December 07, 2005 - Among the intelligent species that emerged on the planet Irth, humanity was the most organized, and thus attained dominance. When a virulent plague struck, the others fled the open air in panic, seeking safety in seclusion. While their fear keeps them in hiding long after the pestilence abated, the surface is far from devoid of life. Creatures of many kinds roam its plains, prowl its forests and lurk in its marshes. Most of them are aggressive by nature, which means even taking a few short steps outside the sheltering walls of the cities and towns can lead to mortal danger.

Magic Hat Software's Irth Online is a fantasy-themed persistent state project that emphasizes role-playing and allowing players to determine their own in-game experience. In live service since the early part of November, its setting is one in which it an all too tenuous peace exists among three diverse civilizations, the northern Arcadians, the swamp-dwelling Morbus and the tropical Mezoteks. Among the title's features, some that are likely to be of interest, especially for those players who prefer open-ended virtual worlds, are a free-form storyline and a skill system in which characters can learn any ability without racial or class-based restrictions.

Includes nine exclusive screenshots

Tutorial, Trial and Discount Offer

Hey, how's it hangin'? Things at Magic Hat are really coming along. We launched Irth Online on 11/01/05 and we're off to a roaring start. I'd like to invite your members to take a trial account. They can play for free! Every 48 hours, your character gets wiped, but it's enough time to see if our open skill system is the right game for you. When you start the game, you will begin on a tutorial island where you can learn the game. The island is non-PvP, so you'll be in a safe environment learning the basics of the game without getting beaten, battered and bruised by let's say, the more aggressive sorts.
Keep in mind that we are an open skill system, no classes, no leveling. Develop your characters and professions in any way you see fit. Don't like what your character has become? Change it by doing different things. The tutorial starts out by showing you how the UI works by virtue of accepting a quest. So you will initially learn UI and quests simultaneously. You will discover how to navigate your character, and control the camera through basic mouse clicks and keystrokes. You will also learn how to use all the menus and drop down boxes, and how to customize the UI to your liking.

Wie Hoglund durch Reverse-Engineering herausgefunden hat, l?uft dieser W?chter alle 15 Sekunden. Er liest zun?chst die Fenstertitel aller laufenden Anwendungen aus, schickt sie durch eine Hash-Funktion und vergleicht das Ergebnis mit einer Liste von Hashes unerwünschter Programme. Sodann schaut das Programm in den Adressraum jedes im System laufenden Prozesses und bildet aus bestimmten Adressbereichen ebenfalls Hash-Werte, die es mit schwarzen Listen vergleicht. Entdeckt es Verd?chtiges, so wird der Account des Spielers gesperrt.

In der im Internet geführten Diskussion sagen die einen, es handelt sich dabei eindeutig um Spyware, denn es geh?rt sich für eine Software einfach nicht, in andere Prozesse hineinzusehen, nicht in die Fenstertitel und schon gar nicht in den Adressraum. Die anderen argumentieren, dass die Software ja nichts ausspioniert. Sie l?uft nur Client-seitig und sendet keine der untersuchten Daten im Klartext an den Server. Es ist nicht einmal erwiesen, dass Hash-Werte übermittelt werden.

You'll meet someone who plays an MMORPG for a living.

Let's take this a little bit further. You earn gold in World of Warcraft, gold with which you can buy these in-game objects. If this game gold is truly valuable to my life, if it lets me get more value out of the pasttime I already pay real-world money for, what's to stop me from paying real money for game money? Nothing. Go to Ebay and do a search for World of Warcraft Gold and let your jaw drop open.

Here we have game currency being traded for real currency, and at a better exchange rate than the Iraqi Dinar.

If we go further still, we can imagine a person winning rare weapons and selling them on auction sites or directly to other players they meet. We can imagine somebody working full-time to gather in-game gold by slaying gold-shitting squirrels (or whatever you do to get gold in the game) and then exchanging it for real dollars to pay the real rent with. Sure, it may be decades before you see this kind of-

Oh, wait. There are people doing that right now.

And if you're chuckling and shaking your head at the glazed-eyed geeks who can't tell the difference between game money and real money, let me ask you something: when Square bought Enix for $727 million two years ago, do you think they they actually stacked crate after crate of cash on a flatbed truck and then drove the $727 million over to their offices?

