"...like a decrepit country where non-profit orgs are forced to take matters into their own hands..."
Err, isn't that the ideal way of doing it? The logic is pretty simple. Taxes are collected with the threat of violence. Fail to pay our taxes then the police show up at your house and throw you in jail and confiscate your property. So, whenever the government does something with tax money, it is collecting that money with the threat of violence. I am not saying this isn't necessary, but it isn't exactly ideal. The ideal is for people to contribute to society without putting them at gun point.
So, whenever charity does something that government could have done, that is a success, not a sign of a 'decrepit' country. It means that people cared enough to act voluntarily, instead of having the majority impose its will on the minority with the threat of violence. Personally, I think the sign of a 'decrepit' civil society is when people only do things when the government threatens them with violence. A healthy society can accomplish altruistic acts WITHOUT resorting to violence or the threat there of.
The problem is, well, the problem. Who cares at which end it is tackled? We don't deal with the problem always from the source because we like the things that are causing the problem. I like that I can commute to work 50 miles away every single day in my car, and my girlfriend can commute to her grad school 20 miles in the other direction away from where we live. Sure, you could build public transportation to these places, but even under the best circumstances you are going to turn my hour long commute into a two hour long commute and charge me extra for the privilege. I don't want to spend four hours of my day in public transportation. You could also jack up the price so high that I can't afford to drive and am forced to either give up my job or my job or move such that my girlfriend has to choose between her grad school and me.
If slapping a new coat of paint over a building cleans up some of the environmental damage that I cause without interfering with my lifestyle, awesome. If someone can build a cleaner car that I can afford, great. The point is that we seek to protect the environment to improve our lives. The earth doesn't give a shit what we do. It ate more then one comet in its life time. Nothing humans can do is going to be more devastating that what nature has already endured. We clean up the environment for our own sake and for our own happiness. As soon as you start advocating environmental protection at the expense of human happiness, then you are simply arguing for some quasi-religious environmental drivel that belongs in a church, not in governmental policy. When asking yourself what environmental policies to implement, I think there is only one question you need to ask. Will this improve the health and happiness of humans now and into the future? If the answer is yes, go for it. If the answer is no, then keep that religious dribble out of governmental policy and in a church where it belongs.
The problem is, well, the problem. Who cares at which end it is tackled? We don't deal with the problem always from the source because we like the things that are causing the problem. I like that I can commute to work 50 miles away every single day in my car, and my girlfriend can commute to her grad school 20 miles away in the other direction from where we live. Sure, you could build public transportation to these places, but even under the best circumstances you are going to turn my hour long commute into a two hour long commute and charge me extra for the privilege. I don't want to spend four hours of my day in public transportation. You could also jack up the price so high that I can't afford to drive and am forced to either give up my job or move such that my girlfriend has to choose between her grad school and me.
If slapping a new coat of paint over a building cleans up some of the environmental damage that I cause without interfering with my lifestyle, awesome. If someone can build a cleaner car that I can afford, great. The point is that we seek to protect the environment to improve our lives. The earth doesn't give a shit what we do. It ate more then one comet in its life time. Nothing humans can do is going to be more devastating that what nature has already endured. We clean up the environment for our own sake and for our own happiness. As soon as you start advocating environmental protection at the expense of human happiness, then you are simply arguing for some quasi-religious environmental drivel that belongs in a church, not in governmental policy. When asking yourself what environmental policies to implement, I think there is only one question you need to ask. Will this improve the health and happiness of humans now and into the future? If the answer is yes, go for it. If the answer is no, well, keep that shit at church.
Disproving evolution is pretty do-able. Finding a human sitting inside of a Dino would kill evolutionary theory pretty soundly. Having a new species suddenly appear in mass would also do a good job at killing off evolution, or in the very least cripple it. Hell, aliens could drop down in a UFO and say "We control evolution!" and that would do a damn good job getting scientist to take intelligent design seriously.
Disproving God on the other hand would be impossible. The closest you can ever get to disproving god is to literally understand everything that ever has and will happen in the universe down to the smallest particle and show that nothing (god) is intervening... at which point the exercise is moot as you are pretty much a god yourself. This is why scientist don't even touch it. If you can't use the scientific method on it, it isn't science, and in order to use the scientific method, you need a way to test your theory.
Now as to evolution, it is not nearly as cemented as you might believe. We have the basics of evolution down pretty well. No scientist worth his salt is going to tell argue against evolution. The real question is what the mechanisms of evolution are. We are cursed in the study of evolution with our terribly short existence on this world. The theory of evolution hasn't been around for more then a few hundred years, yet we are trying to study a process that takes thousands and millions of years to really notice a change. In all likely hood there are still gapping holes in our understanding. The evolution of some complex traits are still baffling. Are there intermediate stages that we didn't see? Is there some mechanism to throw together a bunch of worthless traits into something useful all at once? The truth is that we don't have a full grasp on what is going on.
