Warhammer seems to have decided that players need to scroll through and clickwrap-sign one useless, unread document per login, rather than two. This is intended to be a fig leaf for court action, despite Mr. Jacobs’s explicit statement that they do not expect players to read it every time. I will leave you to Lum for discussion and commentary, including links to meta-drama (what the blogosphere is all about).
Instead, I was curious about how many lifespans will be consumed by this click-through that will never benefit anyone, except the legal bloggers who explain why that argument did not work in court. The original stated plan was to waste thirty seconds per player per day (see the link), so the new plan is fifteen. There may be some plus or minus for a variety of factors, but I am going to hand-wave that away and assume it is a wash. You skip some days, you crash a lot some days, your graphics card is choking today, whatever. Fifteen seconds per player per day: how long until that consumes an entire lifespan?
Or, since this is the blogosphere, Mythic, how many people have you killed today?!!!?!
Life expectancy in the United States is 77.8 years. With eight hours of sleep per day, the average waking lifespan is 77.8*365.25*16*60*60= 1,636,787,520 seconds. Dividing by 15, it will take 109,119,168 player-days to have an entire lifespan spent scrolling and clicking. If Warhammer is a modest success with 100,000 subscriptions, this will consume one lifespan every three years. Warhammer has shipped 1.5 million units, which would take 72 days to consume a lifespan, so the time included with those boxes will get us almost half-way to the first one.
I like the “1/3 years/100,000 subscribers” calculation. That seems easy to multiply. If Warhammer gets 300,000 subscribers, it wastes an entire human lifespan per year on the scroll-and-click-through.
You can also argue about MMOs in general wasting human lifespans.
: Zubon
I know I have a post somewhere about how many lifespans a bug taking x minutes/player/day would consume, but my search fu is failing my tonight. Sleepy.
I received a Tome Unlock achievement in WAR last night awarding me for “Clicking myself 5000” times. Interestingly enough, I didn’t go blind – but after reading your article above does that equate my vanity clicking to some sort of death wish suicide? =)
Love it. I’m going to consider all extra clicks like this from now on.
lol
Since they’re actually saying they don’t expect the players to read it… is a judge going to consider it any more enforceable? I doubt it. Jacob’s comment may well have reduced their chances of succeeding in any litigation.