Umgawa

@WiNGSPANTT from TopTierTacticsco
When I heard about this, my reaction was the same as when Star Trek Online was announced. I don't want to be a fighter jock or command a starship or whatever. I want to be one of those guys who walks around a corridor most of the time, performing generally menial tasks.

And then perhaps when I reach maximum level, I can be like Gaius Baltar and have my own harem.

My issue with the game as it's designed is the fact that I don't want to be the captain of a starship. I want to be a red-shirt, beaming down to a planet, odds stacked against my coming back to the ship as anything other than a pair of smoking boots... I'd like to be on a starship with other people, not AI. I'd like to figure out what the heck Spock was looking at when he looked into that binocular setup at the science station.

But I don't want to be the captain. Every game lets you be the captain. I want something more like Star Trek, with walking down corridors and putting out fires in engineering and telling the captain, "I canna do it, she just doesn't have enough power!" That's how I see Star Trek. Star Trek has always succeeded on good stories, not its space combat, and certainly not on away-missions.

Of course, I'm sure they had to let everybody be a captain when they realized that there was no way they could get people to comply with the orders of a superior officer, and so they had to make it into a game that I have no desire to play.

Granted, this only has a peripheral relevance to the topic at hand, but the most interesting thing I've found with regard to psychology as it applies to WoW (and MMO's in general) is the notion of personal space. I have no idea where or when I read this particular article, it may very well have been linked from TerraNova, but essentially it breaks down to the notion that people have a certain connection with their avatars that they will actually move when a stranger or someone they're not comfortable with moves into their "comfort zone" or "personal space". While some might think this would go without saying, one must consider that this is almost never the case in games such as Halo or other first- or third-person shooters, regardless of how much time we may spend in those games.

For testing purposes, while you're out questing, strike up a conversation with somebody outside of Dalaran, where people are packed in like sardines and nobody really notices. Strike up a conversation, and then get a little bit too close. Watch them back away, and then move toward them again. Granted, you may be branded some sort of social deviant, but it quickly becomes obvious that the aforementioned psychological reaction occurs with regularity.

Reasons not to put WoW on consoles:

1) Just from a hardware standpoint, it's another game that would require a hard drive, like Final Fantasy XI. Not necessarily a bad thing, but Microsoft is generally averse to requiring hard drive installs for most games on the 360.
2) From a display point of view, NTSC is out the window, and therefore the game would have to require a high-def set, because we all remember what happened with the text in Dead Rising, in that it's totally illegible on a 480i set. Even a crappy 1024x768 monitor has a vertical resolution to match a 720p HDTV. Given how much of the game involves reading, unless you can guarantee that everyone who buys the game can play it, you're just looking for a headache.
3) I think you'd only see Microsoft buy Blizzard if they said, "This is our new game, and we're developing it for the Mac," because that's how Microsoft came to acquire Bungie. Yes, Halo, like Marathon before it, was going to be a Mac game.
4) Everyone on the 360 would be stuck with the default UI, unless Microsoft could find a way to sell them through the Marketplace. Wouldn't it be a joy to get to pay 500 Microsoft Points every time CTMod got broken by a patch. Oh, but dashboard wallpapers might be free, so that's certainly a plus.
5) The UI itself isn't really conducive to a gamepad. Hell, it's not especially conducive to a keyboard, unless you throw out the idea that, "This is something for typing on," and start looking at it as a large slab of hotkeys. By the time you move your little pointer with the right analog stick to the spell you want to cast, you could be quite dead. Radial menus and such have made some games more bearable on consoles, but they're still not as good as the slab of hotkeys.
6) Being at the mercy of a system with a five-year life cycle isn't the best way of making money. Just look at Microsoft's view toward backward-compatibility. Or Sony's. "Yeah, some stuff, but we emulate it through software, because we threw out the hardware emulation, so there might be some quirks, but you're just going to have to live with that." At least with computers, they can say, "Yeah, this doesn't run on Vista. Don't upgrade to Vista, or set up a dual-boot, or just buy a Mac."
7) I'm not necessarily against including the people from Xbox Live, as long as they can't talk to me. Not in any way, shape or form. They are, if you listen to the chatter in any online game of Halo 3, clearly the shallow end of the gene pool. Having been raised on games that offer instant satisfaction, you'll see even more temper tantrums when you inform them that, being a new member to the guild, they do not have access to the guild bank. Oh, that makes the kids mad.

I don't necessarily buy the overheating and seating theory, because I've seen a lot of complaints about this exact issue on the WoW technical forums, which go unaddressed. I've been dealing with this particular issue since I hit Outland, and it's tremendously annoying, having to exit the game to get the ground back.

Well, if you go to Wowecon, you could see how easily the all-time highs and lows could be manipulated, unless you're talking about having Eloise track the daily averages and then start tracking the high points and low points of the averages, which would kind of make more sense.

By the way, Wowecon doesn't track the highest daily auction price as part of its data set, and here's why I think that is: Remember the day that the news media went crazy because the price of oil hit a hundred dollars a barrel? That was just one guy who deliberately bought 1000 barrels of oil for $100 each, then immediately sold them for a loss. He just wanted to be the first guy to buy oil for $100 a barrel. However, it's a statistical spike that screws up the interpretation of the market.

