I'm aware of that. It's not enough, by far. And worse, it affects new first-time players as much as veterans. That's not needed; new players have not played through this content yet - it's still fresh and new, and therefore interesting for them. In fact, with new players it's counter-productive - they miss out on content they might have enjoyed. Meanwhile for veterans like myself, we've already done that content. Over and over and over. Even cutting the duration in half just doesn't cut it. Skipping portions of it, however would be a huge incentive to make more new characters and keep playing longer. Case in point, I don't play currently because I got bored with my max-level characters and I have no desire to play through the same content I've already played through umpteen times. So instead of getting monthly fees from me, they get nothing. I'd put money on it there's plenty other ex-players in the same shoes.
That's ALL you ever have, from ANYONE! Hell, if that's your reason for not trusting, I damn well hope you don't trust anyone at all. Anyone you know can only give you their own word that they will continue to be trustworthy in the future. That's what trust is!!
No, you're wrong. That's not all you ever have. You completely missed the most important part: "All you have is their own word." See that? That means there is no else to vouch for them. That's what closed source is. When it's open source, you have a whole fucking lot more than just their own word. You also have the word of every other person who has the capability to read and understand the code. If one of them is lying, you can bet another of them will raise a big stink about it. And that's totally ignoring the fact that a closed-source software vendor always has incentive to present their software more favorably than they should. It's their own product, only they know the details, a they're always going to be favorably biased towards it. It should be an understood fact that a closed source vendor will always lie about their software as much as they can get away with. And they can get away with quite a bit. You can't get away with any lying at all with open source.
So, do we want to just go with my own trustworthy assessment that you're trolling, or the consensus of everyone in this thread? Either way, I'm pretty sure the end result is that everyone knows you're trolling.
One company can be just as trustworthy as the entire Internet, and the entire Internet can be just as untrustworthy as one company.
Clearly you just don't get it, despite fifteen gazillion people already laying it out in plain language that my 5-year-old niece could understand.
The point is, no matter how trustworthy the company has been in the past, you have absolutely no way of knowing for sure that they'll continue to be trustworthy in the future. All you have is their own word.
Bull. You may still have a very accurate assessment, that's why you get someone who you trust to check it over for you.
That's the whole point. With closed source, you can't get someone you trust to check it over for you. It's not an option. The only people who can "check it over for you" is the vendor, because they're the only ones who have access to the data.
It wouldn't be too hard to get rid of the problem with low-level grinding. Simply reduce the levels you need to grind or increase experience gain for each max level character on the account. (One good example is starting at +20 levels for each max level character, with the max starting level being 10 under max. So if you have 3 level 70 characters now, you could start any new character on the same account at 60. With basic level-appropriate green gear pieces of course.) That still doesn't deal directly with the pain of end-game grinding, but having more max-level characters to mix it up with is pretty effective at dealing with that.
I know you're trying to be funny and/or sarcastic, but you're missing the GP's point - which isn't really that funny.
The innovation in this case is taking the game and creating a good working addon applet with it. Something which Hasbro has attempted and failed miserably. And so, because of ridiculous copyright duration, no one is allowed to make a good working version of the game for Facebook.
Brings up an interesting point though... if I get a hot air balloon and go low-flying over the neighbourhood taking pictures of all the girls sunbathing topless in their own backyards I am not breaking any law, even if I put the pictures on the net,
Yes you are if you're not licensed. And if you were licensed, you would also know more about laws applicable to balooning as well as the etiquette.
Actually, no. World PvP never grows old. I can have fun doing that for hours. PvE and instanced PvP gets boring after 30 minutes or so.
I know my prior post didn't give that impression, but I'm right there with you. Battlegrounds drive me up a wall, and arena is worse. Raiding is better, but not by much. World PvP is definitely where it's at for me too. The problem though is, much as I enjoy World PvP, it still grows old after a while, especially if there's nothing else you need to do in the game that pulls you away from it periodically. If world PvP is literally all there was to do, I'd have lots of fun with it. I'm sure I'd even stick around for a few months. But if that's all you have to do, after a few months it's just not worth the monthly fee any more. If they game consisted entirely of solo quests and world PvP, WoW wouldn't have half the active subscriptions it does, and very very few players would still be around who started at/before release.
Oh sure, gear drive will keep some people playing- but it makes as many people quit.
