Does Apple really think they can do a mobile phone to the market in few years without violating any of Nokia's iventions done in the past 20 years that are patented? They think they do but reality is different. This is just Apple's response to get better negotiation grounds and with luck, they get a Judge who has Apple laptop to the case. Only then Apple has chances to win 1 round but only lose at the end at the higher court level.
Did they really think that every game developer would do censored version for their country if they ban the original? Now that someone said no, they are amazed and already are turning the table over the past decisions.
Seems to me that EA tries to justificate DLC with comments like this and easy money for them. A new game costs atleast 50 bucks, sometimes even 60 on the PC. Naturally the same game is 10 bucks or more expensive on console (whatever is reason for that anyway??). This means that DLC can be 10-30 bucks each so there's around 80 bucks or more spent on _one_ game, that was poorly and too fast made in the first place, thus lacked the content that should have been in the game at the first place. That content is now sold as DLC, but the price is over half higher than it should have been.
What used to be 1 game in the past, is now over a half of 1 game, 1-2 DLC content make it full game and players do the testing for it upon release of the original. Keep the game alive for few years with DLC while making the sequel and then milk out the money again. Nice business model. I wish i had a game company.
You are now mixing kids with adults and this game is not made for kids, it's for adults so your argument goes out of the window right now. Besides, how are the games as you listed wrong? I had tons of fun playing DOOM and Mortal Kombat. Not kids games, but i did play them as a kid, so did you propably but that doesn't mean that every violent game should be banned.
I love violent games. That doesn't mean that i go postal and kill everyone for real. It's entertaining to have some alien go up on a human, smack brains on the wall and go for next victim. It's fun. It's not real. It's a GAME.
Sure, i wouldn't want my kids to see that stuff, when they are kids but there are age ratings for a games for a reason. Why the hell Australia doesn't allow some games for anyone, not even over 18 years old?
Why some games are completely banned? Who are they protecting?
No dedicated servers = no communities to extend game life = no players = game does not last long = they can do another sequel = same thing all over. Did i just reveal their business plan?
I have absolutely no idea whats your point there. You managed to bring down the conversation from games to your own legal civil rights? Get on topic please.
L4D's lobby system fails in so many ways, even today after multiple updates.
1. You get assigned to a lobby where someone (lobby host) is from Australia and you from Finland. ERR, thats a 370ms latency right there
2. You join into a game that is already going. ERR, that's a 150ms latency there between you and the server which hardly is playable as you cannot predict the zombies hits properly.
3. Lobby assigns you to a modded server where there are some shitty mods going on, the option "back to lobby vote" is disabled. Shit outta luck there. Too bad that the modded servers and 3rd party servers are in same pile (which SUCKS).
4. You cannot select a server where to go, unless you revert to console commands and are a lobby host or use direct connect to particular server through console.
5. Custom maps are a joke. You have to pre-download them and it takes too long time due to maps (campaigns) being over 100 megs, even 300. Once you download them, imagine 30 KB's a second. Thats 1 hour right there. At the point where you get it downloaded, no one is even playint it anymore. Next time you play, same thing but you get to download whole new campaign. At the moment i have 5 Gigs of custom campaigns downloaded from which i have played 3 out of over 20 campaigns.
On the good old CSS/TF2 system, you could just connect to a server and download the campaign from there directly and fast, if the server used a fastdownload host. I guess there was a reason for this, so the slow downloaders would not reserve a spot but Valve should have had the custom maps available over Steam.
6. You end up on a gameserver that is running within a server that is overcrowded aka overloaded aka running too many goddamn gameservers. Even Valve does this with L4D. The official L4D servers were running only 10-20 ticks per second while the optimal is 30. This is caused by the overhead CPU usage in panic events, such as finales and small fight scenes. At that point the CPU usage peaks up 100-300% compared to regular usage. Imagine 30 servers running fine and then all having panic event at the same time. Sheesh!
7. There is no community in L4D. I have one server in top 150 played L4D servers in the world (valve rank, which you see when entering the gameserver). It has served over 26531 players at that time from which 99,99% are people who see:
- Good server running
- Wonder how they could go there through lobby again
Valve builds a system where players keep in touch through Steam so they get together through random system and them meet up on some server,add eachothers to friendslist and so on. This is perfectly fine but what Valve now forgets is the communities that actually run the servers. There should be a way to pick a server from the list and if its free, lobby assign to it. How hard can it be?
