Brillig

Did you delete the checksum file? That's usually the step I forget.

Erm. How is that different from re-rolling the character?

Edit: Oh, badges. nm

I ALREADY WORK AROUND THE CLOCK!!!!

/H.Ford

Not me. I wanted to see Blizzard plunge into the Abyss, arms akimbo, flailing as their reeking corpse vanishes into the flatulent haze of their arrogance*.

* This might just be me.

Yeah, they certainly deserve kudos

I'm sure they have some turnover in the development ranks, what I meant was that if the founders left together, they could almost trivially raise capital to start a new company. Now, granted, to put together a competing MMO would take years, but other games could come up more quickly.

"Founders of Blizzard" is still a powerful phrase in the geek-space, WoW-hate notwithstanding

You know, I had this reflex Pavlovian thing about 'must have D3', but the more I see trailers and such for it... it doesn't seem that exciting. It seems like D2 with better graphics, and I'm wondering, haven't they figured out anything inovative to do in ten years?

I can't agree. How many "I'm cancelling posts" have their been? Let's take a insanely high number and say that there have been 100,000.

1% of that is 1,000.

CoX -might- notice that loss. No way WoW will.

SC2 might feel a bit more impact, also presumably D3 down the line, but I don't have a feel for how active the forum communities for those were likely to be.

Now where they might actually feel an impact is if the rumors of Blizzard employee discontent are true and -those- folks walk out. But unless there's an en-masse thing led by the founders, I don't see that happening.

This is one case where I don't think there's that much risk of people following WoW. What Blizzard is trying to do here is to pull a Facebook. They have access to eleven (is it still eleven?) million people with disposable income and addictive personalities. That information, assuming they can monetize it, is a mint waiting to be tapped.

This is why they don't care about forum outrage - it's ~1% of their user base, and even if half of them quit, it's a drop in the ocean compared to what they hope to gain. This is also why RealID on the forums is just the tip of the spear. They're going to integrate, network and merchandise their users out the ying-yang. It's the coming apocalypse.

(Contrary to popular opinion, Facebook is neither clumsy nor incompetent about your privacy settings. The more of your personal info they can publish, the more valuable you are to them. It's in their vested interest to make privacy settings as difficult and obscure as possible.)

However, the value of the information is increased by the size of the community because of the network of interactions. It's not quite the square of the size, because there's overlap, but it's way beyond linear. So a community like ours, which is perhaps 1% the size of WoW, isn't worth the risk, monetarily speaking, to exploit like this.

Now NCSoft might try to do something across all their brands. That could be a threat. But my sense is that their portfolio of games isn't tightly integrated enough to pull it off.

So your solution is to tell people to stop playing the game until the expansion is released. Brilliant. (Yes, I know it's not the entire game. It still happens to be a part of core functionality that you seem willing to have broken for two months).

Since that kind of thinking is clearly *not* from anyone who's going to run a successful MMO, any chance of a real response to the question?

Is it a single computer? If it is, there's no reason for it to be. As someone pointed out earlier, what we call the market is actually thousands of individual markets glued together in a single UI. Makes it relatively easy to spread the service out across a cluster of servers.

(No guarantee that anyone will be willing to spend the cash for the servers though).

Then we should be able to get 4 billion. And if the devs didn't used unsigned integers, they should be beaten with noodles, since negative inf values don't exist.

Yes, he's using the term market in the rather technical sense. I.e., each item is a market.