I have been playing Skyrim yet again. I saw an old glitch returning and two new glitches I had never seen before. Hilarious (to some degree). But it also gave me pause to rethink parts of the RPG game I discussed over time in this place. You see, those who played the game might identify that the cupboard in Breezehome has 143 ingots of metals, 15 wolf skins, 4 goat skins, 8 pieces of armour, 12 necromancer robes, a few great-swords, swords, a dozen daggers and a dew more items. This cupboard is twice the size of a night stand. So do you guess that it will all fit? Then I remember the way it was done in Neverwinter nights and my mind went to town on designing a new system.
Part 1 Int eh first part lets take a turn back to the middle ages. Cupboards were not discarded and new ones bought. Cupboards in those days were a sign of wealth, they were upgraded, they got new functions and taking that in mind. I thought of setting a new premise.
Any cupboard has a size and use, yet when the wood sort changes, the maximum load also changes. The same can be applied to ‘runing’ the furniture. In this I used a Raetic approach (it makes sense when you know more on the game), We can upgrade any furniture UNTIL you apply Raetic sigils. When you do that this piece of furniture can no longer be adjusted. So as we have furniture, we can add sigils to add space in the cupboard. So if standard a cupboard can keep 6*10 squares. A rune could add (2-5)*6*10. Sofa’s and chairs can be given sigils to improve regeneration, rest, healing and other matters. It changes the game. Apart from the rest required, regenerate mana is a lot longer process, we think in Bethesda and other terms towards mana, but what happens when that too changes? What if the recuperation is depending on rest and sustenance?
Part 2
We seem to feel that the IKEA approach in these games is OK, but is it? We have become so attached to consumerism and that approach needs to change. Also the cost of what we have in our houses. It is like the Pokemon rage. We have to have it all, and that is wrong. I saw that coming a mile away, so the replay factor is diminished. The learning curve changes. And the need for furniture shops, sigil deployers for wood, stone and metal are a larger stage to add to any game.
In all this we need to set that part and it gave me the idea of an old concept, the bard!
Part 3 Who remembers the comic books of Asterix? Remember Cacofonix? So what happens when we add a bard to the village we live in? The type of bard we find and the type of bard we invite could change the way the village harmony runs. Some bard are good ay creating a fighting atmosphere, se are for feasts and parties, some instil horror (in the invaders). All parts of a game where we have no real control, but the impact is still seen and felt in the game as a whole. Why have we forgotten the second tier influences in games and in gaming?
So as I am going through the motions I see a whole range of changes and updates that Bethesda does not have at present, and with the choices that Microsoft made for them, there are a few more items that could be added to a system like the Amazon Luna, slipping the Microsoft solution further to the back and as optionally Sony and Amazon pair up, there could be a much larger gain for some, more than the additional 50,000,000 consoles sold that Amazon could have at their horizon. There would be a much larger gain and in this fight these two could get a much larger slice of the $200,000,000,000 gaming revenue that is predicted to be at the end of 2023. Personally seen, if Microsoft only gets 10% of that, I would be cool with that. Anything to make them pay the price of short sightedness.
I is just a stage, but consider what I designed over the last two days alone. Microsoft may make all the claims they have, but I am pushing it out here (as it is not 5G). And all this is optional freeware for Sony and Amazon consoles. So there!
Yup, I had been busy brooding over a new story. In this case the foundation is an eco warrior who is sick and tired of his government. He is sick, dead sick and he is willing to share his disease with the rest of the world, all the world.
To get there there needs to be the way to get there and that is the rough path, you see a story is dismissed too often because the setting is just too far fetched. So I had to grasp at history. And there I found an interesting story. In the original setting the story is a sort of cyano salt. All cyano salts are extremely poisonous. The trick is that treatment needs to start IMMEDIATELY. So doctors do have the immediate questions like do you have rat poison in the house, if yes there is a clear path, but if not the test takes too long for treatment, but if the disease is slow that path is often to easily fixed. So I came up with a DNA solution, a portable genetic disorder. A disease caused in whole or in part by a change in the DNA sequence away from the normal sequence. So I started to tinker and I found an interesting setting. It would cause the same stage, it could not be immediately detected and when it does it would be too late. I touched on the subject on September 5th 2021 in the story ‘Eradication’. The story (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2021/09/05/eradication/), the story had some of the parts, but I was nitpicking it now, see if I could find flaws in the stage, you see, the lie (the story) is so much easier to swallow when people believe it to be an option, or perhaps Mary Poppins said it better with “A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down”, and that setting matters. A good story has the elements that drive the persons mind. For a lot if minds it tends to be sex (but those stories already exist), so I had to go into other corners and the eco warrior did the trick, but how to set the stage when we have had so many delusional minds bend on destroying what is around them? And as the young tend to be driven to do the right thing, no matter how wrong it is, as long as they believe that they are doing the right thing they will not care, until it is much too late and there in that setting I had the actual solution. He spread the story that he had found a new way to stop pollution, which he had to test, so he headed of to India and then to China. The larger industrials saw it as a cheap solution to get what they wanted so they pushed officials to apprehend them. A stage was created where he was in India, the Indian government trying to stop people getting to him (allowing him to infect more) and when they got to close to him, he raced off to China where he repeated the stage and then he allowed himself to be captured and raced to the US where he completed the circle. Three hotspot areas where the population pressure would do the work for him. A stage where the initial dangers are not seem, but when you realise the stupid people with the covid setting, the stage becomes believable. Like a chess board where the first square has one rice grain and it doubles every square onwards. So you get one, two, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, 16384, 32768. After that it spirals out of control fast and consider the healthcare options that India and China have. Now consider that these are the infected, how many will they infect? A chess board has 8 rows, so in the second row we have 32768 and there are 6 more rows to go, by the end of row 5 you surpassed the population off the planet. It also reminded me of a image I saw yesterday. It might be the push I needed. The image gave me a chalkboard that stated “I guess we have to retire the expression ‘avoid it like the plague’ given how little effort people put in avoiding an actual plague” I do believe it gave me the idea to let things rise to the surface and now that the elements are at the surface we need to set the second story on how efforts are thwarted into capturing the person as the greed driven industrials want the ‘invention’ before the government can get their fingers on it. Greed tends to be a great motivator, if you doubt that see the lobbyists at COP26.