No. That money only existed as numbers in a computer. In fact, not even 10% of the money in the American economy exists as physical, printed currency. All of the rest exists on servers and hard drives and in the imaginations of the people. It has value for the exact same reason Wow Gold has value: because people think it has value.

I'm guessing that if you started this article thinking it was a joke, this is the point when you sobered up and realized that, as author H.G. Wells predicted, "the future will accost us with boob-slapping ferocity."

The study of consumer behavior examines all aspects of consumers' feelings, thoughts, and reasons for making particular decisions in purchasing products or services or subscribing to ideas, and also how consumers use and dispose of products. Influences on a consumer's beliefs or practices may be influenced by family and friends, religious beliefs, cultural attitudes, by social expectations, by professional standards, by advertising appeals, or by any combination of these factors. While some of these influences are felt in the conscious mind of a consumer (all my friends are wearing a certain kind of boots this fall, so I've decided to buy a pair just like them), an even greater factor may be unconscious beliefs or associations (the smell of this fabric softener reminds me of my mother's laundry day when I was a child, so I'll pick it over the other that doesn't carry personal associations).

The most obvious application for knowledge of consumer behavior is obviously marketing strategy—understanding that a growing number of consumers are on low-carbohydrate diets, for instance, has led to an ever-increasing number of products that are labeled as “Low Carb.?But the study of consumer behavior also has repercussions for public policy (allowing government agencies to make regulations to protect consumers), social marketing (promoting ideas that encourage people to act in their own best interest, such as wearing seatbelts or adopting safe-sex practices), and consumer education (teaching practices that make us smarter shoppers, such as buying in bulk to save money or avoiding produce that has been treated with dangerous pesticides).

Marketers may examine consumer behavior using either primary or secondary research. Primary research is that which is done specifically for a particular product or service, examining attitudes among consumers who make use of it. Secondary research was done by another party or for another purpose, such as census data. While secondary research has many fruitful applications, its uses may be far more limited than primary research, which can be designed address any issue of interest to the marketer.

Primary research is usually conducted by asking consumers to answer survey questions, either by mail, internet, telephone, or in person. Mail surveys are useful because they are inexpensive and may ask as many questions as desired, but the return rate is usually quite low, and, as the respondents are self-selected, the results may be unreliable (people who fill out a survey that comes in the mail with a detergent sample, for instance, may already be loyal to that brand, which isn't helpful in understanding how to recruit new consumers). Telephone surveys may reach a somewhat broader audience, but they are more expensive to conduct and are limited by the participants' patience—most people are unwilling to devote more than five minutes to answering a surveyor's questions over the phone. Internet surveys can be cheap to set up, but exposure to aggressive internet advertising has made many consumers resistant to surveying by this method, and, as with telephone surveys, those who will participate may grow frustrated if the survey isn't brief. Questioning consumers in person, by setting up a booth or desk in a shopping area, can be an effective way of reaching a target group, but face-to-face interviews are particularly prone to unintentional bias. The unconscious behavior or facial expressions of an interlocutor may cause the consumer to answer questions in the way he or she believes is desired.

Any attempt to survey consumers, though, must deal with the issue of bias. The simple wording of a question can predispose consumers to respond in a certain way. For instance, asking “Do you like Coke better than Pepsi??is likely to produce a higher number of Coke loyalists than simply asking “What's your favorite soft drink??Any human involvement in the survey, whether by phone or in person, just adds an additional potential for biased results.

Another way of examining consumer attitudes is through assembling six to 12 consumers in a focus group. Focus groups may work in a less structured way, getting participants to begin a conversation about a class or group of products or services rather than asking pointed questions. This can help avoid bias from those conducting the research and allow consumers to express attitudes that might never have been discovered in a more structured survey, but, as in any group interaction, dominant personalities may influence how others express their ideas. Focus groups are also expensive to conduct and unreliable in making generalizations about wider populations unless many groups are assembled.

Direct observation of consumer behavior in a shopping environment can be a useful tool, allowing us to gauge, for instance, if consumers approaching a display of food products really do go to look at the “Low Carb?packaging first. In some occasions, researchers will examine subjects' physiological responses to advertising. Does a commercial for a cake frosting make the subject salivate? Does a man's heart rate increase when he sees beautiful women in a beer commercial? Again, these methods may be quite expensive and time-consuming, and a great many consumers must be examined for the results to be statistically significant.

