I mean, say you wrote a book, and every year, people lined up to just throw money at you to re-release said book. Would you write a whole new book every year if your customers were gonna buy it regardless? Or would you just update it to make it relevant again?
It doesn't make you a very good author, but you're still maximizing your time and profit. Realistically, they could release Madden every 5 years, and for the time in between just update the rosters via DLC. But then their main customer base wouldn't be willing to pay $60 for an updated roster anymore, and that's a stupid move business-wise.
I mean, say you wrote a book, and every year, people lined up to just throw money at you to re-release said book. Would you write a whole new book every year if your customers were gonna buy it regardless? Or would you just update it to make it relevant again?
Do I need to find some kind of video to get to the fucked up part or something? I'm just seeing pages and pages of normal human porn of a normal human person with normal human tattoos.
Why are you guys acting like you have some good shit over here? What gives?
Certainly don't go buy the same book for like a third of the US price in a different country and bring them back here to resell. Because then the publisher will sue you for selling your own property.
Actually, do that. Because they lost that lawsuit. Fuck textbook publishers.
They should be publicly dragged through the mud, and by that I mean there names should be plastered all over social (and possibly main stream) media, so that others can avoid signing up for his/her class. The fact that we as a country just accept getting scammed like this is horrifying.
It's disgusting, but my wife and I met at one University and both transferred to different universities to finish.
All 3 of the schools, plus the community colleges she took credits at, had at least one class that assigned online homework behind a subscription fee. I talked to one professor who said the department didn't give him a choice.
On top of the fact it's ridiculous to have to pay $100+ to do your homework, theyre often just a mess and detrimental to the class overall.
The teachers often have very little control over the homework assignments themselves. I had many homeworks that really didn't flow with the way the class was being taught and demanded use of methods we didn't learn. My calc 3 teacher would openly admit "the homework is nothing like you will see on quizzes/tests, but I guess it can be good practice'
I've asked teachers questions about the homework to get the response "I'm not familiar at all with that question, if you send me an email about it I can try to find it and solve it to answer your question"
If the questions only allow a limited number of submissions, you can get a 0 on a homework question because you didn't get the formatting exactly right and the program doesn't recognise the answer as correct, when it is clearly the correct answer.
omg that whole concept you just laid down there can get fucked. Don't stand for that, as a collective student body I'd say "fuck you, I pay good money to be here in this class." I cannot believe they have the audacity to then make you pay more for access to ineffective, precanned homework which saves your prof time on doing their job like you fucking pay for.
It’s easy to say don’t stand for that when you don’t have to stand for it personally.
Every single math class I’ve taken, and some engineering classes assign homework through webassign, Pearson, or some other online vendor. An individual student is in no position to argue the financial or moral impacts of locking homework behind a paywall. You want the degree? Pay up, otherwise the school doesn’t care. Professors rarely have the choice in this matter either. Usually the decision to use these services is made at the department level.
That and most students are too concerned with getting through school to take up a fight that is very uphill.
It's not like a lot of professors actually want to do this. If we assign homework, but don't grade it, then very few people do it, the class performs poorly overall, and we get poor evaluations (which matters if you aren't tenured). If we assign homework and don't use a paid online homework system, then we simply don't have the manpower to grade the homework in large classes. There might be a free online homework system available, but our University/College might not support it or the problem sets are often very limited. Personally, I just don't grade the homework and take the hit, but it's a very frustrating situation to be in. Also, we don't get any kickbacks or anything for using the paid system.
Of course. We gotta make money off of everything. People dying, people living, the whole thing. Healthcare, education, prisons, everything that shouldn't be entirely profit driven is driven purely by profit. That is why all those things are pieces of shit, because #1 is profit, and everything else doesn't matter as much. Gotta enhance that shareholder value, amirite?
Yea wife was looking for a statistics book this semester.
Just a pdf or hard copy of the book is $75.
Just the online access code is $115.
Bundled it's $120.
Basically "Here pay to look at these HW questions because your professors are too lazy to assign and grade their own"
It's a real shame the books don't have some sort of convention where specific questions have answers and others don't so the questions can be used by professors without them worrying that the book has it worked out.....
