After checking up on the virus through some of the links in the article...frankly, I would be surprised if most readers of Slashdot were affected. I thnk most Slashdotters are way too smart to engage in the sort of behavior (opening suspicious email attachments) that is necessary to allow infection.
I feel sorry for all the people who aren't, though.
Statesman, the lead dev for City of Heroes, once said something to the effect of "some players leave, other players join," when people made angry noises about quitting over changes he was making to CoH. And that seems to be the truth, at least for CoH; there was recently a huge sweeping change to the way power enhancements were calculated that severely lessened the effect of every power in the game--but people still continue playing it. It will be interesting to see if enough people actually quit and not enough people join over the Star Wars changes to sink the game.
If you use jscrob, it will read your "Recently Played" playlist when you sync your iPod. Likewise, iSproggler should do something similar. I haven't had the time to go through and check out both of them though. There may even be other such clients that will do more interesting things.
I'd rather the system actually track what songs I listen to and how frequently, for the purpose of building up useful information from that. I have songs on my iTunes playlist that I never listen to, and are only there because I haven't gotten around to removing them. I'd rather those not influence what last.fm thinks I like.
I'm a member of a MMORPG RP/writing collective, the RP Congress on the Pinnacle City of Heroes server. It's pretty fun, and I don't have all that hard of a time with it. The other people in the group are great RPers and writers; we even manage to write stories and chat together out-of-game by using MoonEdit.
The thing about in-game RP is that you're limited by and large to text chat only. There are a few emotes--special animations that your character can go through, like waving, dancing, or gesturing imperiously, but they're so generic that they by and large do not enhance the experience. You can use Ventrilo and Teamspeak and Skype and the like for voice communication RPing (and there's one person in our play group who does a hilarious voice for his character) but that only goes so far--especially if you have a habit of playing alternate-gender characters.
One of the things the article didn't really go into is that story-writing can patch over some of the holes, things you can't do on-line, like having two characters played by the same person meet, converse, and adventure together. That's one of the biggest reasons for doing it, in fact.
Of course, even before this I was no stranger to text-based RP. A group of friends and I have been RP'ing via a chatserver--which had no pictures or images at all. Compared to that, text-based RP with images and actions is a walk in the park.:)
I believe the word's derivation originally comes from players complaining that their weapons did so much less damage now it was like they had been replaced with Nerf swords. In the great English tradition of verbing nouns, "to replace with nerf" becomes simply "to nerf."
Funny you should say that. One of players' greatest frustrations in City of Heroes is that the numbers aren't provided, because the developers think the game shouldn't have to be "City of Math." From a recent question-and-answer session with Statesman, the game's lead designer:
Will we ever be allowed to know what the actual stats of our characters actually are? At the moment we're at the mercy of numerous disparate disagreeing partial or out-of-date databases.
Part of my original design was based on the assumption that those numbers aren't really needed in gameplay. One doesn't need to min/max damage per second in order to complete missions or battle in PvP. Take for instance fighting games - I've never seen a popular fighting game that gave exact stats for particular moves - and yet, hundreds of thousands of players love them.
Previous to World of Warcraft, there had never been a mass market MMP success. I thought part of that reason is that MMP's seemed SO complicated to the first time user. Character creation could take a half hour. Players would be moving values around into stats that they had no clue about. I remember receiving a "+3 necklace of Wisdom"...I then asked myself - "what the heck does Wisdom DO?" I scoured the UI, only to discover that there was no information on what these stats actually did in real gameplay.
Now that WoW has come out, and its stats certainly haven't killed its popularity, maybe I outthought myself!
The problem is, this just turns it into "City of Speakeasies of Math" as players use statistical analysis programs like Herostats to crunch the numbers and come up with their own estimates of percentages--and it's the ignorant newbies who have no idea what's good, what's bad, or even where to look to find out who end up getting stung, as they take powers that they think look good but those in the know already know are stinkers. It's far, far too easy to gimp a character build by making poor choices.
