Actually, gnomes are just omitted from the Player's Handbook. They and a decent number of other races in the Monster Manual have rules for use as PCs, and there are persistent rumours that they'll be getting the full-blown PC race treatment when the PHB2 comes out in June 2009.
So... what happens when the people who are there for lore and whacking monsters run out of content and start to complain or quit? Don't think that it isn't going to happen, or that they're going to be a tiny contingent-- just look at how Guild Wars has changed since Prophecies launched.
That's what open betas have been used for, for years now. A bit of cross-marketing with FilePlanet (subscribe to our site and get into beta 'free'!) and everyone but the player wins.
Besides that, there are a couple of reasons why you're not likely to see downloadable demos for live MMOs:
First off, they want to move as many boxes as they can. That initial $50 outlay, when you take into account the tens of thousands of fanboys hoping to grab prime virtual land, loot or names, goes a long, long way to paying off development costs or server leases. That $50 also lets the ol' Sunk Costs fallacy come out to play. You can't return the game, so you're more likely to play the whole month, so you're more likely to climb over the learning curve and UI/AI quirks.
Second, when you start offering free trials of the live game, the gold farmers really start to come out of the woodwork. Between rotating IPs, MAC spoofing and proxies, nothing will block them for long. If you let them in with the rest of the players, your in-game economy is fucked from the very beginning. Free trials tend to manifest when the player-base has stabilized, or when the publisher's absolutely desperate for players, and the risk of disruptive farmers becomes tolerable or necessary.
Korean-style MMOs are a different matter, because they operate on a totally different sort of revenue model. Most of them are dedicated to coaxing real money out of the player for in-game items, and the actual in-game currency allows for little more than subsistence.
If Slashdot were a POTBS fansite. Wake me up when subscription rates toilet and they sell out to SOE, who puts the game on life support. I mean, Christ. City of Heroes/Villains is adding two new branching classes, a huge number of new combinations for existing class types, and adding anti-spam functions, but where's its top-billed thread?
No. The only way that POTBS is newsworthy, is if they got off their asses and added ninjas and robots to the mix.
Yeah, but the vast majority of MMOs end up collapsing, or never go beyond a few thousand users. MMOs actually have a business function as well: you give them money for the privilege of playing, and they hope that you don't outweigh your monthly fees by using too much bandwidth or tying up other resources.
"Follow into foolishness" "Media gong show". I know people love echo chambers, but try looking for actual news articles rather than op-ed pieces that show their biases in the first bite-sized paragraph next time.
They wouldn't need fine print. Signing up for the forum would almost certainly constitute a pre-existing relationship, which is a loophole already utilized by numerous outfits to contact people despite DNC lists.
Are they going to keep the voiceovers that 'explain' how Mac manages to do those incredibly unlikely things while he's puttering around with baling wire, twine and the trap-of-the-minute?
Ignoring the fact that it's a ridiculous choice, he'd refuse and probably counter with a lawsuit. That's what he did in the wake of someone taking him up on his request to code a brain-whizzing, mass-murder simulator, and Penny Arcade's stepping up to make a donation to Child's Play in his name.
This is precisely right. It's also what gives them a huge kick in the ass when they go just a little too far, like Rogers Cable did over here about ten years ago. As what was usual, they added a pile of new channels that nobody really wanted and raised subscription prices accordingly. They also moved a number of popular channels further up the dial, where a vast number of older cable boxes couldn't functionally reach. Their only suggestion was to rent a new cable box, which was just adding insult to injury.
Now, there was an alternative: We could go to the cable company and ask to have the new channels removed. There was no way to do it over the phone, you had to find out where your local cable shop was, drive down there, and hassle the girl behind the counter. Rogers clearly assumed that since we'd swallowed their shit for so long, another mouthful would go down just as smoothly.
Hundreds of thousands of subscribers descended on their outlets, fuming mad, demanding their service be return to its previous state, or canceling cable outright. Rogers got the message, the CRTC got the message, and for once shit actually changed.
The Apple logo encourages people to drop hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars on electronic gadgets they may or may not need (more energy consumption). GreeNYC apple will be used to encourage people to walk, bike and unplug appliances when not in use (less energy consumption).
The author of this dubious piece submitted it to Digg and made a thread about it on SomethingAwful, where he was threatened with banning if he ever tried to advertise his own shitty blog posts again. I have to wonder if GnomeIllusionist is the same unfunny hack trying to astroturf for page impressions again.
That's generally what I thought of, too. The summary reads like a masturbatory fantasy for nerds: your people haven't had to leave the basement for almost three and a half thousand years, you don't need a job, and now God Himself needs your help. The 'AE' ligature in 'Saecular' looks like it's been crammed in with the aid of a crowbar, which annoys my inner linguistic dork more than replacing perfectly good I's with Y's or just tossing apostrophes in to add an exotic flavour to random morphemes.
I can't verify this, but a lot of people think that Rogers cable has been throttling encrypted traffic as well, to get around BT packet encryption shenanigans.
