I'll tell you, this is a place I would attend daily. DDR is great fun - I've gotten so into it that I built my own studio, but doing it alone isn't as much fun as I'd imagine a health club setting.
Actually you don't have to, at least not in Pennsylvania. If both parties know the call may be recorded it's perfectly legal to record it. Of course they never expect *you* to record the call.
I bought a handy device to do just that, and it's already paid for itself: I foolishly signed up with what turned out to be a fly-by-night phone company. Our phone lines would cut out every morning for between 5 and 20 minutes - no outgoing calls, and incoming calls would receive a message saying "could not be completed as dialed."
I reported the problem to them many times, and they could never fix it, so I tried to cancel the service. They refused, claiming the contract hadn't been fulfilled. So I switched to the old phone company and all was fine with the service.
A couple months later I get a letter from a lawyer demanding $1200 for the cancelled contract. I played the totally legal recordings (after all, they said "this call may be monitored or recorded") back of me reporting the shitty service to their techs, and voila, the lawyer went away!
The Tales of Alvin Maker are not combat-free, and the would that we are building based on them isn't necessarily combat-free either. It's certainly not combat-centric, which puts it somewhere on the spectrum between most MMOs and a game like A Tale in the Desert. ATITD is, on the other hand, combat-free.
Just how little do you value your leisure time?
on
Pay-As-You-Play MMORPGs?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
If you have just 3-5 hours/week to play "exciting MMO games like World of Warcraft", I take it that you're working. They charge, what, $15/month? So that's around a buck an hour for you.
My question is, where are you working that $1/hour spend on leisure time is too much? (Or did you mean to post this under "Troll Slashdot" rather than "Ask Slashdot"?;)
If I were on this jury I would intentionally deadlock, forcing a mistrial. In that way, both companies would have to pay to have another trial. I would hope the next jury would do the same.
I'm sure that 3rd party spare batteries will be popular early on, just as add-on lights were popular with early GameBoy Advances. If Sony sells a spare battery for $45, the 3rd parties will probably sell for $15; I'd be the first to pick up a couple for trips.
While those saying "it's only a game" are making an often heard point, I haven't seem much discussion along the lines of why I think this was an interesting event. (BTW, I'm lead designer of ATITD.)
To a new player, ATITD can seem like a game about building "stuff." You build your camp, your compound, your character. If you play a long time, or play smart, you can excel in all of that. But the real challenge is that it's a game about building a perfect society, and that is *hard*. It's hard in RL, and if I'm doing my job correctly it should be hard in the game.
Along comes a foreign trader, with shiny new goods, and an attitude that's totaly offensive, totally out of line with the culture that has developed in our Ancient Egypt. Would you trade with him? Would you put aside your morals, if it meant you'd get an advantage that many people don't have? In real-life, would you patronize a store that had a "no jews allowed" policy? What if they had *really* good prices? Would you do it and hope nobody saw? Maybe feel guilty?
The best books, movies, television - can provoke a range of emotions. I like books that make me feel happy, enraged, triumphant, guilty, enlightened, sad. I want to have all of those emotions available in an MMO, and emotions occur in players, not characters.
So, to create emotions you have to do things to characters that the people behind them will react to. The only question is how hard is it ok to push? So hard that the person kills themself? Of course not. Did this event push too hard? Certainly for some people it did.
I'll continue to make it hard to build this perfect society. If that means we trade subscriber counts for a more memorable, challenging experience, I'm confortable with that. After all, if I were optimizing for subscriber counts, I'd have done a combat based game. Hell, if I were optimizing for money, I'd have been a lawyer!
Storage costs $0.50/G these days, and all drives are faster than network storage. Why anyone would add another piece of duct tape to their Windows box to save fifty cents is beyond me. Cool hack, but that's about it.
All I can think of when I see this kind of thing is that the media companies are building a case for a future lobbying effort to outlaw non-DRM-locked hardware.
Sony just developed an eBook reader - the first to use an e-ink display, and then castrated it with DRM, and a total library of 400 expire-in-2-months books.
Obviously products like these are going to fail, and I just can't see their existance as mistakes. Sony may be smarter than they appear.
Why not play a single player game? I'm not being flip here - single player RPGs are a much better experience than MMOs-played-solo: the stories are more coherent, they tend to be better tuned so that you encounter monsters at a pleasingly challenging difficulty level, and they contain puzzles that open new areas to explore.
