Sold Out
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Discounting that TRWTF is World of Warcraft, etc., how exactly do you sell out of digital game time? I sort of understand for limited edition products, etc, but this is monthly game time.
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@Shishire said:
how exactly do you sell out of digital game time
<font size="7">DERE IZ NO TIME!</font>
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I would guess that this is a reseller and they got given a batch of codes from Blizzard (it's unlikely Blizzard would give out the time code generator) and they ran out of codes.
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No, this is definitely the Blizzard store, but it makes sense when you know how the system works. Basically, every item in the Blizzard store has to have a quantity set. They usually just set a super high number and keep bumping that up, as there's no way of saying "infinite" for some reason.
You just got unlucky in that they forgot to bump the count back up. It should be fixed shortly.
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@JamesKilton said:
They usually just set a super high number and keep bumping that up, as there's no way of saying "infinite" for some reason.
You just got unlucky in that they forgot to bump the count back up.
It seems hard to believe that they're reached the limit of int or bigint.
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Another possibility is a slight variation of my first idea, which is that they pre-generate the codes in batches, instead of on-demand, and they've run out of pre-generated codes.
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@dhromed said:
Who says it has to be that big of a type?@JamesKilton said:
They usually just set a super high number and keep bumping that up, as there's no way of saying "infinite" for some reason.
You just got unlucky in that they forgot to bump the count back up.
It seems hard to believe that they're reached the limit of int or bigint.
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@JamesKilton said:
Basically, every item in the Blizzard store has to have a quantity set. They usually just set a super high number and keep bumping that up, as there's no way of saying "infinite" for some reason. You just got unlucky in that they forgot to bump the count back up.
The power of Cron compels them! The power of Cron compels them!
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@Lingerance said:
@JamesKilton said:
Cron? What? No, the update guy's name is Jeff. But he was on vacation last week.Basically, every item in the Blizzard store has to have a quantity set. They usually just set a super high number and keep bumping that up, as there's no way of saying "infinite" for some reason. You just got unlucky in that they forgot to bump the count back up.
The power of Cron compels them! The power of Cron compels them!
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@JamesKilton said:
No, this is definitely the Blizzard store, but it makes sense when you know how the system works. Basically, every item in the Blizzard store has to have a quantity set. They usually just set a super high number and keep bumping that up, as there's no way of saying "infinite" for some reason.
You just got unlucky in that they forgot to bump the count back up. It should be fixed shortly.
Well... it's been that way for the past week. I agree that it's probably some pregenerated batch of codes or something, but...
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It's only the 30-day ones, maybe they've decided to stop selling them?
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@Shishire said:
What's really amazing is how they happen to be using XSLT in lieu of a server-side templating system.
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@MiffTheFox said:
@Shishire said:
What's really amazing is how they happen to be using XSLT in lieu of a server-side templating system.
Welcome to my previous web development job. You want XSLT templates? We had a million of'em (roughly)!
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@Thief^ said:
It's only the 30-day ones, maybe they've decided to stop selling them?
That'd be a good suggestion provided that they actually sold game time in other quantities.
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CREATE TRIGGER FixOurCrappySoftware ON Inventory FOR UPDATE AS BEGIN IF (SELECT available FROM Inventory WHERE product_type='virtual') < 10000 UPDATE Inventory SET available=500000 WHERE product_type='virtual' END
Is it really that hard to do automation? Sure, it's not that elegant, but it would work.
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Another minor WTF is that through worldofwarcraft.com, you can't just buy one month at a time; instead you have to sign up for a recurring monthly subscription. But through one of Blizzard's other properties you can buy one month at a time without a subscription...
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@Lingerance said:
@Thief^ said:
It's only the 30-day ones, maybe they've decided to stop selling them?
That'd be a good suggestion provided that they actually sold game time in other quantities.They do, yes. They're not sold out of the 90 day or 180 day ones.
