I'll agree with what you said regarding Nintendo. But to be fair, Nintendo has made something that's really really different, while MS has just been refining a decent product. (Nothing wrong with that, it's just more interesting for most people to talk about something new). Nintendo's also had a couple of decades longer to build up their fanboy base, plus they've been the underdogs for a while, and everyone loves a story about the little guy sticking it to the big boys.
To be fair, just in terms of comparisons to what came before it, the Xbox360 was a good bit less interesting than I had hoped. It's really just a souped up Xbox (minus the HD), but at least MS never really tried to hype it as much else. Contrast to Nintendo who made a system that really is different, or Sony, who still sometimes likes to pretend that the PS3 is some sort of breakthrough revolution that changes everything.
Really, I think what MS did with the 360 is what Sony should've done with the PS3. Incremental improvements to an already successful product. As much as we all love to see innovation, there's something to be said about refining an already good product. It's easier to not screw up, the consumer has a better idea of what they're getting, and your console doesn't cost hundreds of dollars more than the competition. You won't get brownie points from the gaming media for innovation, but that's not so bad when there's already a decent sized market for your product.
I've always thought that the Xbox has pretty much gotten a fair deal on slashdot. Of course there's been the fanboys from either side who refuse to give an inch regardless of the realities, and still a general dislike/distrust of Microsoft. But overall, it seems that the general mindset (generalizing is bad, I know, but sometimes interesting) is that Xbox Live has been a monumental step in online console gaming, and MS did a pretty darn good job with it. MS also received a good bit of praise for their decision to include a HD standard with the Xbox, and a good amount of criticism for making it optional for the 360. The 360 appears to have less innovative stuff in it, but still has a fairly positive vibe to it around here as far as I can tell.
All that being said, MS tends to miss the mark with new products far more often than they really get it right, so skepticism isn't necessarily a bad thing. But it doesn't seem that the majority of the/. crowd has a problem acknowledging when they do something well. At worst, a lot of us wonder why they can't be more consistent at it with all the resources they have.
Exactly. And all that should happen while the librarians run back and forth behind the circulation desk, unable to find the opening three feet behind them that would let them out to stop the patron from destroying everything.
For a large majority of the people and jobs out there, the name of your college will cease to really matter after you get your first real job. Education is great and all, but if you've got a couple years of decent work experience under your belt, where you went to school is only a minor footnote.
It might make a bit more of a difference right out of school, where they employers don't have much else to go on. But in that case, your best bet is get a job through personal connections, relying on your school's name probably isn't your best bet.
I seriously don't see how having a moon/mars/space base would be a meaningful bargaining chip in regards to something like nuclear war. Yeah, so in an all-out nuclear exchange, there are 6,000 americans left on Mars...big whoop. Compared to the billions who would die, 6k people on another planet doesn't really make much of a difference.
Are you implying that if we had a big colony on Mars, then we should feel compelled to launch a nuclear strike on Russia, because even though they'd wipe out the USA with their counter attack, we'd still win because there'd still be 6000 Americans still alive somewhere in the solar system? I'm not sure I'd consider that a particularly compelling victory.
Even without some of the inefficiencies that a government run project of this sort would likely suffer from, I cannot imagine any sort of near-future manned trip to mars costing less than at least multiple billions of dollars. A billion dollar prize would be a mere pittance compared to the costs required to get such a project done.
And then consider that such an project is unlikely to have any significant financial payoffs beyond that prize (Space tourism to LEO is reasonable. The market for tourists willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars for a multi-year flight to mars is not big enough for a business plan).
There's just no market driven reason to go to mars, at least until we develop some propulsion technologies way beyond what we have now. The trip is too long, the costs and risks are way too high, and there's just way too many unknowns.
I understand what you're saying, but I find it hard to believe that even pre-supersonic aircraft, that anyone even moderately well versed in the idea would have though that that could be a problem. It was already possible to propel things significantly faster than the speed of sound. Bullets being a prime example. They obviously did not disintegrate purely due to their high speed, if they did, they wouldn't be nearly as effective as weapons.