All of these things are hard for a designer to include in an MMO. When you play one solo you're accepting all the design difficulties that go with MMOs, but eschewing the one thing that they excel at!
Re:The silver lining in the falling sky...
on
P2P Bits
·
· Score: 1
Oh yeah? Name one time since the revolutionary war that people "realize that we've stumbled into Regulations Hell, and...demand a repeal of all of these stupid laws."
That's good! No, wasn't a rhetorical question at all. I often ask people that, and I try to identify the parts of games that I like. Usually when I ask they'll ignore the question and tell me that travel takes too long, or they're sick of glassblowing, or whatever's frustrating them at the moment. (All examples from ATITD, and true) But occasionally I'll hear something like "seeing what comes up when I crossbreed two roses", and so I'll go and code something that sort of has the same feel, but maybe from a different angle.
I'm the designer of A Tale in the Desert. I read about 100 "I hate X" posts for every "I love Y, do more stuff like that" post.
Consequently, I tend to give those "I love Y, do more stuff like that" posts a lot more consideration than the rants. They're much harder to come up with, and infinitely more useful.
In fact, of all the people reading this post, I wonder if three can pick a game they've played recently, and name an activity in the game that they enjoyed doing.
How patents work in the US is that you have one year from date of discovery to file the patent. It's common to wait the full year. There's also nothing stopping you from filing immediately and claiming a date close to a year ago, but you may have to produce internal documents to prove date of discovery if challenged.
So they could claim that they discovered the technique in December 2001.
Yet another reason... ah, I'm sick of saying it already.
Order a TV set delivered to the vacant house in the next neighborhood over. (Can even do it on your own card!) Put a little notecard saying it's OK for UPS to leave the package without a signature. Pick up the set when delivered, and (if using your card) do a chargeback.
How do I know this? Well, after being repeatedly defrauded by one person to the tune of $2000 (he was/is using a list of stolen cards, bouncing off a different unsecured proxy each order), I called our merchant bank, exasperated, and said "how can I stop this guy? How can I stop you fining me for all his charges?"
Their reply: "Oh, you think you have it bad - here's what some merchants are getting hit with," and described the scheme above.
The same person is still defrauding me, and I'm powerless to stop it.
I read thru BondedSender's terms of service. Their allowed complaint rate is 1 per 1,000,000 messages sent. Each complaint over that limit deducts $20 from the sender's bond.
As someone that does legitimate commercial mailings (opt-in, for our MMORPG, about 15,000 messages per month to current and past players), this strikes me as slightly expensive, and somewhat dangerous. Some math...
Typically I get about 10 angry letters per newsletter, so that's $200 to send each newsletter. A cost of 1.3 cents per email isn't bad, since I know that most people read what I send.
Two problems. First, most newsletters go through now. Maybe 10% get spam filtered (I should probably set up a way to track this). So reaching those additional people costs 13 cents each. That is expensive.
Second, I worry that if the system becomes well known, it would be griefed: A single player with a bone to pick would sign up under a bunch of email addresses and "complain" from each. I'm not sure how to resolve this.
Assuming there's something newsworthy about it. And in this case it does look like an interesting product. However, what I *dispise* is not being told how much a product costs, and having a website plastered with "free 30 days evaluation, download now!!!"
Do they honestly expect me to invest hours of my time learning their product, only to find out that it's $5000 a seat? (And I'm making this number up, because I can't for the life of me find it on their website, or Programmer's Paradise, or on Usenet, or anywhere else.)
I did the same thing recently. After much research, I concluded that the $1000 InFocus X1 was an especially good value: It uses DLP technology which doesn't burn-in if you play lots of games, and is quite bright (1100 Lumens). I just took a trip to their site, and see that they now have an X2 which ups the brightness a bit for the same price. They also don't rape you quite as bad as other companies for new bulbs. The only downside to this projector is the 800x600 resolution.
BTW, on the subject of games - playing on one of these is videogame ecstasy. Definitely plan to invest in wireless controllers for each of your consoles.
Re:Wait... so you're telling me...
on
A New Ice Age?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Scientists are up in arms because this movie was written by paranormal talk show host Art Bell and alien abductee Whitley Strieber.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll tell you, this is a place I would attend daily. DDR is great fun - I've gotten so into it that I built my own studio, but doing it alone isn't as much fun as I'd imagine a health club setting.
Collaborative text editors were a hot research topic about 8-10 years ago, and it turns out to be quite hard to get them right.
