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Gaming Site Reviews.. Real Life?
jbp8 writes: "There's an article on GameSpot reviewing the ultimate MMOG - real life!" The article gives real life an Editor's Choice award, focusing on issues such as leveling up ("Typically, a character will learn of the numerous viable career paths available by undergoing schooling. This can be a long and tedious process, equivalent to the sort of 'level treadmill' monotony that characterizes almost all MMORPGs") and player death ("..a serious issue in real life, and cause for continued debate among players, who often direct unanswerable questions on the subject to the game's developers.")
I should have taken the Red Pill.
...where can I find all the cheat codes?
Accentuate the positive, don't waste your mod points on the negative.
The only thing I hate about the REAL LIFE MMORPG is the freaking admins..
Every time I try to PK or steal.. they are on my tail.. can't get away with ANYTHING! Maybe i'm just bad at it.
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
...is it's got very poor replayability, unless you pick the Buddhist specialization (or so I hear).
-Jack Ash
I was expecting much more after the promising 9 month beta test.
Forming a raid to the SCO Headquarters zone; we're going to take down the boss Darl McBride for some ph4t l3wts! All above level 50 welcome! Need healers!! Meet at the Utah portal.
I think I speak for many of us when I say: "Life is good."
Mm, I don't know. I'd feel better about it if I could figure out how to restore from a saved version.
Does that make those who committ suicide the real heros, because they beat the addiction and quit playing? ;)
I spent all my education skill points on computer programming, and now I cant seem to use the damn skills because someone nerfed the ability to gain money with them like before. I wanted to be a god damned power user, now I am trying to get a skillset in another area that looks good, and that will probably be nerfed too!
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
You know you're very much out of scope. Someone should call you're destructor immediately.
"Video games don't affect kids. If Pacman had affected us when we were kids, everyone would be running around in darkened rooms, munching on magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music."
Hmmmm. There are certain in-game populations (Hindus, for example) that do apparently have do-over capabilities. Perhaps you've simply chosen the wrong alignment?
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside a dog it's too dark to read. - Groucho Marx
No, my game has a post-game bonus round, which varies depending on how you played.
Does anyone know where I can find a Real Life server with good role play? I'm a little sick of all the loot monkey, powergamer, rules lawyers that I find on this server.
"To borrow an idea from the Sims, can an almost entirely online social experience fill up the Social Meter?"
Are you a writer for Sex and the City?
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
It just ruined the game when people started selling their items on Ebay.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
It was also found that in the real life MMOG women rarely wear sexy armor, don't say "Mi'Lord", don't have a supermodel's figure, and most importantly do not have a penis.
Remember nobody MAKES you pay bills.
You know I never really liked paying bills, I don't think I'm going to do that any more.
Sigs are like bumper stickers.
This further discourages players from engaging in PVP combat, but it does help real life's rapidly growing player population from getting too out of hand (though eventually there will be a need for additional servers).
Some players insist that additional servers already exist, and that it is the players' responsibility to explore and "settle" them in order to guard against catastrophe and ensure that there are sufficient resources for new players. Skeptics point to extreme lag between the existing server and the suggested new host: ping times are measured in minutes, and player transfer could take months.
The shareholder is always right.
Well, from personal experience I can say that unsubscribing is a bitch. The customer service people have been instructed to hassle anyone who comes in saying they want to unsubscribe until they agree to stay; I know people who say they unsubscribed previously, only to find later that they were still being billed; and all the user interfaces through which you can have your account deleted are just plain user unfriendly. (I am beginning to suspect the "slit wrists" module, which is the one most of the help files direct you toward, is designed just plain not have any way to make it work at all. "Down not across" indeed, what rubbish.)
It seems to me that most people who want to quit eventually just get so frustrated by this sort of run-around that they eventually just give up and keep playing.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
If you have a Feature Request for the next version, you can always post it here.
is that you can't buy and sell characters on eBay.
-a
Can I have the remaining time on your Real Life account, then?
I've been running Real Life for a while now, and occasionally get frame drops and skips, especially in the "Alcohol Consumption" sub-games.
I quite enjoy these sub-games - is this a legitimate memory issue that will be addressed in a patch, or should I be upgrading my system?
We're all gonna die!
The games displays excesive violence e.g. raping, killing and bombing cities with mass destruction weapons; and it's highly intolerable for this game to allow pointing guns at legal enforcement officers and sometime even shooting at them!
The game system itself is very unfair to majority of players. Few rich people can enhance their characters by spending lot of cash to buy equipment and trainings. The more popular MMORPG EQ has proved that players are generally displeased with the premium characters packages, and now 'real life' doesn't learn from history! This has a very adverse influrence to the kid-players whom we lied to them in school that the 'real life' is fair and balance.