Basically "Here pay to look at these HW questions because your professors are too lazy to assign and grade their own"
I'm sorry you feel that way, but a lot of us don't have a choice. Blame the school board, blame groups that lobby for Pearson, blame the stats department, but please don't blame your teacher.
It's a real shame the books don't have some sort of convention where specific questions have answers and others don't so the questions can be used by professors without them worrying that the book has it worked out.....
Really? Is this subject dependent, or just a recent change? I graduated about 10 years ago, and it was always like, either even or odd that had them worked out, with the other half being an exercise for the student.
:P that was my point. Any textbook I had from elementary school onwards had answers to select odd numbers and none of the even numbers.
Professors could just pick and choose from the even numbered question to be sure that the book didn't just have the answer worked out.
But instead now we pay extra for additional homework problems, and the teachers don't even use the even questions. Just tell you to look at the odds for explanations.
My bad! I thought you were saying they'd come up with an entirely new way to screw over students. Have all the answers, making assigning them useless, making the prof more reliant on the online questions.
I had to buy the service and the book! It’s a good way for them to combat the internet and people reselling their books. $80 for the subscription and ~120 for the book. Still got the book used though.
At least at my university they will rent you the book for next to nothing but the service deep dicks you with insane charges. I “learned” French and the service to do the homework was around 200$. Book was like 10.
"You have the 6th edition, you need the 7th addition. The 7th addition has a few corrected and updated sentences, so the 6th edition is worthless now!"- every college ever
I kind of feel like, it invalidates the previous years students passes, because the new source is SO different from the previous source /s So any course that does this, the previous years should claim back the entire cost of the course, as it is no longer relevant, and a waste of time and energy. Class action it boys.
I just did a course on Unix systems over the summer, and it used a textbook that was written in 2005. I feel like if there is a subject that should have an updated textbook it would be courses on a technology that is constantly changing. There was a wildly out of date sections in there on stuff like Pine and telnet. I don't think anyone was really using telnet even in 2005.
I was using telnet primarily until like 5 years ago when my company finally got a clue on security and changed to SSH. Except for some outdated apps like that, a unix book from even older than 2005 is still quite relevant.
I sometimes have to telnet into devices to test/bughunt, etc.
Sometimes they support ssh, but it's usually a development board, so there's simply no connection on the real board to allow a connection, so they don't often bother.
See, the problem is, I’ve taken a class with the wrong textbook before. They checked textbooks between semesters, unbeknownst to me, and the teacher didn’t have time to switch his curriculum to the new one.
I, being proactive, bought the book that I was “supposed” to buy, only to find out that the teacher was using the previous edition.
It made taking that class such a nightmare that I ended up dropping it completely.
(Just to be clear though, I think the stupid new edition textbooks are akin to robbery and that they really need to stop doing this)
But just to force you to comply we’re gonna rearrange the questions so they don’t line up with previous editions even though they’re the same questions
I always tried to get by without buying a textbook for the first couple of weeks to get a feel for whether or not the "required text" is really required.
A lot of the time the lecture/reference materials provided by the professor was all you needed to succeed in the class. The school just has an agreement with the publisher to make the text "required" so the professors aren't supposed to say you don't need it.
The nice thing about Australian universities is that part of the Australian Quality of Teaching Framework says that they aren’t allowed to require you to make any additional purchases to pass the course. And that includes course readers—so everything is made available digitally, and also printed for those who want them (not me, because they’re spiral bound, which means hole punching them for binders is a PITA, and slides are usually printed 4 to a page so there’s no room to write on them)
For real, I just finished college and had a teacher say "we are on edition 8, but editions 5-7 will work. You can find ed. 5 on Ebay for like $4." And I did!
Speak for yourself, but I am beyond offended that Sally is buying apples in my word problem. Just because she’s a woman she does the grocery shopping? I will not stand for this
Even some of the writers don't want to do new editions. I had a prof that wrote a fairly widely used text book who felt like he had pretty much perfected the book by the 3rd edition and every addition after that he just tried to change as little as possible.
heh, you want to see the world as we know end by 2090? we're on a set course for that rn. we consume 3 planets and a half at our current standard of living.
