The Observer

320

*falls out of bed*

Are you actually being serious? Forgive me if I am naturally skeptical. http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/12/18/world/asia/AP-AS-Korea-Kim-Jong-Il.html?_r=4

I really need to find a picture of my toothbrush.

Where's that Youtube video of you singing some French song?

I should take a picture of my toothbrush.

Demon Vanquisher

If you can write nicely, then there shouldn't be any issues. However, I'm not looking at the applications since I'm not EP, so I might be much help. :P

Nice drop. Also, do harpies ever go off duty?

Banned because I would have to hate myself.

Death You will turn into a death star and you will be blown up by a single fighter.

Trust me, I'm a doctor.

I've moved your topic to a more appropriate section. :)

That's true, by definition of "peak". However, it's also true that sometimes people say that a game has reached its peak, and then later something happens and the game becomes even bigger and reaches its actual peak. It's actually a fairly common occurrence. Also, a game could have a "total player peak" (f2p plus p2p), and a "subscriber peak", and a "yearly profit peak" (which could be different than the subscriber peak due to huge profits from...promotions!), and those could all be in different years. Which one is the real peak? The real peak would be the actual peak of the game where it will never be as popular as it was at that moment in time (could be a particular quarter, whatever). It's not really possible to accurately depict when a peak is until the life cycle of the game has already ended because it's theoretically possible for it to increase at any time. I am familiar with a lot of MMO's. They are all, every single one of them, doing way more promotions than before. To me, it looks like MMO promotions are the current trend. I respect that it looks like desperation to you and to many others, but I find it hard to believe that you all would still have that opinion if you'd seen them in as many other MMO's as I have recently. Also, I have a bunch of friends in the gaming industry writing code, so I know why they are going with the differentiated payments model. E.g., my friend worked on a game for the Iphone where people cook recipes and serve them in a restaurant, very simple game. Some premium recipes are available for real cash. 80% of the players play the game for 2 dollars and never buy premium recipes. One lady spent 16,000 US dollars on recipes. 16000 US dollars, on a game whose sum complexity is equal to that of the cooking skill in Runescape. I am not exaggerating any aspect of this story. PS. 2 dollars, apple takes a cut, plus you have to store their data...so each of those customers is probably worth just about nothing to the gaming company. At some point the company is going to realize all of their profits come from the premium recipes, and then the $2 version of the game inevitably gets damaged. Eh, now that I think about it, a lot of gaming companies are as well. If you look at games such as MW3 which isn't even an MMORPG, it now sells double XP for buying Doritos and Mountain Dew. Obviously it's not a dying franchise, but you can get the idea that investors are trying to milk more out of the customers than ever before. Could be the economy? I don't know. Runescape isn't limitless and there will come a time when content won't be "new or extravagant" anymore. In terms of loyalty rewards, I'm sure Jagex was aware of the number of players they had that were actually "real" rather than bots. This is shown by how they started releasing this new loyalty/promotional content months before the bot nuke.

Aww, invite me next time! Grats on 99 (and everything else). :P EDIT: You posted right before I posted this. Ninja!

:)

Nope

I have Chrome so it doesn't work. Judging by my join date and post count, I would've visited this site over a million times.

Grats! You having a party?

Free post on your birthday. <3:

This topic is slow today.

Banned for having a pixel harpy as an avatar.

I'm liking the name. :thumbup: My cat was attacked by a dog today. It ran up a tree and was up there for a little while. Its leg seems injured though. The dog then attacked a neighbour's dog (a small schitzu). Had to call the humane society who issued the owner a fine.