Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Reputation Manager's Guide To Xbox One
symbolset writes "In the wake of a disastrous E3 product reveal Microsoft has purportedly distributed a confidential internal 100-point 'FAQ' for the Xbox One that reads like it's from the Ministry of Truth. It was of course immediately leaked on pastebin. Kotaku has the story and an amusing online poll. In the discussion below make sure to line up the FAQ entries with the AC comments for extra 'Informative' moderation."
This just in: The XBone One has managed to achieve what the Dreamcast couldn't... blowing up prior to launch. The Dreamcast at least fired the engines before exploding in a firey storm of shit. Which, given that their customers seem to be EA games and other publishers, and not, you know, people who are going to buy the console... seems about right.
There are Kickstarter consoles still on the drawing board, I mean, not even prototypes available yet, that have more pre-orders than the XBone. I don't think they could fail harder. Unless (dramatic pause) ... they bring Square Enix to headline this collossal cluster f*ck.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
For some of us, you've already lost the sale. Always on internet is a killer for many of us, since it's mostly taking away our freedom.
Fuck Xbox One.
Netcraft confirms it, the XBone will definitely add 3-4" to your penis after only one use!
Remember the rage around here a few years back when Sony nixed Linux on PS3. Or the whole "rootkit fiasco"? Amazing how quickly past outrage is forgotten.
Q: What exclusive first-party games are in development, and when will we see them?
A: None. Despite bending our customers over a barrel and raping them until they bled and screamed for mercy with our new DRM, we don't have a single exclusive to show for it.
Q: How many games do you plan to ship at launch?
A: We got a lot of promises, but the warehouse is presently, uhh, a bit vacant.
Q: What is the new Xbox Live?
A: For game publishers, it's the second coming of Christ, the ressurection, the moment we've been waiting for, beating ourselves off to in private fantasizing over. For game players, it's an unholy cluster fuck that makes Square Enix scorched Earth policy on every franchise you ever loved look positively humane.
Q: What new benefits does Xbox Live offer?
A: The new generation of Xbox Live gets to know you and your preferences, by watching you 24/7 through a webcam that cannot be turned off, and puts you at the center of all your games and entertainment, and then builds a giant 20 foot thick concrete wall between you and all your friends who you can't share any of it with without an extra fee. It will make sure your Xbox is always up to date and ready for you, like meeting every ex you ever had at a party, who then stalk you for the next year, posting comments on your Facebook about what a whore you were, and a cheater -- that gaming is better with smart, quick and intuitive multiplayer, unlike everything else on the market which can accomplish this basic feat without spying on you, whoring away your personal viewing habits, and knowing exactly when you're about to climax on the couch to post that new advertisement for Buxom Babes 7, backed by the new Smart Match system -- which is just like online dating, only creepier. It adds even more personalization to your TV and entertainment, because what's more entertaining and personal than sitting alone, in your basement, your friends unable to join you to play without paying an extra fee? Nothing, that's what! With the evolved Xbox Live, your games and profile are stored in the cloud, so you can access them from any Xbox One console, and we'd appreciate it a lot if you'd forget about what we've done with Sidekick, and every other Cloud platform we've absorbed like some Doctor Who alien, only with less wit and British charm.... this time will be different. We Promise(tm).
Q: I saw reports stating friends will be unlimited and reports saying the cap is 1,000. Which is correct?
A: We're excited to report it's the lower of the two, which shouldn't discourage you in any way... because we've tried very hard to match the same low standards that are already present in the industry with our next generation console!
Q: Do I have to pay to access Xbox Live?
A: No. We'll just be collecting your personal viewing habits and selling them to the lowest bidder.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
101. Since I would have to pay 500$ for it, will I be able to run my own software on the Xbox One?
It's a bit too long for a troll document, and a just sufficiently corporate-speakish to be real. Teen trolls don't have the language skills to produce a document like that, while adult trolls don't have the time and patience to get over that many points.
It also doesn't look like a collaboration because the writing style stays the same throughout the document.
All in all, it has a very good chance of being a real thing.
I'm sure knowing that is going to make the millions of ruralites feel much better about the situation knowing they're taking one for the team.
But without the phoning home requirement, you'd get some of those millions of "ruralites" to buy an XBox One.
You are welcome on my lawn.