I'm going to have to disagree with you. The numbers just don't support your statement. 10 million subscribers and still going up? Considering that this game has been based on acquiring gear for the last 2.5+ years, that's a lot of players who don't mind it that much. Even for those of us who don't care for it so much, it's the part that breaks up what we enjoy most so it doesn't get old so quick. As well as being the stick prodding us toward the carrot.
I'm pretty sure GP was talking about your reference to Blizzard being one of the first to use the DMCA hammer. IIRC, their use of it was to try to oust players using WoWglider (which any brain-dead idiot should know is against the ToS). Unfortunately the link in the DMCA reference is blocked here at work so I can't check it to be sure.
That's never going to happen. Even for the biggest proponents of it, world PvP is only fun for so long. You just won't have very many people at all who will sit there and do the same world PvP over and over for years on end, with nothing else to mix it up. You need that gear-drive to keep people playing long-term (as in years rather than months). What they do need to do however is bring a lot more balance to PvP and PvE. Pre TBC (but post MC) there was far too much emphasis on PvE to be able to participate in PvP. If you didn't do MC and BWL you were pretty much guaranteed to suck it up in PvP. (Even worse, depending on your class your set gear might not help at all for PvP.) Now it's just the opposite - and the worst of it is, the PvP you have to do to get your PvP gear is the worst form of PvP and is completely unrepresentative of everything PvP was actually supposed to be. PvP gear needs to be equally easy to obtain, no matter which part of the game you want to play. That would include Arena, Battlegrounds, world PvP, raiding, and even 5-man instances or solo questing. Any of those should enable you to get the exact same PvP gear for the same time and effort and give you the same chance to be effective in PvP.
Ironically, this is how Blizzard consistently ends up failing with WoW: they do listen (too much) to the players, and they overreact and screw things up in a different way than before.
That's because Blizzard has always been more of a one-trick pony. They prefer to work on one project at a time and do that one thing to the highest standard possible. Instead of looking at the time-span between Starcraft releases, you need to look at the time-spans between all their releases.
Although lately with WoW expansions, the impact of people they've lost is becoming more and more apparent as their QA has slowly eroded.
Hardware is cheap, so build more than one box for specialized tasks.
"Cheap" is very relative. If we go by what I consider cheap, I'll say that people would rather dual-boot than build a second box using garbage hardware. For myself, building the second box just never happens because there's always more upgrades that need to be done to my primary box that take up the extra funds available for system upgrades. If your secondary box for "specialized tasks" can do with hardware that's 2-3 years old, sure then you just use old hardware from the main box after you upgrade. I think it's pretty safe to assume though that for those people dual-booting, this is not the case.
Then there's also the issues of where to put the second box, getting all the peripherals for the second box (or shelling out still more money for a not-cheap KVM switch that reliably works every time), etc. etc.
In the end it's pretty easy to see why people just dual-boot.
Obviously you and I got very different ideas about what the person you originally responded to was saying.
If the money went directly to artists, though, and copyrights lifted from non-profit digital copying, now that would be a perfect solution.
Perhaps I assumed wrongly, but to me it looked like this was a general reference to legal music download sites with a monthly access fee rather than a per-song payment.
Obviously no one is going to be able to get this type of information on unauthorized/illegal music downloads.
You really can't figure that out on your own?? Seriously?
100,000 songs download in January.
Artist A had only 1 track downloaded and it got downloaded 100 times. Artist A therefore had.1% of total song downloads for that month and gets.1% of total revenue available for artists.
If you know what you're doing, you can get a decent quality video on YouTube as well. Not to mention the fact that they're in the process of rolling out high-res video as we speak. It's undergoing testing, and some videos are already available in high quality. My first video I ever uploaded had a high-res version made available on the first day they went public with it.
The real question is, do you want to have to give everyone a special link directly to your video in order for them to see it. If your video is only for a specific target audience and you have the capability to make sure everyone in that audience gets the link to your video, sure those small irrelevant sites work fine. If you want it to be easy for a wider audience to find, you put it on YouTube.
If you have no input into the outcome of the story, then it might as well be a movie. It shouldn't be a game.
You think that's what the actors in movies say too? "This sucks, I can't make any real choices about what my character is going to do!" Of course not. The script is all written ahead of time. Sometimes the actor is given some leeway with dialog and such, and other times not. Either way, the actor has very little say about the actual story of the movie.
There's no computer game in existence that offers "no choice". In some your choices are just very limited. But there's still choices. In fact, most single-player FPSs are far more linear than JRPGs. Some are even constructed in such a manner that you can't even choose which gun you want to use most of the time (you can, but if you choose any gun except the 'right' gun you won't succeed).
