@wrighteous86: By always filtering those people out, he is effectively saying he wouldn't hire them, because they're never going to make it to the final stack. Out of 100 people, there are always going to be a few who, e.g. kept working at the local grocery store for 5 years throughout high school and part of college. But a lot of the time those people are just lucky or unambitious, and it doesn't necessarily identify that they have some kind of positive work quality.
Discounting anyone under the age of 24 for not staying at the same job for 3+ years is completely unfair. Any older than that and I'd agree with you. It's pretty much impossible to keep the same job that long from 16-24 even if you wanted to.
I read the article earlier. He makes the false assumption that he is losing initial sales, and that the sales disrupt the multiplayer environment for games. Evidence has shown this is not the case. Most of the people "waiting for a sale" were never going to buy the game at all at full price. They were never going to be early adopters and they were never going to enter the pool of available multiplayer players. The multiplayer on these games that spike during sales does not have a long tail because it's not good enough to hold players for more than a week or a few days, or because it's simply not the kind of multiplayer that sustains. If anything, the sales are helpful to those early adopters because it lets them get some multiplayer games in during or just after the sales, whereas before they wouldn't be finding any matches at all.
He's looking at every game sold during a sale as a customer that he lost revenue on, when in reality those customers are "free" revenue because they were not going to buy at all at the higher price point, even before Steam sales became a regular occurrence. These people weren't going to save their $15 for two weeks to buy his theoretical $30 game, they were going to go out to the movies twice or go to the bar something. They weren't going to have that $15 saved up for the sale. This isn't like gasoline or milk, a purchase you have to make to get by, it's disposable income on an entertainment product.
Not only that, but often times people never even hear about a game's existence until it appears on the front page during a sale. Again, those people are not buyers who held out for a sale, they're non-buyers who became buyers due to the sale.
It’s unclear if Rockstar can fix this issue with a patch or not. We’ll have to wait and see.
There's not really an issue to fix. The game has literally maxed out the bandwidth that the console can stream from either source (HDD or disc drive), and instead relies on streaming from both simultaneously. It's not a bug, it's a feature.
@pocketroid: The original game in North America was packaged with the player's guide in the box. His experience wasn't that different from that of people who played the original.
@ghostchant: They can change their processor yields because the way chips are manufactured is that you look at the predicted tolerances and make an estimate, and then when you fabricate the chips you test them to see if they met those tolerances, and on average they can either beat or fail to meet those tolerances.
With regular PC hardware, after you've tested to see what the tolerances actually end up being after fabrication, you can take the components that failed and just downclock them or disable some components (logic paths or cores or cache or whatever depending on the architecture of the part) and just sell that as a lower end version of the same thing for less money. This is one of the fundamental reasons that overclocking works to begin with.
But with a console or embedded system, it's a crap shoot. You can't sell some Xbox One's at 1.6 ghz and some at 1.3 ghz, for example. So they probably made a more conservative estimate than a CPU or GPU manufacturer normally would, and were just going to downclock any chips that exceeded expectations. Apparently a much larger proportion of the yield exceeded expectations. Enough that they could just release all of the chips at 1.75 ghz instead of downclocking most of them.
Really, they only had to beat Black Friday, not Sony. I think at this point most people had made up their minds, and having to wait an extra week isn't going to make them change it.
If you're really deadset on changing something, then I think a better idea would be to make it so that higher MPs at lower difficulties could increase the number of affixes champions and elites have.
I am and always will be fundamentally opposed to any talk of eliminating the Normal -> Nightmare -> Hell progression because it would mean removing one of the core pillars of the Diablo franchise and genre.
I feel like that sentiment is the only reason the difficulties still exist as they are. I don't think it's necessarily valid. Sometimes to improve or grow a game you have to look at whether you're doing something just to follow tradition or because it actually brings something to the game.
Additionally, the "default" progression could still be "normal -> nightmare -> hell" if you didn't explicitly change the difficulty in a system like the one I proposed.
So how is it any different than what they already do. Elites in each difficulty get an additional resistance/debuff/proc per difficutly. And on inferno difficulty you can select what the monster difficulty is on a scale from 1-10.
Monster Power is actually available from the very start of the game, but all it does gameplay-wise is scale up monster damage output and HP. It doesn't increase the complexity of the monsters encountered. Even on MP10 at level one on Normal mode, elites only have a single affix. A monster on MP10 that only has, for example, the waller affix is not complex or interesting to fight. It just has a ton of HP and takes forever to kill. If the monster had waller, vortex, and mortar, like Hell monsters can have, then it could have the potentially to be tactically interesting to fight regardless of if you ran MP10 on a completely twinked character or MP0 on a brand new ungeared character.
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