lord_dragonsfyre - Slashdot User

EA Flip-Flops On Battlefield: Heroes Pricing, Fans Angry 221

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday December 02, 2009 @07:50AM from the put-your-money-where-your-gun-is dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Ben Kuchera from Ars Technica is reporting that EA/DICE has substantially changed the game model of Battlefield: Heroes, increasing the cost of weapons in Valor Points (the in-game currency that you earn by playing) to levels that even hardcore players cannot afford, and making them available in BattleFunds (the in-game currency that you buy with real money). Other consumables in the game, such as bandages to heal the players, suffered the same fate, turning the game into a subscription or pay-to-play model if players want to remain competitive. This goes against the creators' earlier stated objectives of not providing combat advantage to paying customers. Ben Cousins, from EA/DICE, argued, 'We also frankly wanted to make buying Battlefunds more appealing. We have wages to pay here in the Heroes team and in order to keep a team large enough to make new free content like maps and other game features we need to increase the amount of BF that people buy. Battlefield Heroes is a business at the end of the day and for a company like EA who recently laid off 16% of their workforce, we need to keep an eye on the accounts and make sure we are doing our bit for the company.' The official forums discussion thread is full of angry responses from upset users, who feel this change is a betrayal of the original stated objectives of the game."

Comment Re:Which do you believe? (Score 1) 1766

by lord_dragonsfyre on Monday April 21, 2008 @02:59PM (#23148878) Attached to: Ben Stein's 'Expelled' - Evolution, Academia and Conformity

I'd say a lot of it is not observable or disprovable, perhaps insightful. Theories such as infinitely expanding and collapsing universe, universes. And various other ideas often taught have serious lacks on disprovability. But there is no issue in teaching or discussing these in class.

Be careful with terms like "observable" or "disprovable". We can't observe the creation of the universe, but the Big Bang theory does make testable predictions that we can observe, and thereby infer some level of evidence for it. If we observe a universe that matches the universe we would expect from a Big Bang event (which by and large, I think we have, though I know less about cosmology than about other fields), the theory gains credibility; if we observe a universe that doesn't, then it loses it.

This is where I disagree. First off, I think that hypothesis and tests can be cited for intelligent design. I think statements to the nature of discovery of design patterns across species and various levels is just one good prediction for testing. No worse than Darwin's proposition that transitional forms should exist.

Name one. Seriously, the ID creationist movement has been remarkably un-forthcoming about these testable predictions. The closest we've gotten are Behe's "irreducible complexity", which is essentially an argument from personal incredulity, every known instance of which has been debunked, and Dembski's "specified complexity", which is mostly just a hideous misunderstanding of information theory. There's a profound lack of solid, testable claims coming out of ID-c, and that's very telling.

The so-called "design patterns across species" are being explored right now in the very cool field of evo-devo, by the way, and turn out to strongly support our modern understanding of genetics and evolution.

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