2008年11月5日星期三

The Invisible Factors of The WoW’s Success

These Statement:

The massively multiplayer online role play game,World of Warcraft,now is in the lead of world online game market.There are some reasons you already knew,but there are some factors you didn’t notice.Let’s search for these invisible factors.

Outline:

Ⅰ.Qusetion was raised in a reaport,along with some curiosities.

A .There are more than two million players in the west and about five million in china, who are willing to pay for playing this game.

Ⅱ. Invisible factors of the success.

A. Go-it-alone mode of gameplay.

B. Easier control and “fun factors”.

C. Different options offers to players.

D. Long-year experience in online service.

E. Blizzard’s reputation and its’ good concept of creating a game.

Ⅲ. Conclusion



A new report from analyst group DFC Intelligence's David Cole looks at the unique path that gave rise to Blizzard's groundbreakingly-populated massively muitiplayer online role-play game (MMORPG) World of Warcraft, including the myths behind its international impact, and the forecast for competitors hoping to break off a chunk of Blizzard's success.

The report follows below:

'With the interactive entertainment world’s attention about to turn to the new console systems, we thought this month we’d instead take a look at one of the most successful PC game products ever, World of Warcraft (WoW). WoW is of course, a `subscription-based massively multiplayer online role-play game (MMORPG). What makes the product unique is not necessarily the number of users, but the number of users that are willing to pay up to $15 a month to play the game. The game has raised the bar for MMORPG products, particularly in terms of revenue generation. However, there are some fundamental misconceptions about the game that are particularly problematic. In the end, it is a great game that has perhaps recalibrated investor expectations for MMORPG products beyond what makes sense. There is a lot of supposedly new talk about the “World of Warcraft model”. To longtime industry observers, this talk is more retro (or even tired) than it is revolutionary. Still, WoW developer Blizzard Entertainment obviously did something right and it only seems natural to ask what it was. It is only after understanding how Blizzard made WoW a success that companies can ask such questions as: is that success duplicable and if so is our particular company in a position to duplicate that success?

What we know for sure is that World of Warcraft has had one million North American subscribers and one million European subscribers for a total of over two million Western subscribers, not including five million chinese subscribers. This, in and of itself, is an astounding feat. No game had been able to top 750,000 subscribers in those territories, let alone one million or two million. It is important, however, to remember that in terms of revenue generation, World of Warcraft is just one star among the many high-flying video games with millions of unit sales.

Unlike some games which force players to cooperate, WoW facilitates the go-it-alone mode of gameplay. A good deal of the action in World of Warcraft does not occur within the massively multiplayer setting where there are hundreds to thousands of people. Many quests allow the player to enter into an “instance” which is a sort of parallel universe in which the player and whatever group they are part of leave the main gameworld and enter a “court” of their own. Instancing, as it is known, is a controversial practice among the hard-core MMORPG crowd because it breaks the illusion of the game as one seamless “virtual world”.

On the other hand, it allows players greater control of their individual experience and reduces server overhead and lag. The practice also allowed Blizzard to provide direction for player versus player (PvP) gameplay. The normal MMORPG focuses primarily on player versus environment (PvE) experience where a user goes on a “quest” and focuses on fighting computer generated monsters and building their character level. With PvP players fight each other. For WoW, Blizzard introduced “Battlegrounds” about 6 months after the original game release. These are essentially minigames that are almost like the “Deathmatches” from first person shooter (FPS) type games. In the first Battlegrounds release, there were an epic game with up to 40 players and a “Capture-the-Flag” 20 player match. The battles also provided a much needed boost to the factional strife that World of Warcraft fosters between the game universe’s races, the Alliance and the Horde.


Both the PvE and PvP instanced content has proven incredibly popular even as it has led to derisive commentary from MMORPG purists. It appears to us that instanced content lets Blizzard formalize some of the way users play MMOG. For years, different play styles led to social problems among players who were following different implicit rules. Also, many users are not attracted to a purely open-ended game. Some players want clear winners and losers as in an FPS or sports game. Now, people who like PvP battles can engage in those in their own arena while PvE players can hang out in the auction house. This has enabled World of Warcraft to draw players who would normally be classified as moderate gamers, the types who play Counter-Strike, Call of Duty, or Battlefield.

