No kidding. I work with people who can efficiently use AutoCAD, which has one of the most complicated and poorly designed interfaces I've ever seen. But at the same time they can't even change their desktop background without help.
An understanding of how a tool actually works is not always important to being able to use that tool well enough to get their job done. To use the dreaded car analogy, understanding how a manual transmission is built and functions might help you use one more effectively and squeeze some extra performance out of your car, but even someone with absolutely no idea of the actual mechanics of a transmission can learn to use one pretty well.
Getting people like this to change their routine is sometimes difficult, and they'll resist it. But once you get them to accept that the change is going to happen (Either because their boss forced them, or their old option is no longer available, or the new choice is 30% cheaper, etc.) They can learn the new stuff.
Microsoft's grip is not getting more monopolistic. While they certainly aren't entirely reformed and friendly now, they don't hold the same level of power and influence over the industry that they did back in the late 90's.
Linux proponents should talk less about why they think the other guys suck and talk more about why they think Linux is great.
No kidding. This isn't a phenomena limited to Microsoft, or even to the IT industry in general. In pretty much any situation where one person is trying to sell something to another person, you'll get some degree of this sort of feature creep, or stretching of truth. And sometimes it's just honest mistakes.
And it's not just the marketing and sales guys who are always to blame. MS had to cut out a bunch of stuff that they originally said was going to be in Vista. So they oversold their capabilities. But chances are that somewhere along the line, an engineer told management that they could have the new file system integrated and working on time. I don't know why that particular feature didn't make it in time. Maybe management didn't staff it properly. Maybe there was too much arguing on how to implement it. Maybe the engineers were just plain wrong about how hard it would be to get it up and running.
I'm not trying to say that Microsoft does a particularly good job at producing their products, but missing deadlines and having to scale back intentions happens to 99% of all projects out there anywhere in the real world. The reasons are many, and even the best and brightest people in the world can't predict and plan for everything that could go wrong. Development of Windows is not an easy task, and there are probably hundreds if not thousands of distinct situations in the development of each version where things get screwed up. You can't blame it all on the sales people.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the source code for the F-22 avionics is not public domain. While generally government produced information should be public domain, there's some pretty good arguments for not freely sharing something like the technology used in the military's newest aircraft.
That being said, I'd be very surprised if the Department of Defense has to worry about vendor lockout with their F-22 source code. We can joke all day about government incompetence, but I'd be willing to wager that their contracts with the various suppliers and manufacturers involved include getting copies of the source code.
Because we've all personally seen tons of those emails, and 99.9999% of us were smart enough to laugh them off or just plain ignore them. And then on the other hand, this woman was dumb enough to give away a ridiculous amount of money. People doing stupid things is amusing. It sucks that she's wiped out her husband's retirement account, but that doesn't make it any less funny.
Actually, we generally adapt much better than most species, only through technology instead of waiting for evolution. Whatever changes the earth goes through (short of a giant asteroid vaporizing the earth's crust), humans are more likely to survive than just about any other complex life form on the planet.
Our civilization, however, is more fragile. Our population and resource use has expanded to the point where our civilization is currently not well equipped to deal with sudden global changes. Also, part of being able to shape your environment in so many ways is that it gets very frustrating when your environment ends up getting shaped by things out of your control. Climate change, sea level rise, desertification...it can all stress our civilization as it currently exists, and maybe even break it. But most humans still have a strong instinct to survive, and we're lucky enough to have an intelligence level that allows us to adapt far quicker than biological evolution works.
Basically, we're just as good at adapting as any other species, maybe even better. But unlike every other animal on the planet, humans will whine the whole time the change is happening.
You're right, but I think there's one more important aspect to add. Along with that easy availability, you get the benefit of the "great internet filter", meaning that it's easy for lots of people to try lots of games, and share only the good ones with people who have similar tastes.
Flash games certainly aren't a giant buffet table where everything is perfectly cooked and delicious. It's actually very similar to the tradition games industry, with a few masterpieces floating in a sea of mediocre choices. But the easy of access that you mentioned makes it so much easier for the good games to rise to the top, and get separated from the stuff that's not worth the time.
The two parties are certainly similar in more ways than they'd like to admit, but that's not to say that things would play out the same regardless of who is chosen, or that it's an irrelevant choice.