That said, the response to not having a full understanding isn't to throw up our hands and just say "Eh... god did it." You just need to put your head down and keep plugging forward and filling in the gaps. The whole "We don't know, so it must be God" silliness would have meant that after Newton figure out his famous theories we would have thrown up our hands and declared that God must be holding our feet to the other, because we sure as hell don't know what gravity is, only that it exists. Hell, to this day we can't reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity without resorting to outlandish theories that we can't prove - that doesn't mean we throw in the tall and just rack another one up for "God did it!"
I am not much of a NASA fan boy myself, but I can give you the reason why we don't order things like you say.
First, while NASA has displayed an impressive ability to waste money, their budget is a drop in the bucket next to "health care, education, and economic system". It is like asking why someone would bother to buy a candy bar when they are saving up for a mansion.
Second, those problems will NEVER be fixed, at least not by the government. Perhaps some technological innovation will solve them some day, but it won't be by changing government policy. At best, you can satisfy more people then you currently have satisfied. Just take a quick glance around the world. Health care, education, and economics are things that every nation struggles with. Europeans are currently pulling apart their health care systems to keep their governments from going bankrupt, while Americans are clamoring to spend more on the problem. Other nations are walling themselves up economically, while others throwing themselves wide open. In no instance has anyone hit a magical solution for economics. As far as education... well, show me one nation that is happy with its education system, much less think they have it 'solved'.
These problems will never be solved through policy. If there is an amount of money that can be spent to 'solve' these problems, it is far too high for any nation to afford without inciting a tax revolt and destroying their economies. If you look at it objectively and not from ideology, and ask yourself 'what works', the answer is 'nothing'. Every system has trade offs, and no matter how many trade offs you make, it has never worked anywhere even near perfect. At best, you can point to things are were dismal failures by all accounts.
I am not saying we shouldn't keep trying to improve over what we have. Every system has plenty of room for improvement, no matter which direction you feel it should be headed. You just need to recognize that these problems will never be solved, adjust your system as best you can, and move on to other things.
As someone who has written for a scientific journal and has had to read more of these god damn thing then I can count, I call bull shit. The only thing more important in a scientific journal then getting cited, his how many god damn annoyingly large and obscure words you can dredge up that simply do not exist in the English language. The worst is reading journal articles that diverge even a little outside of your field. You have to sit there with a dictionary and google in a futile attempt to translate the drivel they spew forth. Even with a dictionary and google, you quickly find that the 'precise' (read that as 'obscure') words they use either flat out don't exist on google or a full dictionary, have multiple meanings, or no applicable meaning.
That isn't to say they are pulling words out of their ass, just that they are not defined in a dictionary and are actually field specific words. If you are not a member of that field, good luck figuring out what in the hell they mean.
Personally, I find it a little maddening. I need to read journal articles that are not truly in my field on occasion and often times need to grab someone to 'translate' it for me. Some times, I can understand why they used an obscure word, as the translation for it is lengthy. Other times though, you can tell they just wanted to sound smart at the expense of readability, as the translation is quicker then the train wreck of obscure words they use.
Good writing, ESPECIALLY technical writing, is about understandability. You need to assume some level existing knowledge on the part of your reader when writing for a journal, but too often the 'smart' sounding word is used over the understandable word due to poor stylistic judgment when either would have been precise.
Journals are a pain in the ass to read, end of story. Spend some time flipping through even the most top rated journal such as nature and you will quickly realize why some scientist became scientist instead of authors.
Don't take this as me declaring the paper in question bad or not factual, this was just a rant about journal from a poor bastard who has had to read too many.
Re:, Wars, Survival, Wealth - Anything But The Gri
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The Ultimate MMORPG
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· Score: 1
"Consider this from the perspective of someone who is NOT in the game 20 hours a day. If you've got six hours to play per week, and you diligently grind your way to level 15, then find your character doesn't exist one day..."
First, kill grinding and that one sense of 'loss' can be elminated.
As to the crux of your point, there are ways around it. Not wanting to make characters disappear doesn't have to be a show stopper. If the evil undead army sacks your town while you are out, have everyone who had quit in the area pop up in the next closest city. Unless your game is broken, cities shouldn't be being sacked every day. When it does happen a GM can take the time to snap a few choice moments from the battle and slice them into a cut scen. Everyone who had to be moved gets to watch the cut scene when they log in next. They get the highlights of the battle and be explained the things they should know about what happened. Finish up the cut scene with show how they fled in a wagon or what not.
You don't want to punish players when they are not around, but there are ways around that. It just takes a little imagination.
"Ditto any content which can be consumed once and then is never seen again (burnable orc villages, for example)."
You need a dynamic game, and part of being dynamic is a way to regenerate. Lets say you build an Orc city. This is premium content that some builder had to put together by hand. If players destroy it every three days, you are going to have suicidal builders. Okay, build the city like a city. Give it defenses. No, not uber guards. REAL defenses. The most obvious one would be having guards actually call for help and respond to the fact that a horde of 200 players are preparing to raid.
