Today I had a thought. Ya, just one all day — I’m slow like that.

Does anybody ever audit the sales figures quoted in press releases? Does anyone even have that authority?

If the company is required to have an audit each year, presumably you could confirm the sales figures if their income statement had sufficient detail, but what if not? Or what if the gaming division is a small portion of a huge entertainment conglomerate? Again, the detail might be insufficient to confirm the publicized sales.

Concurrent connections are usually vastly different from quoted box sales, so looking at census figures wouldn’t help much. Given the right set of circumstances, and within believable limits, a gaming company could substantially pad their sales figures for the press release.

Just saying.

This is the type of evil scheme that preoccupies my thoughts when stuck in evening traffic.

Yesterday was Patch Day in the World of Warcraft and besides the still-shitty (although improving!) patching system and besides the fixes/nerfs/changes that weren’t disclosed in the patch notes, everywhere the talk was about the Paladins and their unfortunate collision with the nerfbat.

Here is the *intended* fix, per the published patch notes (erroneously dated for 2/04/05, the original patch date. I just won’t even get into it because I tire of the buffoonery):

Paladin

Seal of the Crusader: Fixed a bug where damage per swing was increasing instead of decreasing when Seal of the Crusader was active. This resulted in a dramatic increase in damage per second (DPS) that was unintended. The tooltip for the spell displays the intent of the spell:

“Fills the Paladin with the spirit of a crusader, granting additional attack power. The Paladin also attacks faster, but deals less damage with each attack.”

The overall increase in DPS from Seal of the Crusader should only result from the increase in attack power and not from the increase in attack speed. We understand this is a significant decrease in the power of this spell, but was a necessary bug fix to ensure both overall game balance and the viability of different Paladin Seals.

Ok, I guess. Seems to be some conflicting wording there … but I’ve learned to just nod my head and pretend I have some (any) idea what Blizzard is up to.

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Over at Broken Toys, Lum and his imaginary assistants found an “attempted” interview of IGE’s pharming mogul, Steve Salyer, and, inadvertently, of IGE mouthpiece, Eric Duncan.

Excerpt:

Question: Over the years both IGE and its business has grown, how many employees are currently working for IGE?

Answer – Steve (Salyer): We have about 150 employees/consultants at the moment.

#1 – Right now IGE’s tax accountants are shitting bricks for that “150 employees” comment. (I’m sure he really meant to say there’s one employee (him) and 149 consultants … which require no payroll taxes. Or benefits. And don’t even think about the company 401(k).)

#2 – Consultants sounds nicer than whores or farmers, doesn’t it?

#3 – I wonder if Salyer takes the best stuff for himself. If I was him, I would. “I’ll take 3 of those, 16 of those quest items, 5 of those and I’ll need one of the Onyxia keys. Thanks.”

#4 – I just know the gaming Poindexters are incredulous right now at the suggestion that uber guilds are reselling to IGE. (The very idea!) Welcome to late 1999.

Heh, as I think about it, I’ll bet those Onyxia keys aren’t tradeable, which amply demonstrates how far away I am from worrying about Onyxia AND that I’d make a piss-poor IGE “consultant.”