Do you really think that we'd have invaded Iraq if Gore had won?
Anyways, there's too many people and too many issues for it to be possible for a candidate to have the "right" policies across the board. In elections, just like almost everything else in this world, we have imperfect choices. But that doesn't mean that one choice isn't significantly better than the others. All of the third party candidates have some serious flaws as well. Even Ron Paul.
I'm not an astrophysicist, or a physicist of any kind, but just thinking about this a little bit, I don't think the effects on the sun would be too significant. Or at least, anything that would significantly affect the sun would likely significantly affect the earth directly as well.
The sun is so much larger, it has so much more mass in which to dissipate any energy that it receives. And either way, it's producing such a large amount of energy that I'd imagine whatever it receives from outside sources is just a drop in the bucket.
Possibly, but the thing is, electronic voting doesn't magically solve any of the potential problems with paper/hand count voting. It potentially has all the same problems. And most of these problems aren't very hard to solve for paper/hand counts. It's not hard to make hand counting error free, just have a representative from each party witness each vote as it's recorded.
The biggest source of difficulty with voting in general seems to me to be poorly designed interfaces, whether it's on paper or a computer screen. Either one can be good, and either one can be bad.
Voter verification happens as a separate step from the actual vote collection, so a large portion of the potential voter fraud issues are irrelevant in this conversation.
Point is, there are only two real benefits that I see that electronic voting can have over paper ballots. First, you don't have to worry about figuring out how many ballots need to be printed or running out. But that's not really that hard of a problem to solve, just print significantly more than you could ever need. Second, electronic voting can make tallying up the vote totals faster, but that's really not that important (and potentially a bad thing, seeing results from the east coast while voting is still going on in the west coast seems problematic to me).
In my opinion, those benefits do not come near outweighing the added complexity and costs of electronic voting. If we had some sort of democracy where everyone voted on big issues once a week or something like that, then taking big steps to streamline it might make sense. But as it is, it's just not worth the trouble.
I look forwards to the advances in technology that extend my life to the point where I can accomplish all the other goals that I have for my life so that I can finally find the time to really learn how to play an instrument. Until then I'll just have to suffer under the knowledge that I'm destined to live a life full of unimportant tasks and mired in a cultural wasteland.
By definition, nobody really knows what it's like to be anybody else. There are lots of hills out there to climb, music isn't some magical scared mountain that's taller than all the rest.
Well, sadly, my life is full of responsibilities and such that make it basically impossible for me to be a rock star. And even more unfortunately, most of my friends have similar issues keeping them from living out their musical potential as well.
Rock Band puts us in a situation that I cannot encounter. I am more likely to end up managing a city than I am to end up playing guitar in a big auditorium.
You're almost certainly right that that is the calculation that they're making. But they've got to realize that with there being such a big spread in the options (zero dollars or forty dollars), there's a big middle ground of money that they're just leaving on the table.
I think what's likely is that after a while, all these songs will become available as individual DLC. If you don't mind waiting, you'll get a chance to pay just for the songs that you want.
There's also another level of the middle ground, which music has long taken advantage of with the standard album format, and which also works in RockBand. I recently purchased the entire Red Hot Chili Peppers album that was available as DLC, even though I was really only interested in about half of the songs. But the bundle wasn't as extreme ($20 vs. $40), so I didn't mind dropping a little extra cash for stuff that I wasn't as excited about.
I'm not trying to knock on your decision to try a real guitar, but at such a novice and uncommitted level of playing, are you really doing anything more useful than what you'd get farting around with RockBand?
You're not likely to build a musical career out of it. You're not learning any special skills that are applicable to the rest of your life (at least not any that can only be learned through "real" guitar playing).
If you're having fun with it, that's great. But the suggestion that everyone who's enjoying guitar hero or rockband would be better served with a real guitar is missing the point of those games. And stating that messing around with a real guitar is inherently a more worthwhile activity than a video game is short-sighted as well.
I agree. I think a much more useful line of research is making satellites harder to detect. There's not much that can be done to protect the big bright ones that are already up there, but I'd imagine that better technology has resulted in more capable satellites in smaller packages. Add in some fancy stealth-type technologies, and now we're talking.