A disease that is man made also has a few other parts to it, it calls for all kinds of taboos to be brought to the surface and that too allows for other sides. There needs to be a ‘flaw’ but what if that is an intentional side? What if the original pure people have a dormant immunity? Like all Native Americans, all pure Hindu’s and so on, what if the multi cultural side allows that disease to flourish? That idea is not out of the blue.
I thought on this when I was brooding over peanut allergies. You see, when I was young (long long ago) I had never heard of it and I also never heard anyone at school have it. It came over time. So what if the allergy comes from multi racial, multi cultural parts? I reckon most people in Indonesia are immune (their peanut sauce is the best in the world) so what when we combine thoughts and see how quickly the medical world goes insane with fear? You see, if they believe it could be done the story will catch on and catch on a bit quicker.
Imagination is a fearful thing. It allowed me to create new 5G, it gave me the idea to set a new concept stage in television. A direction optionally never thought of before. Not by Sony and not by DARPA (I think). It allowed me to create stories for TV series, mini series and movies (see the other stories I wrote), it gave me the insight in creating sequels to games and I create a new RPG game to piss of Microsoft as I made it free to anyone making a Sony or Amazon exclusive and I set the stage where the Amazon Luna could optionally sell 50 million consoles more. Yup, it is not merely the imagination, it needs a realistic foundation and that is gained by being able to see in a direction and from an angle others are not considering. Now if I can just find the right angle to another story which I have not put online yet (as I am still mulling things over) I feel that I will have had a productive life, plenty of people never get to this stage and now I have another story on ending mankind and optionally save the dolphins, perhaps they will tell me on my deathbed (somewhere in the future) the same thing they told Douglas Adams: “So long and thanks for all the fish!”
There is always a counter side. It does not mater how good anything is, it does not matter how large the win is, there is an opposite it is the price we pay, the price we accept, because on the whole the deal is actually rather good. There is no opposition, this has been a given truth for decades. At time you need to be ruthless, at times you can be compassionate, at times you have to cut the deadlines, at times you can extent deliveries. They are choices, there are always choices. Some good, some less so. It is the way it has always been
The price of lame It is a side we see and often ignore. In many situations it means crappy, I would say it merely means crappy but that would be wrong. In this example we look at Bethesda and their latest iteration of Skyrim. Some will say ‘Lame’, ‘more exploitation’, and ‘more of the same’. I say when a game is this perfect you would want to have it as you move on. I have played the game on Xbox360, PS3, Xbox One, PS4, and PS5. The game is so large and so near perfect I would want to keep it and there is an upside. The PS5 is free as download if you have the PS4 version. There was alas no physical version. We can state it is lame, it is less, but this is a game that millions have enjoyed for 10 years. So yes, parts are a set A$80, yet the game gives you a lot more, the free edition gives you less new stuff, but I have seen my share of free parts already, after 4 days I see that the game is renewed, it has more and it feels great getting these achievements again. In 10 years the game never disappointed. The price of lame is perhaps a lack of innovation, the opposite is that the players want this game, not another game, it is a tough balancing line and so far Bethesda has done OK, apart from selling their soul to Microsoft (for $8,500,000,000).
The price of tame Weirdly enough it is Google who gets that part. On the one side they have shown great innovation, they have shown massive strides in many areas, from searching to advertisements, they were there, they were first and they keep on rocking, on the other side their console (Google Stadia) is tame, they are not developing software, they are relying on Ubisoft to push that crate (and it will cost them). The other side is that two innovations will pass them by, the innovation I worked out (and are now meant for Amazon Luna) could bring Amazon an additional 50,000,000 consoles to the market. I know, even with shortages it will be a stretch, but that is the setting of tame, you can be non-aspiring, to be non-exciting yet that too comes at a price and in this setting Amazon would be in second place (temporarily overtaking Nintendo). On the upside, it makes Microsoft the wooden spoon contender, with the most powerful console in the world they end up in 4th position and I like that. Microsoft needed to be taught a lesson and I intend to bring it (If Amazon accepts). And that is not a high number, it is massively conservative, because this has never been done before so I have no data to rely on, the numbers could end up being decently higher. And that is merely the first wave, the second wave relies on another player, so I cannot say at present, but that could end up pushing the Luna even more, but I have no idea how much more. What is a certainty that gaming will alter and in the first stage many players ant a piece of that, not all, but plenty.
The price of game It is not easy to look at people as game, but these anti-vaxxers are taking their toll. We can be as social as we like to be, we are unable to properly set up taxation, but we will tax the health system to the max. We see people dying of heart conditions in ambulances, because the ICU’s are filled with anti-vaxxers who now have covid and they are crying like little children. I say that unvaccinated people are not eligible for ICU unless they pay upfront, the reckless endangerment of life is not a cause for healthcare, it needs to become private care. The umbers are staggering. Of all the hospital admissions 80%-90% is unvaccinated. This evidence is ignored too much by too many. There is a slight difference per nation, yet that is understandable. We can treat these people like kids, but then they claim they have rights. OK, you do and with that you get the right to pay for it yourself.
