Redicular

@Zimmy people forget how young and (in some cases) immature soldiers can be.

During my time in the service the single most common broken rule was underaged drinking. theres always many times more low ranking enlistees than anyone else, and low ranking enlistees are 18-21 by and large

a 30 year old tech sergeant with a user name shagnasty would be embarrased. for an 18 year old airman basic... thats not even strange

Its very cut and dried.

when your "clever tactic" affects others enjoyment in PVE... ban him

item duping - ban
plat creating - ban
quest breaking - something you've done prevents me from completing a quest - ban
monopolization -

illegal trading - fix and ignore
invincibility trick - fix and ignore
perching - exploiting terrain features to be un-hittable while still being able to attack - if not an intended feature of the combat system - fix and ignore

@moroboshi

as mentioned, the cable companies don't want ala carte, and even more, the cable CHANNELS don't want ala carte.

you have to understand how the money is distributed around:

viewer pays cable company
cable company takes a cut then pays cable channels

if i'm paying verizon cable 90/month, part of my 90 is going to the oprah winfrey network even though i never watch that channel

in an ala carte situation, the cable company gets cut out or reduced, and oprah gets cut out when i decide to only pay for the ESPN family

back to the actual topic, requiring verizon's fios isp basically will kill this entire venture, its availability is so tiny, and growing so slowly, the feature will be forgotten by the majority before they even have the option of picking it up.

I mean really, its not available in CHICAGO? i can understand some of the smaller towns, but that's one of the largest markets in the US

Is it a bad sign that not only am I not playing any of those, I have no desire to play any of them either?

nexon logo - which is sad 'cause i enjoyed the games, but hate the company

when all the marketing/website/forum only talks about the pvp aspect - the pvp I won't be participating in

lack of class originality - oooh you have a mage, a warrior, and a rogue... so does every game in existence

unbalanced skill choices - if you're going to have the selling point of "choose from hundreds of unique skills" more than 10 of them need to be viable

@Carefulwiththatpoptart

that's exactly the question that comes up with ftp, are they selling game events(turbine), game features(cryptic), or game convenience(gamersfirst)

each person has to decide for themselves, which of those they are willing to have behind paywalls.

me personally, i prefer game convenience, only reason i don't play fallen earth is i'm not fond of the post-apocalyptic setting

and while i prefer convenience being sold, i can tolerate game events(ddo player), but i can not stand game features being locked, I would rather have 10 classes i can't take to max level then having just 3 that i can.

now all of this is a question of degree, ddo as an example has 9/12 classes unlocked, and about 1/2 its races. and most importantly they have every party role unlocked, including ALL the tanks(pld ftr barb) and 3/4 of the nukers(wiz sorc clr) and they primarily pay wall the high utility classes(monk artificer favored soul)

more importantly they balance out the pay-walled quests with the ability to earn shop currency in-game, turning that game event paywall into more of a game convenience one(you can unlock yourself, but dear god that'll be a grind)

the most important thing, imo, for companies is getting people to play for a while, the longer someone plays a game, the more likely they are to start spending money on convenience, and that is where a developer WANTS them to spend. convenience items are usually short term and/or single use(exp bonus potions as an example) a newbie experiencing everything for the first time may not want to blow by low level quests, but that guy who's been playing for a year is tired of doing waterworks for the 832'd time

cryptic is a pure example of doing it wrong, your main game feature is the array of customization, but the people you're trying to coerce don't get to see ANY of that? you're banking on them enjoying secondary features enough to pick you out of the crowd? even worse, because of that disconnect you get tons of bad press. just look at these comments, the main connective theme is crypitc is the wrong way of doing ftp

@Lyre
well, that precludes my interest, god i hate pvp

@kgptzac
the political reasons are probably the strongest reasons FOR region locking that exist. Brianna's example of the US ex-pat in Korea is the worst possible condition. Korea has specific laws on the books that govern how an MMO has to be designed (primary hurdle is there has to be a server-side limit on max continuous play-time). China and a few other Asian nations also have similar laws on the books after a "rash" of people playing themselves to death.

a large scale MMO(TOR, WOW, and the like) has the resources to re-write the game code to conform to those laws, but smaller scale ones might be both financially and technologically better served by just blocking the country.

as someone who got into MMOs through FFXI, I've seen first-hand the strongest benefits of an open region policy, particularly when coupled with multiple strong marketing campaigns: always active servers, and the new and interesting strategies and tactics a different culture can introduce. Japanese and Americans(the two largest bases for FFXI) didn't cooperate a great deal in game, but in the metagame, once the americans overcame their delayed release, data sharing was routine to the point of minor celebrity status for those key translators on both sides.

I've also seen the pitfalls you can run into, a big one is updates, completely open games also means there is no natural time when server load drops, so there's no chance that an update won't stomp all over someones prime-time(US-morning is JP-prime, US-afternoon is EU-prime, and US-prime is US-prime)

all told i'm against region locking, 6 years in an open game has conditioned me to expect both the good and bad of an open game. I expect to log in while unable to sleep and see a full server. I expect anything I list to sell to be gone when i awaken for work. I accept that there will be groups that deny me based on language issues. I accept that my market may not be the largest and updates will fall in my prime-time

yay no j-pop... I'll give it a chance now

the fee isn't to consumers, its to marvel/dc/etc. and thats the issue its an even bigger chunk out of the publishers profit margins, for what is generally the 2nd, or 3rd tier delivery system for digital comics. it encourages smaller/independent publishers to cut their losses and not use the e-reader platform

its really a strange business model, for a 3 dollar book, you're required to pay $1.50 AND amazon takes a $0.90 cut?

$2.99 = max of 59 cents to publisher
$3.99 = max of $1.29 to publisher

and thats only if its the minimum size, which is pretty crappy resolution wise. 15~20 meg for a standard book is more in line with quality we as consumers expect. a 20 meg $2.99 book would be a loss for the publisher