No one method of conducting primary research is perfect or necessarily more advantageous generally than others. In selecting methodology, marketers must consider what kind of information is most important to gather and select the most appropriate method.

A Familiar World

World of Warcraft draws heavily upon the lore of the Warcraft universe. Long-time fans of the Warcraft games are finally able to step into the world from a player's perspective, and experience the universe firsthand. People, places, and units from the strategy games are finally brought to life in World of Warcraft.

You can visit such places as the Burning Steppes, where Grom Hellscream fell in battle against the demon lord Mannoroth, and Ironforge, where the dwarves make their home below the mountain. Legendary heroes, such as Thrall, Cairne Bloodhoof, and King Magni Bronzebeard, are also in the game, presiding over their respective peoples as leaders in their race's capitals.

Guards in the human city of Stormwind look just like footmen from Warcraft III, peasants in the human town of Hillsbrad look exactly like their counterparts in the strategy games, and orc peons shuffle about the farms of Go'Shek in the Arathi Highlands. Night elf players can even see gargantuan Ancient Protectors patrolling the elven lands of Teldrassil, while a towering Ancient of War waits to greet all visitors to Darnassus.

World of Warcraft draws heavily upon the lore of the Warcraft universe. Long-time fans of the Warcraft games are finally able to step into the world from a player's perspective, and experience the universe firsthand. People, places, and units from the strategy games are finally brought to life in World of Warcraft.

You can visit such places as the Burning Steppes, where Grom Hellscream fell in battle against the demon lord Mannoroth, and Ironforge, where the dwarves make their home below the mountain. Legendary heroes, such as Thrall, Cairne Bloodhoof, and King Magni Bronzebeard, are also in the game, presiding over their respective peoples as leaders in their race's capitals.

Guards in the human city of Stormwind look just like footmen from Warcraft III, peasants in the human town of Hillsbrad look exactly like their counterparts in the strategy games, and orc peons shuffle about the farms of Go'Shek in the Arathi Highlands. Night elf players can even see gargantuan Ancient Protectors patrolling the elven lands of Teldrassil, while a towering Ancient of War waits to greet all visitors to Darnassus.

World of Warcraft presents many different monsters to challenge you in battle. These creatures roam the countryside and populate vast dungeons and aboveground locations. There are wandering beasts, such as wolves, spiders, scorpions (called scorpids in this world), six-legged crocodiles called crocolisks, crabs, vultures, hyenas, big cats, bears, and more. More sinister enemies also block your travels. Humanoid foes of every kind, such as pirates, bandits, cultists, and soldiers from the opposing faction, join more unnatural monsters like undead, oozes, gryphons, and elementals, in providing conflict and danger on your journeys.

You'll also see some familiar monstrous creatures, such as ogres, gnolls, centaurs, satyrs, murlocs, wildkin, and others, that are inspired by the hostile creeps of Warcraft III. And you'll encounter more spectacular enemies like demons, infernals, dragonspawn, and mighty dragons stalking the dungeons and high-level areas of the world.

The territories and terrain you will be able to explore are vast and varied. In addition to borrowing from some of the most storied locations in Warcraft history, the game also shows off many different kinds of environments, such as the lush forests in Ashenvale and Feralas, the snowy mountains in Dun Morogh, the savannah of the Barrens, the plains of Mulgore, and the deserts of Tanaris. Swamps in Un'Goro Crater, jungles in Stranglethorn Vale, farmland in Elwynn Forest, and even deforested hills in Stonetalon Mountains are some more of the many environmental regions you can explore. Terrain that has been vastly altered by magic and the ravages of war also appear in the game. The razed city of Dalaran, encased in a protective magic shell, is a painful reminder of the devastation of the Reign of Chaos, while the infested Eastern and Western Plaguelands are filled with diseased animals and plantlife, courtesy of the Scourge's plague.

This long list of fascinating terrain doesn't even include the underground environments and dungeons of the world. There are dungeons available for all ranges of mid- to high-level players, and offer many rich quests, rewards, and enemies to encounter in the depths below ground.