8. No one is actually looking after the players at the servers. There are stats about ragequits, teamkills, and such but not for the server owners. All they can do is look at the logs if someone killed the whole group in some random game and left the server. That sucks, really. And who reads those logs, there are tons of text for crying out loud!
9. The lobby search fails with filtering. If i put difficulty level to Any, i get multiple servers. If i go back, select filter to Expert, i see none or only 1, 2 campaigns with expert on, even though previously with setting any, i saw over 10. If i go back and set it to any again, i see them again, all of them.
10. A lot more stuff that i just can't now remember.
Lobby works to a certain point, perhaps for games like this but needs work - a lot.
Nice to see that a firm that needs paying customers will shoot themselves into their own legs with decisions like this. Maybe they took some example from battlenet and valve's "successfull" lobby system in L4D but they maybe forgot that blizzard can fund their own systems better with wow and Valve has users dedicated servers with their lobby system.
You know, this doesn't mean that the 1 Mb is actually *FREE* of charge. They still have to pay for it, it just has to be available for everyone to buy.
That pixel snow you refer to is assumed to be caused of GPU overheating while the console is in standby mode (yellow light). As you said, the fan isn't spinning while the WC24 is on so the GPU could do something and then start to overheat due to having lack of cooling. I haven't heard any confirmations to this issue either but i stopped keeping my Wii on when i do not need it.
None of these are made by actual fucking professional level designers. The custom campaigns, especially the first ones are usually full of shit with few exceptions that you just listed. I'm amazed that almost after a year since the game was released, there has been only ONE actual content update, the new survival map lighthouse. If this game would have been CS Source or TF2, there would have been lots of downloadable content aka NEW MAPS.
They threw us the developers tools - make your own maps but only after 6 months when everyone was already tired of the same old maps and to the whole game. If the tools would have been given 6 months prior from the day they went beta, there would have been a lot more quality custom campaigns already out.
Death Aboard is the most promising one yet - but it has issues. One of them is the low fps. My eyes bleed when i have to look that twitching screen. It is also far too easy to play trough.
Your domain is your responsibility, just like your password to any site you visit to or any bill you wish to pay. If you do not renew your domain in time, it's your own loss. If the domain really is important to you, this would never happen.
I don't really get the idea they are after while blocking internet radios, YouTube videos and other services from people outside of US. That's like shooting yourself in a leg. Do i need to go pirate to listen and hear this stuff on them? Seriously, these people should get their heads out of ass already.
I just lost my faith to Swedish court system. Even though Piratebay is sorta spreading illegal material through their trackers, the hunt of them has been lead by copyright lobby's and firms up to a point where only winning is the goal no matter what means (bribery) there are used.
If i would have mod points, i would put you up in the sky with them. You said everything so well that i was gonna say.
While i know community mappers will have tons of good campaings on the works, they will not reach the same level of quality as Valve maps are for a quite a while. Professional is always a professional.
They're bothering because this is exactly the kind of support they promised for Left4Dead.
Let go of the silly nerdrage, you''re blinded by it.
Everyone expected more content from _Valve_. More campaigns, more survival maps and only thing L4D seems to get is Tools for community to make their own campaigns and survival maps so that Valve can concentrate for L4D2 instead.
However, the L4D2 Boycott group on Steamcommunity (that has around 18% of people compared to the official L4D Group) made Valve to change their mind. Now they promise more content for Left 4 Dead, the original one and promised not to ditch it when L4D2 is out.
I paid 50$ for the game, i assumed that it would get atleast 2 more campaigns before the end of the year + a lot more content than this, for free. Now 7 months passed after it's release and i've seen 1 _new_ map, survival mode lighthouse. Rest are just warmups for the maps that has been played over and over and over again. Then L4D2 was announced and it's not a suprise for me that a lot of people are dissapointed for the current count of DLC.
TF2 has gotten a lot more content since and so did CS Source too. In the first year of their release, there was amazing count of new maps for these games and new features. L4D is way behind in the schedule.
