Month: June 2006

  • The more things change…

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 46 Comments

    Mike Rozak speculated,

    (Raph’s player lifecyle) + (If players spend less time in each MMORPG that they play, since all the MMORPGs practically the same) =

    1) You’d expect to see MMORPG subscriptions get more “bursty” as everyone tries the new game, gets bored of it in 2 months, and goes on to the next new thing. (This effect is offset by new players that have never played MMORPGs before.)

    1a) The burstiness encourages guilds to form social structures outside the game, such as their own BBS and chat rooms (or voice chat). Thus, guild members can socialize no mater what game they’re playing. => “Social ties” don’t lock players into a game as strongly as they once did. (Is this true?)

    2) Those that get permanently bored will (a) stop playing altogether, (b) go directly to PvP in something like Halo2 or a PvP-specific MMORPG (Eve online), or (c) go directly to a free chat room.

    3) It all leads back to innovation and pushing the envelope so that (a) and (c) players come back.

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  • Peter Mulvey concert

    Hours Categories Music
    Comments 3 Comments

    The Knuckleball SuiteLast night we went to a concert. This is unusual, because we haven’t gone to a concert since we lived in Austin. It’s been a few years. Between the move to San Diego, which seems to mostly lack a music scene of the sort we find comfortable, and the age of the kids (e.g., not concert-friendly), we have had to stay out of it.

    But last week I noticed that Acoustic Music San Diego actually says on their site that they encourage kids attending. So off we went, with David’s Gameboy in tow in case he got bored. We did end up needing it, as he played Pokemon through much of the show; but he also got Peter to sign it, because he said “he plays good music.” Peter misidentified it as a PlayStation — alas, folksingers are not always up on the latest technologies.

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  • This happened to me

    Hours Categories Misc
    Comments 4 Comments

    Well, some of it, anyway, yesterday at the San Jose airport. I have T-Mobile for my phone, and the Total Internet Package. Only I couldn’t log in at the HotSpot at the airport, and none of the accessible website pages gave me an answer as to what my login should be. The one for my.t-mobile.com didn’t work.

    Fortunately, today Google found the answer here, and I am going to reproduce it just so that anyone else stuck can learn it too.

    She instantly shoots back the answer to the question I’ve been looking for almost 10 days for : Username is your 10 digit phone number, default password is the last 4 digits of your social security number. YES!!! That’s it. It works. So simple, I have to wonder why no one else in the company was able to understand my question, let alone answer it.