I'm not an aeronautical engineer or anything, but I believe the big problem was that as you got to the speed of sound, all those waves that you're making in the air began to build up in front of you, and almost literally created a wall of energy that you had to then move through as you reached mach. Then once you got past that point, it became much easier again, assuming you've already dealt with things like the force of drag, thermal issues, etc...
Agreed. To counter the Duke-Nukem effect, I'm hoping that Team Fortress 2 ends up as good as it's looking right now. That game has been in the works forever, and what we're seeing about it today is way different much of what they've shown of it in the past, but it looks very cool now.
And that's a sequel to a game that at its core has a very simple and well-developed core (FPS). Spore is looking to be something rather different than anything before it in scope, so I'd imagine (hope) that they're having to throw out a lot of their hard work, because the chances of them getting everything right the first few times is slim to none.
Inches for the screen because Americans know what inches are.
MM for the thickness, because the point of the chart isn't the actual thickness, but the relative thickness of the iphone compared to the other phones. It's much easier for most people to compare the MM measurements against each other than it would be to compare 3/4" to 5/16" to 3/8", or whatever the imperial measurements would end up being. I deal with fractional measurements all day at work, and I still have to take a few seconds to think about it when I compare them.
It's a silly situation, because for every five level headed Apple supporters like you, there's one rabid Apple fanboy who posts 10 people's worth of comments where he/she actually does stretch the truth, and basically acts ignorant towards reality and such. This in turn brings out not only the anti-apple zealots, but also plenty of people who just decide to troll the fanboy for fun. As is usual in most debates involving more than two people, the noise of the extremes drowns out the real discussions that should be occurring, and everyone ends up frustrated and pissed off.
The only real solution is to ignore the noise as best you can and hope that others try to do the same. It's not a great solution, but the alternative would be a highly restricted, highly moderated forum, which has its whole own set of problems, and isn't what/. wants to be anyways.
All that being said, I think even the most rabid of fanboy-ism has a number of causes, some born out of a real and well earned affection that's sort of run wild, others caused just by boredom or a desire to argue with people. At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter. Large companies like Apple or Sony operate at a level of sales well beyond a point where the words/actions of their fanboys can make or break the company.
Just because they aren't blurring the plates doesn't mean they couldn't. They probably aren't doing it now because they don't really care either way, so why spend the time/money making that happen if you don't need to. If people start raising a big stink about it, and google starts hearing bad PR about it, then they'll probably do something about it.
They would do faces if it was the easiest way to comply with laws that limit publishing pictures of random people on the street. The motivations aren't hard to discern here.
I certainly don't agree with a company threatening or suing their customers for modifying their machines. I don't even care for region encoding or any of that. But in general, I find the built-in anti-copying features in game consoles to be of absolutely no concern to me. Unlike, for example, Apple's music store, where I have to register my various computers to listen to my music on all of them.
While I'm not the hugest fan of these sorts of "protections", I think game consoles are one of the areas where the manufacturer can make a decent argument for why they bother. While they're never going to completely shut out the dedicated and skilled people trying to find their way in, they can keep a pretty good lid on casual piracy, because console cracks are usually just to much work, even if someone else has already figure it out.
It's significantly different, from the average joe computer user point of view, than downloading mp3's or whatever. Once you have a cracked mp3, the file is easy to distribute and get at. Which is one of the reasons why music DRM is so dumb. The files are all pretty easily accessible online to anyone who wants to look at them. But with game consoles, downloading a game and putting it on a DVD generally isn't enough. You need to hack the console, sometimes through some software flaws, often through hardware modification. Even if the hardware mod is relatively easy, the need to crack the case is enough to keep most people out. If Napster required you to solder a chip onto your computer's motherboard in order to download music, it's doubtful anyone outside of tech nerds would've heard much about it.
Not to mention that there are plenty of people out there for which $35,000 is really a drop in the bucket. Giving that money to this guy is most likely money wasted, but if that money was most likely just going to sit in the bank with a few other tens of millions of dollars until you die, then you haven't really lost anything worth worrying about anyways.
If you've got more money than you know what to do with, why not take a couple long-shot bets?
