers with a single user input.
You get insurance. If they don't cover it then hopefully your contract puts the tenant liable for damage to the house. If the tenant can't pay, well, that's just how the system works, and one of the risks you take as a landlord. But, I'm sure there is some kind of insurance that covers "house must be destroyed due to being a safety hazard," due to the popularity of meth-labs. If it's convenient to check up on your tenant regularly, then you may be safe without that clause.
I fear being forgotten. We strive to be remembered; some do this though writing stories, other though research. Some do it though gaining popularity, or by changing history as it happens. Those who take refuge with God, they hope that He will remember them for all their hard work. For everyone else, there is facebook.
When I was in high school I was in the middle of a ring of kids who were pushing me around and calling me names. With anger building up, I tightly gripped my pencil held below my waist. I was interrupted in my thoughts by a teacher intervening, who dragged me off to the principal's office for my treating actions. Fortunately, my parents intervened and convinced the school that I was no danger.
On a similar note, in High school physics, I broke out in an argument regarding another student not returning a book she borrowed. She ended up stabbing my palm with a mechanical pencil, which she claims no harm would have come to me had I not tried to defend my self. I can still see the pencil's mark tattooed into my to this day.
Wow does have complex game mechanics. The learning curve is not steep however. What I say is hardcore is relative to runescape and games that nearly play themselves like farmville. If you play WoW to the "end" it gets hard. Really insanely hard. The hardest boss in the game, Lich King on hard mode, only a small fraction of the 11 million players have beat. I would venture to guess its below 0.1%. To see his strategy: http://www.wowwiki.com/Lich_King_%28Icecrown_Citadel_tactics%29. You take 25 players with you to try and kill him. Its a 15 minute fight, and anyone dieing can easily mean you try again. Just go to that web page and count the number of ways someone can instantly die for making a single mistake. As an added bonus, you only get 50 unsuccessful tries on him and the 3 wing bosses per week. Yes, many players will use up all 50 of those attempts. Also, he has been "out" for about 8 months now.
Maybe you've stopped playing, but runescape is a game aimed at middle school and high school kids. Its simple, has a free ad supported version along with a low cost subscription non-ad version. It can be played from public computers without needing to install any software right in your browser. It provides the standard grind for rewards (with skill points you get to keep forever).
With runescape you get a good deal for what you pay for. It is falls in that nice nitch between causal (farmville) and hardcore (WoW) MMO gamers.
I guess I wasn't clear on how the point system work:
There is a large number of gear items that will cover most of your gear slots available Justice points with quality of 1 level less than the latest released raid. You gain these points though doing level appropriate dungeons, or level appropriate raids that are not the most current. There is no limit to how often you can do these dungeons. These items can only be purchased with points, but similar items are in the dungeons and older raids, with varying levels of quality.
There is a similar list of items available with quality equal to gear from bosses in the current raid for Valor points. You gain Valor points by defeating bosses in the currently released raid (each boss can be done once per week) and by doing a random dungeon once per day (for the same number of points you get for doing 1 boss in 10 player mode, a bit more for 25 player mode). There is a weekly limit of the number of Valor points you can gain. Gear from bosses of the current raid on hard mode is better than any other gear (there are no higher level points).
Once a new dungeon is released, all your valor points are converted to justice points, and all items for sale from valor points now become available for justice points. A new set of valor point items become available. Depending on how long it takes to release (hopefully once per 3-4 months) the next set of dungeons, if you don't do any raids at all you will probably have just enough time to collect all the valor point items for sale before the gear bar gets moved up.
Most gear you gain is bind when pick up and cannot be traded to other players. For a rather large amount of materials that can be gained though solo play combined with an item that can be bought and trade with valor points you can make a tradable gear item of equal quality to that of valor items. About 1/2 of your gear slots can be filled up this way. The player market value of these items is amazing expensive right when a new raid is released and goes down in price the longer the content is around. The longer the content is around the sooner new content will be released, and the faster your new shiny gear will become obsolete.
Like most games, there is a limited amount of content. If you are at the end of solo content, you can do repeatable daily quests for rewards.
