Don't milk the cash cow until its teats fall off: Blizzard's managed to get what, one expansion out so far? SOE has put out how many for EQ2 that was released at the same time? Sure, your balance sheet looks better if you can say, "I'm going to get 200% revenue from my begrudging players this year." It actually looks even better if you say, "I'll stick with 110% revenue from 2000% of the number of happier players."
I also agree that Blizzard's success has nothing to do with following certain business principles. Instead, Blizzard's popularity was because it brought MMOs to the masses, and it achieved that because it set the speed of game play correctly.
For single player games, especially console RPGs, you progress in the game at a certain pace. You may earn a level increase every few minutes. You'll go back to town and purchase some new equipment every now and then. But MMORPGs prior to WoW were unacceptably slow. A single player game which progressed at the speed of a pre-WoW MMO would be labeled as a failure. Simply put, it would be very boring.
Unfortunately, other companies got greedy. After playing many other MMOs, I could see that they designed their game around forcing a player to subscribe for a certain length of time to achieve the "endgame" content. If they didn't have enough content for their players, no problem! Simply slow down the pace of leveling or money acquisition. If your game is boring, people will still forced to play it and pay for it, right?
Blizzard was the first company to significantly change the trend. It eliminated the common "camp & grind" game play, and allowed players to gain levels and equipment at a significantly faster pace. This made the game fun, and attracted a ton of subscribers in doing so. As you said, it turns out that having lots of subscribers is preferable to forcing a few die-hard subscribers to pay. In the end greed wasn't good, and a fun game beat the alternatives.
I feel pretty secure at work because our cubicles sit below security cameras. Despite my feeling that some co-workers are dishonest, nothing has ever disappeared off my desk. It's a good combination of security and convenience knowing that if something disappears, then someone is going to get caught red-handed and will get fired.
But, of course, then the trade off is privacy, something I don't have a problem with in an entirely professional environment. Perhaps you feel differently?
If the land is so darn valuable, then the land developers would be more than willing to SPEND THEIR OWN MONEY to build a bridge, instead of confiscating money from the rest of us so that they can profit.
Valerie Plame was not an active covert CIA agent under the law. One of the law's author's Victoria Toensing even said so. Scooter Libby was not charged with outing her. Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was unable to charge ANYONE with outing her because no crime was committed.
The correct response against people plotting and encouraging a coup isn't to shut down their television station. The proper response is to jail those people for encouraging a coup. I'm not familiar with Venezualian laws, but I'm pretty sure that plotting to overthrow the government is illegal in most countries. Round up those responsible and put them on trial.
But because the television station was shut down first, before arresting any of the station operators, proves that Chavez's decision was a political one to silence free speech from the opposition.
"Responsible disclosure" would have been great, except that history has shown us that it usually doesn't work. When "responsible disclosure" has been tried the vulnerability has lingered (especially with the larger corporations). When the vulnerability has been openly disclosed, then suddenly the software gets a patch. If history had been different then perhaps we would give the idea consideration. But it wasn't, and it was a problem created by the software companies themselves, so here we are today reaping the seeds that were sown.
Often World of Warcraft is dismissed as not having any new features. But it does have one key feature that allowed it to attract tons of players: The quest system to get from level 1 to max level allows you to get there with no grind. You don't stay in the same spot or same area for very long. You don't kill the exact same monster for any longer than 1 hour. The quest system makes you move around, and combat different things, and handsomely rewards players with XP and money and equipment for doing so. Of course, this means that a game must launch in a mostly complete state, and that it must contain a lot of content for quests.
New games that desire to complete would do well to learn this lesson. Camp & grind based gameplay is dead. The less you include in your game, the more successful it will be.
Of course, WoW eventually has camp & grind activities near the end game, but no MMORPG has solved this problem. Eventually you WILL run out of content, and your main option for continued progression will involve a time sink. A good MMORPG will prolong this as much as possible, and a bad MMORPG will simply create a camp & grind headache for players in a futile attempt to extend customer subscriptions.
I salute Harry McCracken for standing up for principle. It might not be the best decision for his own pocketbook or career, but our whole society needs more people like Mr. McCracken to stand up against this type of corruption in journalism. Cheers to you.