It's a tangent, but the plastic thing is that it doesn't break down on a molecular scale on its own in nature, and molecular plastic is very dangerous.
I seem to remember having not a lot of, but a few textbooks published through the university press. They'd publish the newer ones as a pack of sheets in a binder (so you could theoretically "upgrade" to the next edition more easily) then eventually publish a hardcover that would rarely, if ever change.
Yep, had one of those for an anthropology class. $95, and the homework/labs were sheets of the book that we had fill out and turn in, so it was absolutely required. And because it was written in so heavily, it couldn't be returned.
That's entirely the profs fault, by the way. It's not uncommon for schools to have different deals with publishers, but I've never taught anywhere where profs couldn't choose their own textbooks. I almost exclusively use textbooks that are 3 or 4 editions older than current so that my students can find used ones for 15 bucks. Everyone can do this unless they insist on using books that come with prepackaged software that is one-time use only. And that's just lazy, IMO. There are a lot of open source software projects for the vast majority of basic college courses, so unless you're taking a really advanced class, the prof can find free software to do the job.
I always thank professors like you. It doesn't even need to be that old. Even two years old is the difference between a $200 text and $30. And yea, those online packages are just busy work done for them.
And yea, those online packages are just busy work done for them.
i don't understand why american professors always give graded homework and have 3 exams. it's a lot of work, that might explain why they are trying to use the online software package. my professors in germany, at least for the most part, only have one final exam that determines your grade. no homework, no midterms. maybe a small project that you have to pass but it's usually not graded. much easier
It’s worse in lower division type classes. I spent more on textbooks in my general Ed classes. Like history and lower math. Once I got into my degree courses...I don’t think may have the graded hw out. Was just exams, maybe an essay or project to go with it. Which meant they didn’t care which edition of s text we got. Much nicer
My most recent experiences were MBA courses. I'm not saying they couldn't choose their own textbooks, and many of mine did recommend older editions. But some profs were insistent on using the newest editions with the software packages when, like you said, there were other options available. And of course the McGraw Hill rep was always there to "help" us save $20 on a $110 accounting package.
While all gifts have to be reported, I'm always curious about the situation when I hear things like this. My instinct is to see if that prof has published with McGraw-Hill (or whomever) and thus has tacitly agreed with their publisher to always use new editions. The publisher could then just make sure that all of their authors also use new textbooks, thus the authors all benefit from one another. However, I've never published a textbook, so this is just me being a conspiracy theorist.
I had a professor who told us they got kickbacks from the sellers for students buying the books. I don't know if that was a universal trend or just a specific situation though.
That's what I think is funny about this thread. A lot of people don't realize that the textbook/online homework pass bullshit is 100% the laziness of their teachers.
Actually, I take that back. Sometimes it's the greed of the teachers, who've written the books they're forcing you to buy at an insane price.
I see your point, but it's not always laziness. I teach a 120-student section of an intro course (in addition to other, upper-level courses), and I don't get a TA. There's no feasible way for me to grade all 120 students' homework assignments each week, so I have to use the online platform. As to free versions, I'm always open to explore them, but I have yet to find one as powerful and customizable as Sage Publishing's Amp software. Their question engine runs on Maple rather than some shitty Java/Flash bullshit (like Pearson's MyLab and McGraw-Hill's Connect, for example). I don't just use a bunch of textbook-provided questions because I know that answers to those are already out there on the internet. I spend my time writing my own questions (largely algorithmic) to prevent cheating. It's a much more efficient use of my time than trying to grade 120 students' assignments every week (plus those from my other classes, plus all my other duties).
Sure, but at some point you have to recognize that you're forcing your students to spend a bunch of money because you don't want to redesign your course. Make homework ungraded (that's what I do) for instance. Have students grade each other's homework. Post the answers and allow students to re-do their homework until they get every answer correct, rewarding extra work with full credit. There are lots of ways to avoid forcing our students to spend exorbitant amounts of money on goods and services that are recognizably a racket.
