Recently I stumbled across a great post over at Grimwell’s awesome blog called nobody rides for free. It’s basically a discussion of why WotC would charge money for their upcoming “Gleemax” service. To quote Grimwell:

When someone says “I don’t care if they cover their costs.” I hear “I don’t care enough about their product to care if they go under.” As the title of this entry says, nobody rides for free. Companies that fail to make profits quickly fail to make products — because they are closed.

So if you like a product you had damn well better care if the company that makes it is covering their costs. Businesses are not charities, and if they go out of business, that ends the product cycle. Period.

There’s more to his post (go read it!), some thought-provoking devil’s advocate replies, and great responses from Grim.

I had to respond, and then post my response here, because this is an argument I’ve come across before in other forms and I have strong feelings about it. Here’s what I said in response to his post:

This reminds me of the old argument about how tabletop company X is trying to ‘rob’ its customers by ‘forcing’ them to buy endless supplements.

Which always kind of got my blood boiling a bit (no, I was never employed by those companies, but did freelance for a while, and had a friend who was a line developer at White Wolf for a while).

First, since when are they forcing anyone to buy anything? Buy the supplements you want; ignore the rest.

And second, how the heck else are they supposed to keep their doors open and pay their staff? The money has to come from somewhere, and if it doesn’t, that game you so love goes out of print and eventually you can’t get it any more except by shelling out $100 or whatever at an ebay auction. Yeah, that’s SO much better.

Sigh.

Part of it, IMO, is that folks constantly confuse what they want to pay for something with the value of something. The value of something is a much more complex issue that’s partly how much you’re willing to pay for it, and partly how much it cost to provide, and partly how much it costs to keep in operation. When those various aspects of value don’t jibe at all, then you have a problem that causes products to sink. If we all could pay what we want to pay for things, everything in life would be free. Nice thought, but impossible goal.

Another part of it is the current attitude of entitlement that infects so many people. “I want it, therefore I’m entitled to have it” seems to be the prevalent attitude. It doesn’t matter who else is put out or has put huge amounts of time & effort into what you want—if you want it, you should get it for whatever you’re willing to shell out, right? That’s the attitude that really seems to be at the heart of the problem, and the one that makes me throw up my hands in disgust.

If you don’t think something is worth the price, don’t pay for it and don’t use it. I really think it’s that simple. If enough other people agree that it isn’t worth the price, the product will fail and you’ll be proven right. Otherwise, if you really want to use it, pay up. The only time I can see a decent argument against this is when you’re talking about vital services like power, basic food & heat, and gaming doesn’t fall into that!

To me, “I wouldn’t pay more than $5 a year for that” or “I wouldn’t pay for that service” is a perfectly valid argument. But “they shouldn’t charge for that” doesn’t make sense, because it doesn’t take into account any of the other aspects of the situation.

On an almost-related note, I’ve been using the bar code scanner I got to enter books into my LibraryThing catalog (semi-relevant because the ability to BC scan is what pushes some people over the edge into using LT’s fee-based service over other sites’ free services). I have to say, it’s a joy to use! I had some trouble at first until my husband figured out that I was trying to go too slowly. I’m used to finicky devices that you have to be slow and careful with. As it turns out, you’re supposed to whip this thing across bar codes with great speed! Wheee! I entered about a hundred or so books in last night in the maybe 30-45 minutes before I went off to an appointment, and most of that time was spent running back and forth to my bookshelves.

But first… the latest book review is of Phoebe Atwood Taylor’s The Perennial Boarder. Also, since people have been asking me for more detail about the bar code scanner option over at LibraryThing after I mentioned it the other day, I promise that once I’ve gotten my scanner and played around with it a bit, I’ll make a full report/review of what I think of LibraryThing. I can tell you so far that I’m totally addicted, however, and that the 200+ books I’ve entered by hand are barely scraping the surface. I also still have to decide whether I want to use LT with tags the way some people do to keep track of those books I’ve read but don’t end up deciding to keep—some of the books I review, for example, I end up donating to the library when I’m done if I know I won’t read them again.

Now, to pass on the latest T-shirt designs. First, we’ve added one to the Caffeinated Chicanery shop; great for creative people who are tired of always finding out that someone thought of their brilliant idea first:

I hate people who steal
my ideas before I think of them

And we’ve also added to the Gamers’ Heaven shop:

“What do you mean I don’t get frequent flyer miles for gryphon flights?!” and “Invalid Target”.

Okay, okay, I give up. You all made the LibraryThing book cataloging service sound so good that I had to go and join. And immediately become addicted.

Maybe I’ll be able to keep up with it, maybe not, but right now it’s an awesomely fun toy. Besides, I’d really love to have a listing of our books for insurance purposes if nothing else—who’d ever believe how many books we have in this house?! $25 for a lifetime membership is really very cheap, and $15 for the bar code scanner is something I’m more than willing to shell out with the number of books we have.