Instancing and support for solo players, however, are not limited to World of Warcraft. Many other games provide the same types of play to various degrees. A great deal of WoW’s success can probably be attributed to the elusive “fun” factor. So is it simply about building another product that consumers find to be fun? Developing an online game with the quality of WoW is probably within the reach of several companies, assuming they have around $25 to $50 million to invest in creating a well-designed fun game. However, having a high-quality, fun product was only one part of WoW’s unprecedented success. There are several other key factors that will be much harder to duplicate. Blizzard’s global execution was based on years of experience and backed with very strong brand recognition. The foundation for WoW’s success was started years before actual product development commenced.

World of Warcraft is the first truly global online game. At least as impressive as the game’s success in China is its more than 1 million customers in Europe. No other MMORPG has even claimed 100,000 European subscribers.

Blizzard was able to launch a product on a global basis because they had years of experience with releasing and operating online games around the world.Blizzard’s decade long experience with its free Battle.net online game service was clearly a major factor in WoW’s success. Most online game developers have had mere thousands or at best tens of thousands of users. Blizzard was used to dealing with hundreds of thousands of users on a daily basis. This type of large-scale operations experience cannot be underestimated. WoW did not come out of nowhere and was the result of years of experience. This type of experience is probably impossible to duplicate.

Finally of course there is Blizzard’s reputation and the brand strength of Warcraft. Blizzard’s franchises like Warcraft, StarCraft and Diablo were among the most popular PC games of all time. Blizzard is definitely a company well-known for quality of product not quantity. They are a company with a reputation for taking the time to get things right. For example, it took over six years between the release of Warcraft II and Warcraft III. Furthermore, Blizzard, at the time of WoW’s release, was probably the most respected online gaming company in the world. Through years of supporting online games at Battle.net with a high level of service, the company was known as responsive to player desires and just plain good at running online games. Unlike many game company brands, Blizzard had proven its international appeal with massive popularity of StarCraft in Asia, particularly outside Japan. Blizzard even had some indirect benefit from piracy. Warcraft games were some of the most popular pirated games in China and other parts of Asia and this lead to strong brand recognition.

After knowing this,you’ll find how did WoW become the most populor game in the world.

Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI), born at the beginning of 1950s, is a young and promising academic subject. Because the question Can machines think? is always disputed, we can not precisely define AI. Usually, we think that AI is a branch of computer science. From the history of AI, we can clearly find that AI together with computer grown up. AI can be widely applied in many practical fields form robots for exploring the planets to automated personal assistants for navigating in the world of networked computer systems.

Keyword:Artificial Intelligence


1 Introduction

Artificial intelligence (AI), as a young and promising branch of knowledge, has attracted a great many researchers’ attention and fast developed in the past 50 years. Nowadays, some artificial intelligence systems have been applied in a wide variety of practical fields. For example, there are programs that generate investment strategies by predicting trends in the stock market, diagnose patient illnesses suggesting treatment, and control robots in factories.

The fast development of AI has gone beyond the most people’s anticipation. The success in biology and modeling of mathematics leads to the foundation and application in computational intelligence systems. These computational intelligence systems refer to the fields of man-made nerve network, evolutionary computation, swarm optimization algorithms and man-made life. Therefore, artificial intelligence can be considered as the combination of some subjects, include computer science, philosophy, physiology, sociology, information science and computation mathematics.

This paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we define the artificial intelligence. In Section 3, we present the brief history of artificial intelligence. In section 4, we give some practical applications of artificial intelligence. Finally, we will summarize our paper.

2 The Definition of AI

It is difficult to precisely define the artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence, broadly defined, is concerned with intelligent behavior in artifacts. Intelligent behavior, involves perception, reasoning, learning, communicating and acting in complex environments. By the same time, AI can also be defined as the design and analysis of computer programs that behave intelligently. These programs are constructed to perform as a human or an animal whose behavior we consider intelligent. AI researchers have written programs to control nuclear power plants and diagnose problems in complicated electronic devices. However, it has proved to be more difficult to write programs that can reliably recognize faces or clean our house without destroying furniture.