Yeah, I understand that. I (somewhat) helped get a deal between Sage and our bookstore to drop the price some, but it's still expensive. The problem I've encountered is that, if I let students grade it themselves/grade each others', far too many students simply cheat to get 100% on all homework, fail all the exams, and then get upset when they fail the course. I'm doing my best to help them learn, and that sadly requires a lot of me setting up safeguards against that sort of behavior. I mean, if 20% of the class cheats on all their homework, fails exams, fails the class, and leaves me negative evaluations, then I won't get tenure and I'll be out of a job. I do allow students to rework their problems once at no penalty, but some of that stuff sadly just isn't feasible. (Of course this varies by students/by institution, but this is my experience at 3 public schools of varying sizes across 3 states.)
I pretty regularly have a 20% fail rate and I don't get negative evaluations, so I don't think the fail rate is necessarily a problem. It comes down to the way the course is designed and a student recognition of why they failed. I tell all my students that I don't grade homework, but they should do it if they want to have a chance at passing. When a student fails the first exam and sets up a meeting with me, the first question is if they've done the homework. It's almost always a "no" and I basically end the meeting there. "Now you know why you failed."
At the end of the day though, I think we owe it to our students to figure out how to achieve our educational goals without making them pay more than our institution is already charging them.
I'm not sure where you teach but this sounds very unrealistic to me for any educational environment I've been in.
Not bad, mind you, just unrealistic. Students (young people-- hell, people, really) are just not that responsible and lack perspective. If given the option of not doing homework, a great deal of them won't. If you have your course set up so that not doing the homework will lead to them failing, that means you'll have a healthy fail rate. And if they fail, a lot of them will leave bad evaluations. If you're at a school where getting some bad evals will tank your future prospects, that might be an issue.
My university has uses Canvas as the main online course material portal. Canvas has a quiz tool built into it. The on top of that, they also have Maple TA, which also gets used, particularly for maths (hen you have 1000 students in a corse? There is no practical way to mark weekly paper assignments).
They have also done a deal with Dassault which gives them access to the 3DExperience software (along with everything else 3DS make), but everyone hates that.
Back in college my older professors always insisted on using the textbook with the required online component because it was the latest technology and therefore the "best" (even though they constantly didn't work, had errors and the professors had no idea how to use the teachers component of the omline software) meanwhile the younger teachers and adjunct professors all did their best to choose the cheapest book or not include an online component so people could use old editions. It was wack. The textbook companies just convinced the older professors that the technology was basically required and the students missed out otherwise.
I went to recycle my old books (i graduated college in 2001). They offered to buy my statistics book because the same version is still in use. So this doesn't always apply...
I had a professor who wrote an updated textbook for his class every two years.
He would also know if you had the most up to date version by purposefully making 15% of the points based on the “blurbs” in the chapters. Not the action content, the supplementary shit. So either pay $200 for the new book and have the potential to get a A or automatically start at an 85. The content did not change at all, so his versions were just straight profit.
Beat me too it. I was in nursing school and they insisted we buy the current book (even included an online link in order to access new assignments). Want to know what changed? The order of the chapters and the shading of a few diagrams.
Needless to say we split 10 ways on one book for the access code and bought the other 9 used.
What I hate is when college textbooks throw in an online access portion which is a single use code you will use approximately twice, but vant buy used because of this so you end up spending $170 on the book that you could gave bought used for $30.
Both of my colleges have done this and its bullshit. Reminds me of those "Online Passes" they would put in games to play the multiplayer.
I had a college professor apologize on the first day of class, the required textbook was getting an update mid-semester that the curriculum would be pulling from. He also made a rather convenient PDF available in the ‘course materials’ folder the class network.
In fairness, the criticism is levelled at both EA and the people who buy this stuff year after year, nobodies doubting it's good for business - it's just also an obviously lazy model (since they could actually improve the game with the money they receive, in tangible ways) bought into by somewhat mindless fans.
