Columbia Games is having one of their 30% off sales, this one to celebrate Father's Day. This is why I dropped out of Columbia Games' autoship program, which only gives you a 20% discount. If I, as a loyal customer, subscribe to an autoship program or any other program where I get a discount, I really get annoyed when there's a sale and people who haven't been keeping up suddenly get a better price. It's sort of like spurning your core customers.

Columbia Games has also really slowed down their historical wargames development in favor of Victory, their generic wargame series, and Wizard Kings, their fantasy wargame series. Especially Wizard Kings. Not that I have anything against a fantasy wargame, but it seems like when companies make games like these they insist on creating their own new world. There are already too many worlds out there. I'd have been more interested if Wizard Kings had been set in the Forgotten Realms, or Glorantha, or Middle Earth, or even their own fantasy RPG Harn (although not very appropriate because Harn is a low fantasy world).

It's just another series that I don't want to get into. That's the way my rules work. If Wizard Kings had been based on say GURPS Fantasy then I'd be obliged to buy it. But since it's a totally new series not based on anything I don't have that obligation...

Some guy saw my post on rec.games.frp.marketplace and wanted me to post my message on his auction site. It's not a dedicated auction site, it's a section of a community web site (by community web site I mean something like Geocities or Yahoo where they provide web space and other services for your Internet community). It looked like a rather amateur site and the auction section only had like half a dozen active auctions.

Here's the problem with auction sites -- you need buyers and sellers. Until you get that critical number you're just on the fringe. But then you hit that number and you grow and grow and at that point you can really charge for services and make money. So how are you going to do it if you're not eBay? The answer is you have to do something else first. First you need a site that lots of people go to, for whatever reason. Once you have that then you can start building services and have a good chance that those services will be immediately used by a lot of people.

Just starting out a community web site or anything else is really hard because there's so much competition. I think you really need to have a site that you're interested in and will put work into and try to make it the best on the Internet. Once you have that and people go to it, then you can start branching out. On the Internet you need to establish a user base first before you ask them to participate and later on pay.

Something like what Skotos is doing. Sure, they want people to subscribe to their online games, which is their main revenue model. But to get people to their site they have content, they're providing web space for other companies, they're taking over RPGNet which is a good content site. Get people to your site with material that they want to access; build a community via bulletin boards and email lists; then make your games part of that community so that it's natural for people to migrate to them...

As a last note, Timothy McVeigh was executed today. Finally. Stupid M-F goes around killing innocent people he better be put down. And then there's a vocal minority against the Death Penalty, saying things like "if you actually saw an execution you wouldn't suppor the Death Penalty." Sure, some people would be horrified when face to face with someone dying. But, I'm sure other people would find the experience thrilling.

Then there are the people who feel that man does not have the right to kill each other. They're right, in my opinion. People don't have a right to kill other people, governments have that right. Government imposes the Death Penalty, I have no problem with that. Some people would counter that even if government has that right, it's people who actually do the execution. Well, yeah, of course someone eventually has to do it. But that's like saying that Microsoft employees are evil because Microsoft is evil. Microsoft is a corporation, corporations have their own identity on partly reflective of their human component. Much like governments have their own identity which is only somewhat reflected by their citizens.

It's late and I'm not making sense anymore.