AI has one of its long-term goals at the development of machines that can do any thing as well as humans can, or possibly even better. At present, the goal of AI is to understand this kind of artificial behaviors whether it occurs in machines or in humans or other animals.

In order to measure artificial intelligence, Alan Turing, a pioneer in the field of computer, once proposed an intelligence test for AI. In the Turing test, a human judge is allowed to ask a program through some sort of an interface such as a video terminal. If the program can fool the human into believing that it is another human responding rather than a computer, then the program is judged intelligent. You can imagine variants of the test in which you manipulate a robot’s environment to see how the robot responds and judge the robot as intelligent or not depending on whether the robot responds in accord with how a human might in the same situation. Now, the Turing test is not considered a very useful test of a machine’s intelligence. For example, Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA program uses some very simple tricks but appears to the tolerant user to be able to carry on a rather realistic. In order to search a less biased arbiter for what constitutes intelligence, many researchers have employed engineering criteria to judge their progress in building AI systems. For instance, if you wish to build a robot to deliver mail, then you can judge the robot’s performance based on its skill in maneuvering in an office environment and its accuracy and speed in routing mail to its intended destination.

3 The Brief History of AI

The first step toward artificial intelligence was taken long ago by Aristotle (384-322 B.C) when he set about to explain and codify certain styles of deductive reasoning that he called syllogisms. Later, some scientists and mathematicians started to pursue automated reasoning. Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) invented a calculus philosophicus or ratiocinator in which all knowledge, including moral and metaphysical truths, can some day be brought. Of course, it was a dream that could not be fulfilled with the technical apparatus of the time. Until George Boole [Boole 1854] developed the foundations of propositional logic, automated reasoning had a substantial progress.

In 1958, John McCarthy proposed using the predicate calculus as a language for representing and using knowledge in a system, he called the “advice taker”. This system was to be told what it needed to know rather than programmed. Although, some controversy survived among AI researchers, the predicate calculus and several of its variants constitute the foundation for knowledge representation in AI. During the 1960s and early 1970s, much of the early AI work explored a variety of problem representations, search techniques and general heuristics employing them in computer programs that could solve simple puzzles, play games and retrieve information. One of the influential programs was the General Problem Soler, written by Allen Newell, Cliff Shaw and Herbert Simon.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, more capable programs had been produced, which contained the knowledge required to mimic expert human performance at several tasks, including diagnosis, design and analysis. The program that is credited with first demonstrating the importance of large amounts of domain-specific knowledge is DENDRAL, a system for predicting the structure of organic molecules given their chemical formula and mass spectrogram analyses.

On May 11, 1997, an IBM program named DEEP BLUE beat the reigning world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, by 3.5 to 2.5 in a six game match. It greatly encouraged AI researchers’ confidence. Projecting present trends into the future, I think that the day when machine can do things as well as humans can is not far away.

4 The Application of AI

Artificial intelligence is the basis for a host of practical systems. Some of these systems have already existed, but the others are being designed for the future. The following presents some applications of AI.

Language translation systems There are now AI translators that you can speak to and have them print transcripts of what you say in foreign languages. The most advanced systems can answer questions based on the information in the text and produce useful summaries.

Air traffic control systems The skies over our airports are becoming crowded as air travel becomes more popular. Tracking thousands of flights, personnel, and maintenance schedules is a difficult job for humans. Computers help by scheduling the arrival and departure of flights to maximize passenger safety and minimize delays.

Supervisory systems As large office buildings and shopping malls become more complex, we need systems to control public services. A supervisory AI system controls elevators, powers and climate conditions. It also manages security and safety inspections and directs visitors to their destinations.

Automated personal assistants It is now possible to build AI systems to actively guide you in using computer networks. They can search through web pages and filter your mail so that you read only the most important and interesting items. They can help you find information, buy products and services, and locate people through the electronic networks.