An Orc city might realistically have 5,000 full time soldiers. Now, you don't really want 5,000 orcs on screen all the time, as it will kill your servers. But, if a 200 players show up, there is nothing wrong with the game recognizing that 200 players have suddenly shown up in the area and having the orc barracks start spitting out orc soldiers which run to the gates like it is going out of style. So, when the horde of players get to the gates, they find the doors are closed and a horde bigger then their horde is raining down arrows. Further, every time an orc dies, another is spit out from the barracks. The result is that no one is going to raze the city any time soon.
Now, you might think this unfair, but this is just regeneration of content at work. So, an orc city might be next to invulnerable, but the outposts and the scouting parties that it constantly sets out are not. Nor are the smaller villages that it spawns. The idea is this, as you get closer to the orc city, the tougher the opposition you are going to face. There will always be small orc scouting and raiding parties being sent forth. There will always be lightly defended watch towers, moderately defended outposts, and heavily defended villages constantly spilling forth. Let it go unchecked, and you will find your home city surrounded by a grown force of orcs that will eventually attack. Send our mercenaries and soldiers to burn an outposts and raze the occasional village and you can keep the horde at bay. If you find content is being destroyed too quickly or growing too fast, just tweak the rates at which it expands.
Think of it like playing a RTS. Peons under guard are sent out and start building. The building takes time (RL days) and resources. You can disrupt the building with raids, or stop it completely if you gather enough people to completely over take the guards. The closer you are to the orc city, the more guards are with the peons, and the faster the city can send help. Then just tweak how fast things are build, how well protect the buildings are, and how quickly help arrives.
Finally, offer something more then all or nothing. Your six man party will stand no chance to destroy an orc village filled with soldiers. But, your six man raiding party might be perfectly capable of sneaking into the village under the cover of darkness, destroying supplies the village needs to grow quickly, and escaping before the orcs can muster up enough soldiers to kill you.
There is rational depression and chemical depression. Some people are just more inclined to be depressed then others. I got the good end of the genetic stick. I can honestly say I have never contemplated suicide once in my life. Bad things don't get me down for long. Sure, if someone dies I am sad like a normal human, but the pain goes away and I move on pretty damn content with my life. If I had one wish, it would be to live forever.
Contrast this to my best friend. She is bi-polar. Everything in the world could be awesome and she could slashing at her wrists for reasons she doesn't know. Nothing traumatic ever happened in her life and she probably had a much better childhood then I did. Her problem doesn't stem from society, it stems from the chemistry of her head, which is down right fucked up. If she didn't have drugs, she would either live a very miserable life or kill herself. Now, currently she is on a batch of drugs with minimal side effects that let her live an almost completely normal life. She still has her irrational dark moments, they are rare and short lived.
Before she found the right drugs she had to go through a pile of the wrong type of drugs. Some of these drugs had ugly side effects. One drove her temporarily insane after the first does. Another caused her face to break it in terrible acne. Another made her gain weight and always be sick to her stomach. Most just flat out didn't work. More research is needed. The mechanisms by which these drugs work is currently an almost complete mystery. For most drugs, we don't understand how they work, but simply that they do. What we need is an understand of the root cause and the ability to treat it, preferable with a minimal amount of side effects.
People who have never intimately known a truly depressed person can't understand what it is like. Someone who is depressed because of chemistry can not be rationalized with. A depressed person can KNOW that their life is good and nothing is wrong, they can know that their only problem is a chemical imbalance in their head, and they can still want to kill themselves.
Your idea gave me an idea. Imagine this: Similar to what you said, offer an MMORPG where players could create their own content and rules. Hell, this is what NWN is. I am not sure if you were implying this or not, but the next step is to house the actual servers at the MMORPG makers location.
So, basically, the "product" the MMORPG maker is making is a tool to build MMORPGs, and scalable servers. So, Joe six pack could build his own rule set and invite his friends. There are never more then 30 people in his world. His world is small, simple, and really just a place for he and his friends to hang out. A group of dedicated players, or even professionals on the other hand could make 'real' MMORPG plush with content and its own rule system. They might attract so many people that they have thousands of people on at one time.
Hell, even give them a cut of the profits. Chop up the time people spend on each server per month, then divvy out 5% (or whatever) of the fees. So, if a person spends 50% of his time in one world, and the fee is $10 per month, then the owners of the world where he spent 50% of his time gets $10*5%*50%. That is 25 cents per month for that player. Get 6000 people spend all of their time on your server and that is $1500 per month. That isn't enough to quit your day job, but it is a pretty nice incentive to lead a project and create a world that people like.
Next, make then entire thing open source. If you see something you like in one world and want to copy it, go for it. You have solved a number of problems all at once. First, you have created a massive amount of diversity in games. You can have your perm death RP servers right next to your all PvP all the time servers, next to your grinding only server. Next, you have made it easy to build off success. No need to start from scratch. Take the entire source of a server you like and start building your own. This allows content to expand exponentially by making it so that people never need to start from scratch if they don't want to. You also throw the door wide open to letting small contributors add content. In my favorite world I might decide that they need a dungeon, an improved law code, or NPC wolves in the forest. I can make the code and submit it to the owners of the world. Your entire user bases suddenly becomes potential assets. Finally, this system will be the best damn interview you could ever give. If someone manages to create a wildly successful world you can contact them about a job so as to make it full time.
