Which is better? To find new and amazing ways, etc, now. Like, duh.
There's so much wrong with your post I have no idea where to begin. First, cultures aren't designed -- they evolve. Second, "strict rules and provisioning", in the real world, mean the Commissars dine on caviar and the peasants starve. Everyone who advocates such systems tends to see themselves as a Commissar-to-be, of course. THEY know what the peasants "should" and "shouldn't" want, what the peasants "need", and if they have a small amount of extra luxuries compared to said peasants, why, it's perfectly acceptable given the hard work they do keeping the poor dears from killing themselves. Third, ever hear the expression "The only thing more common than hydrogen is stupidity"? Yeah. I think we have proof that is true.
Your doomsday scenario has happened many times in the past, and it follows the same pattern -- vital resource begins to run low, the professional doomsayers and people who think the world would be perfect if only THEY were in charge of it begin squawking, and, meanwhile, as the cost of the old resource goes up, the value of finding a replacement does as well, lots and lots of people try to find a replacement, eventually someone does, and the doomsayers march sullenly back to their caves. The only times this fails to happen is when people are foolish enough to LISTEN to the doomsayers.
Why is it "Activism" and "Community Organizing" when The People We Like do it, but "Propaganda" and "Astroturfing" when The People We Don't Like do it?
Rentals, no, because car rentals are a luxury item, while game rentals are not -- this is because the way people use cars is, oddly, different from how they use games -- but used car sales are a very good indicator of how much people are willing to pay for a new car.
You might also wish to consider that a used car is generally not as good as a new one, due to mechanical wear and tear, while a used game -- assuming the CD/DVD isn't scratched or damaged -- is every bit as good as the same game bought new at a store. So there's another factor there. (I tend to only buy hardbacks used, not paperbacks, because most used paperbacks are about to fall apart and aren't worth even the reduced price, while most used hardbacks will survive several readings. Not all used goods are equivalent to new goods; games and media CD/DVDs are, while cars and analog media like cassettes and VHS tapes degrade rapidly with use. Let's use meaningful comparisons, shall we?)
Well, which would you rather tell your boss and/or release to the press when you explain your quarterly earnings?
"Boss, we're charging too much for this crap, that's why it's not selling."
Or:
"Boss, our games/music/movies are GREAT, it's just people are stealing them!":)
Part of the problem is that it's very hard to distinguish between: People not buying stuff because it's crap.
People not buying stuff because it costs too much.
People pirating stuff they might buy if it was cheaper and/or easier to buy legally online.
People pirating stuff because they're cheapskates who just want it for free, or idiots with self-supporting rationales about how they're "sharing" or "sticking to the MAN! Yeah!"
All of the above come into play in varying proportions, but figuring this out is hard work, and no one wants to do hard work if there's any way to avoid it. So the easiest thing to do is Blame The Pirates, especially since that means you don't need to examine your products to determine if they're actually WORTH paying for.
If this was the OP's point, then, I apologize for misinterpreting him. I thought he was claiming media companies were not perceiving piracy as a form of price complaint, while other companies DO. (Personally, I think one of the best indicators of over-high game prices is the explosive growth of game rentals and the aftermarket. The other side of the equation is that gamers now demand the kind of quality which takes multi-million dollar budgets to produce, but wants to pay what they payed when games cost 10s or at most 100s of thousands to produce. This, in turn, leads to a "hit driven" industry where one mega-best-seller barely covers the losses of a dozen mediocre games. And then it all collapses into the unsustainable mess it is, and the Cycle Begins Anew. So it goes.)
Sure, but you're not "pirating". The OP was claiming that brick-and-morter businesses treat "shrinkage" (my least favorite euphemism as an ex-retail drone; I always preferred "unauthorized discount") as a sign that they're charging too much, while media companies do not.
Buying used over new, waiting for rental instead of buying a movie ticket, canceling cable and watching Hulu -- these are all good examples of sending a useful economic message. "I want this enough to pay X, but not 2X", generally works. "I want this but don't want to pay for it at all", generally, doesn't.
I agree. The only problem with the entertainment industry is that unlike the housing, transportation, energy industries, if a mass of people vote with their wallet then some companies will write it off as piracy increasing as opposed to people being turned off by gouging and making a monetary vote.
,
I'm pretty sure that if you "vote with your wallet" at the grocery store, decide they're charging too much for milk, and just walk out with a gallon or two without paying, they *won't* say, "Golly gee gosh whillikers, we must be charging too much!". They're more likely to say "Stop or I shoot!"