If there's one thing about liberals that I have to give them credit, it's that they're extremely tenacious on average. They march around and protest, hold rallies, write on their blogs, send around petitions, call in to radio stations, and generally make a lot of noise. Based on this "noise" factor you'd think that 85% of the United States are liberals.
This story here on Slashdot is part of that machine. If you just get a handful of them, they'll slap that political stuff in your face if you give them the chance. Of course the story doesn't belong on Slashdot, but they don't care. That's how they get out their message.
Of course, I have no way of guaranteeing this, but this is much to do about nothing. Kucinich is a hard core leftist with little relevancy. He's not going to win the Democrat nomination, and this resolution is going to die a slow, quiet death in some committee. Basically he's a political attention whore. Noone in the House of Representatives with any hope of having a political future is going to support of vote for this.
'Researchers at Paul Verlaine University in Metz said that trials on two of the three machines used in France showed that four people out of every seven aged over 65 could not get their votes recorded.'
So the machines are discriminating against old people?!? How do the machines know? If confirmed, these could be some of the most advanced systems in existence!
Btw, what date do they become self-aware and trigger Judgement Day?
You know what will get me to buy into the global warming hype? It's if they can get countries such as China and India to play by the rules of the CO2 reduction pacts. Currently they are exempt under Kyoto! If you think job outsourcing is currently bad in the U.S. just wait until we sign onto this. The jobs and the pollution will simply go over there where pollution controls are more lax, thus costing us jobs and taxes for the government, while actually increasing industrial emissions.
Until someone can get the emerging polluters to get on board with the 21st century, it seems like this is just an attempt to flog the U.S. economy. It doesn't matter what the science says if the pollution output relocates to China and India.
There are 3 branches of government under the U.S. Constitution, each with checks and balances against each other. There's the legislative, executive, and judicial. The press is not one of those branches.
You might think that it's a good idea for journalists to keep checks and balances against the government, but it's not setup that way. The law is the law. If you think the law stinks then change the law. Get your congressperson to introduce legislation to introduce journalist shield laws.
But until that gets passed into law, a single journalist doesn't have the right to disregard our laws and our system, even if someone thinks that it might be better that way. If everyone had that mentality, that they could disregard the system, then we'd have mass chaos. Pass laws. Change the system if you don't like it. But don't disobey clear judicial orders.
This really surprises me, I'd have expected the republicans to have been more interested in the panoptic registering of bloggers. Can someone explain why this bill was pushed by the democrats?
You have to remember that overall liberals control the "mainstream" media in the United States. CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, NPR Radio, USA Today, NY Times, Time, Newsweek, every big newspaper in every major city, ect ect ect. Democrats complain about Fox News, but the everything else is liberally slanted.
What little conservative media comes from the grassroots. Things like blogs, Drudgereport.com, Rush Limbaugh, and conservative talk radio are some of the biggest sources of conservative news. If Republicans and conservatives want to get out their side of the story, this is how they do it.
This is why liberals are assulting talk radio with the "fairness doctrine" legislation (see Dennis Kucinich D-OH if you don't know about this), attacked grassroots political funding (see the McCain-Feingold legislation), and now want to take out bloggers with this anti-blogger legislation. The liberals believe that if they can shut down everything else, then the only thing that remains will be their message via the "mainstream" media.
The real problem though is that the majority allows it to happen, as they believe their own rights to be being protected or even enhanced (eg "the right to be safe from terrorist attack")
I would remind you that some rights are more important than others. For example, the most important right is the right to life. It's listed first in the preamble. Without it, none of your other rights amount to anything. You can't own property, or have free speech, or pursue happiness if you're dead.
Prioritizing your rights is not a problem. In fact, it's very logical.
Human rights for one requires the value of human rights for all. Otherwise, all rights are just granted by whatever dictator happens to be in charge at the moment.
Except that we here in the United States don't live in a dictatorship.
Those in charge have been elected by the people, and the people grant him the authority to make decisions (such as the exercise of Article 2 of the Constitution during times of war). And if the people don't like the decisions made, then they will vote accordingly in the next presidential election. Actually, the President has been held more accountable than most judges; he's had to face reelection!
