Different day, different size of comic. Will probably just be doing more comics like this, with a return to the half page for important scenes, or just when I feel like it. Dunno.
In Star Wars: The Old Republic, subscribers level up faster than the free-to-play crowd.
But what if it worked the other way? (Not particularly for SW:TOR, but just as a generic idea.) With the subscription games, there’s a problem of monetizing the game in relation to the expenditure of a player playing the game. But slowing down their consumption of the game would just in turn stick them on the game longer, particularly when the only core element of the game available is the story, which has a high value of completion.
So what if the f2p crowd was instead leveled on steroids?
Stick em in, fast forward them through things, making it so as they level up they’re having to skip side-quests, crafting, and all the other things that titillate them. Like driving somebody through Disneyland on a tour just to make them want to ride the rides. “Oh yeah, that’s in the game, and I mean, technically you could do it, but you level up so fast there’s not really any point in it, since you’re just here for the story. Oh yeah, that’s in the game, too. And that. And that as well.”
I imagine it would get the people who don’t want to pay out the door faster.
Of course, this hypothetical system for a hypothetical game would have to be built to handle it. There would probably need to be a lot of dynamic content, so it’s not “do the same thing over and over again with different skins”, but still.
And the big problem I imagine is having players with a low game time being at the top of the level pyramid. Like toddlers with machine guns, they wouldn’t be playing the challenging content so much as blindly stumbling through it.
But, that’s also just a problem with the top-end heavy game development these days. Still seems silly to me to devote 90% of development time to things that only 15% of the game’s audience will experience.
But oh well, I’m just a noob.
Either way, just a thought for the moment. Not saying it’s a good idea, just a hypothetical what-if.
I have writer’s block? Or something. I dunno.
I know vaguely what I want to do for the next scene or two, but I can’t actually think of what to have the character say. Or like, what would be interesting? Or something? Bah. I’ll draw the next scene when I can figure that out. In the mean time, I’m still working on that program for the dojo.
JDBC:Derby is bullshit. The Date/Time data types rely on deprecated objects, which is mildly annoying. Because of it, I figure the entirety of the Java world can’t be relying on Derby, but so far everything I’ve found referencing databases in Java all point to Derby (or some godawfulgiganticnetworkdatabasething which is well beyond the scope of my little program.)
Christ, I wish everyone would get on the same page when it comes to programming.