From Reuters:  Video games ease pain for sick kids, parents

It’s good to see video games being lauded for helping people instead of being accused of driving game players into killing rampages.  I think this illustrates what games are good at:  helping people escape.  Books, movies, music, games – they help people escape from reality.  In this case the media could put a postive spin on it.  In other cases, they put a very negative spin on it. 

This CNN|Money article:  How an iPhone could rock wireless is pretty interesting because it discuss how the Apple iPhone could represent a very disruptive force in the mobile market.  I think this is fascinating on two levels:

• As a consumer:  I’m a gadget fan and am well known among my friends for rabidly acquiring the latest mobile phones.  Right now I have a Motorola Q, but I could easily see switching to an Apple iPhone if it was really cool.  This might be the thing, or even more compelling if combined with an iTV, that gets me to switch to the Mac OS.  Regardless, I’m always excited to see new, really cool gadgets, and I have no doubt the iPhone will fall in that category.
• As a business guy:  I like to see distrupting new business models.  Apple could really shake up the mobile phone space – either as an MVNO (basically a private label mobile carrier – they buy their time from the big networks at wholesale and resell it) or by forcing new relationships with the carriers.  Or even better by forcing the existing carriers to accept a new business model by either ignoring them and using the unlimited data plans that seem common or structuring deals that are more favorable to Apple.  I have no doubt they can negotiate such deals because the right phones (like the Q) do drive people to change networks, which is a big deal.

I’m looking forward to seeing the new iPhone and the new i Business Model – should be interesting.

I envision a world ten years from now where no one talks to anyone else because they are afraid to hurt someones feelings.  That all entertainment is happy pink bunnies that dance around, but never touch or talk to each other – because, well, that might be offensive or encourage someone to do something they shouldn’t.  You’ve read about this world before in books like George Orwell’s 1984, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and Aldus Huxley’s Brave New World. 

Well, we’ve seen a lot of moves towards control of distribution of video games here in America.  Personally, I don’t see why they are any different from movies.  So if R rated DVDs require that the buyer be guarded, I would be ok with M rated (see ESRB ratings) games getting the same treatment.  Why should they be different?  (Other than that the MPAA probably has more lobbiest and movies have been around longer.)   Promoting ESRB ratings and parental responsibility are good things.  What we haven’t seen, yet, is a move to actively censor games.

Germany looks to be moving in that direction.  This article, German gamers face jail for acts of virtual violence, discusses proposed legislation that would impose fines and up to a year in prison for “promotion or enacting in-game violence”.  They quote the law as saying:

“cruel violence on humans or human-looking characters”

What is a human-looking character?  Are undead creatues human looking?  Hmmm, seems like a problem there.   But, let’s continue.  My favorite part is this quote:

“It is absolutely beyond any doubt that such killer games desensitise unstable characters and can have a stimulating effect.”

Which attributed to Gunther Beckstein who is apparently the Bavarian interior minister.   Of course, scientifically speaking, this is open to a lot of debate as there is no concrete proof of this.  But, that is not what I like the most.  I like “densistise unstable characters“…. Let’s think this through – if they are unstable, a lot of things could set them off.  Because they are already unstable.   That’s just dumb.  I mean, what if the unstable character watched Hostel?  (Which from what I understand is a pretty disturbing movie.  I’m too chicken to see it.  Although I do enjoy a good game of Unreal.)  I bet that would set him off too.  I won’t even mention all the violence in books from Harry Potter to, ahem, the Bible, that are open to all ages.

Anyway, this was all set off when an 18-year old kid, that not surpisingly played violent video games, shot and wounded 37 people in his old school and killed himself.  Just like America.  A high profile event and some jackass politician jumps on it and starts spewing out non-sensical crap to grab headlines and fuel the fire.  One high profile event caused by a psychopath and boom, it’s the fault of games.  What about the millions of other people that play violent games that don’t do this?  Ah ha, no mention of them because that isn’t a good media story. 

Well, soon enough all these politician who are too old to understand computers (and think the internet is made of tubes) will be out of there and maybe we’ll get some people who are connected to modern reality in office who won’t make such stupid grandstanding comments.

Sometimes politicians scare me.  Uhm, I mean most of the time.

/rant

This is a good article comparing the two on C|Net.  The article market research firm NPD as providing the following numbers for November sales:

• Xbox 360:  511,000
• Wii:  476,000
• PS3:  195,500

Obviously it’s a lot easier to get an XBox 360, but outselling the PS3 by a lot and a one year headstart are a significant advantage.  What did they think about the quality:

The problem is that I didn’t agree. I looked at Gears of War and it looked great. But so did Resistance: Fall of Man on the PS3. To my eyes, which are admittedly not trained to see the minute differences that can show up on an HDTV, the two war games seemed about equal in quality.