Besides, don't we want to demonstrate the value of our principles by extending them to everyone who comes under the control of our system?
No we don't want to give them our rights. The enemy doesn't have a 2nd amendment right to carry arms. They don't have a right to privacy where they can plot to kill Americans without interference. They don't have a 6th amendment right to a speedy and public trial, where they can expose our informants or methods of spying on the enemy. And they certainly don't have a first amendment right to incite violence and chant "Death to America!"
Foreign terrorists are neither protected by our constitution, nor the Geneva Conventions.
Personally I'd like to know what the author would do in the Ticking Time Bomb scenario; Dahlia probably wouldn't have any answer.
In any case, the number 2 complaint listed is The Military Commissions Act of 2006, which is strange because the author would presumably like to have constitutional protections apply to non citizens captured on a foreign battlefield. Apparently the point of our civil liberties is to protect everyone on earth, including the terrorists, huh?
They no doubt are trying to get it from the Commerce clause. Until the U.S. Supreme Court reverses some of its earlier decisions the U.S. Federal Government can basically do whatever they want.
Of course, if they strike down the use of the Commerce clause to justify anything and everything, then several other Federal programs and departments will become vulnerable, such as Unions and Labor relations, Civil Rights, and possibly even abortion rights. Instead, the individual States will have total control over those issues, because there's no interstate commerce involved. So you can try to deprive the Feds of their ability to mandate ID cards, but you'll probably also kill some other federally controlled programs that you like.
While I certainly agree that this writer for Slate is a moron, my favorite part is the second last paragraph where he tries to compare Warcraft to Matrix Online, as if Matrix Online is somehow better in any regard. Lol!
The problem with most all of the WoW naysayers is that their alternative ideas have already been tried, and they have already failed. Complain all you want, but the gaming public has already voted with their feet.
Unfortunately, that's not just an observation, it's a strategy many people adopt. The consequence? People can manipulate where "the middle" is by becoming ever more extreme. In particular, the right wing of the political spectrum has become masterful at this, pulling mainstream America way to the right with hyperbole and fear mongering.
Then how about listening to both sides and using your own judgement to determine which side is correct? No matter how far anyone slants a story, if you hear all the information then you should be able to spot the phony.
As the dissenting judge noted, this kind of erosion of press protections will have reporters 'contacting sources the way I understand drug dealers do to reach theirs -- by use of clandestine cell phones and meeting in darkened doorways.'
Similar to working with drug dealers, reporters working with inside sources to leak government secrets is ILLEGAL.
1.) The reporters do have the freedom to publish under the 1st amendment, but the Constition gives no right to press secrecy.
2.) The government leaker is committing a crime. Because reporters don't have the right to secrecy, they can be used to uncover the lawbreaker.
Slashdot Mirror
I also agree that Blizzard's success has nothing to do with following certain business principles. Instead, Blizzard's popularity was because it brought MMOs to the masses, and it achieved that because it set the speed of game play correctly.
For single player games, especially console RPGs, you progress in the game at a certain pace. You may earn a level increase every few minutes. You'll go back to town and purchase some new equipment every now and then. But MMORPGs prior to WoW were unacceptably slow. A single player game which progressed at the speed of a pre-WoW MMO would be labeled as a failure. Simply put, it would be very boring.
Unfortunately, other companies got greedy. After playing many other MMOs, I could see that they designed their game around forcing a player to subscribe for a certain length of time to achieve the "endgame" content. If they didn't have enough content for their players, no problem! Simply slow down the pace of leveling or money acquisition. If your game is boring, people will still forced to play it and pay for it, right?
Blizzard was the first company to significantly change the trend. It eliminated the common "camp & grind" game play, and allowed players to gain levels and equipment at a significantly faster pace. This made the game fun, and attracted a ton of subscribers in doing so. As you said, it turns out that having lots of subscribers is preferable to forcing a few die-hard subscribers to pay. In the end greed wasn't good, and a fun game beat the alternatives.
I feel pretty secure at work because our cubicles sit below security cameras. Despite my feeling that some co-workers are dishonest, nothing has ever disappeared off my desk. It's a good combination of security and convenience knowing that if something disappears, then someone is going to get caught red-handed and will get fired.