"Voting with your wallet" means NOT benefiting from whatever good or service you think is overpriced; it doesn't mean getting the benefit AND keeping your money.
Ding! Got it in one! "ZOMG!!! I haz spended mah monies on t3h WOW!" might be a good hook for an article, and will now doubt gull the credulous and get some AP hack to pick it up and run a headline like "How much is your family *REALLY* paying for videogames??? The TRUTH will SHOCK you!", but when you look at the cost of total entertainment, WOW and suchlike is a bargain. 15 bucks (less if you pay in bigger chunks of time) for unlimited gameplay? Movie tickets are pushing 12-15 dollars in some areas, and are 9 bucks even here in Midwestern Hell. Buy a soda (4.50, minimum), and you're already spending more for 2 hours of entertainment.
Perhaps the author ought to look at what he spends on movies, eating out, or any other hobby (I play P&P roleplaying games. Cost of any supplement these days==~40 bucks. Still a good buy in terms of entertainment value.)
I find it hilarious how people say, "Before we run an experiment, we need to know what will happen!" Hello, McFly! You run experiments to FIND OUT WHAT WILL HAPPEN. That's, uhm, the whole FRAKING DEFINITION OF THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD! You can do the math, you can form theories, you can hypothesize... but you never know FOR SURE until you flip the switch.
People like the OP were probably standing around in caveman days, saying, "Ugh. No make fire. What if fire is monster, kill everyone? Bad thing. Not make fire unless know not monster."
...when artificial insemination was first used for cattle, there was the same "moral panic" because, y'know, it was new and different and therefore SPOOOKY, and the same Usual Suspects were all up in arms over it, and, of course, it is now so accepted and commonplace no one even remembers there was an outrage.
Hell, when the first smallpox vaccine was invented, there were very similair panics to what we see today over genetic engineering.
People are stupid, but they are also easily distracted and forget last year's MAJOR CRISIS in favor of this year's equally all-consuming disaster.
Cheating is defined as "Anything which breaks the rules of the game".
The rules of the game are spelled out in the EULA you agree to. If you're the type of person who signs an agreement intending to break it, well, that's between you and your sense of ethics, I suppose, but I wouldn't trust you to keep your word regarding anything.
Among those rules are no one else -- not a bot, not your kid brother, not some guy in China -- can use your account. Nor can accounts be sold or bought. The only exception I know of is that a parent can pay for an account to be used by a minor child. (This is why is you call up blizzard and say "My kid brother logged into my account and trashed my characters! Help!", Blizzard will say, "Well, you weren't supposed to let him have access to your account. Sucks to be you!")
You don't like the rules Blizzard has? There are dozens -- hundreds -- of similair games you can play.
When you sit down to play a game, it is with the presumption "I am going to play by the rules". Do you normally decide that pawns can move like knights while playing chess? Or, to use a slightly better analogy, do you get to use a chess program to make your moves for you while your opponent has to rely on his own skill?
If the game is so boring that you want to pay someone else to play it...well, the game isn't worth playing, is it? Go play something else. (And from a game design perspective, tedium is a part of the balancing mechanism -- scarcity of resources and rate of leveling are set, in part, on the presumption that "No one is going to stand doing this for more than 'x' hours per day." Remove the tedium by botting, and you break the game balance. Non-botting players cannot gather resources as well, so they're forced to bot. It is, indeed, very similair to the use of steroids -- non steroid users feel that "have to" use the drugs in order to compete, and audiences begin to demand levels of performance no unenhanced human can match, leading to an ever-increasing cycle of drug use and the destruction of sport as a test of unaided human ability.)
Which is better? Ever-more-intrusive 'scan' programs to look for cheaters, and a constant war between makers of hack programs and the company, or simply attacking the source of the problem?
I'm not sure the "copyright" angle is the best way to go, but I cannot help but believe most of those upset about it are crying crocodile tears, much more concerned with their access to cheat programs than any moral issues of copyright and privacy.
A lot of features which would make MMORPGS more fun can't be implemented because doing them server-side is too resource intensive and doing them client side means exposing them to hacks. A solid "You will be sued and fed your balls" message to the makers of hack programs would, in the long run, add up to better gaming. (So would better process and memory space protection, but that's a different problem....)
A lot of the "hacker ethic" of openness, user control, and so on simply doesn't apply to online, multiplayer, games, and I wish some of the knee-jerkers would recognize that fact. When you enter any kind of shared, competitive, environment, the moral standards change. "Protecting the gamespace" trumps "Information wants to be free".