Again, these types of games are not for everyone. If you don't like them don't play them, it's just that simple. But clearly enough people like these types of games to make the games profitable.
Basically what it boils down to is if you want the main character to be your avatar in the game, don't play an RPG that's story-driven.
Clearly these types of games just aren't for you. That's fine. Your personal taste is for sandbox RPGs. But that doesn't make these games bad. These games are more or less like a choose-your-own-adventure book. You're not really changing the story significantly, but you do make some choices along the way that will change the ending somewhat. These types of games are for people (like myself) who like reading fiction to see what happens to the character. In these games, it's not your character. The character is not a representation of you in the game. Rather, you have limited control over the character and have the ability to make some choices for him. The fun part in that is seeing how you can change the character by the choices you make. If you're really feeling devious, it can be fun to see if you can force the character to act out-of-character by making certain choices. Some such games will allow that; others won't.
MTV: What do you think of another actor, Heath Ledger, playing the Joker in next summer's "The Dark Knight"?
Nicholson: Let me be the way I'm not in interviews. I'm furious. I'm furious. [He laughs.] They never asked me about a sequel with the Joker. I know how to do that! Nobody ever asked me.
MTV: It was never brought up?
Nicholson: No. It's like, in any area, you can't believe the reasons things do or don't happen. Not asking me how to do the sequel is that kind of thing. Maybe it's not a mistake. Maybe it was the right thing, but to be candid, I'm furious.
He really did. I can't imagine that it's possible for anyone to ever play the Joker better. I was expecting a good movie, but frankly it surprised me by how much it exceeded my expectations. He should certainly win an Oscar for that. Easily the best supporting actor role of the year, even without seeing the films from the last half of the year.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm aware of that. It's not enough, by far. And worse, it affects new first-time players as much as veterans. That's not needed; new players have not played through this content yet - it's still fresh and new, and therefore interesting for them. In fact, with new players it's counter-productive - they miss out on content they might have enjoyed. Meanwhile for veterans like myself, we've already done that content. Over and over and over. Even cutting the duration in half just doesn't cut it. Skipping portions of it, however would be a huge incentive to make more new characters and keep playing longer. Case in point, I don't play currently because I got bored with my max-level characters and I have no desire to play through the same content I've already played through umpteen times. So instead of getting monthly fees from me, they get nothing. I'd put money on it there's plenty other ex-players in the same shoes.
That's ALL you ever have, from ANYONE! Hell, if that's your reason for not trusting, I damn well hope you don't trust anyone at all. Anyone you know can only give you their own word that they will continue to be trustworthy in the future. That's what trust is!!
No, you're wrong. That's not all you ever have. You completely missed the most important part: "All you have is their own word." See that? That means there is no else to vouch for them. That's what closed source is. When it's open source, you have a whole fucking lot more than just their own word. You also have the word of every other person who has the capability to read and understand the code. If one of them is lying, you can bet another of them will raise a big stink about it. And that's totally ignoring the fact that a closed-source software vendor always has incentive to present their software more favorably than they should. It's their own product, only they know the details, a they're always going to be favorably biased towards it. It should be an understood fact that a closed source vendor will always lie about their software as much as they can get away with. And they can get away with quite a bit. You can't get away with any lying at all with open source.
So, do we want to just go with my own trustworthy assessment that you're trolling, or the consensus of everyone in this thread? Either way, I'm pretty sure the end result is that everyone knows you're trolling.
One company can be just as trustworthy as the entire Internet, and the entire Internet can be just as untrustworthy as one company.
Clearly you just don't get it, despite fifteen gazillion people already laying it out in plain language that my 5-year-old niece could understand.
The point is, no matter how trustworthy the company has been in the past, you have absolutely no way of knowing for sure that they'll continue to be trustworthy in the future. All you have is their own word.
Bull. You may still have a very accurate assessment, that's why you get someone who you trust to check it over for you.
That's the whole point. With closed source, you can't get someone you trust to check it over for you. It's not an option. The only people who can "check it over for you" is the vendor, because they're the only ones who have access to the data.
It wouldn't be too hard to get rid of the problem with low-level grinding. Simply reduce the levels you need to grind or increase experience gain for each max level character on the account. (One good example is starting at +20 levels for each max level character, with the max starting level being 10 under max. So if you have 3 level 70 characters now, you could start any new character on the same account at 60. With basic level-appropriate green gear pieces of course.) That still doesn't deal directly with the pain of end-game grinding, but having more max-level characters to mix it up with is pretty effective at dealing with that.