There are some challenges to this system.
First, you need to build everything scalable. You would probably want some sort of scaling curve for the resources you hand out to each world to be based on the number of players. So, if you have a world with just 4 people, you will get just enough resources to run a game with so few people. On the other hand, if you have 10,000 people in your world, you will get resources approaching what a standard MMORPG server farm eats. Further, you need to build it in such a way that one idiot with bad code can't bring down a dozen other worlds.
Second, you really want building tools that scale to the complexity that the user asks for. So, any idiot should be able to fiddle with the stats of a stock NPC or make a simple dungeon, but a dedicated programmer should also be able to build complex law code, GMing tools, a whole new combat engine, or a completely redesigned user interface. You want the maximum amount of customizability possible, but at the same time want it so that any n00b can make minor content additions.
With the right pricing system you could likely make a killing. Offer the building tools for free, even before the game is released. Offer access to the service and the server farm for a monthly fee (whatever is competitive). The monthly fee lets you play in any of the created worlds and lets you build your own. Next, let people buy more resources. If I decide I am serious about building the ultimate worl
I canceled my WoW account a few days ago, leaving the guild I was in. I played EQ, AO, AC, UO, and old sk00l MUDs, in addition to WoW.
"Most of the people I know play for the social endeavor - to be able to spend time with people that they know in what they consider to be a fun and interesting world."
Freeze their ability to level and gain better equipment and most people would quit before their next billing cycle. True, the social aspect of the game is there, but the social aspect of the game is almost an accident. What features does WoW have to actually facilitate any sort of social interaction beyond the ability to form guilds and have access to a few lines of chat? Kill the ability to advance and you have a chat room.
"The story line exists through SEVERAL previous titles and continues throughout World of Warcraft. The history and storylines are a work of art in and of themselves."
There is a story line for sure. I don't recall it reconciling the fact that everyone is an immortal warrior who can't be killed for more then a few minutes... but those anachronisms can be discussed a different day. The story line, while certainly pleasant when they sneak it in, is hardly the focus of the game. Hell, it isn't even a side feature. I can't ever recall seeing a good piece of historical literature go up for sale in the AH for more then a few silver unless someone was going to use it for a quest to get their sw0rd of l33tness. I have never met anyone so enthralled by the story that they cast aside leveling in favor of being a scholar studying the history of the game.
"Concurrently - if you have played the game and just didn't care for it, good luck to you outside of it. I don't play games according to your definition as it stands and appreciate you not being around in WoW to fuck up the experience for the rest of us." Clearly, you don't need my permission to play, and clearly I don't need to play if I find the game to be simplistic, boring, and nothing more then an addiction. That said, I personally would like a developer to grow a pair and offer something more interesting then a mundane NPC slaughterfest where I get to watch my stats slowly rise. MMORPGs are a great idea. Imagine a massive dynamic online world teeming with purpose and content. Imagine a world with interesting events, politics, wars, history, and a verity of things for people to do such that all tastes are met. Now keep imaging, because with the current crop of MMORPGs and the monkey shit they are set to fling for the next generation of games, imagining is about as close as anyone is going to get.
, Wars, Survival, Wealth - Anything But The Grind
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The Ultimate MMORPG
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I personally completely disagree with the article. The articles argument is basically that in order to build the ultimate MMORPG, you just need to combine all the best points of the current MMORPGs. This is complete and utter crap.
MMORPGs are currently suffering from unoriginality. No, I am not talking about the setting. I am talking about core game play. MMORPGs boil down to one thing. If you don't think watching your levels go up and collecting better equipment is awesome, you are going to hate any MMORPG, even a combination of them all, in a few months, if not weeks. What MMORPGs need are some fresh ideas. The sad truth is that to this day UO has a monopoly on originality. How can a game nearly a decade old have more originality then all the current crop of MMORPGs combined?
What MMORPGs need are some real changes. I suggest the following.
Kill the exponential power curve: What kills 99% of most MMORPG content? The power curve. The fact that a level 50 could go to sleep and a level 5 couldn't even land a hit destroys the ability to produce content, slaughters the enjoyment of casual players, renders PvP impossible for anyone not at the cap, and results in a content being completely inaccessible to most players. Further, the exponential power curve really is just a substitute for content. You drive players forward to mindlessly kill NPCs because they think they are working their way up the curve. Kill the curve and find another way to entertain your players.
Dynamic Worlds: No, I do NOT mean monthly or even weekly events. I don't mean GM run stories. I mean true living and breathing worlds. Start an undead army in the artic of your world and have it march south into inhabited regions. Have it physically march. Have it set up camp at dawn, and march at night. If it comes to a city, have it lay siege. If it runs across a corpse, have it raise the corpse into another soldier. The army might not be completely running on auto polite. A GM might lay out way points for it follow each week. From that point on though, the army moves on its own. Make it a long term event. So, at any point, you could ride out from your city, kill some forward scouts, then run off. If someone tries to 'camp' the army, make it behave realistically and swarm. If people in small groups are only willing to do hit and runs, then you did something right.