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@Thief^ said:
@Lingerance said:
Gah, me is fail.@Thief^ said:
They do, yes. They're not sold out of the 90 day or 180 day ones.It's only the 30-day ones,
That'd be a good
maybe they've decided to stop selling them?
suggestion provided that they actually sold game time in other
quantities.
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@powerlord said:
Another minor WTF is that through worldofwarcraft.com, you can't just buy one month at a time; instead you have to sign up for a recurring monthly subscription. But through one of Blizzard's other properties you can buy one month at a time without a subscription...
I re-upped my WOW account after about 2 years of not playing. (I'm an off-and-on WOW player; I'm working towards my first level 80 char.)
I asked a buddy who still plays what the deal was with the horse that looks like it's made out of nebula... "buy it on the store." $25!! The latest expansion has done nothing but added pointless paid services. You can buy a name change. You can buy a race change. You can buy a faction change. You can buy a mount. You can buy stupid pointless pets.
Complete heel-face turn. It's $15/month, but now it has all the idiocy of a free-to-play MMO! The worst of both worlds!
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@blakeyrat said:
@powerlord said:
Another minor WTF is that through worldofwarcraft.com, you can't just buy one month at a time; instead you have to sign up for a recurring monthly subscription. But through one of Blizzard's other properties you can buy one month at a time without a subscription...
I re-upped my WOW account after about 2 years of not playing. (I'm an off-and-on WOW player; I'm working towards my first level 80 char.)
I asked a buddy who still plays what the deal was with the horse that looks like it's made out of nebula... "buy it on the store." $25!! The latest expansion has done nothing but added pointless paid services. You can buy a name change. You can buy a race change. You can buy a faction change. You can buy a mount. You can buy stupid pointless pets.
Complete heel-face turn. It's $15/month, but now it has all the idiocy of a free-to-play MMO! The worst of both worlds!
Agreed. I hate it. I hate them for doing it. I hate myself for being addicted. I wish I wasn't, but I'm like a crack addict. It's annoying how successful Blizzard is at getting people to part with their money.
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@bstorer said:
@dhromed said:
Who says it has to be that big of a type?@JamesKilton said:
They usually just set a super high number and keep bumping that up, as there's no way of saying "infinite" for some reason.
You just got unlucky in that they forgot to bump the count back up.
It seems hard to believe that they're reached the limit of int or bigint.
That's what she said? Ba dum tss?
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@MiffTheFox said:
@Shishire said:
What's really amazing is how they happen to be using XSLT in lieu of a server-side templating system.
You should see their Armoury. There's some nasty-ass XML in there. It actually spits out XML with an XSLT that makes it appear as a giant horrific AJAXified interface. Unless you use IE, then it just spits out the giant horrific AJAXified interface directly.
@blakeyrat said:
I re-upped my WOW account after about 2 years of not playing. (I'm an off-and-on WOW player; I'm working towards my first level 80 char.)
I asked a buddy who still plays what the deal was with the horse that looks like it's made out of nebula... "buy it on the store." $25!! The latest expansion has done nothing but added pointless paid services. You can buy a name change. You can buy a race change. You can buy a faction change. You can buy a mount. You can buy stupid pointless pets.
Complete heel-face turn. It's $15/month, but now it has all the idiocy of a free-to-play MMO! The worst of both worlds!
One word: Activision.
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Heh, you wouldnt believe how many people bought the sparklepony. Hundreds of thousand on the first day when it was released, and more later.
One good feature of sparkle pony is when you buy it once you can use it on all your characters (for that one account) and its ground mount in cities or if you havent bought flying, and its flying mount after you have bought flying skill.
Also, week or so ago Blizzard released a new feature: Remote Auction House. iPhone app and webservice, 3$ per month so you can buy and sell on auction house with iPhone or web browser.
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@blakeyrat said:
The latest expansion has done nothing but added pointless paid services. You can buy a name change. You can buy a race change. You can buy a faction change. You can buy a mount. You can buy stupid pointless pets.
Can you buy a sex change?