The only mostly-finished one I could find that runs on Windows (and Linux!) is MoonEdit. Anyone want to put a server up and try it?
Actually you don't have to, at least not in Pennsylvania. If both parties know the call may be recorded it's perfectly legal to record it. Of course they never expect *you* to record the call.
I bought a handy device to do just that, and it's already paid for itself: I foolishly signed up with what turned out to be a fly-by-night phone company. Our phone lines would cut out every morning for between 5 and 20 minutes - no outgoing calls, and incoming calls would receive a message saying "could not be completed as dialed."
I reported the problem to them many times, and they could never fix it, so I tried to cancel the service. They refused, claiming the contract hadn't been fulfilled. So I switched to the old phone company and all was fine with the service.
A couple months later I get a letter from a lawyer demanding $1200 for the cancelled contract. I played the totally legal recordings (after all, they said "this call may be monitored or recorded") back of me reporting the shitty service to their techs, and voila, the lawyer went away!
I'm lead designer on this project.
The Tales of Alvin Maker are not combat-free, and the would that we are building based on them isn't necessarily combat-free either. It's certainly not combat-centric, which puts it somewhere on the spectrum between most MMOs and a game like A Tale in the Desert. ATITD is, on the other hand, combat-free.
If you have just 3-5 hours/week to play "exciting MMO games like World of Warcraft", I take it that you're working. They charge, what, $15/month? So that's around a buck an hour for you.
;)
My question is, where are you working that $1/hour spend on leisure time is too much? (Or did you mean to post this under "Troll Slashdot" rather than "Ask Slashdot"?
If I were on this jury I would intentionally deadlock, forcing a mistrial. In that way, both companies would have to pay to have another trial. I would hope the next jury would do the same.
I'm sure that 3rd party spare batteries will be popular early on, just as add-on lights were popular with early GameBoy Advances. If Sony sells a spare battery for $45, the 3rd parties will probably sell for $15; I'd be the first to pick up a couple for trips.
While those saying "it's only a game" are making an often heard point, I haven't seem much discussion along the lines of why I think this was an interesting event. (BTW, I'm lead designer of ATITD.)
To a new player, ATITD can seem like a game about building "stuff." You build your camp, your compound, your character. If you play a long time, or play smart, you can excel in all of that. But the real challenge is that it's a game about building a perfect society, and that is *hard*. It's hard in RL, and if I'm doing my job correctly it should be hard in the game.
Along comes a foreign trader, with shiny new goods, and an attitude that's totaly offensive, totally out of line with the culture that has developed in our Ancient Egypt. Would you trade with him? Would you put aside your morals, if it meant you'd get an advantage that many people don't have? In real-life, would you patronize a store that had a "no jews allowed" policy? What if they had *really* good prices? Would you do it and hope nobody saw? Maybe feel guilty?
The best books, movies, television - can provoke a range of emotions. I like books that make me feel happy, enraged, triumphant, guilty, enlightened, sad. I want to have all of those emotions available in an MMO, and emotions occur in players, not characters.
So, to create emotions you have to do things to characters that the people behind them will react to. The only question is how hard is it ok to push? So hard that the person kills themself? Of course not. Did this event push too hard? Certainly for some people it did.
I'll continue to make it hard to build this perfect society. If that means we trade subscriber counts for a more memorable, challenging experience, I'm confortable with that. After all, if I were optimizing for subscriber counts, I'd have done a combat based game. Hell, if I were optimizing for money, I'd have been a lawyer!
Storage costs $0.50/G these days, and all drives are faster than network storage. Why anyone would add another piece of duct tape to their Windows box to save fifty cents is beyond me. Cool hack, but that's about it.
Are you sure about this? Can you identify such a law? Has a court ruled such a law constitutional?
Big surprise - ATRAC3 has DRM!
All I can think of when I see this kind of thing is that the media companies are building a case for a future lobbying effort to outlaw non-DRM-locked hardware.
Sony just developed an eBook reader - the first to use an e-ink display, and then castrated it with DRM, and a total library of 400 expire-in-2-months books.
Obviously products like these are going to fail, and I just can't see their existance as mistakes. Sony may be smarter than they appear.
Great to hear what he's up to these days. He's the third professor in this story from my days at CMU. Brad, if you're reading this, all that videogame stuff wasn't a waste of time after all.