Build the world to be as dynamic as possible. This should be priority number one. Build it so that GMs can jump in and tweak things, but the real goal is build a world that naturally constantly changes. This in it of itself should do a lot of content building for you.
Let Us Lose: You know the worst thing about MMORPGs? The absolute inability to lose. If you play for a month in any MMORPG, at the end of the month, you will be better and more powerful then you were the month before. This translates into two things. First, you degrade any sense of accomplishment. Second, you condition the player to go absolutely nuts whenever he does lose. Imagine the army of undead scenario again. What if the army kept marching and took over city after city? What if it boiled down to just a few cities left and they were forced to pool their resources to make a last ditch stand? What if they could actually lose and have the entire world taken over and the force the game to reset? That would surely suck, but I bet most people would kill themselves to be apart of the final battle to save the world, and I bet they would feel pretty damn good if they actually won. Any real sense of accomplishment is lost in MMORPGs due to the inability to actually lose. Let people lose.
Politics, Wars, Survival, Wealth - Dear God, Anything But Grinding: Build a game with TRUE content. Arenas for PvP, politics for socialites, trade empires for merchants, and some mundane hunting to fill in the niches. If people run off to go kill stuff to get exp and l00t, something is deeply wrong with your game. Bui
I had to go back and reread my own post, because I was pretty fucking sure every point you responded to was not something I said. Your response to my entire argument was:
"Real civilized nations have stringent immigration policies"
Ohh, that is damning.
As to the other two paragraphs, I am pretty fucking sure that I never once said the work taxes, medicine, welfare, yet you managed to write up a two page rant on the subject.
So, if you have something constructive to add, other then attacking strawman arguments that you created, go take a peek at my original post, then try responding.
Most of your rant I am indifferent to. Realism in weapons in a game like this is not high on my list. The game isn't supposed to be terribly realistic. I mean hell, I know if someone tears me apart in real life with a 50 cal gun, a medic isn't going to shock me with the paddles and make everything okay. A sniper round will leave me dead, exc, exc. The game just wasn't built with those things in mind. It would have been neat if they had had an option to make realistic weapon effects, but I won't shed too many tears. Hopefully they will let modders in soon and let them work their magic.
All of that said, there is one piece of your rant that rings so true I don't think anyone can deny it. Mother fucking helicopters eating tank rounds. Holy fucking shit. I think the most jarring moment playing this game was when a transport helicopter was tearing apart a base and I managed to pop off a shot with my tank. The round hit in the windshield of the helicopter despite the fact that it was moving. Nothing happened. There is stretching realism for the sake of gameplay, then there is taking basic common sense out back and brutally raping it.
If they would make just the following two changes, I would be happy.
Glass does not act as armor. Shoot at someone's head behind glass in a helicopter or a any other vehicle in the game, and the guy inside gets hit. Shrink the protection zones that weapons provide. I know gunners can be killed out of helicopters, but it happens rarely enough despite having twelve support guys all gunning away that I think sitting behind a gun offers undo protection. The people not behind guns seem to die just find.
If a tank round hits a helicopter, the helicopter dies. Period. As it stands, the best way to kill a helicopter if you don't have AA or a plan is to load up a jeep with C4, wait for the helicopter to drop low, and flip the switch. Really now... if a helicopter is just sitting there hovering over a flag, it is asking for a tank round, and it shouldn't be disappointed.
"The only way to fix it is to pass new laws. No more outsourcing of jobs. All companies must have a pension package. No lay offs unless the union okay's it. And every company must have a union, or the workers must collectivly agree on pay and terms."
This has been tried. See France. Last time I checked France was in the middle of tremendous social turmoil because their economy is tanking, unemployment is over 10%, and their government is broke. Germany is in the same position. Right now things have gotten so bad that the two top candidates for chancellor are not arguing if they should start to undo their social policies, but how much do they want to undo them.
"The problem the comp sci students are going to face is the same problem the auto workers are facing. Companies don't give a crap about americans, even though the companies started in the USA, the CEO and board of directors are American, and they sell their product to Americans. They will move their factories and tech support and anything they can to Mexico or India or anywhere they can find cheap labor. The CEO's are pretty much trators and they are crapping on the USA."
Move to France. Well, I suppose that is difficult as their immigration policies are a real bitch, but you would feel at home there. You could sit around be pissed off that there are other humans in the world willing to work and declare anyone of the same nationality who doesn't give out jobs based upon nationality is an ass hole. They have dozens of political parties that argue for sealing up the borders from both the left and the right of the argument such that I am sure you could feel at home.
The world is vastly unequal. Some places in this world are richer then others. In some places, $10,000 a year makes you rich; in others it puts you in relative poverty. What is changing is that the inequality between nations is vanishing. Indians, Chinese, and people all over the world can compete against Americans when before they stood no chance. Today, an Indian can get a technical education and get a job in America or at home fulfilling a job that only Americans, European, and Japanese used to be able to fulfill and get paid more then the traditional sweatshop jobs of their native nations.