Adding insult to injury, now City of Heroes's Enhancement-management screen will tell you by what percentage the Enhancements you currently have slotted increase the base values (damage, accuracy, defense, etc.)--but there is still no way to find out what those base values actually are without search-engine archaology.
To be fair, the story was essentially a copy-and-paste quote from the linked article, which was posted in a context where anyone who normally visited the site would already know what was going on. But when it was posted to Slashdot, it really should have been rewritten to add some explanation.
...and don't have to deal with buggy content, server crashes, mapserver disconnections, developer nerfs, and--stop laughing! Dammit, stop laughing already!
You might be surprised. A lot of multiplayer games, even massively multiplayer games, use much less bandwidth than you'd think. MMORPGs, for instance; I have friends who play them tolerably well on dial-up; I have dedicated 20 or even 25K of the ~30K/sec upload speed of my 256 kilobit upstream line to BitTorrent and hardly even notice a hiccup while playing CoH at the same time.
All they're really sending back and forth is positioning data, more or less; the graphics and such are already on your hard drive and not having to be sent anywhere.
...as previous patches. In other words, it leaves your computer even more vulnerable than before.
Don't see any mention of this on the entire last page of comments listed most recently first, so I figured it was worth risking a possible karma hit for duplication.
It seems Sony and SunComm just can't come up with a "real" fix to save their lives.
Digg's been Slashdotted...and now, when they see the mention of their site here, Slashdot will be Diggdotted...it'll create a feedback loop that will suck the entirety of Internet traffic into a swirling vortex! They had to go and cross the streams!
My father has long been of the opinion, based on something that he read somewhere, that decaf coffee is more harmful than regular coffee. Something to do with the decaffeination process introducing harmful chemicals into the brew, or maybe he was just thinking of the process originally used to brew Sanka, I don't know. Either way, this will be just a little bit more validation for him...
...at least, not in big enough numbers to make it worthwhile to make them.
Jeff Kirvin talks about this in the latest entry in his Writing On Your Palm blog. He points out that companies like Toshiba, Sony, and HP who used to make all these high-end super-geek-toy PDAs--the "Ferarris of handhelds"--are now either out of the PDA industry altogether, or at least having a hard time keeping up. Whereas Palm, who makes "Toyotas," just keeps on ticking.
Apparently there just isn't a market for a super-duper-gee-whiz-does-everything PDA at this point.
Check out Conlan Press for the audiobook of Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn, being offered in downloadable MP3 format, book-on-CD format, MP3 CD format, or both mp3 and book-on-CD.
(Note that the book-on-CD version never has shipped, even though it's been months since people placed their pre-orders. Apparently they've been having pressing problems.)
...renting via Netflix or Greencine (or your local Blockbuster) and duping the rentals before sending them back? Can't see that this is really a new danger, it's just the opposite order from the usual sort.
I had thought that being on an IBM site, it would actually have some insightful commentary and discussion on the issues facing ebooks.
Instead, it reiterated the same tired old points pro and con, totally missed the point of the Baen Free Library (and also didn't recognize that Webscriptions, its commercial counterpart, has been doing quite well for itself in e-sales alone), and went on to snark at the very notion of commercially-viable ebooks and talk about various things that don't have a darned thing to do with ebooks, like RFID tagging library books. Um, what?
And the discussion is the Standard Slashdot Ebook Advocacy Debate, whereupon people mostly or totally ignore the content of the article and instead argue about how ebooks suxx0r or r0xx0r.
And here I'd hoped I'd read something interesting. Oh well. Maybe next time.
The fellow subsequently went back and took many more, better photos--including himself (wearing a "Han Shot First" T-shirt) standing on the mockup or sitting in the cockpit. According to a subsequent LJ entry he has found out who the owner is, and gotten a price from the owner (which he says is reasonable considering, but doesn't want to reveal for fear of some private collector snatching it up). But he's not sure where to go from there.
If you'd like to learn more than you ever wanted to know about viral marketing, check out Spreading the Ideavirus by Seth Godin. You can read it free as an ebook.
