- RT @mymoneyshrugged: The government breaks your leg, and hands you a crutch saying "see without me, you couldn't walk." #
- @bargainr What weeks do you need a FoF host for? in reply to bargainr #
- Awesome tagline: The coolest you'll look pooping your pants. Yay, @Huggies! #
- A textbook is not the real world. Not all business management professors understand marketing. #
- RT @thegoodhuman: Walden on work "spending best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy (cont) http://tl.gd/2gugo6 #
Rebates Suck
About a month ago, I bought a new laptop.
The old one still works, but it’s kind of slow, and kind of in demand, especially when Kid #1 has friends over. When I need to get on the computer and whip up some side-hustle money, I shouldn’t have to fight with kids and deal with the whiny “Are you done, yet?” every 10 minutes.
This wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment purchase. Since the old laptop still worked, we had quite a bit of time to find the new one, so I started watching sales. And I waited.
Eventually, I found a great deal. I got a much bigger/faster/smarter/nicer laptop for about $375 with tax. There was a sale, a coupon code, and a rebate all in play to make that happen.
I don’t mind coupons and sales. In fact, I am a fan.
Rebates, however, irritate me.
It shouldn’t have been bad. After all, I was going to Staples, home of the Easy Button®. I should have been able to go home, fire up their website, fill out a form, and get my money in a couple of weeks, right?
Grr.
Apparently, the easy rebate doesn’t apply to the good rebates. If you’re getting $1.05 back on a $100 printer, you can do it in a few clicks. But if you’re getting $50 back on a $400 laptop, watch out. Then, Staples has the same horrible rebate process as everyone else. Print the forms, peel off the UPC label, snail-mail it to the middle of nowhere and wait 4 to 100 months for a gift card.
Double grr.
Obviously, they are hoping a statistically significant percentage of their customers forget to claim their money.
Shady rebate garbage.
Rebates are a marketing ploy to convince customers they are getting a sale, while hoping the customer forgets to ask for the sale price, thereby paying full price and being happy about it.
Ethical businesses would just have a sale and be done with it. Treating your customers right is good for business. Really.
Now, where did I put that receipt?
Can EverQuest Next Compete with World of Warcraft?
Legions of MMORPGs have graced the internet to do battle against Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, yet no challenger has bested
Blizzard’s massively multiplayer online juggernaut. Huge marketing campaigns and years of development by the makers of games like Star Wars: The Old Republic and Rift have left players less than satisfied, with an initial big burst of player excitement and eventual failure.
Every software developer that creates an MMO that tries to take a slice of Blizzard’s pie invariably ends up as a “free to play” model. The latest MMORPG slated to try and take a shot at fighting Blizzard’s dominance is EverQuest Next. The developers are looking to lure players to EverQuest from a variety of other games such as EVE Online and Warcraft, but the design of the game seems to straddle a few different genres.
As with other game releases, the developers at Sony Online Entertainment have tried to suggest that their game will be “new” and “different.” It’s not difficult to understand why skepticism is high. Every game that has seen release in the past few years has had developers boast the same and has crashed and burned just a month or so after the release.
Players of EverQuest Next will find a game focus that includes some familiar fantasy elements of an MMO game (like elves), but developers have sought to step away from the traditional, linear questing experience and offer some world-building opportunities for players (much like EVE Online). One of the interesting features expected of the game is the ability for players to impact permanent change upon the landscape.
For example, during wartime a player might decide to build a wall somewhere, and he or she can accomplish this and actually have that wall erected as a permanent feature in the game world. Similarly, when players fight one another or monsters, a spell or explosion that creates a hole in the world will remain permanently. One of the developers likened this feature to the idea of putting Minecraft into an MMORPG.
Although absolutely everything in the world can’t be destroyed (certain structures will be permanent), this opportunity to build, create, and destroy represents a jump forward from the same opportunities players have had in games like EVE Online. World of Warcraft has occasionally offered players the opportunity to change the landscape, but not on a regular basis. Such changes have generally been implemented after a reset with all the realms taken offline, after which players would log in and see the changes.
However, the lack of appreciable impact on the environment hasn’t stopped players from flocking to World of Warcraft for nearly a decade, and EverQuest Next will need to bring an amazing player experience to lure away current players as well as retain them. The ebb and flow of Warcraft’s player base often coincides with the new release of another MMORPG, but after a month or so the new game’s servers are ghost towns. It won’t take long to see whether EverQuest Next can compete with World of Warcraft.