If you make some basic assumptions about things like useable screen-size and a touchscreen, I'd think you're best served going with a web-based interface. With the latest generation of phone browsers, it's close enough to a normal web browsing that you can make something useable and extremely portable across different phone platforms. You gave only a cursory explanation of what your program would have to do, but it sounds like it wouldn't be terribly intensive, so a web based system seems to be very practical.
"Intuitive" definitely gets overused. It's actually hard to imagine much of anything electronics related being truly intuitive, in that someone who'd never seen one before would have no problems using it
I think more important terms are "efficient", "simple", and "consistent". And along side of all of those, particularly in Apple's case, is thinking about the details.
A basic example comparison between MacOS and Windows is a dialog box with a few options. The MacOS guidelines have long stated that the option buttons should contain verbs. "Save" / "Don't Save" / "Cancel", while on windows the buttons are generally "Yes" / "No" / "Cancel", and leave it up to the user to determine what Yes and No mean in that particular case.
The scroll wheel on the iPod might not be more intuitive that a forwards or backwards button, but it's way more efficient.
True enough, but I wonder how well that sort of thing will work when consumers actually have to pay money to use the early crappy versions. I'm much more willing to shrug off problems on something that I got for free. If I drop a couple hundred bucks on a phone and it's got some significant issues, I'm less likely to pay even more money to upgrade to the next version. First impressions do count, especially when I'm paying for the privilege.
Yeah, but that same store that the company decided wasn't a good place to sell the phone had been sent posters for that exact phone. They were advertising that phone in the very same store that wasn't allowed to sell it.
I don't think that's right. As long as there's a demand for unencumbered music/movies/whatever, someone will jump in to create a supply.
You might not be able to legally buy a DRM-free version of a particular album, but there will still be plenty of other albums available.
Some people see a potential future where DRM slowly creeps up further and further and pretty soon you can't read a single webpage without having to make a micropayment, but that's just not realistic. In fact, I think there's plenty of examples of the "pendulum" already swinging the other way, particularly with music.
You're describing something along the lines of what I'm looking for, but I think you're underestimating the challenge that would be involved in creating such a game. The real issue is that if a game developer wants to provide the players with choices that have serious consequences in the game world, then the developer also has to create all of the necessary content to follow up for all of the possible choices that the players might make. There's really two problems with this approach. First off it's really hard to create any sort of compelling situation in which there are only two stark choices, especially in a multiplayer game. More than likely, there's going to be a wide range of choices that you can anticipate the players taking, so you have to plan for all of them. And even assuming that one of your anticipated results is what exactly what happens, and you have a gameplan in place for it, you're still ending up discarding a huge chunk of work that you did for all the other potential directions the story may have followed.
And none of that helps you when the players decide on a course of action that you never expected. What if the sith characters decide to hijack the shipment themselves? It might be out of character for textbook sith, but there's no guarantee that the players are going to follow those sorts of "rules".
I think the solution is to create a universe where it's all player driven. I'm going to talk about EvE yet again because it has situations similar to what you described. There are stations that need to be consistently supplied, or else they become more vulnerable to attack. The difference is that those stations were put their by players, the players are completely responsible for procuring and transporting the necessary supplies, and if they don't, then it's other players who are going to discover the weakness and attack.
It isn't so much a plotted out storyline as it is just a bunch of people competing through a set of rules that the devs have created. But there's plenty of drama and such that comes out of that. Like you said, events spontaneously happen, or they're planned by players, completely separate from any input from the devs. That's a good thing, but it's not the same as the game being story-driven.
Well that's great if Blizzard is taking steps in that direction (I haven't played WoW in quite some time), but I'm having a hard time seeing how a developer can really keep that sort of thing going for long.
When you say that in WoW when you kill a villain you don't see him anymore, what about if someone else kills him? That's the sort of persistence and continuity that I'd like to see, where player actions and decisions matter not only to themselves, but to everyone else. The big question mark is how could a developer find a way to make enough story driven content to keep everyone busy like that? How much effort could they really afford to put into a villain that only a few players are going to get to kill?
There are plenty of legal ways to get DRM-free content. And there always will be, because there's a market for such things. While it's true and unfortunate that some consumers are getting stung by not understanding the details of the DRM that they might be buying into, that's nothing that a little education on the topic can't fix. As people learn, the market for specifically DRM-free media will increase. We're seeing that already start to happen in the online music world.