Besides, there are cool features. I’m having fun posting a few brief versions of some of my reviews, and looking up other folks’ opinions of books, and who’s reading what.

I knew I shouldn’t try it out. I just knew I’d never be able to resist if I did!

I missed last week’s BTT, so this time I’m doing two weeks in one!

This week:

Do you use any of the online book-cataloguing sites, like Library Thing or Shelfari? Why or why not? (Or . . . do you have absolutely no idea what I’m talking to?? (grin))

If not an online catalog, do you use any other method to catalog your book collection? Excel spreadsheets, index cards, a notebook, anything?

I’ve tried to use cataloging software once or twice, but a couple of things prevent me from actually making it work. I lack enough shelves for my books, making it impossible to dig them all up/keep track of them all, so inputting the massive amount of current ones would be prohibitive. To make it an even halfway reasonable task I’d need a barcode scanner and more bookshelves.

However, that wouldn’t make up for the fact that I’m scatterbrained and forgetful, which means that I’d soon start forgetting to input new books, and then the catalog wouldn’t be at all accurate, and I’d give up.

Last week:

This week’s question is suggested by Island Editions:

Do you have a favourite book, now out of print, that you would like to see become available again? (I have several…)

Absolutely. I mourn the fact that Word Painting apparently went out of… hey wait a minute. It’s back in print!

WOOHOO! No more telling people they should track down a used copy!

Ahem. Okay. The second-most-often mourned out-of-print book in this household would be Janice Henderson’s White Chocolate cookbook.

While I’m posting, time to update on reviews. I’ve posted my third annual gift recommendations for cooks (mostly awesome cookbooks), and a review of the Baker’s Edge Pan.

I love the Pirates of the Burning Sea MMO. I really, really do. I’m utterly and totally addicted to both sea combat (pirating the merchant ships! yarrr!) and the economy. I plan to get into that in more depth soon. But today I want to talk about the pre-order thingie.

Here’s the deal. In order to encourage retail sales (which gets the game on shelves, which puts it in front of buyers, which results in more sales) SoE put out a pre-order box to retailers. This box includes a 60-minute CD of music, and codes for an early launch (two weeks before the normal start date if you just get the normal release box) as well as a couple of spiffy in-game items. The minor amount of money you spend on this box—$10—goes toward your purchase of the final game, so it doesn’t cost you anything. So far, so good.

Then everything goes to Hell. First, most of the companies supposed to be stocking these boxes had never heard of the game, much less the pre-order box program or what it meant. Most of that has been sorted out now, but there are still Gamestops and other outlets that have no idea what PotBS is or that don’t understand there’s any sort of pre-order program available before the major release date.

If that wasn’t bad enough, a lot of the boxes are missing the insert that has the pre-launch codes on it. Without those codes, the only thing you’re getting for that pre-order effort is the music CD. Buyers have been advised on the Flying Labs forums to shake boxes before buying (you should be able to hear the insert slide around) and to, if possible, get customer service to open up the box before you buy to ensure the insert is in there. Folks have reported going into a Best Buy somewhere only to find that fully half of the boxes are missing the inserts. If you get home and find the insert is missing, you’re supposed to go back to the store and swap your box for one that has the insert. Problem is, anyone who doesn’t read the forums isn’t going to know that.

Then there are the places you can order from online such as Amazon that list the various pre-order bennies in their descriptions, but also list the ship date as the major release date. And although it was stated at one point that Amazon would be shipping the pre-order boxes, when I asked if anyone knew for sure that this was happening and when, there was no answer.

So, while we kept our Amazon order in the pipeline just in case we couldn’t find the box, we decided to go looking for the pre-order box. I really want to get in on the whole early launch and so on. No luck at Gamestop, so we decided to try Best Buy. We went this Saturday.

The good news: they had a bunch of pre-order boxes on the shelves! Whooo!

We of course decided to do as suggested on the forums and take the boxes to customer service and have them checked for the insert. We explained to the girl there that many people had been finding that the boxes were missing some of their contents, and we wanted to check the boxes before we bought them. She looked at us like we were idiots and told us that it’s a pre-order box, it doesn’t come with software. We said yes, we know, we’re not talking about software—we mean the pre-launch keys that are supposed to come on a package insert. She rolled her eyes and said she’d check and disappeared into the back. A few minutes later she emerged and told us the box was supposed to be empty.

I’m thinking to myself… supposed to be empty? Why the hell would I come in here and buy an empty freaking box?

We calmly attempt to explain to her that no, as the box says right there on the back, buying the pre-order gets you early access to the game, and that there’s supposed to be an insert that gives you the keys for this. She gets angry and tells us just go buy the boxes and open them.

We leave at that point, shake the boxes well to make sure it sounds like they have the inserts, and buy them. Before we leave the store we double-check that they have the inserts in them, which thankfully they do. However, I have no doubt whatsoever that if they’d been missing the inserts, and we’d gone back to customer service to ask for new boxes, we would have been told the boxes were supposed to be empty and we couldn’t have new ones.