Do you see *any* game developers releasing their engine sourcecodes so shortly after release? It's their product, there is no obligation to release the code. Yes, there are limits what you can do with plugins and mods. However, there are some great games made with these, like zombie panic in which L4D took some ideas. I'm sure Counter-Strike 1.6 sources would be released first but that game is like 7 years old. If any multiplayer Valve game gets their Sourcecode released, that is most likely the one. TF2 is still being actively updated by Valve. It's not going to be "free modded game" anytime soon.
I'd say that Valve is supporting their games currently the most and has the largest community which has many active mappers and mod creators, like Sourcemod which you mentioned. Could you elaborate what you would like to create with Source and why it isn't possible now?
It's good thing that Valve supports the community and shows how they do things. People can learn by just opening the vmf files. In the past they had to decompile the original maps with vmex software but the decompile wasn't always 100% correct. Some Areaportals and such were left off.
Beginners mappers will do mostly remakes as it's rather easy but not all of them are interested of doing something original. These just released files are more inportant to the people who already know some mapping and perhaps have made some work of their own already. Only problem there now will be is the countless remakes of their maps. Some people do not see the problem in this but as a guy who runs TF2 servers or plays a lot of custom made maps, i can safely say that 95% of the remakes will be crap, won't be played on many servers and will have only minor fixes. As the map sizes are somewhat 30-50MB, it's also kind of pain to download the countless remakes since some servers do not provide fast downloads to their maps in-game.
There are some successfull remakes of the original maps too, which incorporate separate game modes. For example Dustbowl was made to Payload map and it is quite successfull. I could see how Granary would become a nice Payload Race mode map with the hands of someone.
Every goddamn radiostation plays the same tunes over and over multiple times a day. Why buy the music if you hear it anyways? Instead, buy some other entertainment like Games and movies. The first one lasts longer than 1 music cd.
Slashdot Mirror
Does Apple really think they can do a mobile phone to the market in few years without violating any of Nokia's iventions done in the past 20 years that are patented? They think they do but reality is different. This is just Apple's response to get better negotiation grounds and with luck, they get a Judge who has Apple laptop to the case. Only then Apple has chances to win 1 round but only lose at the end at the higher court level.
Did they really think that every game developer would do censored version for their country if they ban the original? Now that someone said no, they are amazed and already are turning the table over the past decisions.
Seems to me that EA tries to justificate DLC with comments like this and easy money for them. A new game costs atleast 50 bucks, sometimes even 60 on the PC. Naturally the same game is 10 bucks or more expensive on console (whatever is reason for that anyway??). This means that DLC can be 10-30 bucks each so there's around 80 bucks or more spent on _one_ game, that was poorly and too fast made in the first place, thus lacked the content that should have been in the game at the first place. That content is now sold as DLC, but the price is over half higher than it should have been.
What used to be 1 game in the past, is now over a half of 1 game, 1-2 DLC content make it full game and players do the testing for it upon release of the original. Keep the game alive for few years with DLC while making the sequel and then milk out the money again. Nice business model. I wish i had a game company.
You are now mixing kids with adults and this game is not made for kids, it's for adults so your argument goes out of the window right now. Besides, how are the games as you listed wrong? I had tons of fun playing DOOM and Mortal Kombat. Not kids games, but i did play them as a kid, so did you propably but that doesn't mean that every violent game should be banned.
I love violent games. That doesn't mean that i go postal and kill everyone for real. It's entertaining to have some alien go up on a human, smack brains on the wall and go for next victim. It's fun. It's not real. It's a GAME.
Sure, i wouldn't want my kids to see that stuff, when they are kids but there are age ratings for a games for a reason. Why the hell Australia doesn't allow some games for anyone, not even over 18 years old?
Why some games are completely banned? Who are they protecting?
No dedicated servers = no communities to extend game life = no players = game does not last long = they can do another sequel = same thing all over. Did i just reveal their business plan?
Well i guess the Ubuntu will lose the Windows 7 release.. Even Linus approves it.
I have absolutely no idea whats your point there. You managed to bring down the conversation from games to your own legal civil rights? Get on topic please.
L4D's lobby system fails in so many ways, even today after multiple updates.
