Furthermore, Square-Enix needs to do some serious market research and learn what players actually want from a game.
I couldn't agree more. S-E has had so many good ideas that have been mired by some glaring poor decisions. If they had just spent some time before and during development, their games would be released to fewer "WTF were they thinking" comments. They've been such a successful company and still have quite a few successful games that there's no reason they shouldn't have the budget for more marketing research, testing, and player input.
Most people were NOT paying $28 a month. If I recall, it was like $7 for 20 hours of gameplay in the "action zones". The areas where you socialize, design cars/clothes/characters, find guilds were in social zones where your subscription time wasn't used.
Actually, the monthly fee was reasonable and came out to less than $15 (the standard MMO subscription fee) for a month of gameplay depending on how many hours I put in. The audio advertisements were opt in if I recall (they were the downside of turning on HQ voice chat) and the in-game ads were billboards which added an air of realism to the game.
Depends on what you mean by cheating. The match making system drove me up the wall. I only lost against people 5x my rating because they out-geared me. But that's all I was pitted against because they purposely lowered their rank (rating determines your gear, rank determines who you fight, rating goes up as you play, rank goes up or down if you win or lose) to they could fight newbies.
And honestly, the weapons and cars are all that changed. At rank 1, you were robbing stores and stealing cars. At rank 500 you were robbing the same stores and stealing the same cars. The game failed because it was hollow gameplay.
Biometrics are still considered too intrusive by many people, but not a bad idea. Two-factor authentication using a token is fine until someone loses or breaks their token. If getting a replacement is too difficult or takes too long, you won't get people to adopt the technology. If getting a replacement is too easy, then you're back to the original issue: if they could get your token, someone would just need your PIN to access everything.
Boston, actually, where the wind will change constantly. I'm not saying I've seen a stoplight coate don all four sides with snow, but neither will I say it's impossible.
It's not like a power failure, where it's obvious to everybody what went wrong and what to do.
I'm guessing you live in an area where no one has a car. Massholes where I live definitely do not know what to do when a light is out. However, the proper, legal solution is still the same: if the light is out, you stop.
In Wisconsin, snow blanketed LED traffic lights in some towns, leading to crashes at intersections where drivers weren't sure whether to stop or go
If you're not sure to stop or go, the answer is "stop". I can understand if it's dark and you don't see the traffic lights because they're covered with snow, but if the lights at the intersection aren't working, that doesn't mean the light is green. It means stop and go when it's safe to.
Who needs to enter anything? You can install plenty of malware simply by having the user click on your link. Plus, it depends on who the spam comes from. Would you really check the URL if you received an e-mail that looked like it was from a close friend that simply read, "Check out this link: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/12/15/1652236/Project-Honey-Pot-Traps-Billionth-Spam"? (Disregarding, of course, the Slashdot URL display feature)
Good for Dow. It's probably about time some company jumped on this. I'm just waiting for one of the big oil companies to shut them down so they can go back to using expensive corn crops for ethanol. I mean, corn? Really? Couldn't they have come up with anything more costly that produces less ethanol? Oh! Coming in 2015 from Shell: puppy ethanol!
Thomas Jefferson was a bit nerdy, true, but he was disqualified from being the first nerd president because it's a well-known fact that he ran his own fantasy football league. And we all know that fantasy football is the territory of jocks, not nerds.
Your analogy is pretty poor considering air is both required to live and free to breathe.
On the other hand, missions to the moon, while interesting, cost a lot of money which could be used to pay for any number federal or state budget items and would have a more immediate impact on the economy.
I just think that the $79,000,000 could have been spent on something more beneficial.
Today's MMOs are like riding the subway. One path, the people riding along probably smell, are inconsiderate, and they all looks the same.
That statement applies to most video games not just MMOs. However, unlike most games, subscription MMOs are heavily reliant on the number of players. A subscription-based MMO with too few players probably won't survive for long. So the developers have to find a balance between accessibility and challenge.
Make your game less challenging and you'll annoy the dedicated players. Make your game less accessible, however, and you risk driving off a majority of your subscription base. While I want a challenging MMO as much as the next guy, I want one that will survive.
With regards to your comments on "breaking camp", I remember well those days in the Northern Desert of Ro. I also remember the early days in Upper Blackrock Spire where crowd control was absolutely essential. While I do miss those days a bit, I also remember waiting an hour just to find a group to kill the same couple of camps over and over and over. I also remember ten-man UBRS runs taking more than two hours just to have the boss drop a chest piece for a class not even in the group. Those are not the days I want to relive. Heck, I don't even have time in my life to play games that work like that anymore.