The idea behind viral marketing is that you don't really have to pay for marketing...if you can get people who are totally into what you're marketing to do it for you for free. The idea spreads like a virus--hence the name.
Slashdot Mirror
Until one of these dev companies wakes up and makes a game where you don't need to mindlessly grind cash...
Ahem, cough, cough, City of Heroes, mumble...
After checking up on the virus through some of the links in the article...frankly, I would be surprised if most readers of Slashdot were affected. I thnk most Slashdotters are way too smart to engage in the sort of behavior (opening suspicious email attachments) that is necessary to allow infection.
I feel sorry for all the people who aren't, though.
Statesman, the lead dev for City of Heroes, once said something to the effect of "some players leave, other players join," when people made angry noises about quitting over changes he was making to CoH. And that seems to be the truth, at least for CoH; there was recently a huge sweeping change to the way power enhancements were calculated that severely lessened the effect of every power in the game--but people still continue playing it. It will be interesting to see if enough people actually quit and not enough people join over the Star Wars changes to sink the game.
If you use jscrob, it will read your "Recently Played" playlist when you sync your iPod. Likewise, iSproggler should do something similar. I haven't had the time to go through and check out both of them though. There may even be other such clients that will do more interesting things.
I'd rather the system actually track what songs I listen to and how frequently, for the purpose of building up useful information from that. I have songs on my iTunes playlist that I never listen to, and are only there because I haven't gotten around to removing them. I'd rather those not influence what last.fm thinks I like.
I'm a member of a MMORPG RP/writing collective, the RP Congress on the Pinnacle City of Heroes server. It's pretty fun, and I don't have all that hard of a time with it. The other people in the group are great RPers and writers; we even manage to write stories and chat together out-of-game by using MoonEdit.
:)
The thing about in-game RP is that you're limited by and large to text chat only. There are a few emotes--special animations that your character can go through, like waving, dancing, or gesturing imperiously, but they're so generic that they by and large do not enhance the experience. You can use Ventrilo and Teamspeak and Skype and the like for voice communication RPing (and there's one person in our play group who does a hilarious voice for his character) but that only goes so far--especially if you have a habit of playing alternate-gender characters.
One of the things the article didn't really go into is that story-writing can patch over some of the holes, things you can't do on-line, like having two characters played by the same person meet, converse, and adventure together. That's one of the biggest reasons for doing it, in fact.
Of course, even before this I was no stranger to text-based RP. A group of friends and I have been RP'ing via a chatserver--which had no pictures or images at all. Compared to that, text-based RP with images and actions is a walk in the park.
City of Heroes tried. Players haven't been happy with the results.
I believe the word's derivation originally comes from players complaining that their weapons did so much less damage now it was like they had been replaced with Nerf swords. In the great English tradition of verbing nouns, "to replace with nerf" becomes simply "to nerf."
See the Wikipedia writeup for more information.
The problem is, this just turns it into "City of Speakeasies of Math" as players use statistical analysis programs like Herostats to crunch the numbers and come up with their own estimates of percentages--and it's the ignorant newbies who have no idea what's good, what's bad, or even where to look to find out who end up getting stung, as they take powers that they think look good but those in the know already know are stinkers. It's far, far too easy to gimp a character build by making poor choices.
Adding insult to injury, now City of Heroes's Enhancement-management screen will tell you by what percentage the Enhancements you currently have slotted increase the base values (damage, accuracy, defense, etc.)--but there is still no way to find out what those base values actually are without search-engine archaology.
To be fair, the story was essentially a copy-and-paste quote from the linked article, which was posted in a context where anyone who normally visited the site would already know what was going on. But when it was posted to Slashdot, it really should have been rewritten to add some explanation.
So I gather the topic isn't a prediction that Bill Gates made that hasn't come true. Glad people cleared that up.
...640K is all the memory a computer will ever need. Really.
...and don't have to deal with buggy content, server crashes, mapserver disconnections, developer nerfs, and--stop laughing! Dammit, stop laughing already!