Notably, Rogers is mainly throttling upstream traffic. If you hop on a torrent that's got plenty of seeds, you'll still see amazing download rates, but your own will be capped at about 10 KB/s (yes, kilobytes) out of a regular cap that's probably ten times that speed.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, gnomes are just omitted from the Player's Handbook. They and a decent number of other races in the Monster Manual have rules for use as PCs, and there are persistent rumours that they'll be getting the full-blown PC race treatment when the PHB2 comes out in June 2009.
I, for one, welcome our Battletoads overlords.
So... what happens when the people who are there for lore and whacking monsters run out of content and start to complain or quit? Don't think that it isn't going to happen, or that they're going to be a tiny contingent-- just look at how Guild Wars has changed since Prophecies launched.
As long as the last phase of the final fight isn't a clumsy quicktime event, I'll be happy.
Sounds like they're combining this with the story that broke here a couple of days ago:
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/21/2224228
"Plastics."
Besides that, there are a couple of reasons why you're not likely to see downloadable demos for live MMOs:
First off, they want to move as many boxes as they can. That initial $50 outlay, when you take into account the tens of thousands of fanboys hoping to grab prime virtual land, loot or names, goes a long, long way to paying off development costs or server leases. That $50 also lets the ol' Sunk Costs fallacy come out to play. You can't return the game, so you're more likely to play the whole month, so you're more likely to climb over the learning curve and UI/AI quirks.
Second, when you start offering free trials of the live game, the gold farmers really start to come out of the woodwork. Between rotating IPs, MAC spoofing and proxies, nothing will block them for long. If you let them in with the rest of the players, your in-game economy is fucked from the very beginning. Free trials tend to manifest when the player-base has stabilized, or when the publisher's absolutely desperate for players, and the risk of disruptive farmers becomes tolerable or necessary.
Korean-style MMOs are a different matter, because they operate on a totally different sort of revenue model. Most of them are dedicated to coaxing real money out of the player for in-game items, and the actual in-game currency allows for little more than subsistence.
No. The only way that POTBS is newsworthy, is if they got off their asses and added ninjas and robots to the mix.
Yeah, but the vast majority of MMOs end up collapsing, or never go beyond a few thousand users. MMOs actually have a business function as well: you give them money for the privilege of playing, and they hope that you don't outweigh your monthly fees by using too much bandwidth or tying up other resources.
"Follow into foolishness" "Media gong show". I know people love echo chambers, but try looking for actual news articles rather than op-ed pieces that show their biases in the first bite-sized paragraph next time.
I like having a physical library. Books are perfectly convenient for my purposes, and don't typically come with a triple-digit buy-in.
Von-Neumann machines? They're already there.
They wouldn't need fine print. Signing up for the forum would almost certainly constitute a pre-existing relationship, which is a loophole already utilized by numerous outfits to contact people despite DNC lists.
Are they going to keep the voiceovers that 'explain' how Mac manages to do those incredibly unlikely things while he's puttering around with baling wire, twine and the trap-of-the-minute?
For what it's worth, I think your response was funnier than mine.
Thread is bad? The Pernese could have told you that Long Intervals ago.
Ignoring the fact that it's a ridiculous choice, he'd refuse and probably counter with a lawsuit. That's what he did in the wake of someone taking him up on his request to code a brain-whizzing, mass-murder simulator, and Penny Arcade's stepping up to make a donation to Child's Play in his name.
Faxes make their own paper trails.
No, you'll just need the pink-tinted ones that everyone else uses.
Now, there was an alternative: We could go to the cable company and ask to have the new channels removed. There was no way to do it over the phone, you had to find out where your local cable shop was, drive down there, and hassle the girl behind the counter. Rogers clearly assumed that since we'd swallowed their shit for so long, another mouthful would go down just as smoothly.
Hundreds of thousands of subscribers descended on their outlets, fuming mad, demanding their service be return to its previous state, or canceling cable outright. Rogers got the message, the CRTC got the message, and for once shit actually changed.
Unless the Village People own Scorpio Music, it's their handlers getting their panties in a twist and not the performers themselves.
The author of this dubious piece submitted it to Digg and made a thread about it on SomethingAwful, where he was threatened with banning if he ever tried to advertise his own shitty blog posts again. I have to wonder if GnomeIllusionist is the same unfunny hack trying to astroturf for page impressions again.
That's generally what I thought of, too. The summary reads like a masturbatory fantasy for nerds: your people haven't had to leave the basement for almost three and a half thousand years, you don't need a job, and now God Himself needs your help. The 'AE' ligature in 'Saecular' looks like it's been crammed in with the aid of a crowbar, which annoys my inner linguistic dork more than replacing perfectly good I's with Y's or just tossing apostrophes in to add an exotic flavour to random morphemes.
Notably, Rogers is mainly throttling upstream traffic. If you hop on a torrent that's got plenty of seeds, you'll still see amazing download rates, but your own will be capped at about 10 KB/s (yes, kilobytes) out of a regular cap that's probably ten times that speed.