We see three examples where we price choice, price is not always monetary, but often it is, yet the opposite of that coin is often not monetary. It tends to be quality, quantity or quest like. There is no clear formula either, it is not a neat package, yet there tends to be some red line forming in the sand. The underlying part is that some accept the cost of doing business, others are in denial and they want it all, and guess what. You cannot have it all, there is no way. It is like the old equation of a house. Price, Quality and speed. You can only select two of the three, the third will go in another direction. A sales division will state that you can have all three and then they task their marketing department to set the premise of the third to expectations. Yet that is a figment in their imaginations, and when the data comes forward we get some ‘miss communication’ excuse.
All neatly wrapped up, yet when we dig we get to see the price more clearly and we often see a party in denial, but what happens when it is YOU who pays that price? What happens when YOU need to make a choice, can you? Choosing is often hard, especially when the price is clear. But what do you do when it is not? It happens and not always intentionally, how can you decide the price then?
It is a stage we try to deny, but it is there, we all face it at some point. You see, there is (especially in business) a danger to go ‘gung ho’. There is benefit in awaiting the right moment. Yet what to do when that is in a vacuum? This happens. There is an option to make a decent amount of coins, but it relies on others making a move, or not to make one. But no matter how you slice it, you are in a vacuum until that happens.
You see, what I predicted is close to coming to pass. The console wars will be settled and the outcome will be
Sony
Nintendo
Amazon
Microsoft
Google
Google ended last because it is not creating games, it is relying on Ubisoft and indie developers to get there. Microsoft screwed the pooch a little too often and with my help I will gladly push the suckers to 4th, I preferred them at 5th but Google made that impossible. Third is Amazon and that is because the solution I see will fit the Amazon Luna, more importantly in the setting at present they might get to 2nd, but only temporary and with conservative numbers Nintendo will catch up again. Sony will not be surpassed and what they have going for them will keep them in charge there. I do find it funny that the most powerful console in the world (as Microsoft seems to remind us) will be a system at a mere 4th position. The weakest console defeated them and the Luna has the option to do the same.
All because stupid people will not learn. The greed driven will be all about pushing Azure whilst they cannot play the blues. A sad setting that gets Microsoft exactly what they deserve (answer: zip, zilch, nada).
So why is this a hesitant choice? Well in the first I still have time and I do hope to get my share of well over $400,000,000. Would you not do the same? Only when I see that the battle is over, I will make it public domain allowing indie developers make a bitch out of Microsoft.
What surprises me is that the makers still do not see what is out in the open. It is not rocket science, the clever people should see what I noticed well over a month ago, it was then that I decided to crunch a few ideas and what I see represents well over 50,000,000 consoles. Am I delusional? I will let you figure that out when I set the bar and the visibility of the solution to all. I will of course use the same method to 4chan and a few other open places. You see, the longer Microsoft and Ubisoft are unaware, the better the chances for the indie developers. In a rat race these two will win and I feel a little better if they lose, I am wired that way.
What if others figure out what I saw? That’s OK. If they did it by themselves they earned what is coming for them and I still believe in my 5G solutions to give me the pennies (read: bag of gold) I deserve and there is only so much a person needs. I see greed as an underestimated delimiting factor on creativity, and I do not like delimiters, except in data files. They are essential there.
So whilst you are enjoying coffee, oh no, that would be me and coffee is almost ready. Enjoy the day!
Yes, this sounds bigger than it is (and it is). This is the economy for an RPG. A few places had idea’s, one was particularly helpful. Yet in the stage of the game I designed here, I decided to take a different route. You can barter all you want, yet in the end it is the economy around you that needs to flourish as well. If you do not take that route, you get either a ghost town, or a passively silent one, one that can only move when you are there. It is that approach that is reluctant to me. You cannot create your story, become your story on a blank page where everything is depending on you. That has been the case sine before I was born (in the age of Black and White TV’s).
So as I was mulling over what I personally believe to be a shortcoming on the Elder Scrolls. I turned in another direction and saw the glitch in Fable 2, but the stage was good, so I decided to take a larger gander and set up my own premise. On September 25th I wrote ‘Recap to the intro’ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2021/09/25/recap-to-the-intro/) which gives the list of most articles linked to this game. I will now add:
Behold the economy (OK, that was way too ego driven) yet the stage remains true, you cannot live or play in a vacuum, so as I wrote ‘An almost ordinary generation quest’, I set out the stage of stamping out the economy, there needed to be a stage where you can grow and optionally through you the town could grow. In t6his we need to take notice that a city takes decades to grow (if not centuries), so the town can only grow to some degree. If we consider the baker, the butcher, the fisherman, the blacksmith, the bookshop, the tailor, the potter and the leather shop we see that these people have average skills (2 or 3 out of 5), we need to see how to grow the town. In one stage I talked about the potter part, it will be a growth stage, so to grow the economy, when you gain skills (in your travels) on any of this, when you return home you can teach the shops the skills you learned, it gives you some income, but the larger stage becomes that a town gets X amount of people travelling through it. More important, when a shop becomes more important, more people will come, so there is a benefit to teaching them, because what they sell, benefits you too. And more importantly, when these shops grow into 4 star places, I needed to add a risk as well. You see, some people are depending on ‘non change’ I insist on change, so there is a small percentage of a chance that when the get to that level there is a small chance that they will pack up and leave for ‘the big city’, in addition to it that risk increases by a factor when they become 5 star places. It creates momentum and it creates a larger stage of movement and turmoil. You or your kids can teach the shop again, or they can move themselves.
