As always, I would be fascinated by your explanation.

Check back here tomorrow then. I need time to write it up.

It's based on facts, not my worldview. Certain business models encourage the games to be bad, and some actually REQUIRE them to be bad. I've never seen this explored or explained, so maybe I should at some point.

As always, I would be fascinated by your explanation.

Pay to Play

Example: any arcade game.

Business model encourages good games. Players directly pay for playtime, and if it's not good they won't play. The game has to be fun immediately, and throughout. Making unfair games that kill the player randomly in an effort to extract more coin get labeled quarter suckers and are avoided. The better your game, the more people want to play it and the more money you make.

Pay to Own

Example: most console or PC games.

Business model encourages good games. Players put down a lot of money, and so expect quality. If the game is bad, word of mouth diminishes sales, and developer's subsequent games suffer. The better your game, the more people want it and the more money you make.

Ad supported

Example: beats me I don't know any because they suck

Requires games to be worse than they could be. Nobody like ads interrupting their playtime, and all other things being equal, a game without ads is superior to one with ads. So developers choose to make their game worse than they could to make money.

Freeware

Example: Nethack

There is no business model, so it does not affect game quality.

Subscription:

Example: World of Warcraft (formerly)

In theory encourages good games, since if the game isn't fun then players will stop playing and cancel their subscription, but in reality it encourages bad games that string the player along, stretching everything out in order to lengthen the amount of time a player plays, and thus increase his subscription revenue.

Micro transactions for items not available in game

Example: League of Legends.

Encourages the base game everybody gets to be worse than the optimal game if you pay for everything. Consider that whatever is available for purchase must make the game better or more interesting, or else there would be no incentive to buy it. This means, developers intentionally leave out the interesting parts of their games and hide them behind a paywall. This means the version of the game you first play is necessarily worse than a version of the game with all the additional stuff. The stuff could very well be included, since it's available for purchase right away. This is the developer compromising their base game for the sake of money, which is selling out by any reasonable definition.

Micro transactions for stuff available in game

Example: Crimson (from your pals at Certain Affinity), Farmville

The worst business model, which actually REQUIRES games to be bad. If items that can be purchased can also be obtained by playing (gold in the case of Crimson), then what players are doing when they buy stuff is paying to NOT PLAY the game. This should sound strange, because it is. The only reason someone would pay to not play a game, is if paying to not play is somehow more pleasant than actually playing. This therefore, REQUIRES elements of the game to be unpleasant, i.e. bad, or else players would just have fun playing the game and think it insane to pay not to play. Gold in crimson steam pirates requires grinding and killing monsters. Items and action points in sims social require tons of time to obtain. Games of this type need to be purposely bad, and this is not only selling out, but morally unacceptable since you are purposely wasting people's time.

On the plus side, the source code is available, so if a programmer DOES step forward, it should be relatively straightforward to get to work. :)

I setup a very small LAMP database about 7 years ago at work. I'm not a web guy (C/C++ programmer). I was asked to do it because the database was my idea. "Your idea smart Alec: you do it!"

I'm also busy with work right now, but...

If nobody else steps up then I could have a look at it whenever work permits.

Have you considered using VirtualBox? It runs on: Windows, Linux, and Macs. If you setup a LAMP mini-forum running on the local machine... then you should be able to export the state of the machine and then devs could import it on their machines and would have a working, already setup, test system to develop on.

Once they get their changes working they could export their changes and you could load it on your own machine to try it out.

My email address is enabled on my profile.

These are all really cool ideas - but somewhat beyond the scope of management at the moment. This is an off-the-shelf forum; so far, I'm just turning on/turning off options, and tweaking settings. What you're asking for is actual recoding. That's not going to happen any time soon, unless someone steps up and offers to do the work. (Nobody has, so far.)

On the plus side, the source code is available, so if a programmer DOES step forward, it should be relatively straightforward to get to work. :)

cool, where is it?

- No text -

I'm not alone in feeling this way, I think.

My suggestion would be rather than to denote it with an icon, show the title in some other fashion. Maybe not a bold link? Less saturated / opaque link colour or something.

Make the title NOT a link. If there's no text, there should be nothing to link to. That would distinguish it.

There was this one forum I spent a decade with that put *NM* after contentless posts. That seemed to work well. :p

Nah, I know.
I was just testing to see how far the auto-NM would go, if it would cover the previous NM method. As I suspected, it didn't, for the same reason the method worked in the first place.

And then made fun of it. :P

This either means:

1. Simply buying the content is enough to support such a game, and MMOs like WOW have been charging you a subscription fee for nothing.

I'm not sure how you've managed to conclude this given how little is yet known about Destiny's mechanics for ongoing player participation. WoW is built around a platform that is not only constantly evolving from a gameplay mechanics perspective, but is also continually being augmented with new content. Every two years they deliver a new expansion which adds a lot of new content and mechanics, but these things are also added to the game gradually. It's possible Bungie intend to do this too, but we've no basis for drawing that conclusion yet.

Adam Sessler talks about information told to him by Activision's CEO on Destiny's cost.

This either means:

1. Simply buying the content is enough to support such a game, and MMOs like WOW have been charging you a subscription fee for nothing.

I'm going to guess that WoW's infrastructure has higher requirements than Destiny's, as a start.

In addition... yes. WoW makes considerably more margin than non subscription games. There are other challenges-- ongoing support, service availability, and churn, but if these are properly managed, recurring revenue always trumps one-time revenue.

Time WoW players spend playing just ensures they will keep playing, and thus keep paying.

Time WoW players spend not playing is free money.

Eve's infrastructure probably costs more per player than WoW's because of their single shard architecture and lower player base, but they've still managed to be stable over time where plenty other wanna-be WoW killers bite the dust.