Article: http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/15/ea-kills-its-controversial-online-pass-program/#rGKlmxfwC1h8B0KH.02

It is about time that this happened. The online pass and serial numbers in games were annoying as a way of trying to deal with used games. Things like expired and invalid online passes ruined the system. EA was trying to make money off of used games by forcing players to obtain an online pass to access certain content in the game or to play online. The problem was that all of the online passes expired at a certain point and they would not generate new ones, even for the people who bought them. They were just handed an unused old one that had already expired, causing much frustration. Trying to obtain help resolving the issue was a long process that often ended in failure. Now, they have finally decided to transition them out and just use a downloadable access key much like DLC for various games and it only took a few years.

The question now is how will they try to p

This is a reply to an original article by therealfinn

http://my.mmosite.com/4043191/blog/ritem/world_of_warcraft_the_facts_on_private_servers.html

World of Warcraft has tended to shift its numbers from "subscribers", which are people paying for the game, to "active accounts", which are the number of people actually playing the game in the past set number of months. This largely inflates its numbers and prevents people from knowing how many people actually play their game. At the same time, they are not actually lying about the number of players. Free MMOs are in direct competition with all the others and they tend to offer the same quality of service as many P2P and B2P MMOs now that the overall quality has declined. P2P MMOs have not been pursuing development of what can be considered as "triple A" MMOs. they create the quality that is presented in many F2P MMOs, but the only thing they have to support it is a license to some kind of popular character or title. 

Pursu

So recently, EA and their Maxis branch released the new SimCity for PC. The catch was that this was online only as a form of Digital Rights Management (DRM) to deal with the copyright infringement. Unfortunately, when you make a game online only, you need to have servers that can handle the number of players. This means that servers have to be prepared ahead of time before launch so that everyone can log on once the game is officially released. As we have seen with other games, including MMOs, this never happens. A game's population tends to peak during the first few months and it declines until the death of a game with the rare spikes that occur when expansion packs are released.

Over the years, EA has experimented with numerous forms of DRM. The earliest form was probably CD keys that restricted people to only 1 allowed online at any given time so that people could not share keys. They used online authenciation to try to curb that, but some people just disconnected their Internet

Crowd funding is the act of people pooling their resources (money in this game) to finance a project. Kickstarter has become famous for this concept and what they do is take a portion of the money that you earn through their site as a fee to keep themselves going. Unfortunately, many projects do not reach their goals, but this can be used as a way to determine interest in a concept. However, there is fear that this system is abused and money is not used for the intended purpose, such as developing a game. Some of the sites have taken it upon themselves to force the people who receive the money for the project to either complete the project or return all of the money.

The most notable instance of crowd funding has to be Double Fine Adventure, which raised nearly $3.5 million. Other companies have also turned to crowd funding to try to create new video games. They rely on their name to try to produce sequels to games that have long since been forgotten. These examples include dead fran

I have a 2nd article in the works about DLC and greed again. I probably won't get around to it just yet.

Response to these 2 articles:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/01/30/1183287/-U-S-Senator-Lamar-Alexander-Guns-don-t-kill-people-video-games-do

http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Video-games-drawn-into-violence-debate-4219013.php#page-1

So after Sandy Hook, you think they would finally have some common sense to say place heavy restrictions on firearms and access to firearms. Apparently, this is not a "viable solution" because it goes against the Second Amendment, which has now been interpreted as the right to bear arms rather than say the right to have an organized and trained militia. Every proposal to fix this has been shot down by saying that it won't work 100% of the time. Unfortunately, this is true of ALL laws, but it is the best solution for now and should be implemented. Instead, the scapegoating has begun and gun enthusiasts are using this opportunity to reignite the ar

Back in the day, many buy to play (B2P) and pay to play (P2P) MMOs started off with you having to buy the game and it would come with a subscription for a few months. Afterwards, you would have to pay monthly to continue playing. However, as time went on, free to play (F2P) games began to take over. Nowadays, the F2P market has taken over and P2P is a dying model.

One thing that F2P games have shown us is that you do not need to make people buy anything for them to get started. The only problem is the huge bandwidth costs that comes with people downloading a multi GB game client and patches just to be able to play the game. All you need is a high speed connection, which anyone who plays an MMO should have in the first place. Some game installers are over 4 GB and is much bigger than that once it is actually installed. The installer will also need to be periodically updated to include the newest patches and to reduce the patching time of new players. Many game

I am an advocate of what are called milestone events. This is where players on the server or entire game work together to achieve a certain collective goal that can be measured numerically. It can be collect a certain number of an item or kill a certain number of monsters. As each milestone goal is achieved, a reward is granted to the entire server in the form of either a temporary boost to the entire server or a promotional item that is granted to everyone. Sometimes they give promotional items that are like a preview for the next area to participants or people who place in a ranking. The difference is that the items are eventually accessible to everyone later on without much difficulty.

I am however, disappointed by ranking based events that grant rewards based on your ranking in the overall system. In the short run, this seems like a decent reward and it is better if everyone has a fair start. However, there are problems when things like the item mall can be used to give yourself

https://www.examiner.com/article/fox-news-blames-sandy-hook-shootings-on-videogames

http://gamepolitics.com/2012/12/15/fox-news-tries-tie-tv-facebook-and-gaming-ct-tragedy#.UM5HcW88B8F

http://kotaku.com/5968569/fox-news-links-connecticut-shooting-to-violent-video-games

http://www.destructoid.com/mass-effect-and-more-attacked-over-school-shooting-240657.phtml

It feels like not too long ago that we have had this sort of incident. Somehow, it seems more and more like the news does not bother to confirm their information anymore. They just start making assumptions and go with it rather than bother to thoroughly check their sources and information before they do things like this. The target this time was Mass Effect.

To start things off, they got the name of the person who committed the crime wrong. They got his brother instead who was at the time on his Facebook telling people that it was not him and that it was his brother. So the first thing they do is to look over the person's inter

MMOSITE Forum Link:

http://forum.mmosite.com/thread/2/2/20121021/Are_we_really_destroying_the_MMO_genre-5084bc307f4102d13-1.html

Reddit Article:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/104j7o/you_are_all_destroying_the_mmo_genre_and_you_dont/

There is a clear line between grinding and content. When you release a game or increase the level cap, you need to have level appropriate content. If you have enough new areas with quests and a few instances that will get you to the next level cap without much difficulty, then you have content. However, if your quests only give you like 10% of what you need to your next level and instances only give you 1% per kill with the need to kill thousands of enemies in between, then you have a grind. End game content means usually one of two things. The first is to have a good PvP system. Some players want to get to the level cap so they can enjoy the PvP system with access to all their skills. The second is to have PvE raids for players. However

Link to the article:

http://www.gamespot.com/news/riot-announces-lan-client-will-be-in-use-for-season-2-6398220

After the shenanigans in the match between World Elite (WE) and Counter Logic Gaming EU (CLG.EU) at the season 2 quarterfinals, Riot is working on a LAN client that will be used in tournaments. In the past, many games came with a LAN function to host offline events, such as tournaments like these. However, over time, developers and publishers became more and more worried about the rise of piracy and private servers. They turned away form LAN and just use an internet connection. Unfortunately, the need for a constant internet connection causes problems such as what happened in the League of Legends quarterfinals where there were at least 2 disconnects and 1 power outage that caused the entire event to be delayed. Had this not occurred, there is a chance that the quarterfinals match ups could have been very different considering the path that the first 2 games actual