You can get a gaming PC for about $400 but it will be entry level, when it comes to PC's better to spend at least a little bit more and get something that will last a while.
This one is $529 and is more than a match for the new generation of consoles.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883229285
The biggest thing about investing in the price difference on a gaming PC is that when your not playing games, you can do a LOT of other things on a PC. So the price difference is more than made up for.
All this being said, I am lucky and have enough money to do both, I tend to buy 2 consoles from each gen and keep a gaming PC around. This will be the first gen I do not buy at least 2 of the consoles at launch. I own a Wii-U and I don't plan on getting a Xbox One, I also do not trust Sony enough to pick up a PS4 at launch my PS3 was not a good experience for me... Always seems like I spend more time updating the firmware than actually playing it.
"Which $400 gaming PC that can play games with comparable graphics to forthcoming PS4 games would you recommend?"
One built yourself.
A10-5800K with 8GB RAM costs me.... $247.90 free shipping and before taxes.
Barebones System
8GB RAM
If I decided to drop the extra $150 on a better GPU than the 7660D included in the A10, then you could get a GTX560 and be set to go. Or snag dual GTX460s for the same price.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Insane amounts of money can move a bad product, but it does not ensure it will be a successful product. Just look at Zune, Microsoft threw money at that hand over fist but they still weren't able to gain a significant market share. The most they achieved with their marketing blitz was 10%, their market share plummeted after that, roughly halving every year until they gave up and mothballed the brand.
Since I don't game much any more, mainly because I have nothing to prove to 14-year-olds who would mow me down, the only aspect of Xbone that remotely appealed to me was the promise to revolutionize TV.
Luckily, TV and "sparts" were most of what they talked about! Oh joy. Just the same old TV repackaged. Wow this is totally what everyone wanted. Um.. yeah.
The thing is, I already have several TV gadgets that do most of that, or at least the parts I care about. One is a Roku box. Microsoft should get one. It was $90 at Costco and ranks up there among the best decisions I've ever made in electronics. The thing OWNS my TV on the weekends. Key points: it was under $100 and I already have it. Two of them, actually. Roku in the kitchen over wifi is like wireless cable. Now what am I missing again?
Another gadget is the new Dish Hopper with Sling. The box they tried to ban. Sure, I have to pay every month for it and it only gets "a whole lot of channels" mostly in HD, for not a lot of money. But it does a very good job at it the one thing it does. It also happily feeds ALL of that content to my phone, wherever I might happen to be. Or a PC or tablet or whatever.
Wait, RDB. What about playing pirated video files? What about porn files!? Roku doesn't do that very well! Nope. But the Hopper can play some and I also have an old WDTV Live box which can play nearly anything. It plays some things VLC won't touch. The WD box doesn't do much else but it does do file playback. A perfect companion device. It, too, was cheap.
So I am not feeling the need to drop $500 on another STB. What I have works. Nothing Microsoft demoed or talked about poses any threat at all to these devices. And even if they did, the price tag still kills it.
Sig for hire.
No, it's not. Buy the PS4 and it's all sorted.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
You don't get the point of his message: if you aren't urban, fuck off.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
My cousin currently owns an Xbox 360 and likes to play Call of Duty series, Battlefield series, and similar first-person shooters. He has rejected the Xbox One and is trying to decide between a PlayStation 4 console and a new gaming PC this December. Which $400 gaming PC that can play games with comparable graphics to forthcoming PS4 games would you recommend?
The PS4 is yet to provide the same graphical experience as my 2009 vintage PC. Along with this, the TCO for a PC is lower. over 3 years you'll spend more on games for your console than you would on buying a decent PC and the same games.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Is anyone going to buy the Xbox One?
No.
All the rest of the questions and answers seem pretty stupid after that since that sort of undermines them all.
Oh, it's unlimited. The console might just not allow you to use all of it.
No, that's not the problem. As another follow-up rightly pointed out, broadband is a prerequisite for most online gaming.
The problem is that those friends in rural are locked out from console gaming at all. Well, that's one of the problems, anyway.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Microsoft sells some trackballs that are right-hand only. It doesn't bother them to throw away 15% of the trackball market - which may be more because creative types tend to be lefties.