So, say someone sells a single Light Feather for the price of an entire stack of them, because the buyer accidentally clicked on the wrong line; it creates an anomalous high-buyout for the day of about twenty times what the average buyout price would be. And then the buyer will always come to look at Massively and say, "There's me! I'm the guy who bought a Light Feather for (x number of gold)!" And he'd be there forever.

Low-price buyouts are an equally insignificant statistic, because exceptionally low prices are likely to be bought out and re-listed by people like me. However, you won't find that many exceptionally low-priced buyouts on Wowecon, because the people running the Wowecon AddOn are people who probably know a fair bit about the economy and appropriate prices for the items that they're selling. More than likely, they're also running Auctioneer, which would further incline them to keep their prices around the average level. Now, if you got the Wowecon AddOn running on someone who's completely new to the game, you'd see terribly amusing data that's just all over the place.

Listing the trailing 30-day average probably wouldn't be too difficult, given that it's listed on the same Item/Price Stats page with the current and trailing four days, and I think it'd be a lot more useful than all-time highs or lows. Furthermore, all-time averages aren't available, but the 30-day is more useful because if you took the average daily price of Light Feather, it'd be up to maybe a silver, because it's only recently that the item came into any level of real demand.

As such, for the ease of posting data, I think that average prices for the day in question, previous day, and 30-day average should be about enough, and I think that the price fluctuations ought to be interesting talking points.

To follow up my comment from yesterday, I think I've figured out the issue with the numbers game: They're flawed. The number at the top of the screen for items at Wowecon is simply incorrect, or at least it's not reflective of the actual daily prices.

Take, for example, Thick Clefthoof Leather, which actually traded yesterday at an average price of about 3g72s each, over 126 auctions tracked by Wowecon. This equates to 74.4 gold per stack, not 60, which leads me to believe that you're pulling your data from the Allakhazam line at the top of the item page. You'll find more accurate, daily pricing data under the Item/Price Stats option, and then you can track that for either an individual server or All Alliance, which is the best option for the reasons I'll now go into.

The method for pulling data to Wowecon involves an AddOn that only tracks your own auctions. Therefore, according to Wowecon, no one has sold Primal Might on the Stormrage server since the 15th of December. You can clearly see that underparticipation is a major flaw. However, the actual, according to Wowecon, average price of Primal Might has fluctuated between 83 and 88 gold, depending on the day. This may or may not be accurate, as the amount of sampling data varies from day to day, as well. For example, it only tracked three(!) auctions of Primal Might yesterday. As I said, it's an issue of underparticipation, which would have a tendency toward statistical error as the sample shrinks.

Hopefully, the comment system will accept this link to the Thick Clefthoof Leather pricing data page, so I don't have to type this dissertation a third time (the internet ate my first one). Thankfully, this is the short version.

http://www.wowecon.com/?l=eJxLtDKyqi62MrdSik9MLsnMz1OyLrYyNLVSKs8vj88sSc2NT0ktSczMAQtbWik5AAGGVCLEEENDJG2ZKUrWmVYmhgamZmbGIM0GVkrFpUlItgAtKS5JLClWsq6tBQCyoivt

I'm not sure about the issue with prices in World of Warcraft. A five-percent movement on a few trade goods doesn't really signify much. Knothide Leather moves on an hourly basis considerably more than that on my server, going from five gold at one point in the day to seven in another. This is just an anomaly and is significant of nothing.

However, to address the previous poster's comment, it would have been made a great deal easier to have an up or down-arrow on each line with an indicator as to how much the price moved, either as a function of actual cost (gold) or as a percentage. Instead, I ended up having to dive through the Massively posts to find the previous day's rundown, which didn't strike me as being far off the usual mark.

I'd have more to say, but WoWecon isn't cooperating with me, with regard to data charts. However, without knowing whether there was a fluctuation with regard to supply and/or demand, we can't really determine any reasons as to why the prices would fluctuate. Perhaps it's a glut of auctioned inventory because of the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, perhaps it's because people are leery about posting auctions that would expire early due to Tuesday maintenance, perhaps it's just a post-weekend drop-off. Without better data that extends beyond merely once-per-day pricing, it's completely unpredictable and generally meaningless, since prices can vary wildly from server to server, from hour to hour, and from Horde to Alliance.

Box Office Bust will see Larry in "mission-based exploration, platforming, racing and puzzle-solving"

So, it's basically going to be crap like Magna Cum Laude was. Not an unexpected occurrence. I don't think it necessarily has to be point-and-click (because the original EGA version was from the pre-mouse days, and we had to use the keyboard to type out commands!), but mini-games aren't exactly conducive to problem-solving, as we all remember from the original LSL what happens when you fornicate with prostitutes without prophylactics.

It'd be faster to get to Milwaukee from Chicago than getting to Indianapolis, if a lengthy drive is your major concern. As to why there's no Chicago show at all, it's entirely possible that the reason for that is the entire orchestra is made up of cigarette smokers and they refuse to play in states that do not permit such habits in public venues, thus explaining the lack of a Colorado show as well.