Hyperbole and drastic words like "being held hostage" are just silly. DRM is just another comparison feature (for better or worse) to take in account when you're deciding where to spend your money.
All that being said, I think there's at least one situation in which DRM makes some good sense, and that's stuff like online movie rentals. Give me a good resolution file, a decent media player, a window of a few days to watch it as much or as little as I want, and a fair price. If you do that, then I won't be offended when the media player refuses to play after the third day or whatever.
Nothing's wrong with it, but why not just make it a single player game or a co-op game? What's the point of making in an MMO? I guess there's still a separate social aspect to it all, but there's really nothing new here that you wouldn't find in WoW, it's just themed with the StarWars universe instead of the Warcraft universe. Ok, the quests might take a little longer to complete, but it's not really very different.
And then what happens once everyone's played through the stories? What kind of game is it then? I guess they can add more content, but that stuff takes time to create, and more in-depth quest arcs will take even longer. What's there to keep me interested and paying a monthly fee in order to keep playing
I'm not trying to dump on this game in particular, if it wants to be WoW in space, then that's fine and if they do it well they will deservedly see lots of success. But I'm more interested in seeing something different.
I want MMO's where the decisions and actions of the players have consequences beyond just collecting loot and triggering pre-scripted events. In my ideal version of WoW, you wouldn't just go out to some random field and kill boars, you'd help a wealthy guild build a village in that field, and then a few months later you have to try to defend it from a huge army of horde players that want to burn it to the ground.
I'm looking for more interaction with the world. I want players to be able to shape it in very significant ways. Not to the level of detail such as uploading textures or anything like that, but the developers should provide tons of little props and pieces and let the players find creative ways to use them to further their personal goals.
Trying to find a way to meaningfully mold all of that through some universe wide story arc seems like an almost impossible challenge to me. I don't know if that's what BioWare is going to try to do with this game, but if they're going to give it a shot then it'll almost certainly be interesting to see how it ends up. If on the other hand, they're making a more traditional MMO, then that's ok too. But is not as interesting to me, even if it also happens to have a Star Wars backstory.
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No kidding. I work with people who can efficiently use AutoCAD, which has one of the most complicated and poorly designed interfaces I've ever seen. But at the same time they can't even change their desktop background without help.
An understanding of how a tool actually works is not always important to being able to use that tool well enough to get their job done. To use the dreaded car analogy, understanding how a manual transmission is built and functions might help you use one more effectively and squeeze some extra performance out of your car, but even someone with absolutely no idea of the actual mechanics of a transmission can learn to use one pretty well.
Getting people like this to change their routine is sometimes difficult, and they'll resist it. But once you get them to accept that the change is going to happen (Either because their boss forced them, or their old option is no longer available, or the new choice is 30% cheaper, etc.) They can learn the new stuff.
Microsoft's grip is not getting more monopolistic. While they certainly aren't entirely reformed and friendly now, they don't hold the same level of power and influence over the industry that they did back in the late 90's.
Linux proponents should talk less about why they think the other guys suck and talk more about why they think Linux is great.
No kidding. This isn't a phenomena limited to Microsoft, or even to the IT industry in general. In pretty much any situation where one person is trying to sell something to another person, you'll get some degree of this sort of feature creep, or stretching of truth. And sometimes it's just honest mistakes.
And it's not just the marketing and sales guys who are always to blame. MS had to cut out a bunch of stuff that they originally said was going to be in Vista. So they oversold their capabilities. But chances are that somewhere along the line, an engineer told management that they could have the new file system integrated and working on time. I don't know why that particular feature didn't make it in time. Maybe management didn't staff it properly. Maybe there was too much arguing on how to implement it. Maybe the engineers were just plain wrong about how hard it would be to get it up and running.
I'm not trying to say that Microsoft does a particularly good job at producing their products, but missing deadlines and having to scale back intentions happens to 99% of all projects out there anywhere in the real world. The reasons are many, and even the best and brightest people in the world can't predict and plan for everything that could go wrong. Development of Windows is not an easy task, and there are probably hundreds if not thousands of distinct situations in the development of each version where things get screwed up. You can't blame it all on the sales people.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the source code for the F-22 avionics is not public domain. While generally government produced information should be public domain, there's some pretty good arguments for not freely sharing something like the technology used in the military's newest aircraft.