What exactly are you proposing? Bar immigrants from entering a nation of immigrants, denying them the privilege that your ancestors seemed to have enjoyed so much? Enact some policy to keep these rising nations too poor produce technically minded people to protect American jobs?
The wheels of globalization are turning and they are not going to stop. These nations are rising and they WILL reach higher standards of living. They likely will not surpass American or Western European standards any time soon, but the gap is going to start to close. There are two ways you can look at this. You can bitch and moan that others in the world are rising to your level, or you can look on it as an opportunity. It is opportunity to strike out further ahead and do what Americans have always done. See the next wave coming and ride it before everyone else. Abandon agriculture for industry, industry for miniaturization, and miniaturization for information. That, or you can recognize that the amount of people in the world spending like Americans is rocketing up and that you can reap profit from their demand. An Indian without power has no effect on anyone's economy. An Indian with a power outlet and need for software and electronics DOES effect the economy.
Finally, recognize what you have. Last time I checked, Americans are not dying of starvation. In fact, last time I checked poor Americans are more likely to die of a heart attack from eating too much fatty food then anything resembling starvation. When the poor of your nation are more likely to die from being overfed... it is time a get a grip on reality and recognize how much you have.
I can't answer your first questions, but I can answer your second one.
"Did they ever even actually find ice/water on Mars or is this just more speculation?"
You know those big white caps on the poles of Mars? Yeah... that is ice. Well, frozen CO2 as well, but also ice. There is absolutely no question that Mars has ice.
You said... "And this is different from PvP... how?"
Lets go point by point what I said.
"You are killing brain dead NPCs..."
Granted, there are stupid people out there, but rarely are they as stupid as NPCs. Even the most elegantly scripted NPCs in the MMORPG world today are brain dead. Further more, most of the time the toughest of NPCs are beaten through exploitation of the stupidity of the NPC, and by toughest I should clarify that I mean the ones with the most jacked up stats, not the ones with any grand strategy. Put a human in charge and they would recognize tactics being used, and instead of mindlessly continuing to employ loosing tactics try and change.
"...by the hundreds of thousands for thousands of hours of your life so that you can watch you stats go up."
I am not sure what PvP games you are playing, but I have seen very few where the point of PvP is to watch your stats go up. At worst, PvP some times keeps track of some statistics in terms of how you perform, and the removal of these statistics would not spell doom for that game. Remove the ranking and the stats from Battlefield 2 and no one is going to stop playing.
"Your satisfaction could be mimed with a chat program and a spreadsheet that occasionally up some arbitrary numbers."
Again, spread sheet watching your numbers go up, verses competition against humans.
"MMORPGs are for addicts and no one else."
The 'fun' of an MMORPG is the addiction that is developed around it. When you are doing things that could not be considered fun by any definition of the word simply to achieve some minor goal, you have likely developed an addition. Hell, the words that MMORPG players use scream of nothing but a mindless addiction. "Grinding"? "Camping"? "Farming"? Are you joking me? They very language used is pretty explicit about the 'fun' of the game.
"Someone give me a call when an MMORPG finds the time to make some gameplay."
MMORPGs are games practically devoid of content. They replace content with time consuming activities and rely on addiction to keep players. I have nothing against the concept of a Massive Multiplayer Online World. I would be giddy to play a game, even a fantasy game, set in a changing and dynamic world with deep content. Let me give you a word of advice though; if the entire game revolves around whacking NPCs for l00t and exp, it isn't a dynamic game with deep content. You will know MMORPGs have managed to come up with something golden when they can offer up a game, strip it of stats, levels, and exp, and people would still play it. Strip any MMORPG right now of the ability to level or collect progressively stronger equipment and they would be empty in a week. The day that isn't true is the day I pick up an MMORPG again and merrily shell out my monthly subscription.
"Well that's constructive. Would you care to explain why?"
You are killing brain dead NPCs by the hundreds of thousands for thousands of hours of your life so that you can watch you stats go up. Your satisfaction could be mimmed with a chat program and a spreadsheet that occasionally up some arbitrary numbers. MMORPGs are for addicts and no one else. Someone give me a call when an MMORPG finds the time to make some gameplay.
Should I be able to force a corporation sell a fetish porn magazine in a Toy store? Should vegan stores be required to sell meat? It is a stupid argument. If a store doesn't want to sell a product because they think it will offend the people that shop there, that is their right. Walmart is well within its right to declare that they only want stuff that any kid can grab, bring to mommy, and mommy doesn't have to worry that he just got something of questionable content. Walmart wants to be a place for families. Let them.
Now, I personally disagree with it. I LIKE violent movies and games. If anything, I am irritated with how few games have really had the balls to approach sex and violence. That said, I just don't shop at Walmart.