Intelligent highways Traffic congestion is a growing problem on our major highways. However, doubling the size of our road system would be expensive in the countryside and impossible in cities where space is limited. Instead, efforts are now underway to build AI systems that optimize the usage of existing highways by broadcasting traffic warnings, redirecting vehicles. In the future, your car will plan the route to your destination in coordination with the automated highway managers.

Robots for hazardous conditions Toxic waste cleanup, especially in the nuclear industry, will become increasingly important in the coming years. There are also important applications in biohazard handling in hospital; underground mining; and underwater mining, salvage, construction, and agriculture. Robots can also handle no hazardous tasks that are unpleasant or tedious, such as garbage collection or harvesting crops.

5 Summary

Artificial intelligence is a diverse and rapidly evolving field emphasizing a wide range of techniques and applications. Because the question can machines think?is always disputed, artificial intelligence itself is fully filled with challenge and chance. Therefore, I believe that artificial intelligence will develop quickly and produce a great deal of wealth in the 21 century.

The company’s logistics control

Abstract :expansion of a development company to a certain size, the company's logistics management and control has become more and more important, the traditional "people-oriented" management style has been far from consistent with the requirements of management, financial workers how to put their own And the role of the company's internal control quickly adapt to the needs of the senior management of the company, how to coordinate with the management of the company's full participation in the management and so on, in contemporary business management in a lot of attention.
Key words: Procurement Management Inventory Management

With the size of the company's internal controls and expand the demand for the company's financial control Gengjinyiceng has penetrated into every corner of the company, and in practical work to achieve certain degree of success. In the company's financial control, material management has become very prominent. I combine the study of laws and regulations and practical work experience, for control of the logistics issues to talk about the point of view:

First,to strengthen the work of the Finance

1. To have a comprehensive financial management and hands-on experience in charge of this work. He and the practice of reform ideas to a large extent on financial management on behalf of the company's direction. At the same time, to give the others the terms of reference in order to work.
2. Accounting department accounting staff to clear division of labor, the establishment of system of personal responsibility so that everyone can be a lot of pressure, control was everything. At the same time, of course, should establish an incentive mechanism so that it can improve long-term initiative, each of the accounting staff to play a good style of professional ethics.

3. Accountants to be under the jurisdiction of the accounts, accounts, account-line, quantitative and qualitative and timely reporting of financial statements, true to the legitimate provision of financial data.

Second,to strengthen the management of the procurement

1. Materiel procurement plans and the establishment of examination and approval system. 公 In the master plan on the basis of specific supply procurement plan. Concrete materials procurement, should be strictly in accordance with the "first application for approval and then buy" principle. No declaration of the examination and approval procedures, storage is not acceptance, non-financial reporting, all economic bear. "Execution before" approach to phase out in the end. Otherwise, the "exceptional" repeated the thing.
2. To enhance the quality of procurement management. For the company's product quality and stability, we must use quality raw materials. Managers to deal with the raw materials used in accordance with the requirements of the company's product quality standard specifications for the procurement and distribution buyers, suppliers, warehouse management and inspection personnel. If the buyer of goods into the sub-standard quality of procurement specifications put forward by the quality of materials, storage can refuse acceptance of suppliers of goods and to be returned, economic self-responsibility, or discount prices.

3. Purchase price control. The prices of raw materials directly affect the level of direct costs and benefits should shop around to do. In determining supply and prices before the market carried out an extensive investigation in order to achieve a fair, open, shelf-life, low-cost. In addition, regardless of the size of the value of procurement, first of all must be obtained from the concept of value-added tax invoices. Obtained from the value-added tax invoices to cut costs is one aspect.
Third, strengthen inspection of goods and materials, storage management

1. Establish a strict verification system. The procurement of goods by category, specification, supply unit, and the number of damaged storage for the pre-inspection, and material number is expected to issue a single admission procedures for storage, control is essential to strengthen the material. Although the procedures are very complicated and can not be reduced and the light. Members of acceptance in accordance with certain procedures for inspection, after passing the acceptance in the relevant bills to stamp Chapter acceptance by the buyer and quality inspector, member of acceptance to sign the bill as well as the executives agreed to pay the amount of signatures to form a chain of control.

