I would say a few have been designed this way and even then it's a slippery slope. As revenue starts to slip the temptation is to delve further into pay to win type purchasable. Games that use micro-transactions to sell pets, collectibles, and vanity type items are perfectly fine but very few end it there. Many free to play MMO's become simply ways to grind more purchases from the player base. Mechanics become odious or overly long if you don't purchase a boost. Raids begin to require store bought resources to keep up. Some players begin to use the store as a crutch rather than learn the game and become skillful. Some players begin to expect others to outlay store cash to power through completion. Challenge and achievement are now commodities you can buy with money. Turbine's DDO is a great example of this slippery slope. F2P started as some small bonuses and the ability to buy content in feature packs. Four years later there is a real money auction house where you can pay for the best gear in the game.

I am thoroughly convinced we are 3-5 years away from true digital distribution. Services are getting close but no one has everything available online, yet. Why buy blue ray or any other BS format just to replace it in a few years. I will soon be able to pay a monthly fee and have access to all of the content ever in a click. In the mean time I just pirate.

Default Mabar Ban Problems Last night, some DDO players received erroneous temporary suspensions or warnings regarding an exploit. Due to a technical issue in our exploit suspension process some players participating in the Mabar festival event were incorrectly notified of a rules violation. Any accounts that were temporarily banned as a result of this issue will have their account access restored and will be credited 100 Turbine Points. Any accounts that received warnings will have those warnings removed from their record. This error was an isolated incident and should have no further impact for any DDO players. As always, we welcome player feedback on all aspects of DDO and continually seek to improve the quality of the service we provide to players. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience or confusion and thank you for your patience while we worked to resolve the issue. __________________ What's Tolero up to at the moment? Find out at My.DDO.com! o Feed your need for DDO RSS with DM Feed! Due to the volume of PMs I receive, many will go unanswered. Check the dev tracker often, help your neighbors, or visit the support teams if you have an urgent issue. Reply With Quote Multi-Quote This Message http://forums.ddo.com/showthread.php?t=285262 **** Is it smart for a company to allow users accounts to be banned by an auto-exploit detecting process without human review?

Exposing the Software Engineer was a Total Fail but Apple should have prepared for this contingency and built in a self destruct.

Blames poor implementation of ad screen process for inappropriate and low quality ads. Ignores completely the fact that they are sending customers private information to a third party w/o consent.

Your analogy is a little off... They produce one disk with all the versions but openly advertise different features with different versions. DLC is supposed to be additional content produced after the game goes gold/is released. It violates the spirit of what DLC is...it's extra. It's not part of the game held back so they can charge extra for it. To use your Windows example it would be like after installing if you wanted a network two PC's and had to purchase an additional feature pack to do it. Games cost almost 60 buck...game companies are crossing a line trying to milk their customers.

Dick-over Legitimate Customers

use Google Desktop. It will index and search locally and then remotely.

I have been responsible for this at a number of places where I have worked as an Admin and as a Consultant. Honestly, I wouldn't give it up to accounting or another department. Good documentation is essential to project planning, upgrades, budget planning, troubleshooting... I go to my inventory all the time. This broke... is it still in warrantee, is it work fixing, should I renew the service contract. Rotating machines out of service, purchasing upgrades, verifying that machines meet minimum requirement on new software, trust me you will be happy that you have it. I use Spiceworks to help with the task but my trusty spreadsheet is home to all of that info, granted this has always been with smaller organizations less than 100 total users. If I had 10000 machines I might be thinking a bit differently...

We'll until the early to late 90's Computer Science/Computer Engineering really wasn't it's own field. It was generally a specialty of the EE curriculum.

All documentation sucks now a days. I default to Google for documentation on everything. Microsoft doesn't even really ship docs anymore they just link through to their web documentation. It's just the way of things now. You'll get more and better info from thousands of bloggers and forum posters than you can expect from any doc team.