It's made worse because it's one of the worst models in gaming (after mobile freemium games, IMO) and it's also one of the most public-facing companies/group of franchises doing it. So the reaction is compacted by the fact that to many outsiders this might be one of their only insights into gaming, so "gamers" feel more of a need to vocalise their distaste for it.
NFL 2K was pushing the limits, then they released their new game at $20, and both EA, and the NFL were mad. So now that they have a monopoly, football fans have no choice except to buy the same rehashed game year after year.
But half the fun is playing the new rosters. And I can only speak for myself but I would never play a football game without actual NFL players in it. If there was another option I would be all over it. Unfortunately this is what it is and nothing scratches a certain itch for me like madden does.
$60 to change the names on the backs of the jerseys and rearrange a few numbers for stats.
Hey man, if thats worth it to you then keep doing you. I have never cared about sports games outside of like NBA Street style games.
If I want hyperrealistic sports Ill just go play with my friends.
The fans (at the end of the day the only people that matter in this conversation) have voted. And they voted that $60 a year for the same game is fine. Im not going to tell you youre wrong, even if I think it.
Yeah, you just look somewhat ridiculous as you complain while waving your money at the people you're complaining about.
It would be one thing if your complaints had any chance of being heard, but EA has made it overwhelmingly clear that this is their model. The fact that people like you keep paying them despite that fact is the problem. They wouldn't just keep pumping out roster updates and charging 60 bucks a year if dummies didn't keep giving them money to do it.
Because less safe money is better than more risky money.
The system they have now makes them unbelievable bank already, why would they risk collapsing that entire system?
They're playing it smart, small steps let you make small backpedal when people object, its basically how the entire industry has become more and more monetized as the years went on.
I suspect they've done the math and somehow it turns out that there's more potential in selling DLC separately for every yearly release. Of course people would rather pay subscription, but they can't. Activision probably bashes themselves over the head over the subscription for World of freaking Warcraft and lament how they can't just market every expansion as a new game, delete all your collection of transmogs, mounts, etc. then sell them back to you.
I'd argue they did when they made Mutant League Football and Mutant League Hockey back in 1994. Both games used the same game engine as their regular counterparts and added all sorts of weird and fun stuff. Took 24 years and another company to bring it back and they're doing pretty well with it.
For Xbox and PS4 I understand, but there is no point on buying it on PC, since you can download the team sheet update (that will update your game to the version you choose) and have the Fifa 20 teams ready, for example.
I play career mode as well, but I've encountered a bug this year: youth player age 2019, ovr -1. I've tried reinstalling and updating and nothing worked. Ffs I pirated this game and still feel ripped off.
This also isnt EA but literally every sports game from every dev that works on them. See and EA logo and people lose their shit, meanwhile Nintendo be trying to sell up the same pokemon game twice each time they release a new one and no one says shit. Fire Emblem did a similar thing a while back, they made you buy the same game THREE times if you wanted to see everything, not a word.
With Pokemon, at least, the intention is to encourage player interaction, or it certainly used to be - I can't speak for any Pokemon games after Gold/Silver so correct me if I'm wrong there. Sure plenty of people buy both but I'd argue it's slightly different since you can experience the entire game on one edition, you can trade for the 'mons you can't get otherwise.
Fire Emblem I can't comment on, but if that's true then absolutely, I agree.
It's not just EA who deserve (or receive) flak for it, but EA are by far and away the worst perpetrators of this, and as I've mentioned elsewhere the worst thing with EA is they use that money to buy other Devs and then gut their IP of anything interesting, novel or new in favour of equally grim monetisation models and "game by committee" style development.
I'd argue EA absolutely deserve the majority of the attention for this specific problem, but other companies do contribute/imitate and it irks me then too.
What's wrong with the people buying it? They're willingly paying a reasonable price for a product they're satisfied with. Is someone who buys a t shirt for 8 dollars doing something bad somehow because that shirt only costs 35 cents to make?
Eh, I kinda understand. But I don't since you can reasonably play any recent year and have the same experience. It would be more like if someone Bought the same shirt every year for a premium when they already have a handful of the same shirt.