"When I have killed 50 rabbits, if I know I need to kill 10 more rabbits before being able to take on boss rabbit, I am driven to seek out those rabbits. If I don't know that, I will probably be bored with the game because I have no idea how much longer I need to continue killing rabbits before I am finally able to proceed. Especially MMOGs will be very boring without stats. "
I think that is the entire point. If your game is so dull that showing a spreadsheet is the only way to make people play it... well, it might be an MMO"RPG" in name, but it sure as shit isn't any "RPG" unless you are role playing an accountant watching numbers go up.
The problem is shitty game play, pure and simple. MMORPGs have absolutely horrible game play. The game play is so bad that taking out the raw numbers that show that something is happening would destroy the game. These games cater to addicts. Score for MMORPGs for managing to find such a lucerative addict market, but for the rest of us, it really would be nice to have a REAL RPG.
I don't even know where to begin. Lets start this way: stat based combat does NOT equal an RPG. Stat based combat is the shitty filler that bad RPGs used to fill in their dull and uninteresting stories.
The ultimate RPG would be a simulator of a world. The world might be nonsense, like D&D with Dragons and and magic, but within the 'rules' you accept, the world would be completely coherent. It wouldn't have stats or numbers, at least not any that the player would see. There would be a story, and that player could affect the story.
It is the idea of Diablo vs Planescape: Torment. Diablo was a game about whacking the moles for exp and l00tl. Planescape: Torment had a combat system that was at best medicore, but a truly awesome story and a coherent world. The problem is that Diablo is a hell of a lot easier to build then Torment. Diablo just requires fiddling with the numbers until the game starts to be balanced. Hell, an intilligent enough computer could balance one of these games. Torment requires a team of writers to not only write a story, but to keep them consistent and interesting.
The difference between the mindless numbers game of Diablo and a true RPG is that you could make an AI using todays technology to play that game for you. Until AIs start passing the turning test, no AI will ever be able to play Torment. The same goes for the shitty MMORPGs out today. You could write AI programs to play those mindless games for you. Those are not MMORPGs, those are number counting games. They are awesome if you are addicted to watching numbers go up. They suck if you want an RPG.
My mistake. It was the fall of the Berlin wall that happened first, followed by McDonalds, followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Once the Berlin wall fell, everyone knew it was pretty much the end, hence the confusion in my memory.
I think one of the problems that Sci-Fi is running into is that viewers better understand what is fantasy and what is realistic. Sci-fi can take one of two directions. You can either go in the Star Wars direction where you basically throw realism to the wind and have World War II fighters dog fighting each other in space, or you go the 2001 a Space Odyssey rout. Going the 'realistic' rout is hard. How do you deal with the fact that given just another 100 years computers are going to be significantly smarter then humans? Hell, how do you deal with the fact that there simply might not BE any humans? It is a tough place to write it, and I imagine an even harder place to film in.
BSG is great because it has managed to error more on the side of 2001 then Star Wars. Sure, you can poke holes at it, but for the most part they strive to make a world you believe could exist. I don't know about you, but I watched the first season, and every time the humans won, I was left thinking, "Nah, they didn't win, the Silons are just fucking with them for their own purposes." I believe that the Silons are smarter and better then the humans, which is how it should be. You could almost call BSG an exploration of a Post-Human universe.
Whatever the case, I think sci-fi writers have their work cut out, especially if they don't take the slap stick Star Wars rout. You already see them starting to work around these problems with the sudden glut of post singularity and post human books coming out. Given a few more years we might see some truly great stuff starting to hit books, and eventually the TV and movies.
Maybe China will have a moon base first. That said, Americans always get the last laugh. There might be a Chinese flag on the moon, but I bet the good old McDonalds gold arches won't be far behind it. Honestly, the most ironic thing I have ever seen in my entire life was after the Soviet Union collapsed. They showed footage from a helocopter of a line that wrapped around 5 city blocks to get into the first McDonalds in Moscow...
Sure, NASA will sit there scratching their balls, but my money isn't on NASA. It isn't on China, India, or Japan either. I'll place my bets on good old fashion 100% American corporate greed. Eh, if we are stuck with this capitalist system, might as well use it. Honestly though, I think the corporations are going to be the ones to win this race. I bet while NASA and Russia are still dicking around with the ISS, China is trying to figure out how you can combine a ICBM and a tin can to make a rocket to the moon, and India is trying to justify to its people why they should spend money on space when there are still millions of people that don't have power, someone is going to send up a hotel and start cashing in.
Slashdot Mirror
"...like a decrepit country where non-profit orgs are forced to take matters into their own hands..."
Err, isn't that the ideal way of doing it? The logic is pretty simple. Taxes are collected with the threat of violence. Fail to pay our taxes then the police show up at your house and throw you in jail and confiscate your property. So, whenever the government does something with tax money, it is collecting that money with the threat of violence. I am not saying this isn't necessary, but it isn't exactly ideal. The ideal is for people to contribute to society without putting them at gun point.
So, whenever charity does something that government could have done, that is a success, not a sign of a 'decrepit' country. It means that people cared enough to act voluntarily, instead of having the majority impose its will on the minority with the threat of violence. Personally, I think the sign of a 'decrepit' civil society is when people only do things when the government threatens them with violence. A healthy society can accomplish altruistic acts WITHOUT resorting to violence or the threat there of.