But, of course, then the trade off is privacy, something I don't have a problem with in an entirely professional environment. Perhaps you feel differently?
If the land is so darn valuable, then the land developers would be more than willing to SPEND THEIR OWN MONEY to build a bridge, instead of confiscating money from the rest of us so that they can profit.
Valerie Plame was not an active covert CIA agent under the law. One of the law's author's Victoria Toensing even said so. Scooter Libby was not charged with outing her. Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was unable to charge ANYONE with outing her because no crime was committed.
The correct response against people plotting and encouraging a coup isn't to shut down their television station. The proper response is to jail those people for encouraging a coup. I'm not familiar with Venezualian laws, but I'm pretty sure that plotting to overthrow the government is illegal in most countries. Round up those responsible and put them on trial.
But because the television station was shut down first, before arresting any of the station operators, proves that Chavez's decision was a political one to silence free speech from the opposition.
"Responsible disclosure" would have been great, except that history has shown us that it usually doesn't work. When "responsible disclosure" has been tried the vulnerability has lingered (especially with the larger corporations). When the vulnerability has been openly disclosed, then suddenly the software gets a patch. If history had been different then perhaps we would give the idea consideration. But it wasn't, and it was a problem created by the software companies themselves, so here we are today reaping the seeds that were sown.
Often World of Warcraft is dismissed as not having any new features. But it does have one key feature that allowed it to attract tons of players: The quest system to get from level 1 to max level allows you to get there with no grind. You don't stay in the same spot or same area for very long. You don't kill the exact same monster for any longer than 1 hour. The quest system makes you move around, and combat different things, and handsomely rewards players with XP and money and equipment for doing so. Of course, this means that a game must launch in a mostly complete state, and that it must contain a lot of content for quests.
New games that desire to complete would do well to learn this lesson. Camp & grind based gameplay is dead. The less you include in your game, the more successful it will be.
Of course, WoW eventually has camp & grind activities near the end game, but no MMORPG has solved this problem. Eventually you WILL run out of content, and your main option for continued progression will involve a time sink. A good MMORPG will prolong this as much as possible, and a bad MMORPG will simply create a camp & grind headache for players in a futile attempt to extend customer subscriptions.
I salute Harry McCracken for standing up for principle. It might not be the best decision for his own pocketbook or career, but our whole society needs more people like Mr. McCracken to stand up against this type of corruption in journalism. Cheers to you.
If there's one thing about liberals that I have to give them credit, it's that they're extremely tenacious on average. They march around and protest, hold rallies, write on their blogs, send around petitions, call in to radio stations, and generally make a lot of noise. Based on this "noise" factor you'd think that 85% of the United States are liberals.
This story here on Slashdot is part of that machine. If you just get a handful of them, they'll slap that political stuff in your face if you give them the chance. Of course the story doesn't belong on Slashdot, but they don't care. That's how they get out their message.
Of course, I have no way of guaranteeing this, but this is much to do about nothing. Kucinich is a hard core leftist with little relevancy. He's not going to win the Democrat nomination, and this resolution is going to die a slow, quiet death in some committee. Basically he's a political attention whore. Noone in the House of Representatives with any hope of having a political future is going to support of vote for this.
So the machines are discriminating against old people?!? How do the machines know? If confirmed, these could be some of the most advanced systems in existence!
Btw, what date do they become self-aware and trigger Judgement Day?
Consensus does not determine fact. Science is not up for a vote.
Newsweek 1975:
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/cooling1.pdf
You know what will get me to buy into the global warming hype? It's if they can get countries such as China and India to play by the rules of the CO2 reduction pacts. Currently they are exempt under Kyoto! If you think job outsourcing is currently bad in the U.S. just wait until we sign onto this. The jobs and the pollution will simply go over there where pollution controls are more lax, thus costing us jobs and taxes for the government, while actually increasing industrial emissions.
Until someone can get the emerging polluters to get on board with the 21st century, it seems like this is just an attempt to flog the U.S. economy. It doesn't matter what the science says if the pollution output relocates to China and India.