I have no inside knowledge of any of Apple's plans, but I wonder if they didn't sort of rush the Safari for Windows beta release to quell a bit of the noise that some people have been making about the lack of 3rd party development for the iPhone. Along with this new version of safari, Apple announced today that the way to get your app onto the iPhone is through web applications, and safari is what the iPhone is going to be running. And I guess they decided to release Safari for windows now, just to show that they're serious about letting devs work on iPhone Apps.
Apple most likely wants as much free press about the iPhone as is possible as it gets closer to its release date, so why not get the dev community a little more excited. It sucks that this safari beta isn't quite ready, but safari is pretty well respected on the mac, so I have faith that it'll quickly improve on Windows.
It's not a step back in technology, it's just a change of focus. Sure, there will be lots of things that the shuttle can do that Orion won't be able to accomplish, but there were a lot of things that the Apollo craft could do that the shuttle cannot.
The shuttle is an amazing piece of technology, and the engineers did an outstanding job of meeting some of the design goals. The problem is that some of the design goals were never reached(much cheaper costs via reusable spacecraft, quick turn-around between launches), and other of the design goals ended up being far less useful than expected, even when possible. It's usually not that cost effective to bring something back from orbit and send it back up, just send up a new one. And there are plenty of rockets to choose from to send your cargo into space, the shuttle isn't the most efficient way to move cargo into orbit.
If Steve Jobs is even a little bit like the person that reading about Apple would lead you to believe, I'd have a hard time imagining that he expected the Rokr to accomplish much of anything. That leads me to wonder why he would've gone ahead with it at all, and I wonder if it wasn't in a way used as a bargaining chip to help get cingular/at&t to make some compromises when the real apple phone came along. Jobs could point to the rokr and say, "Look this is what happens when our awesome Apple/itunes/etc brand is mixed with your crappy phone development. You end up with barely-functional garbage that noone buys. Now whey don't you just go on vacation and let us design our phone from top to bottom and we'll let you help us sell them by the truckload."
I don't think it's necessarily fair to group together style and advertising together under the umbrella of "marketing". While it's by no-means universal, there's plenty of people in the tech crowd who see aesthetic design almost as a trick, a sham that those slick marketers have added to their products in order to cover up its deficiencies. While there are many examples of exactly that happening, it's certainly possible to want to design a product that both looks good and performs well.
One of Apple's greatest strengths has been to realize that not only can thoughtful aesthetics and design be applied to things without destroying their utility, but also that there are plenty of consumers who will not only prefer the nice looking choice, they'll even pay extra for it.
I don't think he's saying that, he's just saying that Nintendo directs their advertising energies in other directions.
At the end of the day, you're just arguing semantics. "Hardcore gamer" is not some certifiable title that you can get. Like you said, it's about how much you play. For the bulk of the history of console video gaming, the people who have played lots and lots of video games have been 14-25 males, so they've basically become synomomus with "hardcore gaming" so games made to target the hardcore gaming crowd (which historically has been the largest and most profitable market) have primarily targeted that demographic group.
The vocabulary you use to describe your view of the gaming world is different than the vocabulary used by marketing people and executives, and even many other gamers.
No, but at least this way all the interested parties can sit in one room and get CCP's take on it in person. CCP has done a completely awful job at communicating with the players over these issues, so even if they do care and take it seriously it sure sounds like they don't when you read their forum posts and such.
If nothing else, having a few people from the opposing sides being able to see each other and losing some of the anonymity that the game and the forums provide might allow a little bit of reasonable discussion. As you said, this isn't going to be a bunch of impartial people. Basically CCP has this problem caused by the cloudy division between player and employee, and their response seems to be to make that division even more complicated. It's not the solution to the problem that I would favor, but I guess CCP figures they can't stop all of the bickering, so they're going to at least try to structure it so that they can control it more.
You're right. We measly players couldn't possibly contribute anything positive. Why even try to improve a game when it's so much easier to just walk away? Why not just abandon something that many of us have enjoyed for months/years over some small problems?
CCP should be taking this stuff very seriously because this game is the base of their existence as a company. Players can be concerned and want to help without considering it a life or death situation. The universe of EvE, in many ways, has been built in a large part by the players, it offers us types of gameplay that no other MMO does, and there are large social networks that have been built around and throughout the game. Just "going elsewhere" isn't necessarily the easiest or best option, even if you do keep the game in perspective.