Oh well, at least I have a good time RPing and writing in it...
You might be surprised. A lot of multiplayer games, even massively multiplayer games, use much less bandwidth than you'd think. MMORPGs, for instance; I have friends who play them tolerably well on dial-up; I have dedicated 20 or even 25K of the ~30K/sec upload speed of my 256 kilobit upstream line to BitTorrent and hardly even notice a hiccup while playing CoH at the same time.
All they're really sending back and forth is positioning data, more or less; the graphics and such are already on your hard drive and not having to be sent anywhere.
It was discovered, and remarked upon, and even posted in comments to the original Slashdot article about the patch, on the same day.
...as previous patches. In other words, it leaves your computer even more vulnerable than before.
Don't see any mention of this on the entire last page of comments listed most recently first, so I figured it was worth risking a possible karma hit for duplication.
It seems Sony and SunComm just can't come up with a "real" fix to save their lives.
Digg's been Slashdotted...and now, when they see the mention of their site here, Slashdot will be Diggdotted...it'll create a feedback loop that will suck the entirety of Internet traffic into a swirling vortex! They had to go and cross the streams!
My father has long been of the opinion, based on something that he read somewhere, that decaf coffee is more harmful than regular coffee. Something to do with the decaffeination process introducing harmful chemicals into the brew, or maybe he was just thinking of the process originally used to brew Sanka, I don't know. Either way, this will be just a little bit more validation for him...
All your bass are belong to us!
...at least, not in big enough numbers to make it worthwhile to make them.
Jeff Kirvin talks about this in the latest entry in his Writing On Your Palm blog. He points out that companies like Toshiba, Sony, and HP who used to make all these high-end super-geek-toy PDAs--the "Ferarris of handhelds"--are now either out of the PDA industry altogether, or at least having a hard time keeping up. Whereas Palm, who makes "Toyotas," just keeps on ticking.
Apparently there just isn't a market for a super-duper-gee-whiz-does-everything PDA at this point.
Check out Conlan Press for the audiobook of Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn, being offered in downloadable MP3 format, book-on-CD format, MP3 CD format, or both mp3 and book-on-CD.
(Note that the book-on-CD version never has shipped, even though it's been months since people placed their pre-orders. Apparently they've been having pressing problems.)
Folks might be interested to know, by the bye, that Beagle is in a financial dispute with the company that has the rights to the animated version of The Last Unicorn and is seeking donations to a legal aid fund.
...renting via Netflix or Greencine (or your local Blockbuster) and duping the rentals before sending them back? Can't see that this is really a new danger, it's just the opposite order from the usual sort.
I had thought that being on an IBM site, it would actually have some insightful commentary and discussion on the issues facing ebooks.
Instead, it reiterated the same tired old points pro and con, totally missed the point of the Baen Free Library (and also didn't recognize that Webscriptions, its commercial counterpart, has been doing quite well for itself in e-sales alone), and went on to snark at the very notion of commercially-viable ebooks and talk about various things that don't have a darned thing to do with ebooks, like RFID tagging library books. Um, what?
And the discussion is the Standard Slashdot Ebook Advocacy Debate, whereupon people mostly or totally ignore the content of the article and instead argue about how ebooks suxx0r or r0xx0r.
And here I'd hoped I'd read something interesting. Oh well. Maybe next time.
...would you display neen on VIIV?
The fellow subsequently went back and took many more, better photos--including himself (wearing a "Han Shot First" T-shirt) standing on the mockup or sitting in the cockpit. According to a subsequent LJ entry he has found out who the owner is, and gotten a price from the owner (which he says is reasonable considering, but doesn't want to reveal for fear of some private collector snatching it up). But he's not sure where to go from there.
If you'd like to learn more than you ever wanted to know about viral marketing, check out Spreading the Ideavirus by Seth Godin. You can read it free as an ebook.
The idea behind viral marketing is that you don't really have to pay for marketing...if you can get people who are totally into what you're marketing to do it for you for free. The idea spreads like a virus--hence the name.