Drug tests for athletes aren't invasions of privacy. Cheat programs in online games are the same thing. You want to cheat? Play "Oblivion" and use all the mods you want. In any kind of multiplayer environment, the use of third-party programs must be verboten. Don't like it? No one is forcing you to play.
Of course, "a few sentences of text or a few seconds of video" most likely are being used within legal fair use boundaries. So what's going to happen is that the corporate law firm will grab this program, then send out auto-takedown notices without a human being (to the extent anyone working in the legal department meets that criteria) ever looking to see if the use is even arguably a violation of copyright. Then you'll get the backlash where at least one such auto-generated letter makes its way to someone with the knowledge to fight back and the platform to do it from, and someone will have to issue an embarrassed apology, and then probably turn around and sue the software makers.
...though this might be the result of too small a dataset. Every book I put in resulted in an "unsuggestion" list with at least one book I also liked, or, in some cases, books I knew someone who also liked my main suggestion liked. It seems it's a lot easier to find similarities than unsimilarities, because it's easy to guess that people who like 'A' will like 'A1', 'A2' and 'A3', but it does not follow that they WON'T like 'B'. Why, for example, would I not like Harry Potter because I like Ringworld? Why would my wife be unable to enjoy both science fiction and chick-lit? And why does like Raymond Feist's fantasy mean I'm uninterested in books on programming?
People are complex, and only a few truly pathetic souls have their interests defined so narrowly that it's safe to guess what they don't like based on what they do.
The RICO act is a good example of the reverse -- a law which is used to sweep a far broader net than it was originally written for, with each new extension slipping in as 'just a little bit more'. Once a law has been around for a while, courts tend to be leery of overturning it.
Not sure about the Patriot Act. The courts have gotten wonky in later years. Really, by all standards of precedent, it should have been shredded.
My statement was based on the reasoning in Reno vs. ACLU (http://www2.epic.org/cda/cda_decision.html), where the issue of overbreadth is discussed at length.
IAE, I'm just curious as to how Australia deals with these issues. What are the grounds for challenging a law in Australia, which obviously has a very different Constitution than the United States?
The expected argument will be, "Well, there's no plan to use the law like that."
In American jurisprudence, it is an established precedent that taking it on faith that an overbroad law will not be used in an overbroad manner does not save it from challenges to Constitutionality -- that is, when the government says, "Sure, we COULD use it to arrest families singing 'Happy Birthday', but honest, we won't!", the courts say, "Try again, sucker!". How do Australian courts view the issue of overbreadth?
"If the theory of gravity were so scientific, there would be no concern of how this would be interpreted by people which believed they could flap their arms and fly."
It doesn't matter how well proven a fact of science is, there will always be those who deny it due to their willful ignorance or fanaticism. If the only people they harm in the process are themselves, no great loss. If, however, they have access to children or other innocents -- picture a doctor who doesn't believe in the germ theory of disease -- they become dangerous.
Creationists teach lies to children, lies which make them, as adults, less capable of understanding the universe as it is. The universe is dangerous enough when we do understand it -- it is infinitely more so when we don't.
Whenever you buy from ANY P&P RPG company, the odds are, you're (probably) paying money to a company screwing writers over. WOTC is actually one of the best when it comes to payment on-time; I've also had no problem with White Wolf, Steve Jackson Games, or Fantasy Flight. Other writers have been less fortunate....ask anyone about Guardians of Order, for example. RPG companies tend to go through long stretches of hard times, and the easiest debt to avoid is paying writers and artists for work already submitted. Most of us take it, on the grounds we weren't in it for the money anyway, and if the product is never published, we'll never get paid, so...
I've got at least five projects...no, wait, six...which I completed which, for various reasons, I haven't received any money for. So it goes.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is better?
To find new and amazing ways, etc, now. Like, duh.
There's so much wrong with your post I have no idea where to begin. First, cultures aren't designed -- they evolve. Second, "strict rules and provisioning", in the real world, mean the Commissars dine on caviar and the peasants starve. Everyone who advocates such systems tends to see themselves as a Commissar-to-be, of course. THEY know what the peasants "should" and "shouldn't" want, what the peasants "need", and if they have a small amount of extra luxuries compared to said peasants, why, it's perfectly acceptable given the hard work they do keeping the poor dears from killing themselves. Third, ever hear the expression "The only thing more common than hydrogen is stupidity"? Yeah. I think we have proof that is true.