So the pre-order boxes were meant to encourage retail sales, and yes, they got me to go into a retail store and buy a game that normally I would have bought online. However, the experience of actually going in and buying that game convinced me never EVER to go to a Best Buy again if I can help it. And if you’re looking for Pirates of the Burning Sea pre-order boxes in the Annapolis area and go to the Best Buy near the Annapolis Mall, make damn sure you shake the boxes well before you buy them.

Skill training completed

Today’s review is of Mollie Katzen’s Recipes: Soups. It’s good, but it didn’t bowl me over. Which is too bad, because it’s exactly the kind of food I could use right now.

Sorry for so few reviews, posts, visits to other folks’ blogs, etc. this week. It’s been a very low-energy week. I finally saw the gastroenterologist yesterday, and he basically told me this: yep, looks like my gallbladder is slowly deteriorating and on its way out. But until a test like the HIDA scan or ultrasound shows that unequivocally (the HIDA results were borderline), a surgeon won’t be willing to take it out. So in the meantime, we try a few drugs that probably won’t do much but might if I’m lucky, and mostly we wait until my gallbladder gets bad enough that tests aren’t equivocal and a surgeon will take it out.

As the doc said, “welcome to 2007.”

On the one hand, I’m glad to have surgeons be a bit conservative, and not want to just open patients up and take out our innards at the drop of a hat. Every time we go under anaesthesia and they open us up there’s some risk, even if the procedure is incredibly minor, like this one. However, when they know a certain set of symptoms and test results mean they’ll have to do it eventually, then I can’t help thinking delaying is mostly about insurance: i.e., they won’t do the procedure unless they can prove to insurance they had to. Which means that in the meantime, I have pain and nausea.

*grumble, grumble*

Well, at least it’ll force me to eat a very low-fat diet, because damn do I hate nausea with a passion.

Anyway, I am aware that most of the site (the regular pages, rather than the blogs) is inaccessible right now. Unfortunately I need to wait for Jeffrey to get home from work to do anything about it if it doesn’t recover on its own. In the meantime, I can distract you with the rather hysterical shirt design Jervis came up with:

Level 70 Hottie

Also, since most of our old WoW guild has kind of died away until nearly all that’s left in terms of active players are a bunch of us who all know each other in real life, Jervis decided it was time to just go form our own guild, so we could have a guild vault and all that fun stuff. I don’t know who suggested it, but somehow we ended up with a guild name of “Innocent Bystander.” I find it incredibly funny to have that under my character names!

Since I’ve been so low-energy this week I’ve been playing around in the Pirates of the Burning Sea open beta. I love that game, and look forward to perhaps writing something of a review of it. I adore playing around with the economy. Wealth is your friend. Of course, going out and pirating merchant ships is an awful lot of fun too…

Oh, and I almost forgot. Apropos of nothing, you’ll need a whole box of tissues for this story.

I don’t watch most game-related videos. To be honest, I find most of them supremely boring. The majority of them are exactly what you’d expect to get from a video-maker whose true interest is gaming, not the making of videos. I.e., the focus is on nigh-meaningless (or at least fairly uninteresting) numbers flying across the screen, or showing off some supposedly ‘uber’ character, rather than on making a good video. However, there are three very notable exceptions to this that I can easily think of.

I don’t even play Guild Wars. But dang, Zack’s videos are good enough that I love them anyway! I’ve never pretended to have any skill whatsoever at reviewing anything related to movies or music; I tried it once or twice and quickly realized I should never do that again. But since this isn’t the reviews blog anyway, here’s my attempt at explaining what makes Zack’s videos so different from most of the ones out there.

For one, he has a perfect sense of editing. The movements utterly match the music. This is far and away one of the top reasons I love his videos.

One of the reasons I think his GW videos work particularly well is that the GW emotes are entertainingly spastic, particularly in contrast to the fancy outfits the characters wear, which inherently makes the videos funny to watch.

Zack also picks catchy songs that work well with video game emotes, and then he’s smart enough to stick with those emotes. So many fan-made videos end up as a bunch of ‘talking heads,’ where they somehow try to make it look like the characters present in the videos are speaking things from the songs for five minutes, and frankly that’s boring and dull.

Not that Zack is the only good game-based video maker out there, of course; of particular note is spiffworld, who makes fantastic Warcraft videos based on Jonathan Coulton’s music. If you prefer spastic and hilarious Zack is the better choice; if you like entertaining stories set to original music, spiffworld/Coulton is great:

And finally, no such list would be complete without Cranius’ inimitable “Big Blue Dress”. While it does have a bit of the “heavy on the numbers” problem, that takes a back seat to the more fun stuff. Keep an eye out for the gnome backup singers, and remember: a man who’s truly skilled can look quite good in Twill!