A stage of fluidity that we haven’t seen before in RPG gaming, and I wonder why not. I can not be the first one to come up with this, could I? A stage of increased growth and economic values will also hit the city, when the city grows, the shops have less reason to move (they are revenue driven too). It sets a new stage, instead of having 15 axes, 23 swords, 7 mauls and 2 halberts, we get a stage where we can sell that as scrap to the blacksmith who will create new ingots and create new weapons. That only works when he becomes 4 star or more location. The herbalist has a need for resources, you bring he has no need to move, or to seek out danger. And in this all shops are almost the same, there are shops that will not need ‘feeding’, but their skills too are related to the ranking they have and as you teach them, their value increases and the village grows another step.
And so we create a new stage, not merely collecting weapons and armour, but a stage where the shops grow what they have and to that respect also the scrap they receive from NPC’s and the new goods that come with that.
I feel happy, I created the foundation of an entire economy in a game, there are a few unmentioned parts and there are a few parts not here, but I am still mulling them over. In the meantime, anyone who wants to create an Amazon Luna and Sony Playstation exclusive RPG, feel free to use these ideas (free of charge) and let’s give Bethesda a run for their money, whilst pissing off Microsoft at the same time (slugging two for the price of one tends to be more satisfactory).
Have a great day
P.S. WordPress still haven’t fixed colouring, their CEO might be colourblind
We love the words ‘free’ and ‘rewards’. In this I am no different. This setting all started when I was taking a look at some version of ‘merge life’ iPad game. The game starts nice enough, challenging enough and I saw the warning ‘absurd amount of advertisements’ yet initially when I started that was not really the case. So after 10-15 minutes I had reached stage 2 and the game was oddly satisfying. It was then that the advertisement wave hit me. Close to one advertisement EVERY 30 SECONDS. Yes, that was absurd and after 2 advertisements I deleted the game. But the mind took a wander and I remembered something from the AC Brotherhood time. Yes Ubisoft did do good things, even innovative things. But the idea got twisted in my mind to something more. I wrote in a previous article about games for Amazon Luna, not sure if I did this (I have written over 2000 articles). There are two stages in this.
Stage One Board games. Most forgot about the power of board games. They are simple games, but a setting we always return to. We do not need to kill everyone (I mostly do). There is tranquility in a game of chess, a game of checkers, a game of Monopoly, a game of Backgammon, a game of Shogun (and so on). But what w forget is that most people prefer to play alone. Now, there is some need to connect to like minded people, people who just want to play a game. For them there are three options. Set up the Luna to facilitate for 2-4 players, connect to up to 3 online players and play alone with computer managed NPC’s. The powers behind consoles and streamers forgot about that, didn’t they? Now the optional connected IP is separate and for another day.
Stage Two When it comes to rewards, Ubisoft forgot a side (it was fair enough) but when we have mobile games they could lead to a lot more visibility. For the example I will use the Fable Pub games. You play the games and you get the rewards. In the mobile game it might be about money, yet the goal is to get to the 5 star (might have been 4 star) point. When you get there you will get 2 rewards. So each game there (Keystone, Fortune’s Tower and Spinnerbox) will result in a direct reward, a weapon, or an outfit that is linked to Fable in Amazon Luna (just as an example), the second reward is a Luna Key. Each board game will get a Luna Key, so if you play 4 games, each of the 4 games will get a key. And the Luna key will open a special option. So in the examples given Chess will give you a new board and a new chess set, Backgammon will give you a new board and stones (there are Indian, Egyptian boards and stones), Monopoly will give you an NHL, NFL or other city board, Shogun has additional colours and Japanese family crests and so on. Additional rewards that can grow the interest in other games and that is beside the setting that could be offered. All stages forgotten or ignored and why? Is the setting of a Luna Key so complex? Is the setting of offering the player something more not enticing? I would think that with all the bugs Ubisoft introduced they might go overboard pleasing the customers they so often disappointed.
The stage of giving a player more is important (and growing in need), especially now. There are the bugs the glitches, yet when you add the congestion it comes down to the choice of limiting yourself to urban players, or give rural players options to play when there are too little. There is also the need to feed the beast (the players), they need to go to work, they need to be somewhere else and setting a stage where the player can optionally play a fitting mobile game (like Ubisoft did for AC Brotherhood) where the player can play to get a new unique 5 star blade, pistol, outfit or whatever. A stage that adds to the game, not replace it, or circumvent thresholds. Offer more, offer unique and they will love the brands they embrace even more. Machiavelli stated (in some form) “There is such a gap between how people actually live and how they ought to live that anyone who declines to behave as people do is schooling himself for catastrophe” it gives the setting for leaders to adhere to needs, but there is a hidden side here. “There is such a gap between how people expect rewards and how they should see them that anyone who declines to lead as people expects them to do is schooling himself for massive setbacks” It comes down to the stage of what exactly is a reward, if it needs to be earned (not paid for) it will grow in value, and gamers are all about earning showing that they had the goods to play the game. As an example CDPR (makers of Witcher III) created an in-game game named Gwent, we got to play for extra’s and it became a separate game too, now that game makes well over a million dollars annually. People got into the game and now it is a separate game that is leading gamers to more and the gamer has become willing to pay. The setting is that it is free and as people get into it they will spend the few dollars they need to get more cards and expansions. For streamers it is not that easy. The enticement of a monthly fee needs to be there, so as games add more value, the threshold for gaming THERE lowers and people become more eager to play and will play for all the free rewards, which is an oxymoron. As gamers get more by playing, they will play more and call other people to their cause. Yet we must not forget that at times the player needs a solitary moment and as systems accomodate that, the gaming borrow will become ever more comfortable. Consider the board game Man, don’t get angry (Indian: Pachisi). A 1914 game that so far has sold more than 70,000,000 copies. Yes most in an era that is pre IBM PC XT, yet we have always returned to places of comfort, for nostalgic reasons, for the simplicity of play and for the stage of pure randomness. You see too many games are all about changing the setting of what the dice do, too many are seemingly less random than we think and within ourselves we see that, even if the brain is not detecting it yet. You think it is chance that you are one square away from winning when the ‘computer adversarial pig’ throws double six? We automatically feel that it is bad luck because we see ‘dice’ but we forget it is a computer animation and that setting is starting to bite more and more, so the power of real randomness, of a real chance to win is becoming more and more important. In this as Amazon is developing games and Google is not, they have the advantage (I do not know where Netflix stands at present). And it is up to Amazon to create the most comfortable burrow (read: man cave) we can have before the competitors catch up. For now they are all about ‘Let Ubisoft do the cool stuff’ (glitches included), it is about comfort levels, especially in gaming. Niccolò Machiavelli wrote about this in 1513 (yes over 500 years ago). The greed driven seem to ignore it, the lesson was quite clear and whilst the greed driven come up with more versions of some form of Antón Castillo we can just investigate the list and see that games like Call of Duty did make $20 billion, but it is a mere 20% of what Pokemon made and Pokemon for the most is Nintendo only. There is an upside to tailoring to fun, it is what the people want and it is a lesson Microsoft (Sony too) have forgotten to much, too easily and too completely and it makes Nintendo the real threat to Sony, Amazon could go a similar route and surpass Microsoft more easily than they think (the fact that Microsoft is often in denial helps too).