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@Spectre said:
@blakeyrat said:
The latest expansion has done nothing but added pointless paid services. You can buy a name change. You can buy a race change. You can buy a faction change. You can buy a mount. You can buy stupid pointless pets.
Can you buy a sex change?
Yes.
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@Spectre said:
@blakeyrat said:
The latest expansion has done nothing but added pointless paid services. You can buy a name change. You can buy a race change. You can buy a faction change. You can buy a mount. You can buy stupid pointless pets.
Can you buy a sex change?
I just checked, and...
@WOW FAQ said:
What is Character Re-Customization?
Character Re-Customization is a paid service that lets you change an existing character's gender, face, skin color, and other cosmetic features determined by his or her race and gender combination.
Yes, yes you can. I'm going to go cry now.
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@Shinhan said:
Heh, you wouldnt believe how many people bought the sparklepony. Hundreds of thousand on the first day when it was released, and more later.
One good feature of sparkle pony is when you buy it once you can use it on all your characters (for that one account) and its ground mount in cities or if you havent bought flying, and its flying mount after you have bought flying skill.
But but but... they're exchanging real cash money for nothing! You give Blizzard $25 fucking dollars, and they run an UPDATE statement on their database server! And this is people who are already paying Blizzard $15/month just to log in!!! (For people who don't play WOW, you can buy equivalent mounts in-game using in-game moolah. It just doesn't look all sparkly. But some of them are pretty badass. Especially if you're a druid and have an hour to run a certain quest chain. It's not my flying mount, I turn into the flying mount! Suck it down.)
How do I get in on this scam? Why are MMO players so dumb?
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@blakeyrat said:
How do I get in on this scam? Why are MMO players so dumb?
Sadly, this seems to be the model all the big companies are going to start following. Microtransactions: selling you shit that should've been in the game to begin with!
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@blakeyrat said:
@WOW FAQ said:
What is Character Re-Customization?
Character Re-Customization is a paid service that lets you change an existing character's gender, face, skin color, and other cosmetic features determined by his or her race and gender combination.
Yes, yes you can. I'm going to go cry now.
You can't already do this?
You mean the game sports yesteryear's graphics and you're stuck with em?
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@dhromed said:
@blakeyrat said:
@WOW FAQ said:
What is Character Re-Customization?
Character Re-Customization is a paid service that lets you change an existing character's gender, face, skin color, and other cosmetic features determined by his or her race and gender combination.
Yes, yes you can. I'm going to go cry now.
You can't already do this?
You mean the game sports yesteryear's graphics and you're stuck with em?
The great thing about WOW is that it not only looks like shit, it also runs like shit. My computer which has no issues running Arkham Asylum or Aliens vs Predator slows to a halt when confronted by Dalaran in WOW. Even when it was released t looked like shit, bt at least then they had the excuse of relatively high poly counts. Now that every character has 48 non-optimized glow effects, it's just sad.Note that Everyquest 2's engine shits all over WOW's, and it came out at the exact same time.
And if you think that's bad, subtract another 15 FPS if you're using a Mac.
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My first foray into MMOOROORPPGPGs was Lineage II, so I was suitably disappointed by WoW shitty look.
@blakeyrat said:
subtract another 15 FPS if you're using a Mac.
What is the physical meaning of a negative framerate? Backwards play?
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@dhromed said:
The clock is more likely to turn backwards than the game is to render a single frame. Either that, or it renders up to 15 frames per second, but they are the opposite of what they should be.My first foray into MMOOROORPPGPGs was Lineage II, so I was suitably disappointed by WoW shitty look.
@blakeyrat said:
subtract another 15 FPS if you're using a Mac.
What is the physical meaning of a negative framerate? Backwards play?
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I once knew a developer called Conan. He used to pray to Cron all the time.