Your doomsday scenario has happened many times in the past, and it follows the same pattern -- vital resource begins to run low, the professional doomsayers and people who think the world would be perfect if only THEY were in charge of it begin squawking, and, meanwhile, as the cost of the old resource goes up, the value of finding a replacement does as well, lots and lots of people try to find a replacement, eventually someone does, and the doomsayers march sullenly back to their caves. The only times this fails to happen is when people are foolish enough to LISTEN to the doomsayers.
Why is it "Activism" and "Community Organizing" when The People We Like do it, but "Propaganda" and "Astroturfing" when The People We Don't Like do it?
It doesn't?
Rentals, no, because car rentals are a luxury item, while game rentals are not -- this is because the way people use cars is, oddly, different from how they use games -- but used car sales are a very good indicator of how much people are willing to pay for a new car.
You might also wish to consider that a used car is generally not as good as a new one, due to mechanical wear and tear, while a used game -- assuming the CD/DVD isn't scratched or damaged -- is every bit as good as the same game bought new at a store. So there's another factor there. (I tend to only buy hardbacks used, not paperbacks, because most used paperbacks are about to fall apart and aren't worth even the reduced price, while most used hardbacks will survive several readings. Not all used goods are equivalent to new goods; games and media CD/DVDs are, while cars and analog media like cassettes and VHS tapes degrade rapidly with use. Let's use meaningful comparisons, shall we?)
Well, which would you rather tell your boss and/or release to the press when you explain your quarterly earnings?
"Boss, we're charging too much for this crap, that's why it's not selling."
Or:
"Boss, our games/music/movies are GREAT, it's just people are stealing them!" :)
Part of the problem is that it's very hard to distinguish between:
People not buying stuff because it's crap.
People not buying stuff because it costs too much.
People pirating stuff they might buy if it was cheaper and/or easier to buy legally online.
People pirating stuff because they're cheapskates who just want it for free, or idiots with
self-supporting rationales about how they're "sharing" or "sticking to the MAN! Yeah!"
All of the above come into play in varying proportions, but figuring this out is hard work, and no one wants to do hard work if there's any way to avoid it. So the easiest thing to do is Blame The Pirates, especially since that means you don't need to examine your products to determine if they're actually WORTH paying for.
If this was the OP's point, then, I apologize for misinterpreting him. I thought he was claiming media companies were not perceiving piracy as a form of price complaint, while other companies DO. (Personally, I think one of the best indicators of over-high game prices is the explosive growth of game rentals and the aftermarket. The other side of the equation is that gamers now demand the kind of quality which takes multi-million dollar budgets to produce, but wants to pay what they payed when games cost 10s or at most 100s of thousands to produce. This, in turn, leads to a "hit driven" industry where one mega-best-seller barely covers the losses of a dozen mediocre games. And then it all collapses into the unsustainable mess it is, and the Cycle Begins Anew. So it goes.)
Sure, but you're not "pirating". The OP was claiming that brick-and-morter businesses treat "shrinkage" (my least favorite euphemism as an ex-retail drone; I always preferred "unauthorized discount") as a sign that they're charging too much, while media companies do not.
Buying used over new, waiting for rental instead of buying a movie ticket, canceling cable and watching Hulu -- these are all good examples of sending a useful economic message. "I want this enough to pay X, but not 2X", generally works. "I want this but don't want to pay for it at all", generally, doesn't.
I agree. The only problem with the entertainment industry is that unlike the housing, transportation, energy industries, if a mass of people vote with their wallet then some companies will write it off as piracy increasing as opposed to people being turned off by gouging and making a monetary vote.
,
I'm pretty sure that if you "vote with your wallet" at the grocery store, decide they're charging too much for milk, and just walk out with a gallon or two without paying, they *won't* say, "Golly gee gosh whillikers, we must be charging too much!". They're more likely to say "Stop or I shoot!"
"Voting with your wallet" means NOT benefiting from whatever good or service you think is overpriced; it doesn't mean getting the benefit AND keeping your money.
Ding! Got it in one!
"ZOMG!!! I haz spended mah monies on t3h WOW!" might be a good hook for an article, and will now doubt gull the credulous and get some AP hack to pick it up and run a headline like "How much is your family *REALLY* paying for videogames??? The TRUTH will SHOCK you!", but when you look at the cost of total entertainment, WOW and suchlike is a bargain. 15 bucks (less if you pay in bigger chunks of time) for unlimited gameplay? Movie tickets are pushing 12-15 dollars in some areas, and are 9 bucks even here in Midwestern Hell. Buy a soda (4.50, minimum), and you're already spending more for 2 hours of entertainment.
