Blog trolls, that is, and why they're good for blogs.
Recently, I've come to the decision on changing my policy on trolls. It was due to one troll in particular.
He's been visiting the site for a really long time now, and was around when it was shutdown. In fact, he was the only person to leave a negative comment when the site went down. :)
Well I guess it serves you well. You underestimated me :))).Here are some other examples of his antics:
You have no clue who I really am :))) And that makes me smile.
1. "lots of conspiricy"
2. "the industrial espionage of EA"."
3. "Did Blizzard rape the wife perhaps ?"
4. "You live in 1980 or in 2010 ??? dude. Do you sleep at night?"
5. "I don't care that some copies were bought on line. We live in 2011."
6. "players all screamed Blizzard murdered their mothers"
7. "The future lays with the mind of Rob Pardo"
8. "mmorpg.com site is collaborating with EA to kill any leaks by banning accounts for life."
He's from the Mechelen region of Belgium, he refuses to give himself an alias (I've asked him many times), and yes.. all of his posts are non-coherent ramblings. Insanity and early onset dementia will do that to you.
I get a kick out of every post he makes. In fact, whenever he writes something, all I can picture is someone sitting at their computer screen and doing this:
So, if you've ever seen me call someone "@prisoncharlie", you now know who I'm talking about; the insane Belgium guy. I'll point him out whenever he posts.
The reason he's so great for this blog (and why trolls are useful in any blog) is due to many reasons:
1. It's great entertainment.
@PrisonCharlie2. You don't even need to read what he says. Just agree with what he's saying and compliment him. He keeps coming back.
Mmmm hmm mmm hmmm.. Yes, that's very interesting.
You seem to know a lot on the subject, and you are clearly highly intelligent and handsome. Please tell me more.
3. Normal readers like the entertainment, and keep coming back just to hear prisoncharlie's thoughts.
4. He visits A LOT, which drives up traffic.
5. If he complains on other sites about this blog, it just drives up more viewership! There's no such thing as bad publicity.
6. If you read his comments, within one of his insane posts you might see a certain word that triggers a thought, memory, or brainstorm. He can help further ideas for new posts. Just like this one! He gave me the great idea about how useful trolls really are to blogs. :)
7. All of his comments and mispellings actually increase the number of keywords on the site, giving the blog much better search enginge optimization and increased traffic. Nice.
So, if you're a blogger - take note.
* UPDATE:
Oh another idea!
8. It also increases search engine optimization by having common mispellings on your blog. It gives you a better advantage over other blogs especially since the average person mistypes or mispells all the time and large sites are reviewed and edited for content. It pays to have bad grammar on your site! :)
Alternative Title: "Bah. Cookie-cutter gaming sites."
Wow, some amazing new news! CAPCOM Trademarked "E.X. TROOPERS"
Nov 23 - Digital Castration
Dec 1 - First Spotted by Siliconera
Dec 1 - GoNintendo
Dec 2 - Joystiq
Dec 2 - VG247
Dec 2 - Feedthegamer
Dec 2 - Play.tm
Dec 2 - Gamenews
Dec 2 - Gamefront
Dec 2 - Gamingessence
Dec 2 - Play3-live
Dec 2 - Favoniangamers
Dec 2 - Digibutter
Dec 2 - Spaziogames
.. and a hundred more by tomorrow, plus the aggregators.
10 days might as well be a hundred years in internet time. So, consider yourself ahead of the curve. :)
Coincidentally, Siliconera (the gaming site that broke the Capcom news) was the same group that I had actually leaked the Blizzcon imgur link to in August (2-3 months before Blizzcon). It was about 1-2 weeks after TOD's email and I sent them an email to their tip line. They never emailed me back, and they never published the leak so I guess they didn't believe it. They really missed out on something big.
Real Money Auction House
RMAH testing has finally started.
(The EU announcement is still up, but the US RMAH announcement was deleted and Bashiok also deleted his Tweet regarding the announcement.)
They're giving players fake B.Net credits (50 Beta Bucks to be exact) and not using real money, like what I had mentioned last weekend. The money can't be used to purchase Blizzard store items, of course. :)
It's too bad they didn't mention a time frame for this testing (if you hear anything, let me know.) I would love to know when it will be ending, because future D3 players also need enough time to prepare their PayPal accounts for the new system. Hard to say if the PayPal announcement will be happening during the RMAH testing, or if they'll wait until it's completed.