And his conculsion:

I just hope these guys realize that for all the differences, the similarities in the performance of these two boxes are remarkable.

Given that the Xbox 360 has been out for a year longer, is substantially cheaper ($200 less comparing retail prices of premium versions), readily available, and has sold at least 5-6 million more consoles…. this seems to me a pretty strong endorsement.  If I’m Sony with my new technological marvel, the PS3, that I’m trying to sell on the basis of its serious performance enhancements over anything else – this is not a good thing to hear.

Here is an intereting article from Terra Nova called On Babies and Bathwater.  It does a good job of articulating the issues and the most likely outcome.   I like it because it provides more of an economics perspective of the issues.   (See my original post on this issue here.)

Wow, there is an interesting debate going on over there.

So this is an interesting post on how some Korean players are using a mod to enable bidding on items during a raid.   Interesting idea.   Frankly I’m surprised that no one has set up a commercial guild where you pay real money to go on the raids and get the items you want and the guild members split the cash (and still get the items they don’t sell).   Anyway, back the the point, this article points out that some items sell for as much as 9,000 gold which translates to about $270 (using the numbers in the article).  

In the U.S. the gold exchange rate is more like $100-$150 per 1,000 gold which would make this seem really expensive for a single item.   Also, the guilds in the U.S. that sell items (for gold) are selling them at much lower prices.  Here is a price list from Death and Taxes (one of the top guilds worldwide).  It puts the most expensive item at around $150. 

So, higher end items are between $50-$300 each.  These are items from 40-person raid instances so they are pretty hard to get.   Interestingly, these prices dovetail nicely with items purchased with the new honor system (discussed in several recent posts).   You can find an example of those prices here.  But basically, $200 gets you 21,000 honor points (not sure if this was before or after they reduced the honor generated).  But the best armor pieces and weapons in the honor system cost between 20,000 and 23,000 honor to purchase.   Amazingly all these prices align.

So whether you buy the items with gold or pay someone to get the honor for you, the prices are around $150-$200 per epic item.  You could also use that to calculate how much you are getting earning per hour played (although you cannot resell these items as they are all BOP – Bind on Pickup).  I don’t want to do that calculation though, because it will depress the crap out of me.

This is a really interesting little case study on government waste. I know the $500 hammer is old, but looking at this makes me want to scream. I wish the people in government would look at things in this way:

How many taxpayer dollars am I wasting today?

So in an attempt to find what the average American pays in taxes every year… well Google failed me. Anyway, here is the closest thing I could find:

Source (home page, I can’t find the original page again… but check this out)

OK since I couldn’t find anything else, I’ll take $13,789 to be the average American’s average annual tax burden for the purpose of illustrating my plan.

So, to illustrate how my proposed system would work I went digging for pork examples and found this site that talks about government waste. They have a porker of the month award (hilarious IMO). So in this example some Congressman from North Carolina grabbed a $750,000 earmark for signs at bus stops in Chapel Hill. (I picked this one because well, I went to Duke and our archrival is UNC in Chapel Hill.)

So a quick calculation of $750,000 / $13,789 gives us 54.39. That’s the number of taxpayers whose taxes got wasted on this project. Now how depressing is it that 54 people’s entire taxes for the year went for signs at stop bus stops in Chapel Hill, NC. That stuff should be collected locally (the press release about this has more info).

So the Citizens’ Against Government Waste should take their 2006 Pig Book (hilarious name) and next to all the waste they should put a little person icon and a number showing how many people’s taxes were wasted. At least then people might think a little. Instead of oh, it is just another million dollars here or a million dollars there, they should think about the people whose money they are spending.

This is crazy. Admittedly I’m pretty small government oriented, but how can anyone look at this and think it is reasonable?

Here is what I have to say:

Dear Congressman,

I work hard for the money I make and I pay my taxes. I’m happy to pay them because I think the U.S. is a great country and taxes are an important part of enabling any government. However, the amount of waste in the system is extraordinary. Next time that you insert an earmark or add some pork – or vote for them – please think of me and every other American. The individual taxpayers. And say, would they want me to spend their money this way? Is this really helping the country? Could this money be better spent?

Thanks,

Andrew

/rant

I’m not endorsing or saying I support the views of any of these sites, I just found them as I was writing this post and they had the info I wanted. It’s interesting to see where you end up as you start meandering while doing research. Originally this was going to be a short post with just that $500 hammer case study. But then I got sucked in.

On 12/10 (a Sunday) the rumors started:  That the new honor system (which I previously mentioned) would see its prices raised in the next patch (Tuesday) so you should spend your honor now so you don’t get screwed.  It was easy to believe this rumor because it was now a lot easier to get the spectacular Marshal/Warlord armor pieces and weapons.  