Before broadband there was a thing known as a modem which hooked up to a telephone line. I realise that you may not have heard of these existing, as they did, in that uninteresting bit of history between the late Cretaceous and yesterday. However posting on Slashdot is entirely possible through such a device. Some are still rumoured to exist out in the wilds, far beyond the sight of the last suburb, where the 3G reception icon on your phone starts to flicker.
You don't get the point of his message: if you aren't urban, fuck off.
Suburbanites and ruralites aren't numerous enough to move Microsoft's needle. So fuck off.
Does it need to be more clear? Fuck the fuck off? Go away? You're not needed here?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
They ran 2 (or likely 2 million) situations through some great combonator. In situation A, they don't phone home every 24 hours and more people can buy the box, but publishers get mad that they can't impose draconian DRM. In situation B, they do phone home every 24 hours and less people can buy the box, but the publishers are happier. Situation B made them more money in spite of losing them customers, so that's what they went with.
What I think they may have failed to take into account is those of us who have broadband but won't buy the box anyway because of this.
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
Quite aside from the other purchase stoppers, I have a projection system, and the Kinect simply doesn't work in that environment -- I know this -- we tried it. It's blinded by the projector just to start, and when you stand where it can see your outline blocking the projector, you're an annoying shadow on the display anyway. Complete non-starter. We threw our Kinect in a box and never took it out again.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Someone dumped some stuff in a pastebin, and somehow we all *know* it's an internal Microsoft guide for "Reputation Managers".
Why do we *know* this? (Hear me out - I'm not attempting to deny it. I'm making a larger point.)
Perhaps it's because of Microsoft's reputation.
What is that reputation? Contempt.
Microsoft has contempt for the people who are forced to use its products. This is why people react so strongly to Microsoft's recent innovations: it's not the change, but the contempt, that they are reacting to.
Microsoft wasn't always this way, but the attitude was certainly well entrenched by the time that it introduced its Office certification, the "MOUS".[1] The contempt came through with its introduction of the Office Ribbon, immediately after Microsoft said it'd be "too hard" for users to learn the "very different" user interface of OpenOffice. It came through with the total lack of investment in IE. It came through with the introduction of Vista. It came through with WinCE, and the Kin, and with the trashing of Windows Phone 7 users' investment: can't take your apps to 8, suckers! Most strongly, it has come through in the introduction of Windows 8.
The contempt was multi-leveled with 8. An interface designed for touch...and nearly no computers to use it on, nor any in the offing at the time of launch. That was subtle contempt. But the really big, fat, obvious, in-your-face contempt was in the look and feel of the UI. Big blocks of flat primary colors, vocabulary like "charms", dumping you suddenly back at the start page every time Microsoft thinks you're doing something too complicated: this was a UI for pre-schoolers or early primary-school kids. On tranquilizers.[2]
Why did Microsoft think that 8's UI would be acceptable to adults? Because Microsoft has complete contempt for its users. Microsoft has been dissing its users for a long time now. And with "x-bone phone home", always-on cam, etc., the dissing continues: you're a child. You can't handle privacy: you'll just do naughty things with it.
*This* is why we believe some anonymous pastebin: we know, inside, that Microsoft has contempt for its users. We've got the message.
The XBox One was conceived in a culture of contempt, and soaked in it throughout its gestation. If gamers have any self-respect, it will die still-born.
--tl;dr-stop-here--
1. Rebranded the MOS. Would you rather be a mouse, or moss? Which is more respectful?
2. This is what gets people's backs up about the '8 UI. "Can't handle change" never passed the sniff test: tens of millions could handle running away to iOS, Android, OS X... and some can even work with Chrome, according to Amazon's best-seller lists. I've yet to read their complaints about the inefficiency of those UIs.
People (even slashdotters) aren't good at introspection, though, so the unconscious reaction to Microsoft's contempt as embodied in the 8UI came out as a dislike of the mechanics of the UI, rather than as "Microsoft is insulting me! The bastards!"
The Xbone will do ok in the US. That's its home market, there's always a degree of "patriotic" buying (though not to the same extent as in Japan) and, like them or not, some of the 360's exclusive franchises still have a lot of market power. There are people who will buy an Xbone for Halo. The overlap between those people and "people who read slashdot" is probably quite small.