As I see it the consoles (streaming or not) is one, yet the ability to correctly connect a mobile or tablet has a lot more going for it than most realise and as that link is more and more visible the connected system (console or streamer) will reap additional rewards as well.
We all do that at times, we all search for a reason. Whether it is for a solution, to blame or to incite. These are the most likely reasons, but they are not the only ones. The thought came to mind when the BBC (at https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58961836) gave me ‘Amazon’s Jeff Bezos ‘may have lied to Congress’’ a stage where ‘may’ is operative. So there is not even any level of assurance that he ‘had most likely’ lied, that on the premise it was highly likely that he was not truthful, or any other stage of ‘creating doubt towards sincerity’. We are also given the claims that “Amazon copied products and rigged its search results in India to boost sales of its own brands”, as well as “sought to correct the record on the inaccurate media articles in question” and in finality we get “they were considering referring the firm “for criminal investigation””, so in the third, what ‘criminal investigation’? For allegedly rigging results in India? For inaccurate media articles? It is an open field and in all this, we need to consider that US congress is merely trying to get fines from rich companies any way they can get, it is what incompetent people tend to do, play the blame game.
Yet to understand it we need to take a look at the Reuters article (at https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/amazon-india-rigging) where we get ‘Amazon copied products and rigged search results to promote its own brands, documents show’. Here we are given “The internal documents also show that Amazon employees studied proprietary data about other brands on Amazon.in, including detailed information about customer returns” this is indeed a solid accusation. In addition we get “It is difficult to develop this expertise across products and hence, to ensure that we are able to fully match quality with our reference product, we decided to only partner with the manufacturers of our reference product”, it is quite the accusation, yet this happened in 2016. So in the first, why is this not in Indian courts? In the second, why do we see a bland US Congress setting when it is not an activity on American soil? It was Amazon.in, it was in India and referred to Indian products. In addition we get the small part at the very end of “In sworn testimony before the U.S. Congress in 2020, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos explained that the e-commerce giant prohibits its employees from using the data on individual sellers to help its private-label business. And, in 2019, another Amazon executive testified that the company does not use such data to create its own private-label products or alter its search results to favour them” I see it as two parts, in 2019 there is a stage of “Amazon executive testified that the company does not use such data to create its own private-label products or alter its search results to favour them” which would support the stage of wrongful action mentioned earlier, and in 2020 we get “prohibits its employees from using the data on individual sellers to help its private-label business”, as such a stage optionally exists that a flaw was found and dealt with. Optionally there remains a stage that in 2016 “Amazon employees working on the company’s own products, known as private brands or private labels, planned to partner with the manufacturers of the products targeted for copying”, so a stage remains that Indian employees became creative to create their own private fortune in debatable ways, a stage that was close over time and there Reuters has a larger issue. The documents, what EXACTLY do they prove? I am not against Reuters here, they have proven themselves a few times over, so I am asking exactly what internal documents were in play? If they were emails and there the language and the path is also important. Reuters might be on the money, but they start with “A trove of internal Amazon documents reveals how the e-commerce giant ran a systematic campaign of creating knockoff goods” and there we see the assumption it is linking ‘internal Amazon documents’ towards ‘the e-commerce giant’, yet these employees, how high up the ladder were they, were they all Indian? In that case can a quality case based on quantifiable data be made against the e-commerce giant, or is this the event involving a few rotten apples (sorry, rotten pieces of fruit). So when we see the questions that rise from the Reuters article, the US Congress made leaps without investigating the evidence before referring it for Criminal investigation. You see, there needs to be a viable case before referring it, so there needs to be decent questionable evidence and so far, no one has seen it and I reckon it might not be there in the way the BBC article gives us the goods. I think there is a lot more and in all this, when we see “sought to correct the record on the inaccurate media articles in question”, we could have seen evidence and more importantly the media can show the evidence that it was wrongful data handed to them, but we do not see that either (at present), the media is very protective of one another at the alleged expense of anyone else.