The rumor was quickly quashed in a blue post (in the World of Warcraft forums posts by admins/Blizzard employees are in blue and are thus called blue posts – kind of a rare and important proclamation from on high).  Here is the post (well really a reply in another post):

19. Re: Heard the price of GM weapons….  |  12/10/2006 10:12:27 PM UTC   
More than likely the prices will be adjusted for the current honor rewards sometime after the expansion releases to reflect their ‘value’ more appropriately when compared to expansion items.

That would mean the prices would be going down though, not up.

[edit]Changed original text to indicate that the prices, if lowered, would happen sometime after the release of the expansion and not right when it releases. I wouldn’t want to mislead anyone in to thinking that they can save up for release day and spend their honor on newly cheapened items before running in to Outland. Likely that will not be the case.
[ Post edited by Drysc ]

Now of course, today, 12/12 (Tuesday), the patch comes out.   And, wow, they didn’t raise the honor prices to purchase the armor and weapons!   Woot!  Oh wait.   Sorry.  Yeah, it’s true we didn’t raise the prices.   We just lowered the amount of honor you get.   By 30%.   The blue post:

0. Honor Gain Reduction- 12/12/06  |  12/12/2006 05:24:29 PM UTC    
Now that the Before the Storm content patch has been live for the past week, we’ve had a better opportunity to track the rate at which players are accumulating honor, and subsequently how easy it’s been to obtain honor rewards. In gauging these elements, we’ve determined that the effort required to obtain honor rewards is more trivial than we had intended. As a result, during today’s maintenance we’ve applied a hotfix that reduced the amount of honor gained by approximately 30%. This change allows the honor rewards to be obtained at rate that better reflects the item’s in-game value.

The reason that we decided to reduce the rate of honor gain rather than simply raise the honor cost of each item, is to ensure that everyone’s time and effort participating in PvP since the patch is not diminished. As this change will only affect future honor accumulation.
[Posted by Nethaer]

Now hey, I’m all for changing things to make sure the game stays balanced and fair.  That’s an important part of all MMORPGs.  But, saying one thing and then changing it in two days is a little ridiculous.  To their credit, at least the honor earned in that one week didn’t depreciate.   But now it takes about 50% longer to get anything (reducing honor earned by 30% sounds better though.)

So that basically means for the higher end items it now takes an extra week or two for the average players to get.  (Possibly more, it is really hard to calculate honor gain since it is highly dependent on victories, which if you are not in an experienced PVP group can be pretty close to random.)

Red 5 Studios announced they have closed $18.5 million in funding from Benchmark Capital and Sierra Ventures.   Mark Kern was team lead on World of Warcraft.  I wish him and his team the best of luck on their new game!

They are using the Project Offset engine, which if you haven’t seen it yet – you really should.  It looks amazing and the videos are really impressive.

On last Tuesday Blizzard released a patch called Before the Storm which is basically World of Warcraft 2.0 (patch notes).  A large patch on Tuesday is not uncommon, they happen at least once a quarter.   So while the expansion (The Burning Crusade) got delayed until Jan. 16, they released most of it in the 2.0 patch.   It is missing the ability to go to level 70 (a big deal for those of us that have been level 60 for a year and a half), the Outlands (a whole new area with new dungeons that on the surface look like they will be a lot of fun), and Arenas (a new type of PVP – player vs. player – combat area that looks really cool.   

They did add entirely revamped talent trees for every class in the game – which allows you to change how you play and to plan for how you spend your points once you finally move past level 70.   Another, bigger change is the way the honor system works.  This is a big deal.

This is a big deal because the rewards you get from the honor system are equal to at least Tier 2/2.5 epic items (which require 40-man raids of complex dungeons) and just shy of Tier 3 items (Tier 3 items come from Naxxramas which is a very difficult raid that can be completed by only the best geared and most experienced guilds) in some cases.  So before this patch epics were kind of rare, the honor system rewards, called Field Marshal (Alliance) or Warlord (Horde) armor and Grand Marshal / High Warlord weapons were very rare.   To get them you had to achieve the appropriate PVP ranking which took playing a lot for 6-8 weeks, including a push in the end that required 80+ hours of playing and, often, multiple people playing your account.

Now anyone can get these armor sets and weapons quickly.  For a reasonably active, but not super hardcore player, it might be possible to get a single weapon or armor in a week and certainly is achievable in two.  (Some of the armor is cheaper.)   Already it is common to see people with the GM/HWL weapons and no other epics. 

So I guess they are succombing to making stuff accessible to the masses.  I think that’s a good idea for the game.  Having really powerful stuff to acquire in an understandable, attainable way (that doesn’t depend on either being in a 40-person raid or grinding 100+ hours a week in battlegrounds) is a good thing. 

I also think they are doing this to help people gear up for the new grind to level 70 that starts on Jan. 16.