I sometimes wonder about the state of society that lawsuits like these should even come about in the first place. If people are dumb enough to give away their login credentials to some random website, what business is it of Facebook's? And if Facebook wants to shut the door on third parties, surely it's their service to do with as they wish?

Honestly, I'm not sure I could even consider WoW to be a level-based game. Sure, your character has levels, and there is a levelling system there. But the game essentially doesn't even begin until after you hit the max level, and the levelling process is nothing but an extended tutorial. As you say, your entire character progression is gear-based, and since the level-based portion of the game is essentially trivial, I've always felt that WoW plays very much more like a gear-based game.

Yeah, I was going to say something similar, but you've pretty much nailed it. FFXI may have some dumb policies, but they're up-front about it. Some of the complaints this lawsuit makes are just plain stupid though. What a waste of the court system's time.

Yeah, I read that section and was left puzzled at how the author was making such authoritative-sounding statements about a language with which he is so obviously unfamiliar. And then later in the article he claims to be an English major... Uh, yeah, good luck with that.

Ah, but it's perfectly safe. When you write your password out on the application form it comes out as ******!

Honestly, I'm not sure how the parent got modded flamebait, because I have to agree with that final point. The summary is entirely content-less, to the extent that *shock* I actually did have to RTFA, and all I can say is that I'm not impressed. Don't get me wrong, I can see where the article is coming from, but I do have to disagree with it. The arguments it presents are not particularly compelling, so if you're having a hard time arguing against it, all that tells me is that you're really not trying.

In fact, I'd even go so far as to say that the entire insight contained within the article can be summarised in a single sentence from its first paragraph: "America's special role in managing the Internet is good for America". That's it. I'm sure that reason is good enough for America, and I do have to admit that the Internet has been kinda ok under America's control so far, and for those reasons I don't expect the situation to change any time soon.

In spite of that though, the point I'm trying to make is that TFA did not make a give a single compelling reason for why America should have control of the internet. No, "because it does already" isn't a compelling argument. And contrary to what the summary (which, to reiterate, is utter crap) claims, TFA doesn't even mention international bodies. The article was trite and weak. The summary was not a summary by any meaningful definition of the term.

I'm sure they do resent it. But if their tax-funded competitor is obliged to provide content that would not otherwise be shown at all (because it "doesn't get good ratings") and said content is high quality work that contributes to the cultural enrichment of the country, then I don't see why the commercial broadcasters' resentment is meaningful.

Of course the said thing is, when it gets added back to the article, they'll just cite the mainstream newspapers that copied the phony quote. And then it'll become a part of the ever burgeoning body of Wikipedia's New Truth. Facts? Facts be damned, we don't need those in an encyclopedia.

Y'know, that's actually the first thing I picked up on when I read the summary. That quote is so enormously vague as to be meaningless. You're probably right that he said "high-end" meaning high budget, because, quite frankly, if you're interpreting "high-end" any other way, the claim becomes entirely laughable, instead of merely questionable. But at what point does your budget qualify you to be considered "high-end"? It's a totally meaningless quote.

The only MMORTS I've ever played (I don't consider the current generation of browser strategy games to be true RTSes) was Beyond Protocol, during its beta. The game had some really great concepts at its core, and was really great fun. Now, I have no idea what their budget was, but it was enough to give the game some decent 3D graphics, and that's enough to count as high-end in my book. Unfortunately, I'm guessing it wasn't enough of a budget to actually let them finish the game, because when it was released it was a most awfully unstable crashy piece of software. I never really gave the game a chance after that, but I do hope they've managed to fix that up, because the core gameplay was incredibly fun.

So, I don't believe that Mytheon is the first high-end MMORTS, by any meaningful definition of the term. And more than that, the presence of microtransactions makes me incredibly sceptical of the quality of gameplay. I have never once seen any competitive game in which microtransactions did not significantly detract from gameplay. The entire point of a competitive game is to, y'know, compete. If you're competing with your wallet instead of with the other players then there is no competition, and if there's no competition then there's no game. To quote some other poster from another microtransaction article a few days ago: "It's like bribing your DM to give your level 3 character a +5 sword." Why would you even play in that game? And that sentiment applies far more strongly in competitive games, as opposed to a collaborative game like D&D.

I think you're just getting a bit old. You and me both, actually, I know exactly what you mean, there are some days when I can't even be bothered to log on and do stuff. But saying that, when I look at the game, intellectually I can't deny that actually pretty much everything has become less and less of a chore, quite significantly so, in fact. And they keep making things even easier. I agree with everything else you said though. MMORPGs these days have precious little actual RP of any kind. They've started to make some headway on that, with the new phasing technology and whatnot, I suppose. Hopefully they'll include lots more stuff that does that in the future. And I'd love it if they found a way to make all the old content relevant again too, but they've repeatedly said that they have no intention of doing so, and I can kinda understand why. Certainly, I think that simply bumping up the loot tables of every old instance every time they released a new expansion would be an incredibly bad thing.

