As long as I'm here... the economics of MMOs (from the consumer side)

Been rather a while. I need to set a regular time for this or something.

City of Heroes is now well past 6 months and shows no signs of abating. My "main" (the character I play most often), Thermocline, is now level 40, with just under 500 hours of playtime (I think, might be just under 400, I was tired when I was checking).

I basically have a part-time job worth of play in this game. It works out really well from a cost-per-hour perspective. For $15 a month, I get a hundred hours or so of playtime -- that's about 15 cents an hour. Compare with $8.00 for a two-hour movie, or $2.25 for a comic book that lasts perhaps 10 minutes.

Of course, to enable that low cost, I do need to have an internet connection, which has a cost. And a computer. But I used those things for other purposes. Besides, the real comparison I wanted to make was with other games. I'm getting really good value for my money comparing CoH with, say, Half-Life 2. HL2 is a great game, and will probably take me 40 hours to finish. So it'll have cost me about a buck an hour. If I replay it, or play it online, that'll be extended... but for every half-life, there is a Pirates of the Caribbean (cost, $40, actual playtime, about an hour, total time including install and reading manual maybe 90 minutes, time spent enjoying it 0 minutes). That was an expensive one.

So the point is... MMOs are a great value for the consumer, if you play them. If you don't play them, of course, then you should stop paying for them.

Firefox autocomplete

Shamelessly stolen (from someone who himself shameless stole it):

Memo to myself:

To turn on inline autocomplete in Firefox…

1. Enter about:config in the URL field
2. Right-click on the page and create a new Boolean value
3. Enter browser.urlbar.autoFill as the preference name (note, case-sensitive: ‘F’, not ‘f’)
4. Set the value to true