Father Xmas

You must work for a union shop.

If you made that comment, Larry would fire you for not working as hard as Joe.

No it's more like Joe found out the ERP software doesn't sanity check number of hours worked per week and he was putting in for 1000 hours instead of 10 and getting paid for it and nobody caught it yet.

"But it's not theft, ArenaNet isn't out of anything." True but there's a reason RMT and gold farming (because the gold has to come from somewhere) is banned/harshly discouraged in every MMO out there. It destabilizes the game economy, it discourages players who can't $2W and encourages more to use RMT which in turn can cause more hacked accounts. Also ArenaNet has their own RMT system in place for GW2 and really don't want the competition but do want to limit gold production so the exchange rate remains somewhat stable.

Why was it in our game that every new feature it seemed had it's own currency that you couldn't trade or convert from one to another? It's because they wanted everyone starting in the same boat. They didn't want someone to immediately buy all the things you can get with the new currency without at least doing the content that rewards that currency. And since the amount of that currency is tied to the number of times that content is run there's a risk/reward metric built in. It's why we have MARTy in AE now, to keep the rewards in check with the effort required to get them.

Sometimes people need a shovel to the face, some people multiple times because they don't get it.

Bugs are the software equivalent to a mechanical malfunction. If software manifested itself as a mechanical device, the shear size and complexity of all the gears, levers and cogs working together would boggle the public's mind. It would also allow them to grasp why sometimes a gear slips or a shaft gets bent in a device that complicated.

When every other case of merging two common $1 objects produce a $3 object, a combination producing a $10000 object seems rather unambiguous to me.

The game was less than two weeks old, with 11000 accounts already compromised by gold farmers in the first few days. This is just another form of gold farming. And like I said, those who stumbled upon it and only used it a couple of times, no ban but if you started to crank them out like iPhones at Foxconn then hammer time. No mercy for gold farmers.

I believe it was patched within a day of it's discovery. Also isn't it usually policy in MMOs not to mention an exploit until it's fixed. The Mission Architect incident was a case of asking players to use it to tell stories and not as a power leveling tool because the devs couldn't figure out how to allow the first without allowing the second. If anything it's a prime example of what you get when you try to warn players away from an known exploit.

That reasoning works so well as a defense. "Your honor it's not my fault, I couldn't resist stealing that car, they shouldn't have parked it somewhere I could see it". I think there was plenty of oversight since it was caught and dealt with quickly. Don't forget at the time the game was less than two weeks old.

It's entrapment if it was intentional. It was a bug, likely one caused by a simple mismatch of indexes between tables. It's like when Citadel got his face put on sideways. Some build step was skipped or some newer/older include file was used while patching an unrelated bug and this was what cropped up. And with over a million players, 3000 is a trivial number of abusers.

But money is a resource too. If spending $10 to make $11 on one thing while spending $10 could make $12 on something else, why stick with the first thing?

And in my example it's because tax laws are overly complex to the point it's counter intuitive.

CoH's best year is comparable to Aion's worst quarter. Factor of 4 here.

Yes but that's business, and not just the entertainment business. I once worked at a company that destroyed a bunch of excessive old consumables used in an older model of their product because it was more favorable financially to get the tax write off than putting them on sale and sell them off at a loss to the few customers still using that older model. Customer goodwill isn't a line item on a financial report.

Yes, our best quarter was Q4 of 2005 at $15.3 million (CoV launched the end of October). 2005 was our best year at $33.5 million. Guild Wars came out that year as well, and in three quarters (they weren't around in Q1) they had total revenues of $40.4 million. In 2006 they had twice our revenue. We didn't out earn them until 2008, a year after their last box expansion came out.

Nope, never did. CoH in the first four years had revenues between $25-34 million. Aion last quarter was a mere $31.6 million, down from $46.9 million the quarter before. Aion had revenues of $175 million in revenues over the last four quarters. CoH had revenues of $183 million in revenues in it's entire 8 year life.

As for Guild Wars 2 ... over one million pre-orders. 'Nuff said.

I'm not poo-pooing the game I'm just trying to put things into prospective here. While CoH had reasonable numbers for a pre-WoW MMO in the west, compared to NCSoft's other titles, we are the hot dog cart on a street of popular high end restaurants. Our revenues are simply not in the same ballpark and never were.

Still don't know what caused the revenue downturn between Q2 2009 and Q4 2009 when it dropped from a reliable $5 million or more a quarter before to $3 million after.

Sorry, I meant third parties who might be persuaded to buy the game may reconsider if there is a major drop in players before the end.