That's a crappy way of looking at things. If you don't like the way something is going, then just turn your head and walk away?
A lot of people enjoy EvE for what it has been, and what it could be. As players, we're not only doing ourselves a favor, but we're also doing CCP a favor by making suggestions that we feel would increase our enjoyment of the game and convince us to keep sending them money for our subscriptions. It's CCP's job to digest those suggestions, separate the good from the bad, the practical from the unworkable, the important from the irrelevant, the whining from the valid complaints, etc. While players should not expect to have their every whim fulfilled, developers who think that they are incapable of making mistakes or bad decisions aren't any better for a game. I'm not an fan of the phrase "the customer is always right", but it's important to remember that without enough customers, your business ceases to exist.
Many who are complaining are not doing so out of spite or a sense of entitlement, we just don't like seeing bad things happen to a game that we care about. When/if there comes a point where I feel that no matter what is said, CCP cannot be persuaded to take their game in a direction that's acceptable to me, then sure I'll quit. But I've gotten well over a year of good times out of EvE and see the potential for much more fun. I'm not going to bail just because the game has hit a rough spot.
Well, except for a government, I find it hard to believe that anybody would do auditing without getting paid for it. And I don't see anybody potentially paying for an audit of EvE besides CCP. But there doesn't have to be a conflict of interest. If CCP gave an outside auditing company money upfront, where their payment was guaranteed and not in any way dependent on their final results, then impartiality could be maintained.
Of course, selecting from the player base, whether you pay them or not, doesn't really fall along these lines. In fact, the blurry lines between employees and players that already exists is pretty much what's started the whole problem in the first place.
There are a number of large alliances, many of which are quite hostile towards each other. But no one side is so much bigger than the rest that they could completely rush the voting and run the table. I'd expect that the major alliances will each choose a candidate or two for their members to vote for, and those candidates would be all but guaranteed to win a spot.
The smaller alliances, not to be insulting or anything, most of them don't interact at the level where the cheating would make much of a difference. Not to say that they don't have a right to have concerns or opinions on the matter, but just that they are generally less personally involved in this whole mess.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll agree with what you said regarding Nintendo. But to be fair, Nintendo has made something that's really really different, while MS has just been refining a decent product. (Nothing wrong with that, it's just more interesting for most people to talk about something new). Nintendo's also had a couple of decades longer to build up their fanboy base, plus they've been the underdogs for a while, and everyone loves a story about the little guy sticking it to the big boys.
To be fair, just in terms of comparisons to what came before it, the Xbox360 was a good bit less interesting than I had hoped. It's really just a souped up Xbox (minus the HD), but at least MS never really tried to hype it as much else. Contrast to Nintendo who made a system that really is different, or Sony, who still sometimes likes to pretend that the PS3 is some sort of breakthrough revolution that changes everything.
Really, I think what MS did with the 360 is what Sony should've done with the PS3. Incremental improvements to an already successful product. As much as we all love to see innovation, there's something to be said about refining an already good product. It's easier to not screw up, the consumer has a better idea of what they're getting, and your console doesn't cost hundreds of dollars more than the competition. You won't get brownie points from the gaming media for innovation, but that's not so bad when there's already a decent sized market for your product.
I've always thought that the Xbox has pretty much gotten a fair deal on slashdot. Of course there's been the fanboys from either side who refuse to give an inch regardless of the realities, and still a general dislike/distrust of Microsoft. But overall, it seems that the general mindset (generalizing is bad, I know, but sometimes interesting) is that Xbox Live has been a monumental step in online console gaming, and MS did a pretty darn good job with it. MS also received a good bit of praise for their decision to include a HD standard with the Xbox, and a good amount of criticism for making it optional for the 360. The 360 appears to have less innovative stuff in it, but still has a fairly positive vibe to it around here as far as I can tell.
/. crowd has a problem acknowledging when they do something well. At worst, a lot of us wonder why they can't be more consistent at it with all the resources they have.
All that being said, MS tends to miss the mark with new products far more often than they really get it right, so skepticism isn't necessarily a bad thing. But it doesn't seem that the majority of the
Exactly. And all that should happen while the librarians run back and forth behind the circulation desk, unable to find the opening three feet behind them that would let them out to stop the patron from destroying everything.