Can Amazon have done something wrong? Yes, absolutely, the firm is too big, things fall through the cracks. Yet the chance of Jeff with the Telly Savalas hairdo Bezos, or Nate Sutton, Amazon’s associate general counsel to openly lie to Judiciary Committee is too ludicrous to consider. That is the stage and when I see “We strongly encourage you to make use of this opportunity to correct the record… as we consider whether a referral of this matter to the Department of Justice for criminal investigation is appropriate,” I feel that this is an attempt to get another fine out of Amazon. Yes, I agree that the letter is merely good form, but I reckon that the players would have done a decent level of homework before that letter went out, and with another shutdown 9 weeks away, America needs all the cash they can lay their fingers on, I am merely wondering if their path is all on the up and up. But that is merely me, questioning whatever I see. I merely wonder if anyone else noticed the questions that the article brings up, it might be my not so trusting nature.
If Amazon did something wrong, OK. It happens and a fine will be the result, but this happened in India, so why is there no reference to a request from India, a request from Indian vendors and a more thorough investigation into the evidence. All that seems to be missing, weird, is it not?
Why? Because train of thought reads too boring, thats why! So this all happened, or better stated started happening a few hours ago. Someone stated that IBM Z Mainframes are in 96% of all mainframe places. Now, I have no problem with this, I moved out of mainframes 30 years ago, and I still respect what these things can do (they are just too big for my desk). Yet in this, my first question was, what do the other 4% use? A simple question. I got all kinds of answers, yet none of them answered my question ‘What do the other 4% use’, in this it does not matter if it is known, but it is essential to look at.
Why? Well, in this IBM has a luxury problem, they basically own 96% of that market, but the 4% can become 8% then 16%, at that point the message from IBM becomes 4 out of 5 use our mainframe. When the 96% is 120,000 mainframes it is one thing, when it is based on 960 mainframes it is a whole different story. The numbers matter, that has always been the case (even if Microsoft is in denial now they are shedding market share).
Reasons There can be a simple reason. For one epidemiology, if it is about real time numbers, the market is slim, massively slim, compared to that market a size zero model is a mere chunky blobernaut. Cray is one of the few players in that setting and it makes sense that a Cray is there where an IBM is optionally not. Still, I would want to know.
You see, in strategic thinking we have two elements we ALWAYS need to keep one eye on. One is threat the other is weakness. In this example real-time data management is a weakness. Now we need to understand that this market is set to billions and those who desperately need it, that number is not an issue, yet for IBM investing that much for 4% is tactically not sound, not until that marketshare is a lot larger. That makes perfect sense and let’s face it no one owns 100% of a market, if that ever happens we will have a lot more problems than we could possibly understand.
Why do I care? Well, for the most I do not, but at present I am not to involved with any SWOT analyses, and the ones I did lately was done for wannabe managers who seemingly only understand bulletpoint memo’s. The idea of any strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analyses that is related to business competition, project planning and capability planning is more important than most people realise. We see it in intelligence, business intelligence and market intelligence. And now we see two new real markets emerging where it is important too. Gaming and SAAS/GAAS. Even as GAAS is still some time away, the need to actively SWOT in all three is there and I believe the players are not too finicky about that and they need to be. As the cloud is oversold and the dangers are underestimated their board of directors need to hold up a mirror where they can tell themselves that it doesn’t matter, and when we understand how completely those people are lying to themselves, at that point you might get the idea that there is a problem. The SWOT has more sides, it tests your capability, your software (Strengths and opportunities) but that needs to be levelled by weaknesses and strength.
800 years ago To understand this we need to go back to the good old days (Ghengis Khan). It was he who stated “It is not enough for me to win, my opponents must all fail”. Yes, I admit it is a massively loose translation but it applies to the now. When we stumble over sales people and their unnatural large ego’s, we tend to listen because they make the loudest claims, yet are they valid? Consider Solarwinds and what they enabled criminals to do, when you consider the news last week when we were given ‘SolarWinds hackers stole US sanctions policy data, Microsoft confirms’, it was a weakness and a threat, so when we how long the hack was active and that we now see that policy data is online and open for anyone to look into, what other sides are not yet known? It is not enough for SAAS vendors to look at SWOT, their customers need to do the same thing. So when I considered the 4% is was not because I need to know everything (which at times is still nice as a high executive CIA decision maker has a girlfriend that has size 6 lingerie, his wife is size 11), so who needed to do the SWOT, someone at the CIA or me? One could say both as I am his threat and he is my opportunity.
The stage of what is what could be remains forever in motion.
So where from here? That remains open. For players like Amazon, the enabling of GAAS becomes more and more important, especially when you see the blunders that players like Ubisoft makes, they need to be aware of where their customers are, especially when Netflix becomes active in gaming too. They will have an advantage, but Amazon can counter it, yet there are sides that remain unknown for now and they should not be (not on that level) and there is the rub. Too many rely on external solutions when that solution needs to be in-house. And we can disperse with all the marketing BS that some give like “We are a better company now”, when you drop the ball to that degree there was a massive space for improvement and you merely are on par for not being where you should have been a year ago. An old IBM Statistics wisdom was “You’ll know when you measure”. This sounds corny but it is true, you cannot anticipate and adjust when there is no data and in all this any SWOT analyses would have been usable data. So where was the 4%? I do not know and the poster seemingly did not know either. It might be fair enough, yet when that 4% becomes 8%, when should you have known? It is a question with a subjective answer. Yet in gaming it is less so, especially as I am becoming aware (unproven at present) that Microsoft has one nice trick up their sleeve. There is partial evidence out there that Skyrim will be on PS5 in digital formal only. Several shops now have a ‘DO NOT USE’ for any physical PS5 format of Skyrim. Now, there might be an easy answer for this after all these lockdowns, but it is only 4 weeks away now, so you tell me. Is Microsoft playing its ‘bully’ card? Are they trying to push people to Xbox? It is a fair approach, they did pay 8 billion and change for it, but consider that their actions are set to a larger stage. A stage of millions of angry fans. I solved it for them by creating public domain gaming ideas for any Sony exclusive RPG game. I am not Bethesda, I am a mere IP creator, but when software makers are given a free ride towards Sony exclusives and even if one game hits the mark, the Bethesda market share dwindles to a lower number. Now consider what happens when that happens on Amazon Luna too? I might be a mere 1% factor, but if another one joins me I grow 100% whilst Microsoft dwindles more. For Microsoft Amazon is becoming a real threat and a weakness, for Amazon Netflix is optionally a threat and a weakness whilst Google Stadia is optionally the opportunity for Amazon.