The dungeon finder system allows players that have no friends or connections to do small 5 man dungeons with randomly chosen players. The dungeons are easy, as total party kills are rare (and when they occur you can continue where you left off). It rewards better gear than solo. Do it enough and you get points to buy good gear. Once per day you can get points to buy great gear. And its a stepping stone to find groups to do the big group raids. You can then ask around to do the hard content (10 or 25 player raids) and get great gear fast.
Heroic mode raids give the best gear. Heroic modes are designed to give the really, truly serious players a challenge. They are not for everyone, and you aren't missing much "content" if all you are missing is trying bosses on their hard setting.
The system in fair so far as not giving advantages to those that spend more money. Those that have more time have an advantage as they can make more attempts to get bosses down, this is blunted by the fact you can only get gear for defeating a boss for gear once per week. And when new content is released, new more powerful gear is available to everyone.
The system does not reward veterans with power, only vanity (titles, mounts, achievements). Someone who has played for 1 year, but not within the last 3 months is going to typically be less powerful than someone who has just started playing 3 months ago.
The system rewards skill and dedication. Dedication is playing for 2 hours a day, 5 days a week for a month. Playing for 12 hours a day, 7 days a week for two weeks is less dedication. Skill is being able to work and communicate with others (make sure important things get said), devising a strategy and doing your job within that strategy (boss does x,y,z, which can be countered with a,b,c), knowing and utilizing your class mechanics (the optimal set of buttons to press to maximize damage, threat or healing), and demonstrating situational awareness (don't stand in fire).
Part of WoW's fair play model is putting a level playing field for everybody. Once you pay for the expansions there is nothing (aside from trying to dual box) that you can use out of game money to boost your in game abilities, and conquencitly you know that you have an equal opportunity to advance as everyone else. They do sell collector's editions, and a few vanity items with real money. Trading in-game items for real money is against the ToS.
Under their philosophy, You can't sell parts of the game, unless its completely separate from the main game, as otherwise anything you can acquire in those sub areas would give those players willing to spend more money an advantage. The Arena realm is separate from the main game, and it costs extra to participate.
Try this - Turn on your TV and enable Closed captioning. Count how many ads have CC.
My experience is that about 10% do. Most of those 10% are either for hearing aids, or they are targeting senior citizens. Those that don't fit into those categories often don't do CC as well as they could. I saw an Intel commercial a while back that had CC for every thing, including repeating text that was already on the screen, and informing the viewer that the Intel sound bit was played.
Here at Washington State University, the download of any file ending in ".torrenet" over http/ftp is blocked. Furthermore, attempting to use bittorrenet anyways simply doesn't work, you get no connections. Updating World of Warcraft simply causes it to default to the HTTP download instead of P2P. Their stance on the issue, is that there are non-P2P ways to get pretty much any piece of legal software, use those instead.
You can use IKVM to run most Java libraries in the c# (mono or .NET) environment.
I like that c# is progressing much faster than Java is. Java has been stuck in version 6 for quite a while now; version 6 only has a few slight language changes from 5.
However, I think c# goes a bit too fast; it has some language bloat where there is not a clear direction on where things are going. Many non-intuitive language features make understanding code more difficult. The core library is the worst offender, as it has a lot of Microsoft specific features that were not made very extensible. Many library functions can change the way the language operates and compiles, making it harder to build robust libraries and code that works well with the unknown.
<p>What's next? Retails QQing about WoW: Cataclysm is being offered as a direct sale from Blizzard with the benefit of no-installation, retail per-order lines, etc? The only thing you miss is: a) CE editions and b) the "party" a store might throw.</p><p>In other words, if a game store says "We're not going to sell Warcraft if you offer direct sales!" do you really think WoW players will notice? They'll get their game one way or another. </p></quote>
MMOs can't be sold as unused anyways due to their nature. The value of those disks after the CD key has been used is the same as the trial CDs that are sold for $2. MMOs pretty much have the ultimate DRM, as unlike almost any other game, the AI is not included. The behavior of all the NPCs is done on the server side, which is very difficult for crackers to get past. Other games (with a single player component) can't get away with this kind of DRM, since it adds a significant cost to maintain the games, and it artificially introduces latency.
I can only imagine the outcry of gamers should a DRM be used in this way for a single player game.