For a large majority of the people and jobs out there, the name of your college will cease to really matter after you get your first real job. Education is great and all, but if you've got a couple years of decent work experience under your belt, where you went to school is only a minor footnote.
It might make a bit more of a difference right out of school, where they employers don't have much else to go on. But in that case, your best bet is get a job through personal connections, relying on your school's name probably isn't your best bet.
I seriously don't see how having a moon/mars/space base would be a meaningful bargaining chip in regards to something like nuclear war. Yeah, so in an all-out nuclear exchange, there are 6,000 americans left on Mars...big whoop. Compared to the billions who would die, 6k people on another planet doesn't really make much of a difference.
Are you implying that if we had a big colony on Mars, then we should feel compelled to launch a nuclear strike on Russia, because even though they'd wipe out the USA with their counter attack, we'd still win because there'd still be 6000 Americans still alive somewhere in the solar system? I'm not sure I'd consider that a particularly compelling victory.
Even without some of the inefficiencies that a government run project of this sort would likely suffer from, I cannot imagine any sort of near-future manned trip to mars costing less than at least multiple billions of dollars. A billion dollar prize would be a mere pittance compared to the costs required to get such a project done.
And then consider that such an project is unlikely to have any significant financial payoffs beyond that prize (Space tourism to LEO is reasonable. The market for tourists willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars for a multi-year flight to mars is not big enough for a business plan).
There's just no market driven reason to go to mars, at least until we develop some propulsion technologies way beyond what we have now. The trip is too long, the costs and risks are way too high, and there's just way too many unknowns.
I understand what you're saying, but I find it hard to believe that even pre-supersonic aircraft, that anyone even moderately well versed in the idea would have though that that could be a problem. It was already possible to propel things significantly faster than the speed of sound. Bullets being a prime example. They obviously did not disintegrate purely due to their high speed, if they did, they wouldn't be nearly as effective as weapons.
I'm not an aeronautical engineer or anything, but I believe the big problem was that as you got to the speed of sound, all those waves that you're making in the air began to build up in front of you, and almost literally created a wall of energy that you had to then move through as you reached mach. Then once you got past that point, it became much easier again, assuming you've already dealt with things like the force of drag, thermal issues, etc...
Agreed. To counter the Duke-Nukem effect, I'm hoping that Team Fortress 2 ends up as good as it's looking right now. That game has been in the works forever, and what we're seeing about it today is way different much of what they've shown of it in the past, but it looks very cool now.
And that's a sequel to a game that at its core has a very simple and well-developed core (FPS). Spore is looking to be something rather different than anything before it in scope, so I'd imagine (hope) that they're having to throw out a lot of their hard work, because the chances of them getting everything right the first few times is slim to none.
Inches for the screen because Americans know what inches are.
MM for the thickness, because the point of the chart isn't the actual thickness, but the relative thickness of the iphone compared to the other phones. It's much easier for most people to compare the MM measurements against each other than it would be to compare 3/4" to 5/16" to 3/8", or whatever the imperial measurements would end up being. I deal with fractional measurements all day at work, and I still have to take a few seconds to think about it when I compare them.
It's a silly situation, because for every five level headed Apple supporters like you, there's one rabid Apple fanboy who posts 10 people's worth of comments where he/she actually does stretch the truth, and basically acts ignorant towards reality and such. This in turn brings out not only the anti-apple zealots, but also plenty of people who just decide to troll the fanboy for fun. As is usual in most debates involving more than two people, the noise of the extremes drowns out the real discussions that should be occurring, and everyone ends up frustrated and pissed off.
/. wants to be anyways.
The only real solution is to ignore the noise as best you can and hope that others try to do the same. It's not a great solution, but the alternative would be a highly restricted, highly moderated forum, which has its whole own set of problems, and isn't what
All that being said, I think even the most rabid of fanboy-ism has a number of causes, some born out of a real and well earned affection that's sort of run wild, others caused just by boredom or a desire to argue with people. At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter. Large companies like Apple or Sony operate at a level of sales well beyond a point where the words/actions of their fanboys can make or break the company.