Blizzard is using a $0.15 Listing Fee and $0.65 Successful Sale Charge for every transaction.
"These numbers are not final and are for testing purposes only; they're subject to change."Still, this is what they're "anticipating" and these prices are very expensive. If $0.80 per sale is expected by Blizzard, apparently they're anticipating that items will easily sell for $10.00 to $50.00.
The number of free listings per week haven't been identified yet, but I'll find out soon enough. I'll update once I find out.
On this current system, minimum bids will be at least $0.90-$1.00 each, so that the users make at least $0.10-$0.20 profit. But there's also the Listing Fee to be really concerned about. $0.15 lost per failed sale is A LOT. So, it's not really worth the risk unless you sell items at a minimum of $3-$4 each.. probably more. Even $3 is really pushing it because you'll probably spend $3 in Listing Fee undercuts before it even successfully sells. There's a lot of risk and random chance involved here.
And also don't forgot about the major cuts that PayPal will be making into your profits. All of this needs to be considered very carefully by RMAH users.
I'm also really interested in finding out the Auction maximum durations. For a long time I theorized that they would want as many transactions as possible from players because of the large amounts of money they would make from every failed Listing Fee. So, I assumed that it would be much shorter than WOW. WOW offers 48, 24, and 12 hour auction lengths for example.. which are still very short for an auction, but with Diablo 3 I was thinking that they might reduce the duration on the RMAH even further.
* UPDATE:
Okay, looks like Blizzard has deleted both the EU and US versions now. All Tweets removed too.
Luckily, I made a copy. Here's the original page:
And here's the interface screenshot:
* UPDATE:And.. looks like they're back up again.
"Damnit Tim this wasn't supposed to go up until next week! Everyone already knows it by now so we might as well just do it today. Thanks again, Tim. Metzen is fucking pissed."
PayPal Preparations
Although most countries have already had their User Agreements amended to include Blizzard's new "Micropayments for Digital Goods", some specific countries haven't been amended yet.
Singapore, for example, has an upcoming UA amendment effective December 22, 2011.
For micropayments you receive up to $3.99 USD, the buyer can reverse the transaction. Anything over $4 though will be very difficult to ever get a refund.
Considering Blizzard's anticipated fee system, combined with PayPal's UA, average items will probably be selling anywhere between $2-5. That's their belief anyways, players might react differently.
I was hoping for more of a penny system, but apparently this slot machine will be taking $0.80 per pull.
Looking For Clues
This is around the time when you want to start looking for clues on their website (or other media) about potential release dates. Blizzard likes to hint at release dates, if they have them planned that is.
In the RMAH screenshot, Blizzard gave themselves $223.32 Beta Bucks for example. Ooooo.. must be a 02/23 release date! :)
[January 1st is 32 days from now (when the picture was first posted), putting it on the very first day of 2012. Plus, 223.32 = 2 / 23 / 20+12. Perhaps the release date will be announced on Dec 31st to close off the 20th Anniversary or on Jan 1st as part of the new year. That would put the game release about 2 months away, which is normal timing. Sneaky.]
The Book of Cain probably won't have anything, unless the release has been planned for a really long time. Even though the book wasn't supposed to come out until after the VGA (when more lore is leaked), apparently many people have already received review or advanced copies.
Keep your eyes peeled on the website though for any new Diablo lore items that contain numbers or dates. (They might get more tricky with numbers though, since that's what players are looking for now.)
Blizzard first hinted at the Cataclysm release date on October 4, 2010. Remember Mekkatorque predicting a 12.7% chance of the Cataclysm? (Cataclysm came out on December 7, 2010). So, a hint was made a little over 2 months before launch.
Why You Should Never Trust Retail Store Release Dates
Hey, isn't that what I said too? :)Other Investigations
Now that the RMAH testing is finally live, I wonder how much time is needed to fully test it. The Gold Auction House still has some bugs, but they've taken it offline. The beta has been going on for 3 months now, the Gold Auction House started testing 1.5 months ago.. would the RMAH only need 1 month of additional testing?
I'll have to think about it some more. I can't really see the RMAH taking 2+ months for testing, and the RMAH Testing announcement didn't make it sound like there would be any major server wipes. The success of the RMAH will determine when they make their release date announcement..
Other than that, a lot of my time has been spent on a pretty interesting investigation. Most of my time has been spent on it, and I'm still waiting for some more information to come in. So, if I don't post for a couple days, don't be surprised; I'm still working on something.