There are 3 branches of government under the U.S. Constitution, each with checks and balances against each other. There's the legislative, executive, and judicial. The press is not one of those branches.
You might think that it's a good idea for journalists to keep checks and balances against the government, but it's not setup that way. The law is the law. If you think the law stinks then change the law. Get your congressperson to introduce legislation to introduce journalist shield laws.
But until that gets passed into law, a single journalist doesn't have the right to disregard our laws and our system, even if someone thinks that it might be better that way. If everyone had that mentality, that they could disregard the system, then we'd have mass chaos. Pass laws. Change the system if you don't like it. But don't disobey clear judicial orders.
You have to remember that overall liberals control the "mainstream" media in the United States. CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, NPR Radio, USA Today, NY Times, Time, Newsweek, every big newspaper in every major city, ect ect ect. Democrats complain about Fox News, but the everything else is liberally slanted.
What little conservative media comes from the grassroots. Things like blogs, Drudgereport.com, Rush Limbaugh, and conservative talk radio are some of the biggest sources of conservative news. If Republicans and conservatives want to get out their side of the story, this is how they do it.
This is why liberals are assulting talk radio with the "fairness doctrine" legislation (see Dennis Kucinich D-OH if you don't know about this), attacked grassroots political funding (see the McCain-Feingold legislation), and now want to take out bloggers with this anti-blogger legislation. The liberals believe that if they can shut down everything else, then the only thing that remains will be their message via the "mainstream" media.
I would remind you that some rights are more important than others. For example, the most important right is the right to life. It's listed first in the preamble. Without it, none of your other rights amount to anything. You can't own property, or have free speech, or pursue happiness if you're dead.
Prioritizing your rights is not a problem. In fact, it's very logical.
Except that we here in the United States don't live in a dictatorship.
Those in charge have been elected by the people, and the people grant him the authority to make decisions (such as the exercise of Article 2 of the Constitution during times of war). And if the people don't like the decisions made, then they will vote accordingly in the next presidential election. Actually, the President has been held more accountable than most judges; he's had to face reelection!
No we don't want to give them our rights. The enemy doesn't have a 2nd amendment right to carry arms. They don't have a right to privacy where they can plot to kill Americans without interference. They don't have a 6th amendment right to a speedy and public trial, where they can expose our informants or methods of spying on the enemy. And they certainly don't have a first amendment right to incite violence and chant "Death to America!"
Foreign terrorists are neither protected by our constitution, nor the Geneva Conventions.
Personally I'd like to know what the author would do in the Ticking Time Bomb scenario; Dahlia probably wouldn't have any answer.
In any case, the number 2 complaint listed is The Military Commissions Act of 2006, which is strange because the author would presumably like to have constitutional protections apply to non citizens captured on a foreign battlefield. Apparently the point of our civil liberties is to protect everyone on earth, including the terrorists, huh?
They no doubt are trying to get it from the Commerce clause. Until the U.S. Supreme Court reverses some of its earlier decisions the U.S. Federal Government can basically do whatever they want.
Of course, if they strike down the use of the Commerce clause to justify anything and everything, then several other Federal programs and departments will become vulnerable, such as Unions and Labor relations, Civil Rights, and possibly even abortion rights. Instead, the individual States will have total control over those issues, because there's no interstate commerce involved. So you can try to deprive the Feds of their ability to mandate ID cards, but you'll probably also kill some other federally controlled programs that you like.
While I certainly agree that this writer for Slate is a moron, my favorite part is the second last paragraph where he tries to compare Warcraft to Matrix Online, as if Matrix Online is somehow better in any regard. Lol!
The problem with most all of the WoW naysayers is that their alternative ideas have already been tried, and they have already failed. Complain all you want, but the gaming public has already voted with their feet.
Then how about listening to both sides and using your own judgement to determine which side is correct? No matter how far anyone slants a story, if you hear all the information then you should be able to spot the phony.
Similar to working with drug dealers, reporters working with inside sources to leak government secrets is ILLEGAL.
1.) The reporters do have the freedom to publish under the 1st amendment, but the Constition gives no right to press secrecy.
2.) The government leaker is committing a crime. Because reporters don't have the right to secrecy, they can be used to uncover the lawbreaker.