Just because they aren't blurring the plates doesn't mean they couldn't. They probably aren't doing it now because they don't really care either way, so why spend the time/money making that happen if you don't need to. If people start raising a big stink about it, and google starts hearing bad PR about it, then they'll probably do something about it.
They would do faces if it was the easiest way to comply with laws that limit publishing pictures of random people on the street. The motivations aren't hard to discern here.
I certainly don't agree with a company threatening or suing their customers for modifying their machines. I don't even care for region encoding or any of that. But in general, I find the built-in anti-copying features in game consoles to be of absolutely no concern to me. Unlike, for example, Apple's music store, where I have to register my various computers to listen to my music on all of them.
While I'm not the hugest fan of these sorts of "protections", I think game consoles are one of the areas where the manufacturer can make a decent argument for why they bother. While they're never going to completely shut out the dedicated and skilled people trying to find their way in, they can keep a pretty good lid on casual piracy, because console cracks are usually just to much work, even if someone else has already figure it out.
It's significantly different, from the average joe computer user point of view, than downloading mp3's or whatever. Once you have a cracked mp3, the file is easy to distribute and get at. Which is one of the reasons why music DRM is so dumb. The files are all pretty easily accessible online to anyone who wants to look at them. But with game consoles, downloading a game and putting it on a DVD generally isn't enough. You need to hack the console, sometimes through some software flaws, often through hardware modification. Even if the hardware mod is relatively easy, the need to crack the case is enough to keep most people out. If Napster required you to solder a chip onto your computer's motherboard in order to download music, it's doubtful anyone outside of tech nerds would've heard much about it.
Not to mention that there are plenty of people out there for which $35,000 is really a drop in the bucket. Giving that money to this guy is most likely money wasted, but if that money was most likely just going to sit in the bank with a few other tens of millions of dollars until you die, then you haven't really lost anything worth worrying about anyways.
If you've got more money than you know what to do with, why not take a couple long-shot bets?
I have no inside knowledge of any of Apple's plans, but I wonder if they didn't sort of rush the Safari for Windows beta release to quell a bit of the noise that some people have been making about the lack of 3rd party development for the iPhone. Along with this new version of safari, Apple announced today that the way to get your app onto the iPhone is through web applications, and safari is what the iPhone is going to be running. And I guess they decided to release Safari for windows now, just to show that they're serious about letting devs work on iPhone Apps.
Apple most likely wants as much free press about the iPhone as is possible as it gets closer to its release date, so why not get the dev community a little more excited. It sucks that this safari beta isn't quite ready, but safari is pretty well respected on the mac, so I have faith that it'll quickly improve on Windows.
It's not a step back in technology, it's just a change of focus. Sure, there will be lots of things that the shuttle can do that Orion won't be able to accomplish, but there were a lot of things that the Apollo craft could do that the shuttle cannot.
The shuttle is an amazing piece of technology, and the engineers did an outstanding job of meeting some of the design goals. The problem is that some of the design goals were never reached(much cheaper costs via reusable spacecraft, quick turn-around between launches), and other of the design goals ended up being far less useful than expected, even when possible. It's usually not that cost effective to bring something back from orbit and send it back up, just send up a new one. And there are plenty of rockets to choose from to send your cargo into space, the shuttle isn't the most efficient way to move cargo into orbit.
If Steve Jobs is even a little bit like the person that reading about Apple would lead you to believe, I'd have a hard time imagining that he expected the Rokr to accomplish much of anything. That leads me to wonder why he would've gone ahead with it at all, and I wonder if it wasn't in a way used as a bargaining chip to help get cingular/at&t to make some compromises when the real apple phone came along. Jobs could point to the rokr and say, "Look this is what happens when our awesome Apple/itunes/etc brand is mixed with your crappy phone development. You end up with barely-functional garbage that noone buys. Now whey don't you just go on vacation and let us design our phone from top to bottom and we'll let you help us sell them by the truckload."
I don't think it's necessarily fair to group together style and advertising together under the umbrella of "marketing". While it's by no-means universal, there's plenty of people in the tech crowd who see aesthetic design almost as a trick, a sham that those slick marketers have added to their products in order to cover up its deficiencies. While there are many examples of exactly that happening, it's certainly possible to want to design a product that both looks good and performs well.