,add eachothers to friendslist and so on. This is perfectly fine but what Valve now forgets is the communities that actually run the servers. There should be a way to pick a server from the list and if its free, lobby assign to it. How hard can it be?
1. You get assigned to a lobby where someone (lobby host) is from Australia and you from Finland. ERR, thats a 370ms latency right there
2. You join into a game that is already going. ERR, that's a 150ms latency there between you and the server which hardly is playable as you cannot predict the zombies hits properly.
3. Lobby assigns you to a modded server where there are some shitty mods going on, the option "back to lobby vote" is disabled. Shit outta luck there. Too bad that the modded servers and 3rd party servers are in same pile (which SUCKS).
4. You cannot select a server where to go, unless you revert to console commands and are a lobby host or use direct connect to particular server through console.
5. Custom maps are a joke. You have to pre-download them and it takes too long time due to maps (campaigns) being over 100 megs, even 300. Once you download them, imagine 30 KB's a second. Thats 1 hour right there. At the point where you get it downloaded, no one is even playint it anymore. Next time you play, same thing but you get to download whole new campaign. At the moment i have 5 Gigs of custom campaigns downloaded from which i have played 3 out of over 20 campaigns.
On the good old CSS/TF2 system, you could just connect to a server and download the campaign from there directly and fast, if the server used a fastdownload host. I guess there was a reason for this, so the slow downloaders would not reserve a spot but Valve should have had the custom maps available over Steam.
6. You end up on a gameserver that is running within a server that is overcrowded aka overloaded aka running too many goddamn gameservers. Even Valve does this with L4D. The official L4D servers were running only 10-20 ticks per second while the optimal is 30. This is caused by the overhead CPU usage in panic events, such as finales and small fight scenes. At that point the CPU usage peaks up 100-300% compared to regular usage. Imagine 30 servers running fine and then all having panic event at the same time. Sheesh!
7. There is no community in L4D. I have one server in top 150 played L4D servers in the world (valve rank, which you see when entering the gameserver). It has served over 26531 players at that time from which 99,99% are people who see:
- Good server running
- Wonder how they could go there through lobby again
Valve builds a system where players keep in touch through Steam so they get together through random system and them meet up on some server
8. No one is actually looking after the players at the servers. There are stats about ragequits, teamkills, and such but not for the server owners. All they can do is look at the logs if someone killed the whole group in some random game and left the server. That sucks, really. And who reads those logs, there are tons of text for crying out loud!
9. The lobby search fails with filtering. If i put difficulty level to Any, i get multiple servers. If i go back, select filter to Expert, i see none or only 1, 2 campaigns with expert on, even though previously with setting any, i saw over 10. If i go back and set it to any again, i see them again, all of them.
10. A lot more stuff that i just can't now remember.
Lobby works to a certain point, perhaps for games like this but needs work - a lot.
Nice to see that a firm that needs paying customers will shoot themselves into their own legs with decisions like this. Maybe they took some example from battlenet and valve's "successfull" lobby system in L4D but they maybe forgot that blizzard can fund their own systems better with wow and Valve has users dedicated servers with their lobby system.
So next on the list is cellphones with cameras. Can't get those inside either?
You know, this doesn't mean that the 1 Mb is actually *FREE* of charge. They still have to pay for it, it just has to be available for everyone to buy.
Small time indie developers also get a larger share over at Steam sellings than in retail, which is alone a major risk anyway.
My only wonder is, how much bandwidth Steam really eats per month? Is 500 Terabytes enough?
That pixel snow you refer to is assumed to be caused of GPU overheating while the console is in standby mode (yellow light). As you said, the fan isn't spinning while the WC24 is on so the GPU could do something and then start to overheat due to having lack of cooling. I haven't heard any confirmations to this issue either but i stopped keeping my Wii on when i do not need it.
What? Does Linus use MacBook Air and crapping on it?
None of these are made by actual fucking professional level designers. The custom campaigns, especially the first ones are usually full of shit with few exceptions that you just listed. I'm amazed that almost after a year since the game was released, there has been only ONE actual content update, the new survival map lighthouse. If this game would have been CS Source or TF2, there would have been lots of downloadable content aka NEW MAPS.
They threw us the developers tools - make your own maps but only after 6 months when everyone was already tired of the same old maps and to the whole game. If the tools would have been given 6 months prior from the day they went beta, there would have been a lot more quality custom campaigns already out.