That being said, I'd be very surprised if the Department of Defense has to worry about vendor lockout with their F-22 source code. We can joke all day about government incompetence, but I'd be willing to wager that their contracts with the various suppliers and manufacturers involved include getting copies of the source code.
Because we've all personally seen tons of those emails, and 99.9999% of us were smart enough to laugh them off or just plain ignore them. And then on the other hand, this woman was dumb enough to give away a ridiculous amount of money. People doing stupid things is amusing. It sucks that she's wiped out her husband's retirement account, but that doesn't make it any less funny.
Damn. I'm only 28 and already I'm so old that I can't make sense of this "leet-speak" that kids are using these days.
Actually, we generally adapt much better than most species, only through technology instead of waiting for evolution. Whatever changes the earth goes through (short of a giant asteroid vaporizing the earth's crust), humans are more likely to survive than just about any other complex life form on the planet.
Our civilization, however, is more fragile. Our population and resource use has expanded to the point where our civilization is currently not well equipped to deal with sudden global changes. Also, part of being able to shape your environment in so many ways is that it gets very frustrating when your environment ends up getting shaped by things out of your control. Climate change, sea level rise, desertification...it can all stress our civilization as it currently exists, and maybe even break it. But most humans still have a strong instinct to survive, and we're lucky enough to have an intelligence level that allows us to adapt far quicker than biological evolution works.
Basically, we're just as good at adapting as any other species, maybe even better. But unlike every other animal on the planet, humans will whine the whole time the change is happening.
You're right, but I think there's one more important aspect to add. Along with that easy availability, you get the benefit of the "great internet filter", meaning that it's easy for lots of people to try lots of games, and share only the good ones with people who have similar tastes.
Flash games certainly aren't a giant buffet table where everything is perfectly cooked and delicious. It's actually very similar to the tradition games industry, with a few masterpieces floating in a sea of mediocre choices. But the easy of access that you mentioned makes it so much easier for the good games to rise to the top, and get separated from the stuff that's not worth the time.
The two parties are certainly similar in more ways than they'd like to admit, but that's not to say that things would play out the same regardless of who is chosen, or that it's an irrelevant choice.
Do you really think that we'd have invaded Iraq if Gore had won?
Anyways, there's too many people and too many issues for it to be possible for a candidate to have the "right" policies across the board. In elections, just like almost everything else in this world, we have imperfect choices. But that doesn't mean that one choice isn't significantly better than the others. All of the third party candidates have some serious flaws as well. Even Ron Paul.
I'm not an astrophysicist, or a physicist of any kind, but just thinking about this a little bit, I don't think the effects on the sun would be too significant. Or at least, anything that would significantly affect the sun would likely significantly affect the earth directly as well.
The sun is so much larger, it has so much more mass in which to dissipate any energy that it receives. And either way, it's producing such a large amount of energy that I'd imagine whatever it receives from outside sources is just a drop in the bucket.
Possibly, but the thing is, electronic voting doesn't magically solve any of the potential problems with paper/hand count voting. It potentially has all the same problems. And most of these problems aren't very hard to solve for paper/hand counts. It's not hard to make hand counting error free, just have a representative from each party witness each vote as it's recorded.
The biggest source of difficulty with voting in general seems to me to be poorly designed interfaces, whether it's on paper or a computer screen. Either one can be good, and either one can be bad.
Voter verification happens as a separate step from the actual vote collection, so a large portion of the potential voter fraud issues are irrelevant in this conversation.
Point is, there are only two real benefits that I see that electronic voting can have over paper ballots. First, you don't have to worry about figuring out how many ballots need to be printed or running out. But that's not really that hard of a problem to solve, just print significantly more than you could ever need. Second, electronic voting can make tallying up the vote totals faster, but that's really not that important (and potentially a bad thing, seeing results from the east coast while voting is still going on in the west coast seems problematic to me).
In my opinion, those benefits do not come near outweighing the added complexity and costs of electronic voting. If we had some sort of democracy where everyone voted on big issues once a week or something like that, then taking big steps to streamline it might make sense. But as it is, it's just not worth the trouble.
I look forwards to the advances in technology that extend my life to the point where I can accomplish all the other goals that I have for my life so that I can finally find the time to really learn how to play an instrument. Until then I'll just have to suffer under the knowledge that I'm destined to live a life full of unimportant tasks and mired in a cultural wasteland.
