Keep in mind that inflation adjusted this huge unwieldy brick cost ~14k USD in today's currency according to a quick lookup on an inflation calculator.
You can get netbooks/ultrabooks with good battery life for "pocket change" in comparison today or still more portable mobile workstations with additional high capacity battery packs for less than what the first mac portable cost back then.
True, copyright/IP law around here is quite bad, but I wouldn't agree that the courts are in Big Media's pocket (well, except for Hamburg, obviously), the pirate party has been gaining considerable traction causing some rethinking in the bigger parties when it comes to sucking up to the content industry for IP legislation and it doesn't change that this verdict has reasonable chances of getting overturned if appealed considering the stellar track record of the OLG Hamburg when it comes to that.
For what it's worth, this is a copyright case and Hamburg is the preferred location for ridiculous lawsuits by rights holders due to their excessively industry friendly media rights chamber.
The BGH overturns their verdicts with satisfying regularity and the defendant hopefully will appeal that one.
HO2? >_>
(You meant to say Dihydrogen Monoxide)
>
Lack of LAN IS a gameplay flaw. LANs create an immersion environment that cant be replicated any other way.
You can all sit in the same room, on the same network, and play Starcraft 2.
You can just play with each other, you can play lan games.
The only real complaint I'm seeing here is "It's not easy to download copies for all our friends and play together without buying the game"
[...]
Other than that, you can 100% recreate the experience, as long as you have internet access.
And that's where the trouble starts.
Some of my favourite LAN parties in the last decade or so were done in places without direct internet access.
- My parent's garage: Adjacent to the house, but no cabling there, 15-20m to the DSL modem and my parents would've killed me if I had to prop open a door for a LAN cable letting flies and mosquitoes into the house all night.
- My cousin's garage: 10-20m away from the house and on the opposite side to the location of their DSL modem inside the house.
- A mate's backyard party hut (complete with wet bar and pool table): 50+m from the house and any internet access.
- A mate's deceased grandmother's vacant house: No phone or internet at all.
A WiFi bridge can be dodgy (access points behind multiple walls) and cell phone reception is spotty at best at either of those places which rules out phone tethering and I don't know how well it would work either way, setting up NAT behind a tethered phone that is already behind the service provider's NAT or god forbid, the game wanting to download a patch over a volume limited phone contract with probably mediocre speed.
Lastly, even if you have a place where you have no problems accessing your ordinary internet connection, ISP outages can happen, especially if you live in a rural area where phone cables aren't run underground (takes only one tree falling over during a storm or one drunk driver hitting a phone pole) or one construction worker to accidentally the whole cable if it is underground.
If you don't think this is an issue, you've probably never been on the receiving end of an internet outage during your recreational time, as an internet outage is exactly when I tend to fire up a good singleplayer game.
I'll take my classic LAN mode and offline single player every day and games that are not MMO but force you to be logged in/online even for single player or LAN play can fuck right off again and will not see a dime from me.
>Multiplayer Avatar interaction was indefinitely postponed
That struck me as odd for an mmo... it sounded like it's a single-player experience.
For those of you who, like me, don't know Eve, normally in Eve you only see each other's ships, but it is multi-player.
Correct, I probably should have worded that better. You can interact with other player's spaceships (preferably through violence
>It's about the fact that we pay a subscription each month (an expensive one compared to other MMOs, I might add) and we feel that we deserve anything they develop for free.
Like all of those shiny new expansions they release every 6 months for absolutely nothing?
Don't get me wrong, a $60 monocle is total bullshit, but demonizing them for not giving you all of those neat vanity items for free is a little overboard.
Well, there hasn't been an expansion worthy of praise since Apocrypha in 2009...