Why not play a single player game? I'm not being flip here - single player RPGs are a much better experience than MMOs-played-solo: the stories are more coherent, they tend to be better tuned so that you encounter monsters at a pleasingly challenging difficulty level, and they contain puzzles that open new areas to explore.
All of these things are hard for a designer to include in an MMO. When you play one solo you're accepting all the design difficulties that go with MMOs, but eschewing the one thing that they excel at!
Oh yeah? Name one time since the revolutionary war that people "realize that we've stumbled into Regulations Hell, and...demand a repeal of all of these stupid laws."
Skotos does this distribution method exactly.
That's good! No, wasn't a rhetorical question at all. I often ask people that, and I try to identify the parts of games that I like. Usually when I ask they'll ignore the question and tell me that travel takes too long, or they're sick of glassblowing, or whatever's frustrating them at the moment. (All examples from ATITD, and true) But occasionally I'll hear something like "seeing what comes up when I crossbreed two roses", and so I'll go and code something that sort of has the same feel, but maybe from a different angle.
I'm the designer of A Tale in the Desert. I read about 100 "I hate X" posts for every "I love Y, do more stuff like that" post.
Consequently, I tend to give those "I love Y, do more stuff like that" posts a lot more consideration than the rants. They're much harder to come up with, and infinitely more useful.
In fact, of all the people reading this post, I wonder if three can pick a game they've played recently, and name an activity in the game that they enjoyed doing.
If leveraging a previous library works, then maybe they should make the XBox 2 backwards compatible with the Playstation 2
They can have my fingerprints.
On second thought, I'll just give them the finger.
How patents work in the US is that you have one year from date of discovery to file the patent. It's common to wait the full year. There's also nothing stopping you from filing immediately and claiming a date close to a year ago, but you may have to produce internal documents to prove date of discovery if challenged.
So they could claim that they discovered the technique in December 2001.
Yet another reason... ah, I'm sick of saying it already.
Order a TV set delivered to the vacant house in the next neighborhood over. (Can even do it on your own card!) Put a little notecard saying it's OK for UPS to leave the package without a signature. Pick up the set when delivered, and (if using your card) do a chargeback.
How do I know this? Well, after being repeatedly defrauded by one person to the tune of $2000 (he was/is using a list of stolen cards, bouncing off a different unsecured proxy each order), I called our merchant bank, exasperated, and said "how can I stop this guy? How can I stop you fining me for all his charges?"
Their reply: "Oh, you think you have it bad - here's what some merchants are getting hit with," and described the scheme above.
The same person is still defrauding me, and I'm powerless to stop it.
I read thru BondedSender's terms of service. Their allowed complaint rate is 1 per 1,000,000 messages sent. Each complaint over that limit deducts $20 from the sender's bond.
As someone that does legitimate commercial mailings (opt-in, for our MMORPG, about 15,000 messages per month to current and past players), this strikes me as slightly expensive, and somewhat dangerous. Some math...
Typically I get about 10 angry letters per newsletter, so that's $200 to send each newsletter. A cost of 1.3 cents per email isn't bad, since I know that most people read what I send.
Two problems. First, most newsletters go through now. Maybe 10% get spam filtered (I should probably set up a way to track this). So reaching those additional people costs 13 cents each. That is expensive.
Second, I worry that if the system becomes well known, it would be griefed: A single player with a bone to pick would sign up under a bunch of email addresses and "complain" from each. I'm not sure how to resolve this.
Assuming there's something newsworthy about it. And in this case it does look like an interesting product. However, what I *dispise* is not being told how much a product costs, and having a website plastered with "free 30 days evaluation, download now!!!"
Do they honestly expect me to invest hours of my time learning their product, only to find out that it's $5000 a seat? (And I'm making this number up, because I can't for the life of me find it on their website, or Programmer's Paradise, or on Usenet, or anywhere else.)
I did the same thing recently. After much research, I concluded that the $1000 InFocus X1 was an especially good value: It uses DLP technology which doesn't burn-in if you play lots of games, and is quite bright (1100 Lumens). I just took a trip to their site, and see that they now have an X2 which ups the brightness a bit for the same price. They also don't rape you quite as bad as other companies for new bulbs. The only downside to this projector is the 800x600 resolution.
BTW, on the subject of games - playing on one of these is videogame ecstasy. Definitely plan to invest in wireless controllers for each of your consoles.
Scientists are up in arms because this movie was written by paranormal talk show host Art Bell and alien abductee Whitley Strieber.