Think about the children! You incensitive clod!
Its people running the hacked client and cheating there way to the top taht are ruining it for the rest of us.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Hey! anybody got cheat codes for the new 1.98 patch?
On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?
It's too much like the Sims. Pointless tasks to get simoleans to impress people with house and stuff in it. WAY too much micromanagement. I have to figure out when to go to the bathroom, sleep, eat, etc?
Still, I'm somewhat addicted to the game, and not looking to stop any time soon.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
So are multiple-personality cases just Buddhists that hit Select while they were putting the code in?
I am not a man, I am a free number.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
So that's what it means when they say "REAL" gamers never restore from saved versions.
Ted: "I don't like it here. I don't know what's going on. We're both stumbling around together in this unformed world whose rules and objectives are largely unknown, seemingly indecipherable or even possibly nonexistent, always on the verge of being killed by forces that we don't understand."
Allegra: "That sounds like my game all right."
Ted: "That sounds like a game that's not going to be easy to market"
Allegra: "But it's a game everybody's already playing."
"The dead know only one thing: It's better to be alive."
Yeah, take that BillGates character for example. I bet he used the money freeze cheat. Lamer.
I'll put it this way: There may be other games that let you have sex, but the feedback is sooooo much better in "Real Life".
Enjoy!
On Arrakis: early worm gets the bird. Magister mundi sum!
It's way too violent and fills my mind with all kinds of impure thoughts that make me want to go on killing sprees, unfortunately.
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
It needs a better search function. Usually you have to private message another player and hope they've already seen the item you're looking for and know where it resides.
Seaching for other players for the partnership or relationship mini-games usually requires manually initiating a private message session with many different players before a suitable match is found. This can be very time consuming and while there are in-game services that claim to be able to help you with this, they don't attract enough players to be truly useful.
Not enough features come standard. If you want enhanced vision to see at night or zoom in, you have to purchase addons. If you want to know what the world you are on looks like, you must purchase a map. If you want to know your position on the map, you must purchase a GPS. Not all addons work as well as you'd expect. For example, screen capture capability with a camera addon is usually limited to only a small portion of your viewable display area.
Many of the players carry infectious agents, seemingly introduced into the game by its creator. These range from slightly annoying (they'll slow your progress in the game for a few days) to lethal (game over). Some activities in the game will expose you to infectious agents. The sexual activity minigame, while fun, is the most notorious for this. Some of the players have been trying to reverse engineer these problems and distribute patches, but they're only having limited success.
Even with all my complaints, real life does get some things right. There's nearly a limitless supply of background music tracks and while the in-game admins would prefer you purchased them as addons, they're easily enough aquired without using hardly any in-game currency once you start using the Internet features.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
The truly amazing thing about Real Life is that the development process only took six days, although that all depends on who you ask.
irb(main):001:0>
No, just because life isnt fun doesnt make death any more interesting.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
I was creating a world on the PC and all the sudden it was like "bleep beep beep beep beep" and I was like, "Wah?".
It devoured my world.
It was a really good world.
Then I had to create it again and I had to do it fast and it wasn't as good.
It was kinda, a bummer.
I'm God and I'm a deity.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
....is no one understands the economy.
Slackware, what else when it must be secure, stable, and easy?
This was generally a good review. Unfortunately, the reviewer completely failed to explain the finer points of character creation.
A unique feature of real life is that, while players cannot choose their own character attributes, new players can enter the game only when their characters have been created by players already online. The mechanic is that two players of opposite gender and appropriate age and alignment combine their attributes randomly to create a new PC. This mechanic makes the gender attribute more than superficially significant: much of game play, including many socials, are gender-specific.
The newly-created avatar actually encumbers the female "mother" character for 9 months, after which it typically spends time as essentially an item in the mother's inventory. Character creation is normally part of the "parenting" system referred to in the review, although it is not uncommon for characters other than the creators to parent the newbies.
Many players of real life find character creation among the most enjoyable aspects of the game. There is a practice-only option for character creation: in fact, practice character creation is itself one of the most popular activities in real life, and is discussed endlessly in-game.
Some character classes in real life, for example, the "nerd" class, are usually nominally male, but essentially genderless from the gaming POV. Perhaps the reviewer's character is a nerd: if so, I'd encourage use of the in-game training and character mods to develop some character creation skills. I think the reviewer might be surprised by how much fun they can be.
Video Game/Reality dissociation... Heh. Oh man, the stories I could tell, don't get me started.
Okay, you twisted my arm. Back in college, me and my friends played a lot of Diablo online. When word of the duping cheat got out, we were on Battle.net day and night trying to duplicate exotic loot for each other. The duping cheat was extremely tricky; you had to pick up a small amount of money at the EXACT moment that you dropped the weapon you wished to duplicate. Or maybe it was the other way around, I don't remember. Anyway, because of the nature of the cheat, it took a lot of tries to even get it right once.
