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Another thing to ponder...

Why do people lock their doors when they leave their homes? Anyone determined to steal your shit will just break the nearest window...

Privacy is important because if you live long enough and do enough things, you're going to come across people who you don't want to find you. Maybe it's because they didn't like your clothing style, or maybe it's something much more serious than that.

Women are much more at risk than men for this sort of thing, but as an example do you want that crazy ex to have all of your contact information? Do you want her to have the ability to use it to at best call you at weird hours of the night and at worst open bank accounts or credit cards in your name?

Perhaps there is a thief looking for a nice house to rob in a certain area. Well, your pictures sure look nice and you posted your address, so now it's a matter of just staking out the place.

Most random strangers aren't going to peruse facebook to steal your identity, but why take the chance?

Also, I second that employers are now searching social networking sites in order to screen employees. If you set all your settings to private, they can't spy on you and you come across as a responsible person who guards his personal information.

As far as facebook and women, it's more trouble than it's worth. The minute you start something up and then add another female friend, all hell breaks loose, even if it's your 3rd cousin who lives 9 hours away.

So privacy on the web is not just about identity theft. While overblown, identity theft does happen, but the other side of the coin is protecting your information from people who you know but don't want to know THAT well.

The point would be is that if you take out equipment that you aren't ready to use and get killed, you wasted the backpack as your equipment refills on respawn, anyway.

Eg, you plant 3 mines and use 2 grenades. You want more grenades, it also refills your mines. The spies haven't run into your mines yet, so you can't replace them. You get necked. Now you just lost 2 mines from the backpack since you will respawn with 3 more mines, anyway.

Not really an issue that needs fixing imo, but I think that's what Agent is trying to talk about.

I updated my drivers not too long ago, and now the card runs really hot when doing mundane things like surfing the web. The fan is on constantly and even shifts up to high, but the card makes the bottom of my laptop too hot to touch for more than 30s or so.

Is there some kind of setting in the new ATI drivers that is making this thing run at 110% all the time? I have "PowerPlay" settings checked and set to max battery...when they were set to max performance, my laptop would reset from overheating when playing games.

I do think you are being very assuming on how the PS devs will support their product post beta though. Yes, some will inevitably leave, there is the possibility though that some will actually stay around.

No, I just understand economics. If PS becomes about money, then the only way to make more under a single-payment scheme is to charge for additional downloaded content or release a sequel. Patches only serve to generate more sales as glaring bugs/balance issues are discovered, but as the game's lifecycle moves past the sales apex, there's no more reason to patch the game.

Additionally, with such a meager production team, "some" people leaving is enough to stagnate development. Need proof? They still haven't produced an actual game after over 6 years of supposed development.

Finally, ads only punish players if you don't do them right. Putting an ad banner or two on the loading screen, for example, is unobtrusive to the game experience. The "beta" isn't the final retail version, btw...that's why it's called a "beta."

Cronky, my overall points are 1) the scheme still punishes paying customers, however way you spin it and 2) is that charging a one-time fee lends itself to one-time developer efforts. The devs can't get paid for patches, new content, etc, so they aren't likely to try very long after the game's release ala Ubisoft. Well, they can if they start nickle and diming everyone for DRM, but that's the same type of payment scheme that frustrates consumers with companies like EA Sports. If you want to go that road, we might as well just go back to playing CT because PS will just be an independently developed version of that with regards to lackluster support. The majority of the dev team will move on to bigger and better things with all the money they are going to make off the game already in hand, regardless of how perfect or imperfect it is.

Cronky, define "a little bit of money."

Judging by the amount of people who visit this site regularly, if PS sold 100 copies at $10/ea, they'd make $1k. Then they'd divide that up into however many developers worked on the game. Finally, you divide that by the over half-a-decade worth of work, and you're down to mere pennies an hour. Perhaps ads would generate less revenue than that, I don't know. There are way too many variables to consider, such as longevity, frequency of play, etc. I will concede that the up-front pricing scheme would generate more revenue AT FIRST, but once the game peaks and tapers off, wherever that is, revenue will cease. Either way, neither scheme is going to pay the bills at first, so you might as well try to use one that brings the community together rather than divides it.

But your post hit the nail on the head wrt how ads generate revenue -- you're absolutely correct that for an ad system to generate profit, players have to want to play the game, play it often, and continue to play it. But isn't that the goal of PS? A one-time payment scheme doesn't give any incentive to create a game that has lasting appeal, nor does it create any incentive to give patch support. The developers will make the same amount of money if people play it for 10 minutes or 10 years.

Finally, you keep focusing on giving players a "reason to pay money" without focusing on the reason NOT to pay money. Let's say you release the demo with a pay option, and 35% of people decide to pay for the "full" version (I think it would be a poor assumption that a higher percentage of people will purchase the full version than just use the free version). Let's also be generous and assume 100 people started playing the demo. By paying for the game, I just reduced my player base from 65 people to 35 people. Now of those 35 people, only a smaller percentage are going to be in my time zone and willing to play the game at 8pm-10pm EST. So I just paid money to have access to more maps/features, but now I don't have anyone to play the game with! And there's no singleplayer option to keep me occupied until more people purchase the game. Oh, but now you want to charge money for more individual maps in the future. Well, let's say 2/3 of paying customers purchase your new maps. Now that brings the number down to 24 players who have full access to the game.