By definition, nobody really knows what it's like to be anybody else. There are lots of hills out there to climb, music isn't some magical scared mountain that's taller than all the rest.
Well, sadly, my life is full of responsibilities and such that make it basically impossible for me to be a rock star. And even more unfortunately, most of my friends have similar issues keeping them from living out their musical potential as well.
Rock Band puts us in a situation that I cannot encounter. I am more likely to end up managing a city than I am to end up playing guitar in a big auditorium.
You're almost certainly right that that is the calculation that they're making. But they've got to realize that with there being such a big spread in the options (zero dollars or forty dollars), there's a big middle ground of money that they're just leaving on the table.
I think what's likely is that after a while, all these songs will become available as individual DLC. If you don't mind waiting, you'll get a chance to pay just for the songs that you want.
There's also another level of the middle ground, which music has long taken advantage of with the standard album format, and which also works in RockBand. I recently purchased the entire Red Hot Chili Peppers album that was available as DLC, even though I was really only interested in about half of the songs. But the bundle wasn't as extreme ($20 vs. $40), so I didn't mind dropping a little extra cash for stuff that I wasn't as excited about.
I'm not trying to knock on your decision to try a real guitar, but at such a novice and uncommitted level of playing, are you really doing anything more useful than what you'd get farting around with RockBand?
You're not likely to build a musical career out of it. You're not learning any special skills that are applicable to the rest of your life (at least not any that can only be learned through "real" guitar playing).
If you're having fun with it, that's great. But the suggestion that everyone who's enjoying guitar hero or rockband would be better served with a real guitar is missing the point of those games. And stating that messing around with a real guitar is inherently a more worthwhile activity than a video game is short-sighted as well.
I agree. I think a much more useful line of research is making satellites harder to detect. There's not much that can be done to protect the big bright ones that are already up there, but I'd imagine that better technology has resulted in more capable satellites in smaller packages. Add in some fancy stealth-type technologies, and now we're talking.
If you make some basic assumptions about things like useable screen-size and a touchscreen, I'd think you're best served going with a web-based interface. With the latest generation of phone browsers, it's close enough to a normal web browsing that you can make something useable and extremely portable across different phone platforms. You gave only a cursory explanation of what your program would have to do, but it sounds like it wouldn't be terribly intensive, so a web based system seems to be very practical.
"Intuitive" definitely gets overused. It's actually hard to imagine much of anything electronics related being truly intuitive, in that someone who'd never seen one before would have no problems using it
I think more important terms are "efficient", "simple", and "consistent". And along side of all of those, particularly in Apple's case, is thinking about the details.
A basic example comparison between MacOS and Windows is a dialog box with a few options. The MacOS guidelines have long stated that the option buttons should contain verbs. "Save" / "Don't Save" / "Cancel", while on windows the buttons are generally "Yes" / "No" / "Cancel", and leave it up to the user to determine what Yes and No mean in that particular case.
The scroll wheel on the iPod might not be more intuitive that a forwards or backwards button, but it's way more efficient.
True enough, but I wonder how well that sort of thing will work when consumers actually have to pay money to use the early crappy versions. I'm much more willing to shrug off problems on something that I got for free. If I drop a couple hundred bucks on a phone and it's got some significant issues, I'm less likely to pay even more money to upgrade to the next version. First impressions do count, especially when I'm paying for the privilege.
Yeah, but that same store that the company decided wasn't a good place to sell the phone had been sent posters for that exact phone. They were advertising that phone in the very same store that wasn't allowed to sell it.
There's something incredibly silly about that.
I don't think that's right. As long as there's a demand for unencumbered music/movies/whatever, someone will jump in to create a supply.
You might not be able to legally buy a DRM-free version of a particular album, but there will still be plenty of other albums available.
Some people see a potential future where DRM slowly creeps up further and further and pretty soon you can't read a single webpage without having to make a micropayment, but that's just not realistic. In fact, I think there's plenty of examples of the "pendulum" already swinging the other way, particularly with music.