2. To strengthen the management of storage. A storekeeper on the storage of materials in an orderly manner categories, placed neatly on a regular basis and inspection, finishing in a timely manner. This would overcome the public's confusion in the management of stocks, raw materials to eliminate lag time deposit deterioration, loss of theft, had embezzled his and other undesirable phenomena occur, to ensure that corporate cost control, and at the same time establish and improve relevant rules and regulations, such as goods signs, security, fire prevention , And public health, and effective control.

Fourth, strengthen the management of supply distribution

1. Issuing vouchers. Expected to receive one-on accurate records to the Treasury Department to release the number of material handling and leadership signed the document, the strict implementation of the voucher expected to receive will help put an end to no one expected to get under-reporting of multi-collar, and control of treasury stock shortages, but also conducive to Accounting departments of the cost of production, control the type and quantity of raw materials, workshops and departments to reduce the backlog of waste. At the same time expected to receive a single financial report in a timely manner, in favor of financial accounting and oversight. At the same time, expected to lead to the use of clearly marked, so as to the accuracy of financial accounting, cost the correct assessment.

2. Strictly control the replacement material. One batch to specify in detail the reasons by the competent leadership signed the document. Due to the use of materials such as man-made improper operation caused by the batch, others should be held responsible, not fraud.

3. Orders for the production of single-end analysis. Should be done one month on a regular basis, to be completed in a single Ministry of Finance, production control, product management and other related departments. Production orders, the actual number of qualified storage products, such as the number of substandard goods in a clear one by one, to improve the rate of input-output analysis in a timely manner to provide a first-hand information.

Fifth, strengthen the management of the Treasury finished

1. Establish a strict system of storage products. Strengthening the system of storage of finished products to ensure that the company can generate revenue. Cost control is important, but if not full enterprise storage products, the business plan is expected revenue will come to nothing, cost control, efficiency can not be achieved. The link to relax, it is possible that some people within and outside the collusion, drilling system loopholes, the company capital, loss of profits. Many companies spend money on the ERP and other logistics control system, as long as the system according to the requirements of the operation, strict and orderly, will be able to achieve our goals.
2. Stringent delivery system. Shipping, we must carefully check shipments of a single species, specifications, quantities, so that they match. Must have a signature delivery, reduce inventory and accounts in a timely manner. White, no arrears are shipped, and offenders fined.
3. Inventory on a regular basis. The inventory of raw materials and procedures for the same warehouse. In case of shortage of goods, should be held immediately and an additional reason for the responsibility.

如此效果

“听说你在请精神病医生看病,你觉得对你有没有帮助?”
“当然有。几星期前,电话铃响我不敢接。但现在,电话铃响不响我都去接。”

应急措施

一精神科医生在半夜接到一个发疯似的电话,是他的一个患偷窃狂的病人打来的。
“大夫,你一定得帮帮我,”他恳求道,“我那种非偷不可的老毛病又犯了。”
“哦,看在老天的份上,”精神科医生回答说,“就地偷两只烟灰缸,到早晨再给我打电话吧。”

神与教皇

一位富翁为一家精神病医院捐赠了一笔巨额资金,他在参观
时,一位精神病患者对他吼道:“我是教皇!”
富翁皱了皱眉头说:“谁说的呢?”
病人居然理直气壮地说:“神说的!”
这时,只见另一个患者跳出来大声说:“不,我没说过这种话,这个家伙自以为是教皇。”

与众不同

一位精神不正常的病人,在医院倒立着走路。
医生说:“杰克,快站直了走路,这样走多累呀!”
他充耳不闻,依然我行我素。
医生又问:“为什么你要做出这般异样的举动呢?”
他一边倒着走一边说:“我这么走是为了显得与其他病人不一样,不再让人把我看成精神病人了。”