All SWOT settings that could have been seen from afar from the beginning. It is not everyones train of thought, yet in this day and age, I think it needs to be, the markets and our lives are changing in all kinds of ways too quickly and too large, we need to think head and having a clear grasp on how to apply SWOT in our lives might become essential.
The difference? That is a much harder line to follow. It comes down to the word ‘Insight’ and it is a dangerous, a very dangerous word. Because depending on the person this can be Insight, speculated insight, expected insight, and adjusted insight and more than once they are all on one pile making the data less reliable. Insight is also subjective, we all see it differently and that does not mean that I am right and everyone else has a wrong station. No, it is all subjective and most CAN be correct, but as the insight is disturbed by speculated, adjusted and expected versions, the numbers alter slightly. And now we see that 4% was not 4%, is was 7% and 5%, 5% because there were other IBM mainframes in play (adjusted) and 4% was the speculated number and 7% was the expected number. Now we have a very different station, the expected moves us from 96% use our product, towards 9 out of 10 are our customers, which is now a mere step towards 4 out of 5 use IBM. So would you like to bring that conversation to any board of directors? They’ll serve your balls for dinner (see image).
Still feel certain that you do not want to know? In reality most SWOT analyses are seemingly pointless and often amazingly boring, yet in this day and age they are an essential part of business and gaming at $130 billion a year is facing that side as well. So when you consider what I gave you also consider the impact that some shops have ‘DO NOT USE’ for Skyrim preorders, 4 weeks before release, lockdown or not, it beckons all kinds of questions. And to be fair, there could be a simple explanation for all of it, but that too is the consequence of trying to create hypes via YouTube without clearly informing the audience. It is a weakness Microsoft has shown a few times (Bethesda was never completely innocent, but equally never this guilty).
So what has a game in common with a business setting? It is simple, they both need to manage expectations and that too is a side of SWOT, even as marketing often merely focusses on opportunity, there is a weakness and a threat. The lack of clarity and misinformation are both a weakness (angry customers) and a threat (churning customers) and in the world of gaming the churners are the real danger, they can get the flocking population of angry gamers to come with them and really make numbers spiral downward. In this day and age SWOT is an additional essential way to go, in nearly all walks of life. We simply can not avoid being that naive anymore, not with spiralling energy prices and more and more articles that can at present no longer be found in any supermarket, all whilst plenty of people are in a holding pattern for their incomes.
It is a train of thought and it is up to you to decide if you want to do it or not, because that was always your right, the right to ignore, but it must be said that it will be at your own peril.
This is not reality, this is not what is happening, but it could have been. Surprised? I actually was when my mind (the back of my mind) came up with a third idea for a TV series. Perhaps that is the wrong setting, a mini series is better. You see any story needs to have a beginning, the substance, optionally with twists, plots and loads of question marks. After that we get an ending, the satisfaction of any story is that there is completion. Now, I love the works of Terry Gilliam and as such I loved 12 monkeys and Brazil, they leave question marks. It is not a fine refined story from beginning to end. A setting I homaged to in the third season of Keno Diastima. The series needs to keep a question mark or two in place, let the watcher, the reader, the appreciator of any story find their own epilogue in this. If a story draws in the person taking notice of that story continues and sparks their own imagination, the story goes beyond success. That is how I believe that stories need to go at times. Here I giggle towards Jimmy Carr who stated more than once that women watch porn movies to see if they get married in the end. Or as I see it an alternative to ‘Try before you buy’ or is it ‘Fit before you commit’?. So in any paradoxical setting we need to take the stage of ‘a statement that is seemingly contradictory or opposed to common sense and yet is perhaps true’, here we see the use of ‘perhaps’ and that is fine, only history is to some degree is set in absolutes and even those are at times debatable. You see, in the two elements of what could be we need to see the stage of what could be possible and that is where we need to go. A stage where it is not about what happens when X and Y do not happen, but a stage where we see what is happening because X1 and Y2 never did happen, and we can set a stage to adhere to this and that was the stage my mind was tinkering with the last 2 days (it might have been longer but I was not aware of it) and seeing this come to pass is important.
It does not interfere with any of my IP, so I have no issues making that public now. Yet is it interfere or inter phere? Weirdly enough it is a larger setting that applies and there my mind keeps me out for now.
So when I stated in the past “being able to test” there is a stage where we see what happens, but because some elements are in play it did not happen. So when I talked about the assassination of a fictive character named Marty Walsh there was a larger stage, that stage was that fictive character Patrick Pizzella would have served longer and he would have given his seat to a person named Julie Su in 2024. Because that is no longer happening certain labour adjustments were never made and that is the rub, for some players that change would have been detrimental to their profit margins. Yet how can you set the stage of what never happened? Well if you think of the Patents in play, if the change happened, the stage for 2026 would alter slightly, not a lot but enough. Because of a stage Julie Su favoured, 3 students would enter the halls of ISG, they started having lunch together and they come up with an idea that would set the foundations of 5G in a new direction, it would create 4 patents setting a new direction that creates the partnership of Rogers Wireless and Amazon and that 5G goes into new directions, this never happens but the changes towards that were really small and even if you cannot prove it, the stage was close to alter economic boundaries and more important Technological settings on nanotechnology and 5G, three people were essential to that part and as Marty Walsh the threshold is shifting towards the not happening. A paradoxical stage that becomes a non-event and Julie Su would never know, because she was not where she needed to be for the events to happen.