Talking of WoW, I don't get the whole point of it...you spend hours and hours killing the same monster again and again, and then you run into a dungeon and kill more of the same (but different coloured or slightly bigger) monsters. Rinse and repeat + pay Blizzard £200 a month to play it. This cost of course includes all the stupid things that you WoW mugs buy from the Blizzard store such as gold, mounts, weapons, etc. Maybe even...WoW mugs...or even new mugs for your WoW avatars...you mugs! I had the misfortune of playing it with some friends - unfortunately due to having a life outside of a virtual world, I didn't get to play it quite as much as them and the level gap increased every time I logged on.
It's almost as if Blizzard want you to devote most of your spare time to feeding their game world with real dollar (and thus feeding their developers with cakes), whilst they supply you with a steady stream of 0s and 1s in return.
Aside from that, the gameplay feels so disjointed from any decent playable game such as GTA4/Street Fighter/Diablo etc. which you pay once for and then play play play. (Yes I know one is a Blizzard game)
Anyone ever play POWDER (it's on PPC/Nintendo DS/other ports) it's an absolutely awesome Roguelike. Ok it isn't multiplayer, but it's challenging and fun - I'd rather play a 80k game than WoWs sprawling epic(fail).
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@dhromed said:
My first foray into MMOOROORPPGPGs was Lineage II, so I was suitably disappointed by WoW shitty look.
@blakeyrat said:
subtract another 15 FPS if you're using a Mac.
What is the physical meaning of a negative framerate? Backwards play?
Believe me, everybody who wasn't a Blizzard fanboi was disappointed by WOW's graphics the day it came out. It was instantly obsolete, graphics-wise.
The real crime is that despite the hundreds of millions they have pouring in, they've never gone back and addressed their fucking engine. I mean, they could grab an off-the-shelf engine, give it their *same* poly counts and effects, and increase the performance by shitloads-- but they haven't bothered. (Oh, and as an added bonus, anti-aliasing which WOW SO BADLY NEEDS would be available. Their current engine's buggy "full-screen effects" implementation prevents AA from working right somehow.)
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@Charleh said:
Anyone ever play POWDER (it's on PPC/Nintendo DS/other ports) it's an absolutely awesome Roguelike. Ok it isn't multiplayer, but it's challenging and fun - I'd rather play a 80k game than WoWs sprawling epic(fail).
I'm actually playing a little Mission: Thunderbolt on my train commute right now. It's a Rogue-like from the early 90s, and also a 16-bit app so it was a bitch to get running right. But it's cooler because it's sci-fi.
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@blakeyrat said:
I mean, they could grab an off-the-shelf engine, give it their same poly counts and effects, and increase the performance by shitloads-- but they haven't bothered.
Why bother when people are apparently content with what they get already?
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@Charleh said:
It's almost as if Blizzard want you to devote most of your spare time to feeding their game world with real dollar (and thus feeding their developers with cakes), whilst they supply you with a steady stream of 0s and 1s in return.
Holy shit, somebody finally cracked the code! This guy must be some kind of genius detective!
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@morbiuswilters said:
Actually, he's only half right. Ideally Blizzard would rather have you send them money but receive no 0s or 1s in return. Those cost money, you know.@Charleh said:
It's almost as if Blizzard want you to devote most of your spare time to feeding their game world with real dollar (and thus feeding their developers with cakes), whilst they supply you with a steady stream of 0s and 1s in return.
Holy shit, somebody finally cracked the code! This guy must be some kind of genius detective!
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@bstorer said:
@morbiuswilters said:
Actually, he's only half right. Ideally Blizzard would rather have you send them money but receive no 0s or 1s in return. Those cost money, you know.@Charleh said:
It's almost as if Blizzard want you to devote most of your spare time to feeding their game world with real dollar (and thus feeding their developers with cakes), whilst they supply you with a steady stream of 0s and 1s in return.
Holy shit, somebody finally cracked the code! This guy must be some kind of genius detective!
In the end, They ended up settling with a plan somewhere in between. They take your money, and send you back 0s. They keep the 1s.
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@blakeyrat said:
The great thing about WOW is that it not only looks like shit, it also runs like shit.