Again, the system you describe is punishing a paying customer, but you're not looking at it that way. You're looking at it from the perspective of a seller who thinks he ought to get paid for content. While that is true, the traditional payment scheme you are proposing doesn't work for dedicated online multiplayer games that are intended to lure players in for continued play. It was created for single player games that would be replaced within the year with the next single player game. Nintendo doesn't make more money when I fire up my NES classics, they only make money when I purchase a new Wii game. That's why successful MMORPGs are a subscription service. It's also why Angry Birds can still make money for its developers when I fire it up, but not COD4.

Cronky, you don't get it. If you give a limited demo version but charge for a "full" version, you are punishing the paying customers by limiting their player base.

Games that are extremely popular like COD4 can get away with this, even though it frustrates most consumers. Games that have a cult following of about a dozen players like PS can't afford to divide the community.

Whats to say, for example, preventing the Mercs from settings up Mines at Spy Spawn where they cant be avoided or simply camp the spawn

Proper map design.

"Infiltration" is a large part of SvM mechanics, and without chokepoints the game just wouldn't be any fun because there would be no interaction forced between the spies and the mercs. The spies would easily be able to move point-to-point uncontested using the HBS to ensure they went where the mercs weren't. But this infiltration should not rely on running to point "X" faster than the mercs can get there and place mines, which results in the game being decided in the first 3 minutes -- either the spies successfully taze/grab and push through and use their speed to run amok, or they get killed and the mercs are able to set up a virtual fortress that is exceptionally difficult to overcome.

As I mentioned previously, the big issue with CT is that the game mechanics and bugs strongly favor the mercs in chokepoint situations. For example, you effectively can't jump on a merc unless you are the spy host (and then it's too generous), a merc can miss a bullcharge into a wall or a berserk and still jump out of it, a merc with high lag will hit you with a bullcharge based on your projected position in the server, not your actual position in space on your screen, and if you try to grab or elbow a merc and he jumps you go into an animation that freezes you in place to get killed. Then there are the design oversights like MT that allows you to also locate stationary spies and EMF that allows you to locate spies not using electronics.

The end result is a game that makes it exceptionally difficult to pass mercs even with a properly executed double team once mines and traps are placed. If you take away all those things that make mercs so impossible to take on, then you can add a grace period to allow them to set up traps to make the game more even. It also will make the game rely more on calculated strategy, coordinated attack, and recon instead of taze and run tactics.

BTW, I do like the idea, Im just stating possible negative outcomes from allowing Mercs to "set up" first.

You can avoid timed grenades by *gasp* changing up your timing. In CT, this is exceptionally risky because your success hinges so highly on infiltrating prior to mines/traps being set in a lot of maps. But if those mechanics are fixed and you already know mines are set up anyway, then there is very little risk in waiting an extra 3-5 seconds and laughing when grenades start randomly going off. It's a fairly easy cue to tell you to go the other way or let him waste more grenades.

Adding an option to alter merc placement time on each map is actually a decent idea. There are some maps that are too easy for spies if they utilize a good initial rush (eg. club house). The only miitogator to this right now are borked game mechanics that overall favor mercs. If you take those away, a delay time might even become necessary.

Cronky, I wasn't trying to say that you could make as much as Google. But your revised option still splits the community because the "free" version players only have a handful of original maps and can't download community content. Again, this makes the game less enjoyable for EVERYONE, not just the free players, because the list of people with whom I can play the latest hot map is limited.

It bewilders me that multi-million dollar companies like EA Sports can't understand that charging $60 for a game and then $20 for an expansion a few months later doesn't yield very high profits. Consumers will quickly lose interest in having to pay for expansions so shortly in order to enjoy the latest, and with each expansion the player base becomes more and more split. Additionally, when they add things like new guns/equipment, the player base who doesn't want the expansion gets frustrated with being at a competitive disadvantage and stops playing.

That economic model is not where you guys ought to go. You need to focus on ways to generate revenue that promote openness and a larger community. Sadly, a little add on the screen here or there may be the only way to accomplish both of those goals.

Every economic model requires a large volume to turn a decent profit. Even if you charged $60 for the game, you'd only make hundreds for half a decade worth of work without a very large number of people purchasing the game.

The advantage of ads is that the revenue never stops.

I find it ironic that Cronky would say one can't make a profit off website ads when Google and Facebook make all of their money that way.

The major issue with a limited free version is that it splits the player base, making the game experience less enjoyable to everyone. That's why my free copy of Angry Birds doesn't limit me in that way, although that's a singleplayer example and may be apples to oranges.

Oh repostingink since it was last post on previous page...

http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2012/04/opinion-kohler-video-expensive/

Link to wired.com article

http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2012/04/opinion-kohler-video-expensive/

Aptly titled "Video Games Can't Afford to Cost this Much."

I just read an interesting article on wired.com about video game pricing [summary:  console games are too expensive in lieu of free to $3 mobile products]. If PS cost money, the initial pricing is going to have to be about $5 with a free trial option to get people hooked. Anything more than that and the 5 people who pay over 20 for the game will be left scratching their heads wondering how they can get a game. PS isnt competing in the AAA market, you guyzs juat don't have the resources for that. Also, the traditional pricing scheme of games revolves around people getting bored enough in time for your sequel, which as far as I can tell isn't your goal. Your best hope for cashing in is ad revenue on the free version. If the game catches on, the revenue would also give you a steady stream of money to provide updates to keep people hooked to make more ad money to provide more updates etc etc.

I paid 10 for Deathspank, an indy Adventure game. Do you really think an indy stealth game is worth 3-4 times that amount?

Sorry for typos on mobile phone.