Will the Xbone do as well in the US as the 360 has (where the sales data shows it's the dominant console)? Probably not, at least on the basis of what we've seen so far. Sony's given the "floating voters" with no strong attachment to either camp a lot of reasons to go in the PS4 direction this time. But the Xbox series has a lot of loyal fans in the US and most of them will still be hanging on.
The danger for MS lies outside of the US. Ok, it's never managed to get the Xbox to succeed in Japan. So it's probably fair that it doesn't put too many resources into trying this time around (you'll never get away from the fact that the demographic profile of gamers looks very, very different in Japan and is much less interested in those games we consider "mainstream" in the West).
But Europe? Europe was in many ways the key swing battleground of the 360/PS3 generation and didn't really commit strongly to either camp. There's no "domestic" console, so no "patriotic buying" effect; in short, there's everything to play for. But MS seem to have decided not to play.
The TV offerings (which won't even be available in many territories to start with) aren't exactly tempting in Europe. I've had to sort out phone/tv/broadband packages in the UK, Belgium and the US in the last couple of years and can hand-on-heart say that you can get a decent TV package much more cheaply and easily in Europe these days. Sky or Virgin Media vs Comcast? It's not even close. MS is facing much tougher competition to take over from the existing TV providers.
The competition in Europe is, therefore, much more likely to be about being the better machine for games. Sony's messaging so far has been "games, games, games". I'm not really sure that Halo has more potency as a brand than Resistance, or that Gears of War is more potent than Killzone in Europe.
Then there are the emerging markets. The parts of the world that don't buy many consoles right now, but which might conceivably start to buy a lot more over the course of the next few years. These are also places where the 24-hour-dial-home restriction is likely to be a serious deterrent.
If MS doesn't do some urgent damage limitation, the Xbone runs a serious risk of ending up as a single-territory console.
How does the achievable graphical complexity of the GPU in the Tegra 3 SOC of this "Ouya" console compare to that of the Latte GPU in Nintendo's Wii U?
What's interesting and/or unfortunate about Tegra 3, depending on your point of view, is that it doesn't have a lot of GPU. More than Wii, probably less than Wii U. It has been described as being similar to [original] Xbox-level graphics, but it's actually rendering at 1080p whereas the Xbox was operating at much lower resolutions. Also, the Tegra 3 games have more graphical effects than other titles; the Xbox didn't have the visual effects the Ouya does.
What's great about it is that it has an assload of CPU. Apple's A5X benchmarks faster (graphically) than the Tegra 3, but the Tegra 3 beats it soundly about the head, neck, and shoulders when it comes to CPU performance. And meanwhile, the Tegra 3 has higher visual quality; it renders effects that don't even show up on the A5X.
I have yet to find any direct comparison between the two platforms. Presumably it would take a lot of work to get a specific OpenGL benchmark running on the Wii U.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
[Ouya] doesn't have a lot of GPU. More than Wii, probably less than Wii U. It has been described as being similar to [original] Xbox-level graphics, but it's actually rendering at 1080p whereas the Xbox was operating at much lower resolutions.
So in other words, it's comparable to Dolphin, which emulates a Wii but upscales the graphics.
What's great about it is that it has an assload of CPU.
But does it beat the 3-core PowerPC G3 in the Wii U? And even so, what would "an assload of CPU" provide to major video game developers to get them to develop for Ouya rather than Wii U?
Well, then I guess there's a fundamental misunderstanding over the producer/consumer relationship.
Who cares what Microsoft wants? It's not about what THEY want, it's about what the consumer wants.
And let's not BS. Microsoft doesn't "want you to have a decent internet connection" at all. They don't care about your bandwidth. You could probably use a dialup and as long as Microsoft has its hooks in you to see that you're not using your XBONE in some unapproved way they don't care.
"Microsoft wants..." I like that.
That's not what they're saying at all. If you only have an internet connection on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 4am to 5am guess what, Microsoft still wants you to buy an XBONE and they'll let you play it during those hours. C'mon, you don't really believe Microsoft cares about how reliable your internet service is, do you? When you go to the store to buy an XBONE are you going to have to prove that your service is reliable before they'll let you swipe your credit card? "Sorry, your ping rates are too high, you can't buy an XBONE". I don't think so.
All Microsoft cares about is control. Not even for the profit on the XBONEs themselves, but for the future control that having that plugged-in consuming/spying device in your house.
You are welcome on my lawn.