Perhaps the author ought to look at what he spends on movies, eating out, or any other hobby (I play P&P roleplaying games. Cost of any supplement these days==~40 bucks. Still a good buy in terms of entertainment value.)
I find it hilarious how people say, "Before we run an experiment, we need to know what will happen!" Hello, McFly! You run experiments to FIND OUT WHAT WILL HAPPEN. That's, uhm, the whole FRAKING DEFINITION OF THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD! You can do the math, you can form theories, you can hypothesize... but you never know FOR SURE until you flip the switch.
People like the OP were probably standing around in caveman days, saying, "Ugh. No make fire. What if fire is monster, kill everyone? Bad thing. Not make fire unless know not monster."
http://archive.gamespy.com/fargo/august03/autorpg/
How many skyscrapers have people seen collapse which are NOT controlled demolitions?
In other words, how many data points do you have on "What does a skyscraper collapsing on its own look like"?
In other other words, how do you know that "falling straight down" is an artifact of controlled demolition, and not an artifact of being a skyscraper?
...when artificial insemination was first used for cattle, there was the same "moral panic" because, y'know, it was new and different and therefore SPOOOKY, and the same Usual Suspects were all up in arms over it, and, of course, it is now so accepted and commonplace no one even remembers there was an outrage.
Hell, when the first smallpox vaccine was invented, there were very similair panics to what we see today over genetic engineering.
People are stupid, but they are also easily distracted and forget last year's MAJOR CRISIS in favor of this year's equally all-consuming disaster.
Cheating is defined as "Anything which breaks the rules of the game".
The rules of the game are spelled out in the EULA you agree to. If you're the type of person who signs an agreement intending to break it, well, that's between you and your sense of ethics, I suppose, but I wouldn't trust you to keep your word regarding anything.
Among those rules are no one else -- not a bot, not your kid brother, not some guy in China -- can use your account. Nor can accounts be sold or bought. The only exception I know of is that a parent can pay for an account to be used by a minor child. (This is why is you call up blizzard and say "My kid brother logged into my account and trashed my characters! Help!", Blizzard will say, "Well, you weren't supposed to let him have access to your account. Sucks to be you!")
You don't like the rules Blizzard has? There are dozens -- hundreds -- of similair games you can play.
When you sit down to play a game, it is with the presumption "I am going to play by the rules". Do you normally decide that pawns can move like knights while playing chess? Or, to use a slightly better analogy, do you get to use a chess program to make your moves for you while your opponent has to rely on his own skill?
If the game is so boring that you want to pay someone else to play it...well, the game isn't worth playing, is it? Go play something else. (And from a game design perspective, tedium is a part of the balancing mechanism -- scarcity of resources and rate of leveling are set, in part, on the presumption that "No one is going to stand doing this for more than 'x' hours per day." Remove the tedium by botting, and you break the game balance. Non-botting players cannot gather resources as well, so they're forced to bot. It is, indeed, very similair to the use of steroids -- non steroid users feel that "have to" use the drugs in order to compete, and audiences begin to demand levels of performance no unenhanced human can match, leading to an ever-increasing cycle of drug use and the destruction of sport as a test of unaided human ability.)
Given that no one is forcing you, if eating shit annoys you, you really only have yourself to blame if you're annoyed.
Which is better?
Ever-more-intrusive 'scan' programs to look for cheaters, and a constant war between makers of hack programs and the company, or simply attacking the source of the problem?
I'm not sure the "copyright" angle is the best way to go, but I cannot help but believe most of those upset about it are crying crocodile tears, much more concerned with their access to cheat programs than any moral issues of copyright and privacy.
A lot of features which would make MMORPGS more fun can't be implemented because doing them server-side is too resource intensive and doing them client side means exposing them to hacks. A solid "You will be sued and fed your balls" message to the makers of hack programs would, in the long run, add up to better gaming. (So would better process and memory space protection, but that's a different problem....)
A lot of the "hacker ethic" of openness, user control, and so on simply doesn't apply to online, multiplayer, games, and I wish some of the knee-jerkers would recognize that fact. When you enter any kind of shared, competitive, environment, the moral standards change. "Protecting the gamespace" trumps "Information wants to be free".
"Waaaah! Blizzard won't let me cheat!"