So when we see the story evolve we do not merely see when did not happen, but we get a glimpse of what else was never a reality and what more is on the stage to be considered an option. Paradoxical settings are never the stage of one stone in a pond and watching the ripples, they are the second, third and fourth stone that interfere with the ripples seen. The caster will hope that the second stone will create enough chaos, but that person knows that more might be required. The story is then an almost given certainty, and the story evolves as it had the caster, the stones and the ripples to focus on, and as such the paradoxical parameters are set to the audience. Yet in all this there is a finite amount of actions that we can take and that too sets the stage towards a maximum stage that any story can hold. I believe that this is a stage that American producers can never comprehend, they watch the story and see how the spreadsheet goes green, yet that part had nothing to do with either the caster, the stones or the ripples. That person needs to trust the finite approach to the storyteller and so far they either over manage or merely cut off hoping to get better grounds elsewhere. A sad stage, but in this the storyteller does not care, that person can revert to books to tell the story for those who care, for that person the story was everything and in this FX has always been right from the moment they gave that slogan to their audience.
This is not about an alcoholic taking his 12 steps three times with 3 breaks. This is about a 1935 movie. An absolute masterpiece by Alfred Hitchcock. It is also one if the first exposures by Tinseltown of the use of industrial espionage. Over time there would be more cases and more events, yet the stage I saw today ‘Twitch confirms massive data breach’ (source: BBC) made me think of the earliest steps in that direction. Even as we are given “it comes at a time when competitors such as YouTube Gaming are offering huge salaries to snap up gaming talent, so the fallout could be significant.” This does not mean that Google was behind it, yet the larger stage is that Industrial espionage is at the seat of many corporations and these corporations have absolutely no idea what they are in for. There are no checks, no balances and at this point Twitch is in a stage where they could lose the bulk of their value overnight. So as I read “Twitch confirmed the breach and said it was “working with urgency” to understand the extent of it” I see a stage where a company was clueless and now less of a clue where their money will go in November 2021.
Even as I think back to the 39 steps and the momentous line “The 39 Steps is an organization of spies, collecting information on behalf of the foreign office of…the design for a silent aircraft engine” but the one step they did not have in those days was the disgruntled employee. They can do in one hour more damage then Baker at MI-6 or Evans at MI-5 can do in a month, and companies are just not ready to take a larger setting of cyber and internal investigations serious. Fell free to doubt me and call +44 1242 221491 (GCHQ), they probably have a few leaflets and other information that will make any CTO cry like a little chihuahua.
The problem how to go about it, as I see it it will be too late for Twitch, Microsoft was done for a long time ago and Google is one of the few who has a decent handle on cyber security. Yet the nightmare is actually a lot worse. To grasp this we merely need to take a look at ‘Industrial Espionage: Criminal or Civil Remedies’ by Gillian Dempsey (at https://www.aic.gov.au/sites/default/files/2020-05/tandi106.pdf) the quote “Australian companies should be mindful that competitors, and nations which might be hosts to Australian investment, may have a strong interest in Australian trade secrets and other economic intelligence. Although its incidence and prevalence are unknowable, industrial espionage by governments and private sector institutions is a fact of contemporary commercial life. Recent developments in the technology of intercepting communications make such activities easier to undertake and more difficult to detect than in the past.” There are a few issues and the biggest one is partnerships, find in that partnership two disgruntled employees on both sides of the fence and that company is pretty much doomed. Even if the law becomes adequate, the rules of evidence will get in the way because the bulk of ALL companies have a lovely disregard of non-repudiation, and the third party exploiting the two angry people will laugh all the way to his zero tax haven (Cayman Islands anyone?) And that stage will grow and grow, because there is a board room believe that their company will not get into that, all whilst they cannot see the pie chart as the chunky blubbernaut in the room ate it. And the game gets to go from bad to nasty, with cryptocurrency the appeal for many increases whilst the ability to find the people involved goes from tiny to a number approximating zero and the law is not ready, it hasn’t been ready for several years and as sources give us “One of the reasons why corporations engage in industrial espionage is to save time as well as huge sums of money. After all, it can take years to bring products and services to market and the costs can add up.” This is true but it is the setting that several people who were dismissed ended up with huge starting bonuses whilst being as productive as the janitors paperweight in that new company. So when did you get $675,000 a year with a startup bonus of $3,500,000 plus a piece of real estate in the Cayman Islands for surfing Facebook all day long? That is the setting that some companies face and until they adjust the safety in their firms, they are the companies with huge neon lights and the neon phrase ‘sucker’ right next to it. I was taught about non-repudiation at Uni 14 years ago and so far the amount of companies taking it serious is just as close to zero as the people getting convicted of it.
So whilst the media is flaming the $13,000,000 total twitch payments, we are all looking in the wrong direction. We see one side, and this might have been by disgruntled people (my speculation) but it was an attack of a side that Amazon had decently solidified, so what comes next and when will it impact something that YOU depend on? There was a lesson and it was handed to the people in 1935, so why did the decision makers not take the essential steps?
Perhaps they were done in some places but there is at present no evidence that any were done.
Lawrence van Rijn - Law Lord to be 