I absolutely agree. In fact, if you're going to point out indie games that are doing well at a higher than "normal" price point, I'd have to mention Illwinter's Dominions 3. You might say that it's something of a niche game, in that it'd probably only appeal to people who already like turn-based strategy games. But within that niche, I wouldn't hesitate to say that this is the single best game I have ever played. And it's going for $55 at the moment. The game is several years old now, and they've successfully maintained sales at that price point, because, quite simply, the game really is worth it.

Most other indie games, I would never consider paying that much for. Even the ones that are fun, if they don't have any depth of gameplay or replayability value then they're not going to be worth much more than $10, maybe $15. That's why all these publishers are aiming for that low price point - because it's a reasonable one for the quality of games they sell. The games that actually are high quality will sell for what they're worth.

Oh sure, it's not a problem now, because Blizzard have rather cleverly moved all the important stuff onto non-purchasable alternative currencies. Back at 60 it was a lot worse though. It's actually an example of one of the many steps Blizzard have taken in their endless fight against the gold sellers. The fact that you don't complain about inflation these days shows just how successful it's been.

Developers being cocks? Sorry, I actually facepalmed when I read that. I take it you've never played an MMO? Gold selling thrives in MMOs because, at the end of the day, there is one fundamental truth that applies both in and out of game: (some) people are stupid. Gold selling has a noticeable and significant negative effect on the game. Sometimes this means they've got their bots out keeping a given zone completely barren of mobs, so that any actual players who want to do anything in the zone are unable to do so. Sometimes it means that the gold sellers flood the auction house with the items they have farmed up, meaning that any legitimate player who wants to sell some items for a bit of gold can't do so because the going rate for those items is so low that they can't turn a profit. On the flip side, the people who have bought gold now have so much money that the market price for other (non-farmable) items goes through the roof, meaning that honest players can't afford the things they want. Gold selling absolutely ruins the in-game economy, which makes the game a lot less fun for everybody, and that means the developers lose subscribers. That is why.

In fact, in recent years, things have got even worse. As the developers get better at spotting the behaviour of the gold sellers' farming bots, the gold sellers change tactics. Instead of targeting the game, they target the players - through various trojans and keyloggers and whatnot, they compromise a players account, strip it bare of gold and items, and then sell the proceeds on to other players. Of course when the player discovers this, they immediately go crying to the devs demanding that their items and gold be restored. The dev company then has to spend god knows how much on employing extra customer support staff to deal the player's own lax account security. That is a direct cost to the dev company caused by gold sellers. The claim that the developers are being cocks by protecting the interests of both themselves and the players is laughably ignorant.

Allow me to finish up with a little personal anecdote. An acquaintance of mine in WoW once had his account compromised by gold-sellers. I don't know how, since he's usually a fairly tech-savvy person, but everyone slips up once in a while. The gold sellers stripped his character completely clean, took everything he had, and passed it on. When he finally got his account back, and was waiting for his items to be restored, you know what his first response was? He went straight to the gold sellers and bought some gold, to cover what he had lost. Yup, he went to the very people who had stolen his (imaginary) gold, and paid them real money to get it back. And he never once made the logical connection that the people who had taken his stuff were the same people he was dealing with. The average person really is that stupid.

It's only a minority that actually does buy gold, so you can't even claim that "players want it". But when the developers have to fight an uphill battle against both the gold sellers and that stupid minority, so that they can improve the game for those very same players, you do have to have a bit of respect for what they do.

Why should anybody be incapable of calibrating a touchscreen? I honestly cannot think of a single situation in which that would occur (barring actual physical disability that would prevent a person from using the machine entirely). I think you're underestimating poor grandma if you think she's incapable of pressing a button on a touchscreen. In fact, why should a person even need to know that they are doing a calibration at all? Why not just have "Press here to begin casting your vote" with a nice obvious red button, and then a few other simple inane comments requiring the user press a button to continue? Job done.

Saying that, I actually agree with you that a voter shouldn't have to go to the trouble of doing a calibration to work around the machine's faults. But arguing that such a calibration would somehow be discriminatory is an utter nonsense to my way of thinking. Anybody who is capable of using a touchscreen machine to vote is equally capable of calibrating it. As the GP poster said, you just touch three places on the screen and you're good to go.

Y'know what else comes in times of great stress? A botched rush-job.

Inspiration is one thing, but as you quite rightly pointed out, after that comes implementation. Funny thing about implementation, it can take a while, and be methodical.