I know you're trying to be funny and/or sarcastic, but you're missing the GP's point - which isn't really that funny.
The innovation in this case is taking the game and creating a good working addon applet with it. Something which Hasbro has attempted and failed miserably. And so, because of ridiculous copyright duration, no one is allowed to make a good working version of the game for Facebook.
That doesn't apply to balloons.
Brings up an interesting point though... if I get a hot air balloon and go low-flying over the neighbourhood taking pictures of all the girls sunbathing topless in their own backyards I am not breaking any law, even if I put the pictures on the net,
Yes you are if you're not licensed. And if you were licensed, you would also know more about laws applicable to balooning as well as the etiquette.
Actually, no. World PvP never grows old. I can have fun doing that for hours. PvE and instanced PvP gets boring after 30 minutes or so.
I know my prior post didn't give that impression, but I'm right there with you. Battlegrounds drive me up a wall, and arena is worse. Raiding is better, but not by much. World PvP is definitely where it's at for me too. The problem though is, much as I enjoy World PvP, it still grows old after a while, especially if there's nothing else you need to do in the game that pulls you away from it periodically. If world PvP is literally all there was to do, I'd have lots of fun with it. I'm sure I'd even stick around for a few months. But if that's all you have to do, after a few months it's just not worth the monthly fee any more. If they game consisted entirely of solo quests and world PvP, WoW wouldn't have half the active subscriptions it does, and very very few players would still be around who started at/before release.
Oh sure, gear drive will keep some people playing- but it makes as many people quit.
I'm going to have to disagree with you. The numbers just don't support your statement. 10 million subscribers and still going up? Considering that this game has been based on acquiring gear for the last 2.5+ years, that's a lot of players who don't mind it that much. Even for those of us who don't care for it so much, it's the part that breaks up what we enjoy most so it doesn't get old so quick. As well as being the stick prodding us toward the carrot.
I'm pretty sure GP was talking about your reference to Blizzard being one of the first to use the DMCA hammer. IIRC, their use of it was to try to oust players using WoWglider (which any brain-dead idiot should know is against the ToS). Unfortunately the link in the DMCA reference is blocked here at work so I can't check it to be sure.
That's never going to happen. Even for the biggest proponents of it, world PvP is only fun for so long. You just won't have very many people at all who will sit there and do the same world PvP over and over for years on end, with nothing else to mix it up. You need that gear-drive to keep people playing long-term (as in years rather than months). What they do need to do however is bring a lot more balance to PvP and PvE. Pre TBC (but post MC) there was far too much emphasis on PvE to be able to participate in PvP. If you didn't do MC and BWL you were pretty much guaranteed to suck it up in PvP. (Even worse, depending on your class your set gear might not help at all for PvP.) Now it's just the opposite - and the worst of it is, the PvP you have to do to get your PvP gear is the worst form of PvP and is completely unrepresentative of everything PvP was actually supposed to be. PvP gear needs to be equally easy to obtain, no matter which part of the game you want to play. That would include Arena, Battlegrounds, world PvP, raiding, and even 5-man instances or solo questing. Any of those should enable you to get the exact same PvP gear for the same time and effort and give you the same chance to be effective in PvP.
Ironically, this is how Blizzard consistently ends up failing with WoW: they do listen (too much) to the players, and they overreact and screw things up in a different way than before.
That's because Blizzard has always been more of a one-trick pony. They prefer to work on one project at a time and do that one thing to the highest standard possible. Instead of looking at the time-span between Starcraft releases, you need to look at the time-spans between all their releases.
Although lately with WoW expansions, the impact of people they've lost is becoming more and more apparent as their QA has slowly eroded.
Hardware is cheap, so build more than one box for specialized tasks.
"Cheap" is very relative. If we go by what I consider cheap, I'll say that people would rather dual-boot than build a second box using garbage hardware. For myself, building the second box just never happens because there's always more upgrades that need to be done to my primary box that take up the extra funds available for system upgrades. If your secondary box for "specialized tasks" can do with hardware that's 2-3 years old, sure then you just use old hardware from the main box after you upgrade. I think it's pretty safe to assume though that for those people dual-booting, this is not the case.
Then there's also the issues of where to put the second box, getting all the peripherals for the second box (or shelling out still more money for a not-cheap KVM switch that reliably works every time), etc. etc.