You're describing something along the lines of what I'm looking for, but I think you're underestimating the challenge that would be involved in creating such a game. The real issue is that if a game developer wants to provide the players with choices that have serious consequences in the game world, then the developer also has to create all of the necessary content to follow up for all of the possible choices that the players might make. There's really two problems with this approach. First off it's really hard to create any sort of compelling situation in which there are only two stark choices, especially in a multiplayer game. More than likely, there's going to be a wide range of choices that you can anticipate the players taking, so you have to plan for all of them. And even assuming that one of your anticipated results is what exactly what happens, and you have a gameplan in place for it, you're still ending up discarding a huge chunk of work that you did for all the other potential directions the story may have followed.
And none of that helps you when the players decide on a course of action that you never expected. What if the sith characters decide to hijack the shipment themselves? It might be out of character for textbook sith, but there's no guarantee that the players are going to follow those sorts of "rules".
I think the solution is to create a universe where it's all player driven. I'm going to talk about EvE yet again because it has situations similar to what you described. There are stations that need to be consistently supplied, or else they become more vulnerable to attack. The difference is that those stations were put their by players, the players are completely responsible for procuring and transporting the necessary supplies, and if they don't, then it's other players who are going to discover the weakness and attack.
It isn't so much a plotted out storyline as it is just a bunch of people competing through a set of rules that the devs have created. But there's plenty of drama and such that comes out of that. Like you said, events spontaneously happen, or they're planned by players, completely separate from any input from the devs. That's a good thing, but it's not the same as the game being story-driven.
Well that's great if Blizzard is taking steps in that direction (I haven't played WoW in quite some time), but I'm having a hard time seeing how a developer can really keep that sort of thing going for long.
When you say that in WoW when you kill a villain you don't see him anymore, what about if someone else kills him? That's the sort of persistence and continuity that I'd like to see, where player actions and decisions matter not only to themselves, but to everyone else. The big question mark is how could a developer find a way to make enough story driven content to keep everyone busy like that? How much effort could they really afford to put into a villain that only a few players are going to get to kill?
You could make that argument, but it'd be stupid.
There are plenty of legal ways to get DRM-free content. And there always will be, because there's a market for such things. While it's true and unfortunate that some consumers are getting stung by not understanding the details of the DRM that they might be buying into, that's nothing that a little education on the topic can't fix. As people learn, the market for specifically DRM-free media will increase. We're seeing that already start to happen in the online music world.
Hyperbole and drastic words like "being held hostage" are just silly. DRM is just another comparison feature (for better or worse) to take in account when you're deciding where to spend your money.
All that being said, I think there's at least one situation in which DRM makes some good sense, and that's stuff like online movie rentals. Give me a good resolution file, a decent media player, a window of a few days to watch it as much or as little as I want, and a fair price. If you do that, then I won't be offended when the media player refuses to play after the third day or whatever.
Nothing's wrong with it, but why not just make it a single player game or a co-op game? What's the point of making in an MMO? I guess there's still a separate social aspect to it all, but there's really nothing new here that you wouldn't find in WoW, it's just themed with the StarWars universe instead of the Warcraft universe. Ok, the quests might take a little longer to complete, but it's not really very different.
And then what happens once everyone's played through the stories? What kind of game is it then? I guess they can add more content, but that stuff takes time to create, and more in-depth quest arcs will take even longer. What's there to keep me interested and paying a monthly fee in order to keep playing
I'm not trying to dump on this game in particular, if it wants to be WoW in space, then that's fine and if they do it well they will deservedly see lots of success. But I'm more interested in seeing something different.
I want MMO's where the decisions and actions of the players have consequences beyond just collecting loot and triggering pre-scripted events. In my ideal version of WoW, you wouldn't just go out to some random field and kill boars, you'd help a wealthy guild build a village in that field, and then a few months later you have to try to defend it from a huge army of horde players that want to burn it to the ground.
I'm looking for more interaction with the world. I want players to be able to shape it in very significant ways. Not to the level of detail such as uploading textures or anything like that, but the developers should provide tons of little props and pieces and let the players find creative ways to use them to further their personal goals.
Trying to find a way to meaningfully mold all of that through some universe wide story arc seems like an almost impossible challenge to me. I don't know if that's what BioWare is going to try to do with this game, but if they're going to give it a shot then it'll almost certainly be interesting to see how it ends up. If on the other hand, they're making a more traditional MMO, then that's ok too. But is not as interesting to me, even if it also happens to have a Star Wars backstory.