Death Aboard is the most promising one yet - but it has issues. One of them is the low fps. My eyes bleed when i have to look that twitching screen. It is also far too easy to play trough.
That comic as in reply to a solution in every news comments is seriously overrated.
Your domain is your responsibility, just like your password to any site you visit to or any bill you wish to pay. If you do not renew your domain in time, it's your own loss. If the domain really is important to you, this would never happen.
You are allowed to say FUCK here. There is no censorship needed. Infact, lets all say it loudly and proudly: FUCK YOU
I don't really get the idea they are after while blocking internet radios, YouTube videos and other services from people outside of US. That's like shooting yourself in a leg. Do i need to go pirate to listen and hear this stuff on them? Seriously, these people should get their heads out of ass already.
I just lost my faith to Swedish court system. Even though Piratebay is sorta spreading illegal material through their trackers, the hunt of them has been lead by copyright lobby's and firms up to a point where only winning is the goal no matter what means (bribery) there are used.
If i would have mod points, i would put you up in the sky with them. You said everything so well that i was gonna say.
While i know community mappers will have tons of good campaings on the works, they will not reach the same level of quality as Valve maps are for a quite a while. Professional is always a professional.
They're bothering because this is exactly the kind of support they promised for Left4Dead.
Let go of the silly nerdrage, you''re blinded by it.
Everyone expected more content from _Valve_. More campaigns, more survival maps and only thing L4D seems to get is Tools for community to make their own campaigns and survival maps so that Valve can concentrate for L4D2 instead.
However, the L4D2 Boycott group on Steamcommunity (that has around 18% of people compared to the official L4D Group) made Valve to change their mind. Now they promise more content for Left 4 Dead, the original one and promised not to ditch it when L4D2 is out.
I paid 50$ for the game, i assumed that it would get atleast 2 more campaigns before the end of the year + a lot more content than this, for free. Now 7 months passed after it's release and i've seen 1 _new_ map, survival mode lighthouse. Rest are just warmups for the maps that has been played over and over and over again. Then L4D2 was announced and it's not a suprise for me that a lot of people are dissapointed for the current count of DLC.
TF2 has gotten a lot more content since and so did CS Source too. In the first year of their release, there was amazing count of new maps for these games and new features. L4D is way behind in the schedule.
Do you see *any* game developers releasing their engine sourcecodes so shortly after release? It's their product, there is no obligation to release the code. Yes, there are limits what you can do with plugins and mods. However, there are some great games made with these, like zombie panic in which L4D took some ideas. I'm sure Counter-Strike 1.6 sources would be released first but that game is like 7 years old. If any multiplayer Valve game gets their Sourcecode released, that is most likely the one. TF2 is still being actively updated by Valve. It's not going to be "free modded game" anytime soon.
I'd say that Valve is supporting their games currently the most and has the largest community which has many active mappers and mod creators, like Sourcemod which you mentioned. Could you elaborate what you would like to create with Source and why it isn't possible now?
It's good thing that Valve supports the community and shows how they do things. People can learn by just opening the vmf files. In the past they had to decompile the original maps with vmex software but the decompile wasn't always 100% correct. Some Areaportals and such were left off.
Beginners mappers will do mostly remakes as it's rather easy but not all of them are interested of doing something original. These just released files are more inportant to the people who already know some mapping and perhaps have made some work of their own already. Only problem there now will be is the countless remakes of their maps. Some people do not see the problem in this but as a guy who runs TF2 servers or plays a lot of custom made maps, i can safely say that 95% of the remakes will be crap, won't be played on many servers and will have only minor fixes. As the map sizes are somewhat 30-50MB, it's also kind of pain to download the countless remakes since some servers do not provide fast downloads to their maps in-game.
There are some successfull remakes of the original maps too, which incorporate separate game modes. For example Dustbowl was made to Payload map and it is quite successfull. I could see how Granary would become a nice Payload Race mode map with the hands of someone.
Every goddamn radiostation plays the same tunes over and over multiple times a day. Why buy the music if you hear it anyways? Instead, buy some other entertainment like Games and movies. The first one lasts longer than 1 music cd.