Incursions wasn't completely horrible because it added High Sec PVE that doesn't make me want to stab my brain out to escape the boredom, but even that was poorly (read: not at all) followed up (risk/reward is seriously skewed in high sec and easily farmed in the lower tier sites for relatively ridiculous/easy ISK per hour) and most likely done with extremely few development resources as most of the individual bits were already in the game in one form or another while the nose candy enthusiasts in Team
Oh, and I forgot one other point that was pointed out in another comment:
I'm already bloody paying a premium subscription price for EVE (well, not any more at the moment) and double dipping (or rather attempting to do so) into a customer's wallet like that also offended quite a lot of players in conjunction with the idiotic price points. A couple of EUR/USD for a full set of high tier clothes might have been acceptable to some in that context, but the way it was rolled out, not a chance.
Microtransactions have a place in gaming. That place is Free To Play games or to justify further development time on an already aging one time purchase title (like Team Fortress 2 before it became completely F2P and MT based).
The EVE MT experiment did not just fail because of that, it failed because of a multitude of reasons, most of which a sane person would have seen coming from miles away.
First of all, the NEX Store (the name of this abomination, yes I'm biased against it, deal with it) was released in a vacuum of a completely single player environment. The only place your purchase will be seen in all its glory is in the confines of your own game client in a shabby little hole called the Captain's Quarter (or dismissively, the Captain's Closet). Multiplayer Avatar interaction was indefinitely postponed for now (they finally admitted/realized that they had nothing fun in terms of gameplay value on the drawing board for it, go figure), so the only way your purchase is visible to other players is through the Tiny Avatar portrait (which is one of the reasons why the Monocle was the only item seeing significant sales, the other being trolls buying them to enrage the more easily excited opponents of microtransactions in EVE).
Second, the concept of a market-less (if you ignore the resale), infinite supply item is diametrically opposed to the core concept of EVE's player run economy and sandbox nature. Everything in EVE has a price defined by supply and demand. The price of the Vanity Items is based solely on the current ISK equivalent value of a month's worth of game time.
For a more sane approach on that and how it would be at least somewhat acceptable, I made a thread about that on a community forum in the wake of the ingame riots.
Third, even the low-price tier is still retardedly expensive. Even the cheapest items still cost 1000 AUR which amounts to 1/3 of a PLEX (the Gametime Code token which converts to 3000 AUR, clocking in at around 17 USD from a cheap supplier) and a full set of clothes (boots, pants, shirt/jacket, etc) would set you back over 20 bucks worth of PLEX/Gametime.
The reason given in TFA, while certainly not wrong as it really was bloody stupid to launch with almost exclusively high-tier items, compounds with all this and resulted in a huge backlash against CCP over it (and other poor decisions and a backlog of frustration over the last two years of neglect towards the core gameplay) but was definitely not the only or even the main reason for it.
I should probably also point out that the prices of the items in general are also hugely immersion breaking. The ISK equivalent price of a monocle (the highest priced item) is roughly that of a dreadnought. Which is a capital ship. The second largest and expensive tier of ships (after supercapitals).
And even the cheapest boots cost as much as a battleship.
Admittedly, you apparently buy a lifetime subscription to your clothes as they don't get destroyed upon player death like implants (another decidedly un-EVE feature of the Vanity Items) but that still seems somewhat extreme...
I expected Heroin/Crack dispensers reading the headline.
Left disappointed.
Either way, I don't know why this is surprising except for one fact: That it didn't happen much, much sooner. That's what happens when there's no real world consequences for your behavior (or you think you can avoid them).
That's not surprising. It happened before and it will happen again.
EVE has a very rich history of large scale scams, reaching from investment scams like this one to long-planned infiltrations of alliances like the infamous heist by GHSC (who incidentally ripped assets to the tune of 200ish billion ISK off one of the major alliances again just recently).
The only "surprising" and novel bit about this story is that he apparently/supposedly didn't do it for the e-fame or e-gain, but for RMTing the scammed ISK because of real life troubles, which was the reason for his subsequent banning.
Arithmetic is being able to count up to twenty without taking off your shoes. -- Mickey Mouse