Who needs it? Was I the only person greatly disappointed by GTA IV? Compared to the previous GTA games on the PS2, there was nothing to keep me playing after the story. In my opinion, more story wouldn't bring players back to the game as much as more interesting multi-player modes, car mods, and maybe some sort of turf wars or some other reoccurring event in single player.
SANS.org offers a whole lot of courses regarding InfoSec. Start with SANS 401 unless you feel you really need the into 301. Sadly, they get pretty pricey if you don't have a company reimbursing you.
Oh goodness, please tell me you're just trying to be funny.
Listen people: if you're alive, one day, you're going to die. You can take steps to live longer (eat healthy, wear a seatbelt, don't drink cyanide, etc), but worrying about every plane that flies over your house is not one of them.
Take heart in knowing that you're more likely to be struck and killed by a train while worriedly searching the sky for an airplane thousands of feet up.
Couldn't someone make the same correlation with video games: that sitting on your butt playing video games can lead to obesity which leads to health problems later in life?
Good point. I was never taught all these tax rules I need to follow, either. However, when it comes to tax time, there are several sections on the form where I'm supposed to declare any income or purchases that were not taxed: out-of-state purchases or services like plowing my neighbor's driveways, etc.
Assuming there's something like that on the Sweden tax forms, then these girls should be listing their untaxed income from their "web services".
Of course, I don't know too many people who actually declares their out-of-state purchases and untaxed income, but that's a whole other discussion.
For several months during and after the game's release, the game's director and lead designer, Fumito Ueda, maintained that the game's status as a prequel was simply his personal take on the game and not necessarily its canon nature, as he largely intended for players to decide the specifics of the story for themselves. However, during an interview in March 2006, Ueda revealed that a specific connection between the two games exists: the world featured in the two is the same, with Shadow of the Colossus taking place at an unspecified time before Ico. He revealed that Wander sires the line of horned boys of which Ico's protagonist is a descendant.
Slashdot Mirror
Furthermore, Square-Enix needs to do some serious market research and learn what players actually want from a game.
I couldn't agree more. S-E has had so many good ideas that have been mired by some glaring poor decisions. If they had just spent some time before and during development, their games would be released to fewer "WTF were they thinking" comments. They've been such a successful company and still have quite a few successful games that there's no reason they shouldn't have the budget for more marketing research, testing, and player input.
Most people were NOT paying $28 a month. If I recall, it was like $7 for 20 hours of gameplay in the "action zones". The areas where you socialize, design cars/clothes/characters, find guilds were in social zones where your subscription time wasn't used.
Actually, the monthly fee was reasonable and came out to less than $15 (the standard MMO subscription fee) for a month of gameplay depending on how many hours I put in. The audio advertisements were opt in if I recall (they were the downside of turning on HQ voice chat) and the in-game ads were billboards which added an air of realism to the game.
Depends on what you mean by cheating. The match making system drove me up the wall. I only lost against people 5x my rating because they out-geared me. But that's all I was pitted against because they purposely lowered their rank (rating determines your gear, rank determines who you fight, rating goes up as you play, rank goes up or down if you win or lose) to they could fight newbies.
And honestly, the weapons and cars are all that changed. At rank 1, you were robbing stores and stealing cars. At rank 500 you were robbing the same stores and stealing the same cars. The game failed because it was hollow gameplay.
Biometrics are still considered too intrusive by many people, but not a bad idea. Two-factor authentication using a token is fine until someone loses or breaks their token. If getting a replacement is too difficult or takes too long, you won't get people to adopt the technology. If getting a replacement is too easy, then you're back to the original issue: if they could get your token, someone would just need your PIN to access everything.
The research, which may 'help mothers with rare genetic disorders have healthy children...'
I'd say that's a pretty good reason for this research.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine Decent game but still 10x better than the movie
It's not like a power failure, where it's obvious to everybody what went wrong and what to do.
I'm guessing you live in an area where no one has a car. Massholes where I live definitely do not know what to do when a light is out. However, the proper, legal solution is still the same: if the light is out, you stop.
In Wisconsin, snow blanketed LED traffic lights in some towns, leading to crashes at intersections where drivers weren't sure whether to stop or go
If you're not sure to stop or go, the answer is "stop". I can understand if it's dark and you don't see the traffic lights because they're covered with snow, but if the lights at the intersection aren't working, that doesn't mean the light is green. It means stop and go when it's safe to.