In the end it's pretty easy to see why people just dual-boot.
Obviously you and I got very different ideas about what the person you originally responded to was saying.
If the money went directly to artists, though, and copyrights lifted from non-profit digital copying, now that would be a perfect solution.
Perhaps I assumed wrongly, but to me it looked like this was a general reference to legal music download sites with a monthly access fee rather than a per-song payment.
Obviously no one is going to be able to get this type of information on unauthorized/illegal music downloads.
You really can't figure that out on your own?? Seriously?
100,000 songs download in January.
Artist A had only 1 track downloaded and it got downloaded 100 times. Artist A therefore had .1% of total song downloads for that month and gets .1% of total revenue available for artists.
Yeah, but actors get paid big bucks not to have any influence over the story of the movie,
If an actor doesn't enjoy acting, they don't last very long.
while you have to pay for not having any influence over the story of games!
No you don't. Like I said, don't like it, don't buy it. There's plenty of selection in games out there.
If you know what you're doing, you can get a decent quality video on YouTube as well. Not to mention the fact that they're in the process of rolling out high-res video as we speak. It's undergoing testing, and some videos are already available in high quality. My first video I ever uploaded had a high-res version made available on the first day they went public with it.
The real question is, do you want to have to give everyone a special link directly to your video in order for them to see it. If your video is only for a specific target audience and you have the capability to make sure everyone in that audience gets the link to your video, sure those small irrelevant sites work fine. If you want it to be easy for a wider audience to find, you put it on YouTube.
If you have no input into the outcome of the story, then it might as well be a movie. It shouldn't be a game.
You think that's what the actors in movies say too? "This sucks, I can't make any real choices about what my character is going to do!" Of course not. The script is all written ahead of time. Sometimes the actor is given some leeway with dialog and such, and other times not. Either way, the actor has very little say about the actual story of the movie.
There's no computer game in existence that offers "no choice". In some your choices are just very limited. But there's still choices. In fact, most single-player FPSs are far more linear than JRPGs. Some are even constructed in such a manner that you can't even choose which gun you want to use most of the time (you can, but if you choose any gun except the 'right' gun you won't succeed).
Again, these types of games are not for everyone. If you don't like them don't play them, it's just that simple. But clearly enough people like these types of games to make the games profitable.
Basically what it boils down to is if you want the main character to be your avatar in the game, don't play an RPG that's story-driven.
My thoughts exactly. I read the summary and here's what I got:
"Irrelevant 2-bit video hosting site decides to become even more irrelevant by removing some of their small collection of videos."
Clearly these types of games just aren't for you. That's fine. Your personal taste is for sandbox RPGs. But that doesn't make these games bad. These games are more or less like a choose-your-own-adventure book. You're not really changing the story significantly, but you do make some choices along the way that will change the ending somewhat. These types of games are for people (like myself) who like reading fiction to see what happens to the character. In these games, it's not your character. The character is not a representation of you in the game. Rather, you have limited control over the character and have the ability to make some choices for him. The fun part in that is seeing how you can change the character by the choices you make. If you're really feeling devious, it can be fun to see if you can force the character to act out-of-character by making certain choices. Some such games will allow that; others won't.
Facial expressions just don't carry too well over the intertubes.
Oil is more like paper in general than "the punch card". Won't be obsolete in the near future.
Wow. It's true.
Better start burning lol.
http://www.mtv.com/movies/news/articles/1573617/20071106/story.jhtml
MTV: What do you think of another actor, Heath Ledger, playing the Joker in next summer's "The Dark Knight"?
Nicholson: Let me be the way I'm not in interviews. I'm furious. I'm furious. [He laughs.] They never asked me about a sequel with the Joker. I know how to do that! Nobody ever asked me.
MTV: It was never brought up?
Nicholson: No. It's like, in any area, you can't believe the reasons things do or don't happen. Not asking me how to do the sequel is that kind of thing. Maybe it's not a mistake. Maybe it was the right thing, but to be candid, I'm furious.
I doubt you'll find much debate on that.
I would have to agree with this.
It really is the best villain I've seen.
And that in particular.
Unfortunately I've already posted to this thread and can't mod your post up further.
He really did. I can't imagine that it's possible for anyone to ever play the Joker better. I was expecting a good movie, but frankly it surprised me by how much it exceeded my expectations. He should certainly win an Oscar for that. Easily the best supporting actor role of the year, even without seeing the films from the last half of the year.