A really cute implementation of a simple idea, although, alas, Firefox doesn't seem to think gamers exist. At least a third of the questions had no answers that were even close to what I would pick.
That being said, what I really like is the quiz UI. For radio-button style questions, it's really great! Why make the user keep clicking 'next' after checking a radio button - they can only select one darn button anyway! And the autocomplete at the end, with the option to 'Go back' is very similar to Google's 'undo'. It's a great feature because it takes the 'responsibility' away from the user, while not depriving them of choice or power. By this I mean, rather than constant alerts popping up saying, 'Make this decision, make it nao, and it's FINAL SO YOU BETTER KNOW WHAT YOU WANT AND CHOOSE CORRECTLY OR YOU WILL DIE AS IF YOU DRANK FROM THE FALSE GRAIL!!!1!1!!' ahem... it just lets you do your stuff, and gives you a way out if you change your mind.
~_o From nao on, my radio button quizzes shall be done in this seksy style!
And yes, they put all this hard work into making it all shiny and here I am raving about their quiz UI. XD What can I say.
P.S.: This wouldn't work for checkbox style questions - those require the user to select, then click next/submit, because there's no way to tell when the user is 'done'. The signal for that needs to come from the user. So alas, no shinies!
Uncovering an advertising fraud scheme. Or "the Internet is for porn"
You have heard about fraud and online advertising. You may have seen the Wall Street Journal video "Porn Sites Scam Advertisers", or even read the story at today's Wall Street Journal about "Off Screen, Porn Sites Trick Advertisers" (Hint: to avoid the WSJ paywall, search the title of the article through Google News and click from there, to read the full article).Since I am intimately familiar with the story covered by WSJ (i.e., I was part of the team at AdSafe that uncovered it), I thought it would be also good to cover the technical aspects in more detail, uncovering the way in which this advertising fraud scheme operated.
It is long but (I think) interesting. It is a story of a one-man-making-a-million-dollar-per-month fraud scheme. It shows how a moderately sophisticated advertising fraud scheme can generate very significant monetary benefits for the fraudster: Profits of millions of dollars per year.
Waoh, just waoh. O.o
via zurb.com
I don't play Guild Wars for any sort of social interaction. If any social interaction happens, it's completely incidental. I play Guild Wars because single-player RPGs are very hard to find on the PC nowadays, and the funny part is that even taken as a purely single-player RPG, Guild Wars (starting with Nightfall) is still better than 99% of single-player RPGs made in the past ten years. I'm still debating if that's because Guild Wars is so good, or because other RPGs made suck just that much.That said, the Companion system (as it was proposed) was going to have little impact on grouping. They don't take party slots, so they don't discourage it. The removal does, however, negatively impact soloing in its complexity. For all the focus on how easy soloing will be in GW2, someone seems to have forgotten how *fun* it should be. I've played the "one character spams attack skills on one monster until someone falls down" game in MMOs before many times. If you've leveled up in one MMO, you've done it on all of them, and there's only so much you can do to that formula to make it interesting for any extended period of time. AI Companions would have been a big change in keeping things interesting and adding that extra level of tactical choice in combats.
It sounds like they're removing everything that made the Guild Wars series special and replacing it with flashy things that won't matter in the long run. Seriously, no one is going to care about environmental weapons two weeks in the game. Either that, or they'll over-use it like Blizz did with vehicles and annoy everyone with it.
Neatly sums up my impressions so far.
Oh yes it's very beautiful. Is that enough?
Sacred 2 was very beautiful. -_- And it was also a crappy game that utterly failed to live up to its predecessor. Oh wells. Cross the juicy chicken fingers I guess.
Cluebot: If they’re not willing to group with you and help you take advantage of Recruit a Friend to get you to max level so you can play with them… well, they’re not really a fgood riend, understand? They’re just people you know that said, “Hey, why not pick up the game and join us, it’ll be cool dude.” No, this is more about you wanting to get yourself to max level so you will be worthy of joining them in what they’re doing. Friends are usually at least a teensy bit interested in spending time with you, no matter the level, especially if it’ll help you get to play with them and their max level characters faster.
Ah baar, you are so wise. And yet, you forget, environments change people. :( The Stanford Prison Experiment isn't just a university experiment.
"One of the primary reasons I stopped playing was that I felt like so much of what made raiding interesting and fun was that elite end of the game where you have access to content that only a few people every get to see," Doug Thomas, Associate Professor at USC and co-author of A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change, said. "Systematically, I felt what Blizzard has done is taken their high-end game content and made it increasingly accessible to larger group of players."
"Even if you couldn't get the high-end Epics, you could get something that was pretty much equivalent through token systems. That kind of thing kind of eroded one of the core dynamics about what was fun about the game for me."
via gamasutra.com
Translation: There are always more people who would rather wave their peens in other people's faces, rather than get better at using those peens privately.
Thus, if you remove the option to have the rarest, biggest, purplest pixellated peen, those peeners would then rather quit than continue.
...what do you mean the sex is the fun part?