One of Apple's greatest strengths has been to realize that not only can thoughtful aesthetics and design be applied to things without destroying their utility, but also that there are plenty of consumers who will not only prefer the nice looking choice, they'll even pay extra for it.
I don't think he's saying that, he's just saying that Nintendo directs their advertising energies in other directions.
At the end of the day, you're just arguing semantics. "Hardcore gamer" is not some certifiable title that you can get. Like you said, it's about how much you play. For the bulk of the history of console video gaming, the people who have played lots and lots of video games have been 14-25 males, so they've basically become synomomus with "hardcore gaming" so games made to target the hardcore gaming crowd (which historically has been the largest and most profitable market) have primarily targeted that demographic group.
The vocabulary you use to describe your view of the gaming world is different than the vocabulary used by marketing people and executives, and even many other gamers.
No, but at least this way all the interested parties can sit in one room and get CCP's take on it in person. CCP has done a completely awful job at communicating with the players over these issues, so even if they do care and take it seriously it sure sounds like they don't when you read their forum posts and such.
If nothing else, having a few people from the opposing sides being able to see each other and losing some of the anonymity that the game and the forums provide might allow a little bit of reasonable discussion. As you said, this isn't going to be a bunch of impartial people. Basically CCP has this problem caused by the cloudy division between player and employee, and their response seems to be to make that division even more complicated. It's not the solution to the problem that I would favor, but I guess CCP figures they can't stop all of the bickering, so they're going to at least try to structure it so that they can control it more.
You're right. We measly players couldn't possibly contribute anything positive. Why even try to improve a game when it's so much easier to just walk away? Why not just abandon something that many of us have enjoyed for months/years over some small problems?
CCP should be taking this stuff very seriously because this game is the base of their existence as a company. Players can be concerned and want to help without considering it a life or death situation. The universe of EvE, in many ways, has been built in a large part by the players, it offers us types of gameplay that no other MMO does, and there are large social networks that have been built around and throughout the game. Just "going elsewhere" isn't necessarily the easiest or best option, even if you do keep the game in perspective.
That's a crappy way of looking at things. If you don't like the way something is going, then just turn your head and walk away?
A lot of people enjoy EvE for what it has been, and what it could be. As players, we're not only doing ourselves a favor, but we're also doing CCP a favor by making suggestions that we feel would increase our enjoyment of the game and convince us to keep sending them money for our subscriptions. It's CCP's job to digest those suggestions, separate the good from the bad, the practical from the unworkable, the important from the irrelevant, the whining from the valid complaints, etc. While players should not expect to have their every whim fulfilled, developers who think that they are incapable of making mistakes or bad decisions aren't any better for a game. I'm not an fan of the phrase "the customer is always right", but it's important to remember that without enough customers, your business ceases to exist.
Many who are complaining are not doing so out of spite or a sense of entitlement, we just don't like seeing bad things happen to a game that we care about. When/if there comes a point where I feel that no matter what is said, CCP cannot be persuaded to take their game in a direction that's acceptable to me, then sure I'll quit. But I've gotten well over a year of good times out of EvE and see the potential for much more fun. I'm not going to bail just because the game has hit a rough spot.
Well, except for a government, I find it hard to believe that anybody would do auditing without getting paid for it. And I don't see anybody potentially paying for an audit of EvE besides CCP. But there doesn't have to be a conflict of interest. If CCP gave an outside auditing company money upfront, where their payment was guaranteed and not in any way dependent on their final results, then impartiality could be maintained.
Of course, selecting from the player base, whether you pay them or not, doesn't really fall along these lines. In fact, the blurry lines between employees and players that already exists is pretty much what's started the whole problem in the first place.
There are a number of large alliances, many of which are quite hostile towards each other. But no one side is so much bigger than the rest that they could completely rush the voting and run the table. I'd expect that the major alliances will each choose a candidate or two for their members to vote for, and those candidates would be all but guaranteed to win a spot.
The smaller alliances, not to be insulting or anything, most of them don't interact at the level where the cheating would make much of a difference. Not to say that they don't have a right to have concerns or opinions on the matter, but just that they are generally less personally involved in this whole mess.