Who needs to enter anything? You can install plenty of malware simply by having the user click on your link. Plus, it depends on who the spam comes from. Would you really check the URL if you received an e-mail that looked like it was from a close friend that simply read, "Check out this link: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/12/15/1652236/Project-Honey-Pot-Traps-Billionth-Spam"? (Disregarding, of course, the Slashdot URL display feature)
Good for Dow. It's probably about time some company jumped on this. I'm just waiting for one of the big oil companies to shut them down so they can go back to using expensive corn crops for ethanol. I mean, corn? Really? Couldn't they have come up with anything more costly that produces less ethanol? Oh! Coming in 2015 from Shell: puppy ethanol!
Thomas Jefferson was a bit nerdy, true, but he was disqualified from being the first nerd president because it's a well-known fact that he ran his own fantasy football league. And we all know that fantasy football is the territory of jocks, not nerds.
And of course we can't forget Obama -- I hear rumors he's been sleeping with a Black chick!
That's just his way of keeping it old school.
Your analogy is pretty poor considering air is both required to live and free to breathe. On the other hand, missions to the moon, while interesting, cost a lot of money which could be used to pay for any number federal or state budget items and would have a more immediate impact on the economy. I just think that the $79,000,000 could have been spent on something more beneficial.
Today's MMOs are like riding the subway. One path, the people riding along probably smell, are inconsiderate, and they all looks the same.
That statement applies to most video games not just MMOs. However, unlike most games, subscription MMOs are heavily reliant on the number of players. A subscription-based MMO with too few players probably won't survive for long. So the developers have to find a balance between accessibility and challenge.
Make your game less challenging and you'll annoy the dedicated players. Make your game less accessible, however, and you risk driving off a majority of your subscription base. While I want a challenging MMO as much as the next guy, I want one that will survive.
With regards to your comments on "breaking camp", I remember well those days in the Northern Desert of Ro. I also remember the early days in Upper Blackrock Spire where crowd control was absolutely essential. While I do miss those days a bit, I also remember waiting an hour just to find a group to kill the same couple of camps over and over and over. I also remember ten-man UBRS runs taking more than two hours just to have the boss drop a chest piece for a class not even in the group. Those are not the days I want to relive. Heck, I don't even have time in my life to play games that work like that anymore.
But why can't he be an evil genius?
Because the job of "Evil Politician" pays as much and has very little in the way of intellectual requirements.
Who needs it? Was I the only person greatly disappointed by GTA IV? Compared to the previous GTA games on the PS2, there was nothing to keep me playing after the story. In my opinion, more story wouldn't bring players back to the game as much as more interesting multi-player modes, car mods, and maybe some sort of turf wars or some other reoccurring event in single player.
I would like to donate money to your research on chronic boredom disorder as long as you find Video Games to be an effective cure.
It's simply Fair Use between assholes.
Kinda like in prison?
SANS.org offers a whole lot of courses regarding InfoSec. Start with SANS 401 unless you feel you really need the into 301. Sadly, they get pretty pricey if you don't have a company reimbursing you.
Listen people: if you're alive, one day, you're going to die. You can take steps to live longer (eat healthy, wear a seatbelt, don't drink cyanide, etc), but worrying about every plane that flies over your house is not one of them.
Take heart in knowing that you're more likely to be struck and killed by a train while worriedly searching the sky for an airplane thousands of feet up.
Couldn't someone make the same correlation with video games: that sitting on your butt playing video games can lead to obesity which leads to health problems later in life?
Good point. I was never taught all these tax rules I need to follow, either. However, when it comes to tax time, there are several sections on the form where I'm supposed to declare any income or purchases that were not taxed: out-of-state purchases or services like plowing my neighbor's driveways, etc.
Assuming there's something like that on the Sweden tax forms, then these girls should be listing their untaxed income from their "web services".
Of course, I don't know too many people who actually declares their out-of-state purchases and untaxed income, but that's a whole other discussion.
For several months during and after the game's release, the game's director and lead designer, Fumito Ueda, maintained that the game's status as a prequel was simply his personal take on the game and not necessarily its canon nature, as he largely intended for players to decide the specifics of the story for themselves. However, during an interview in March 2006, Ueda revealed that a specific connection between the two games exists: the world featured in the two is the same, with Shadow of the Colossus taking place at an unspecified time before Ico. He revealed that Wander sires the line of horned boys of which Ico's protagonist is a descendant.
Are you willing to back that statement up by giving us your real name and address?