One time after college, we went to get some french fries downtown. One of my friends payed for it with a tenner, but the woman behind the counter gave him back too much change, like she thought he'd given her a twenty. And the expression on his face... I'm sure we all knew what he was thinking right then. He'd discovered a duping cheat in reality! Let's buy more french fries, pay with another tenner, get back even more money! He'd be rich!
It took us ten minutes to talk him out of it. He seemed so determined to try it again, as an experiment. Of course we all knew it wouldn't work , and we'd end up stuffed with french fries. But for him, it was like he finally found a flaw in reality that he could exploit.
I'm pretty sure he went on to become the editor of a major dutch gaming publication.
If there were ever a story to serve as the definitive example of slashdot nerdiness, this is it.
I haven't found *any* yet. So, if I screw up, I have to live with it! That, or just reset back to the beginning ...
There should be more floating around, so that if we slay a particularly nasty middle manager we don't have to keep doing it over and over each time we die. I'm scared to take on any more, in case I get killed.
The other advantage would be that every time we are about to do something risky, we could save *first*! About to ask the boss for a raise? Save first! About to finally ask the girl in the next cubicle over out? Save first! About to take a financial risk? Save first! Entering a tough bit on an annoying PS2 game with not enough save points? Save first!
And yet, real life STILL doesn't have as many features as Nethack.
Back in the days when me and my mates played FAAR too much quake to be healthy. I remember a conversation between a friend and his girl.
(F) You are my night in shining armour!
(M) Is that RED armour ?
It's true that your player's race will affect gameplay - but the situation was far worse in earlier versions of the game. In fact, before the Emancipation Proclamation patch was applied in 1863, players could be "owned" by other players and forced to work for them as slaves - typically endless "farming" of certain items such as Tobacco and Sugar Cane. Whether or not you could be owned as a slave was determined by your character's race.
Many problems remained after the patch. This has required additional patches to ensure that all players have an equal chance to develop their character and participate in the in-game economy regardless of character race. The admins still have some work to do, but the game is much better in this regard than it used to be.
Unfortunately, many of these problems continue due to malicious players. On several occasions, players have amassed power and tried to kill all players of a certain race. The worst of these was a German player who killed several million players this way in the 1940s, and started a round of PvP combat that lasted six years and involved player armies from nearly all the regions of the game world. The fighting only stopped after a group of players in the North America region discovered the Nuclear Weapons Exploit and used it to force a surrender.
Remember the days when Republicans were the party of fiscal responsibility?
I find that Real Life is not fair to chaotic characters. Lawful characters have it much easier. I mean, just look at the artifact weapons: Lawful characters have the Thermonuclear Bomb which does 4d10 shock damage, 3d8 fire damage, and 2d6 radiation damage for 100 turns afterward.
Chaotic characters only have the SCUD Missile which has a -1 to hit and only 3d6 damage.
Lawful characters can enchant the Thermonuclear Bomb up to +6 when it becomes a Hydrogen Bomb which does 8d10 shock damage but less radiation damage. SCUD Missiles cannot be enchanted but instead lose -1 to hit for every year left in the desert.
Not fair i'm telling you.
# ssh -l neo the_matrix; killall -9 agent_smith
glittering prizes
glittering prizes
glittering prizes
glittering prizes
Crap! Why isn't this working?
- Real Life sucks, but quitting involves the complete and utter termination of existance. Not existing has got to be the least fun thing imaginable, if only because you're no longer around to experience it. Ever.
- Real Life sucks now, has sucked, and is quite likely to suck in the future, but there's always the chance that it won't. And even if it does, there might be some quite nice bits. Even a 0.1% chance of things turning out worthwhile is better than 0% chance of experiencing anything ever again.
- Quitting is a one-way process. The lack of QuickSave and QuickLoad was a major oversight by the development team, and sadly looks to be extremely difficult to add after release.
- Quitting is not a guaranteed process; you can get through most of the way only for the process to be interrupted, leaving the possibility of you being stuck only partly in the game, unable to interact with it properly. You'll quit eventually, but that might take years.
- Quitting may also be painful, and ruin the game for other players.
I think I speak for many of us when I say: "Life sucks, but what else is there?"I havent found any sex vendors yet. I have found stores that sell sex devices, but no actual sex vendors.
Is this 'sex' quest kind of like the Jedi quest in Star Wars: Galaxies? No guarantee you'll get to attempt the quest, and odds of about 1-1000 of succeeding? Eh, maybe I can wait till someone just sells their woman on EBay
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!