Drug tests for athletes aren't invasions of privacy. Cheat programs in online games are the same thing. You want to cheat? Play "Oblivion" and use all the mods you want. In any kind of multiplayer environment, the use of third-party programs must be verboten. Don't like it? No one is forcing you to play.
Of course, "a few sentences of text or a few seconds of video" most likely are being used within legal fair use boundaries. So what's going to happen is that the corporate law firm will grab this program, then send out auto-takedown notices without a human being (to the extent anyone working in the legal department meets that criteria) ever looking to see if the use is even arguably a violation of copyright. Then you'll get the backlash where at least one such auto-generated letter makes its way to someone with the knowledge to fight back and the platform to do it from, and someone will have to issue an embarrassed apology, and then probably turn around and sue the software makers.
...though this might be the result of too small a dataset. Every book I put in resulted in an "unsuggestion" list with at least one book I also liked, or, in some cases, books I knew someone who also liked my main suggestion liked. It seems it's a lot easier to find similarities than unsimilarities, because it's easy to guess that people who like 'A' will like 'A1', 'A2' and 'A3', but it does not follow that they WON'T like 'B'. Why, for example, would I not like Harry Potter because I like Ringworld? Why would my wife be unable to enjoy both science fiction and chick-lit? And why does like Raymond Feist's fantasy mean I'm uninterested in books on programming?
People are complex, and only a few truly pathetic souls have their interests defined so narrowly that it's safe to guess what they don't like based on what they do.
The RICO act is a good example of the reverse -- a law which is used to sweep a far broader net than it was originally written for, with each new extension slipping in as 'just a little bit more'. Once a law has been around for a while, courts tend to be leery of overturning it.
Not sure about the Patriot Act. The courts have gotten wonky in later years. Really, by all standards of precedent, it should have been shredded.
My statement was based on the reasoning in Reno vs. ACLU (http://www2.epic.org/cda/cda_decision.html), where the issue of overbreadth is discussed at length.
IAE, I'm just curious as to how Australia deals with these issues. What are the grounds for challenging a law in Australia, which obviously has a very different Constitution than the United States?
The expected argument will be, "Well, there's no plan to use the law like that."
In American jurisprudence, it is an established precedent that taking it on faith that an overbroad law will not be used in an overbroad manner does not save it from challenges to Constitutionality -- that is, when the government says, "Sure, we COULD use it to arrest families singing 'Happy Birthday', but honest, we won't!", the courts say, "Try again, sucker!". How do Australian courts view the issue of overbreadth?
...except how to hold on to power. That's their job, really, and the good ones do it well. No one ever lost an election because they didn't understand the things they were supposed to be making laws about. See also http://www.pontification.com/serendipity/index.php ?/archives/117-The-Know-Nothing-Party.html/
"If the theory of gravity were so scientific, there would be no concern of how this would be interpreted by people which believed they could flap their arms and fly."
It doesn't matter how well proven a fact of science is, there will always be those who deny it due to their willful ignorance or fanaticism. If the only people they harm in the process are themselves, no great loss. If, however, they have access to children or other innocents -- picture a doctor who doesn't believe in the germ theory of disease -- they become dangerous.
Creationists teach lies to children, lies which make them, as adults, less capable of understanding the universe as it is. The universe is dangerous enough when we do understand it -- it is infinitely more so when we don't.
>Go on, say something in European.
"Le Americans, they steenk!"
"By yiminy, ve surrender!"
How's that? I know I have a bit of an accent, but I think I can be understood.
Uhm...the game was released over a year ago. I've got it.
n g-Scorcery/dp/1588469425/sr=8-1/qid=1158090121/ref =pd_bbs_1/103-2450426-3529402?ie=UTF8&s=books
http://www.amazon.com/Game-Thrones-D20-Based-Gami
The fact someone who was waiting for the game didn't even know it was out says a lot about why they went under, methinks...
Whenever you buy from ANY P&P RPG company, the odds are, you're (probably) paying money to a company screwing writers over. WOTC is actually one of the best when it comes to payment on-time; I've also had no problem with White Wolf, Steve Jackson Games, or Fantasy Flight. Other writers have been less fortunate....ask anyone about Guardians of Order, for example. RPG companies tend to go through long stretches of hard times, and the easiest debt to avoid is paying writers and artists for work already submitted. Most of us take it, on the grounds we weren't in it for the money anyway, and if the product is never published, we'll never get paid, so...
I've got at least five projects...no, wait, six...which I completed which, for various reasons, I haven't received any money for. So it goes.