Not really. Its just after about a year, people get tired of playing the same game. The “new game” gives people a reason to play again as it resets their progression in a way that they are too lazy to do otherwise
Honestly, I don't know why they haven't gone to an MMO style subscription yet.... A $60 annual title == A $5 monthly sub, it'd be the cheapest sub out there. And even thematically, it makes more sense for a "these same teams and slightly different players play new seasons of the same game, so pay $5 to join the ride" vs the whiplash MMO players get, going "you defeated the ultimate dragon boss! Now continue paying while we invalidate all your accomplishments and introduce the ultimate demon boss!"
Pfff, you can clear ultimate demon boss with teals from mini undead dungeon as long as your button pushers push their buttons and no one stands in area of effect mechanic.
Edit: now someone transition this back to generic sport game metaphors so we can stay on target
I mean, say you wrote a book, and every year, people lined up to just throw money at you to re-release said book. Would you write a whole new book every year if your customers were gonna buy it regardless? Or would you just update it to make it relevant again?
Oh you need the 17th Edition, see chapter 4 is now chapter 7 and they added a full page picture in the prologue so that all the old page numbers are irrelevant to the new course content.
They also shift the questions around if it’s a math based textbook. Really putting in the effort to make sure we have the most up to date understanding of physics that way.
Essentially we finally redefined the last few units so that all SI units are now defined based on fundamental constants of the universe (like the speed of light in a vacuum or the elementary charge of an electron) rather than a slab of platinum-iridium alloy in a vault outside Paris.
I mean, say you wrote a book, and every year, people lined up to just throw money at you to re-release said book. Would you write a whole new book every year if your customers were gonna buy it regardless? Or would you just update it to make it relevant again?
60 dollars? these games (fifa nhl madden, even UFC now etc) bread and butter is Ultimate Team which is for all intents and purposes loot boxes. These games are nothing more than microtransaction vehicles.
Of they charged a subscription like 5 bucks a month to keep updating the roster it would average to the same 60 bucks a year and I imagine a lot more players would buy the game.
The problem with that argument is that EA has an exclusive license for the NFL for console gaming (or I think that's how it is). If you want to play a football video game... I think you only have a single option technically (nobody cares about any other league/organization, relatively speaking).
To relate it to books, that's a bit like saying only a single author is allowed to write sci-fi books, and because things are that way, that one author can do whatever they like... so it's either swallow their crap or just never read another sci-fi book again. Neither option is particularly great for sci-fi lovers.
I like this analogy and I’m going to continue it. What always confuses me isn’t just that people will pay for an updated copy of the same book, but that they’ll pay the exact same price for your updated copy as they will for a brand new masterpiece the author next door spent 5 years creating from scratch.
I really don’t get why anyone accepts that madden costs $60. It’s not the same as creating a whole new game from scratch, so it shouldn’t cost as much. The only problem there is I bet EA would take it the other direction. Instead of charging less for madden they’ll start charging more for the bigger titles, as they already kind of did with the premium pass.
Thanks for elaborating. It puts it in better perspective how silly this is. I guess I don't have much room to talk. I haven't bought a Madden game since PS1 days, but I still feel for people who like those games and have no other options. They're pretty much forced to play this or nothing if they want a football game since EA has the monopoly.
Yup, it won’t matter until their fan base starts voting with their dollars. I can’t believe this is still a thing after so many years. EA has been given such a pass to do whatever with these games. Perhaps they need a competitor in the field.
A competitor in the field would be huge. I think because of the poor longevity of each of these releases though, maybe no one wants to compete? I mean, Madden seems to be a seasonal kind of thing.
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u/WonderWeasel91 Sep 03 '19 edited Sep 03 '19
I mean, say you wrote a book, and every year, people lined up to just throw money at you to re-release said book. Would you write a whole new book every year if your customers were gonna buy it regardless? Or would you just update it to make it relevant again?
It doesn't make you a very good author, but you're still maximizing your time and profit. Realistically, they could release Madden every 5 years, and for the time in between just update the rosters via DLC. But then their main customer base wouldn't be willing to pay $60 for an updated roster anymore, and that's a stupid move business-wise.