The USS Quad Damage

I was reading something on wired.com called Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business and found something interesting.

One of the Free business models is called the “Freemium” model. Basically you give the basic cut down version to 99% of people and the 1% of people who upgrade to the premium version pay for everyone.

Now if you look as music I’d say consumers are saying they want that model because thats how they are treating music.

Who are the premium users? People who attend concerts and get to interact with the artists in ways that you simply can not with an mp3 copied from someone else.

I guess the idea is that the free version allows other people to be compatible with your premium version increasing it’s value.

For instance Adobe Reader is free and the program which you use to create PDFs isn’t. Meaning that if people couldn’t get the reader then the value of the PDFs you create are diminished because very few people could read them.

When you look at music the idea is that the more people whom know of an artist the more value that artist has to their premium fans. Whether it’s other people liking the artists music or people detesting the artists music or just simply people knowing of the artists music.

The reason this works is because it costs virtually nothing for every free user due to the negligible costs associated with bandwidth. Esp if everyone is downloading your music via p2p, BT or a site which pays you to list your music so they can make money via advertising.

And what about people reselling music for a profit?

Really if someone is stupid enough to resell something that can be obtained for free you’ve either got a previously unknown market for premium services or a market which would cost you more to exploit than you’d get in revenue. Either way you’ve found a new way to make money or someone is subsidising your premium services.

I played tower defence on Kongregate. Interestingly, despite how I don’t approve of spelling aberrations like “Krispy”, I don’t mind the fake old russian style of “Kongregate”. Also, because it’s going to host Lila’s dreams, I kinda like the site. That was until I logged into facebook about a week after I played TD, and saw that facebook knew I played tower defence.

What… thefuck?

I never “logged into” Kongregate, nor put any other identifying information there. The worst thing I could’ve done is not logged out of facebook. The freaking site used my cookie to identify me on facebook. Knowing facebook’s complete disregard for giving out my information, Kongregate probably knows exactly how many times I’ve watched “The Sound of Music” and played “Quake”, and laughed at how I masturbate to that “I am 16 going on 17 song”, things I’ve dutifully entered into facebook because I’m a fucking retard.

If there needs to be regulation on the internet, it’s not to stop people from downloading illegal content, it’s to keep people’s privates private. Because seriously, even you don’t want to know what I get upto at 3am on a Sunday morning…

Blizzard has decided to post a statement on gold selling stating that gold sellers are responcible for hack accounts.

While that maybe true now it isn’t the whole truth.

See there’s always going to be a market for gold sellers. Yes Blizzard can track down the transactions, detect bots, respond to player complaints about farmers, ban people etc,...

However gold selling is probably a market that would be best served by regulation and guide lines rather than black and white legality which simply creates a race to the bottom. Capital punishment for all crimes doesn’t so much reduce crime and simply push people to the extremes. I mean if your going to get capital punishment for stealing a handbag you might as well carry an illegal assault rifle to try and blast your way out of trouble if your going to be arrested.

For instance the main reason peoples accounts get hacked is because people farming gold and botting are lumped into the same catagorie as people who hack accounts. Both are illegal. The difference is that the first pays Blizzard money and has an interest in keeping the accounts active for as long as possible and the later doesn’t have any sort of tie to the game what so ever.

So rather than targeting farmers what you’d want to do is squeeze out people who hack other peoples accounts from the marketplace by encouraging a code of ethics for gold farmers and allowing those who follow it to do what they do unhindered.

Blizzard could make special gold farmers accounts all tied to a master gold seller account much like a guild. Then they could decide that gold farmers aren’t allowed to enter instances. That if there is a registered complaint then they are ported to another zone of their choice so that the player can quest in that zone in peace. That they must do their best to prevent and refund gold/items from hacked sources. That they shouldn’t be disruptive or use hacks/exploits. That gold farmers are not allowed to spam or advertise in game or on the forums except in a dedicated channel/forum for them.

Blizzard could even build in a payment thing under account management and be a eschow service taking a small cut for administrative costs. Or even have players sell gold to gold sellers for credit to their accounts.

You can also extend it to power leveling. You could have a power leveler log into your account via their own account and perhaps be limited to a character that you’ve preselected and power level them. There maybe limitations such as being unable to do anything but repair and accept items in trade. However it probably isn’t nessisary as Blizzard could easily see which power leveling service you were using if there was a complaint about lost gold/items.

Anway the idea being that at the end of the day gold sellers/farmers whom have a low negative impact on the game for other players exist and gold sellers/farmers whom have a high negative impact on the quality of gameplay for players are squeezed out of the market. Players would be able to trust gold sellers/farmers and power levelers who’ve gone through official channels and the impact on gameplay would be minimal.

Plus if Blizzard found that people were simply power leveling or buying gold rather than farming or leveling themselves then perhaps they’d change their game mechanics to promote people actually playing the game rather than attempting to limit their exposure to grinding and create more of the content that people actually log on for.

So the UK is looking at adapting some form of the tree strikes and your disconnected from the internet as proposed months ago by the ARIA in Australia.

Everyone seems to think this is a bad thing. I say it is an awesome thing. Consider the implication’s of being able to remove people from using the internet for downloading copyright material they have no rights to download.

All you need is a honey pot bittorrent server and a disclaimer saying that if your associated with the RIAA, ARIA, Record label, Movie industry, piracy enforcement agency or anything similar your not allowed to download anything from the site.

Inquiring minds at these companies view the site and download copyright material they have no rights to copy.

Those same people/companies find themselves without internet access.

Now that I’ve got your attention…

well, actually this IS an article about sex with robots!

So don’t worry guys (and girls) you may soon have your very own e-girlfriend (or e-bo) to fool around with.

Ready for the worst joke in history? (Hey, it’s 6am and I’ve been up for hours!!!!!)

Gives a new meaning to … wait… wait… it’s coming… you’ll love this, seriously…

ROOT DIRECTORY

get it? cos like… ahh screw it it’s not even funny – I’m going back to bed!