My computer had no problem, but my char only made it to level 10 (I think).As far as the graphics, I don't think they're shit. They're just cartoony, which is kind of what they're about. There's a CAD comic about this that I'm sure you've all seen so I won't hotlink it.
There are much more worthy things for which you can make fun of WOW, like the moneysucking-ness. I just don't think the graphics are a big deal, though I would generally choose to play LOTRO over playing WOW due to familiarity and the fact that the armor actually looks like something someone would wear in the movie (if they were poor).
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@belgariontheking said:
@blakeyrat said:
The great thing about WOW is that it not only looks like shit, it also runs like shit.
My computer had no problem, but my char only made it to level 10 (I think).Leveling is so fast now that the intro areas are pretty much entirely devoid of people, and the people who are there are low-level and thus don't have special effects on their avatars. Capital cities could still be bad, but 2/3rds of the races don't start in capital cities. (And the non-expansion capitals are somewhat empty now, too. Good place to go if Dalaran is killing your system and you need an auction house.)
@belgariontheking said:
As far as the graphics, I don't think they're shit. They're just cartoony, which is kind of what they're about.
The two are not mutually-exclusive. There are tons of cell-shaded (read: cartoony) games out that push a shitload more polys a shitload faster. Borderlands springs to mind, for example.
But art style aside, their poly counts suck shit-- they used about half the polys that EverQuest 2 did, and those games were developed simultaneously. Trees are still rendered with transparent flat "leaf" polys randomly splayed around a solid truck. Blizzard has never spent more than a third of a second thinking about clipping issues-- it really takes you out of the game when you notice your longsword is stabbed right into the flank of your horse. Or that your long elf-ears stock out the side of your solid iron helmet.
@belgariontheking said:
There's a CAD comic about this that I'm sure you've all seen so I won't hotlink it.
I don't even know what "a CAD comic" is. Like... a stand-up who talks about Autodesk?
@belgariontheking said:
There are much more worthy things for which you can make fun of WOW, like the moneysucking-ness.
I was griping about that. But you have to give me some time to catch up-- the moneysucking-ness is pretty new, and (before a few weeks ago) I hadn't played for close to 2 years.
@belgariontheking said:
I just don't think the graphics are a big deal,
Well, it's not a big enough deal to override the social networking aspects that keep me there. The problem is I know like 30 people on Cenarion Circle, and there's no way they're all going to move on to another game-- so if I want to talk to them, I have to pay for WOW.
I still think it's ridiculous that they regularly release 800+ MB patches to add new and even dumber dungeons, but won't spend a couple megs increasing the poly counts of the 10 main races. I can understand keeping their own engine, and keeping their own (inefficient) special effects, because they're already in-place and don't require much QA. But doubling or tripling poly counts of the most common game characters/creatures isn't going to break the bank. They could even make it an optional update.
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@blakeyrat said:
the moneysucking-ness is pretty new
I read "monkeysucking" and felt very confused.
@blakeyrat said:
@belgariontheking said:
I just don't think the graphics are a big deal,
Well, it's not a big enough deal to override the social networking aspects that keep me there.
I prefer pretty games over ugly games, even of the gameplay of the uglier game is better -- but only up to a degree. A fun, stylish game >> 3 megatons of pixel shaded goodness and crap gameplay.
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@dhromed said:
A fun, stylish game >> 3 megatons of pixel shaded goodness and crap gameplay.
So to you, megatons of pixelshaded goodness and crap gameplay is eight times better than a fun, stylish game?
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@blakeyrat said:
I don't even know what "a CAD comic" is. Like... a stand-up who talks about Autodesk?
Just check out the tag. And don't click on it like all the other n00bs out there.
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@Xyro said:
@dhromed said:
A fun, stylish game >> 3 megatons of pixel shaded goodness and crap gameplay.
So to you, megatons of pixelshaded goodness and crap gameplay is eight times better than a fun, stylish game?Yeah, that's what it says. Can't you read?
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