The problem is, well, the problem. Who cares at which end it is tackled? We don't deal with the problem always from the source because we like the things that are causing the problem. I like that I can commute to work 50 miles away every single day in my car, and my girlfriend can commute to her grad school 20 miles in the other direction away from where we live. Sure, you could build public transportation to these places, but even under the best circumstances you are going to turn my hour long commute into a two hour long commute and charge me extra for the privilege. I don't want to spend four hours of my day in public transportation. You could also jack up the price so high that I can't afford to drive and am forced to either give up my job or my job or move such that my girlfriend has to choose between her grad school and me.
If slapping a new coat of paint over a building cleans up some of the environmental damage that I cause without interfering with my lifestyle, awesome. If someone can build a cleaner car that I can afford, great. The point is that we seek to protect the environment to improve our lives. The earth doesn't give a shit what we do. It ate more then one comet in its life time. Nothing humans can do is going to be more devastating that what nature has already endured. We clean up the environment for our own sake and for our own happiness. As soon as you start advocating environmental protection at the expense of human happiness, then you are simply arguing for some quasi-religious environmental drivel that belongs in a church, not in governmental policy. When asking yourself what environmental policies to implement, I think there is only one question you need to ask. Will this improve the health and happiness of humans now and into the future? If the answer is yes, go for it. If the answer is no, then keep that religious dribble out of governmental policy and in a church where it belongs.
The problem is, well, the problem. Who cares at which end it is tackled? We don't deal with the problem always from the source because we like the things that are causing the problem. I like that I can commute to work 50 miles away every single day in my car, and my girlfriend can commute to her grad school 20 miles away in the other direction from where we live. Sure, you could build public transportation to these places, but even under the best circumstances you are going to turn my hour long commute into a two hour long commute and charge me extra for the privilege. I don't want to spend four hours of my day in public transportation. You could also jack up the price so high that I can't afford to drive and am forced to either give up my job or move such that my girlfriend has to choose between her grad school and me.
If slapping a new coat of paint over a building cleans up some of the environmental damage that I cause without interfering with my lifestyle, awesome. If someone can build a cleaner car that I can afford, great. The point is that we seek to protect the environment to improve our lives. The earth doesn't give a shit what we do. It ate more then one comet in its life time. Nothing humans can do is going to be more devastating that what nature has already endured. We clean up the environment for our own sake and for our own happiness. As soon as you start advocating environmental protection at the expense of human happiness, then you are simply arguing for some quasi-religious environmental drivel that belongs in a church, not in governmental policy. When asking yourself what environmental policies to implement, I think there is only one question you need to ask. Will this improve the health and happiness of humans now and into the future? If the answer is yes, go for it. If the answer is no, well, keep that shit at church.
Disproving evolution is pretty do-able. Finding a human sitting inside of a Dino would kill evolutionary theory pretty soundly. Having a new species suddenly appear in mass would also do a good job at killing off evolution, or in the very least cripple it. Hell, aliens could drop down in a UFO and say "We control evolution!" and that would do a damn good job getting scientist to take intelligent design seriously.
Disproving God on the other hand would be impossible. The closest you can ever get to disproving god is to literally understand everything that ever has and will happen in the universe down to the smallest particle and show that nothing (god) is intervening... at which point the exercise is moot as you are pretty much a god yourself. This is why scientist don't even touch it. If you can't use the scientific method on it, it isn't science, and in order to use the scientific method, you need a way to test your theory.
Now as to evolution, it is not nearly as cemented as you might believe. We have the basics of evolution down pretty well. No scientist worth his salt is going to tell argue against evolution. The real question is what the mechanisms of evolution are. We are cursed in the study of evolution with our terribly short existence on this world. The theory of evolution hasn't been around for more then a few hundred years, yet we are trying to study a process that takes thousands and millions of years to really notice a change. In all likely hood there are still gapping holes in our understanding. The evolution of some complex traits are still baffling. Are there intermediate stages that we didn't see? Is there some mechanism to throw together a bunch of worthless traits into something useful all at once? The truth is that we don't have a full grasp on what is going on.
That said, the response to not having a full understanding isn't to throw up our hands and just say "Eh... god did it." You just need to put your head down and keep plugging forward and filling in the gaps. The whole "We don't know, so it must be God" silliness would have meant that after Newton figure out his famous theories we would have thrown up our hands and declared that God must be holding our feet to the other, because we sure as hell don't know what gravity is, only that it exists. Hell, to this day we can't reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity without resorting to outlandish theories that we can't prove - that doesn't mean we throw in the tall and just rack another one up for "God did it!"
I am not much of a NASA fan boy myself, but I can give you the reason why we don't order things like you say.
First, while NASA has displayed an impressive ability to waste money, their budget is a drop in the bucket next to "health care, education, and economic system". It is like asking why someone would bother to buy a candy bar when they are saving up for a mansion.
Second, those problems will NEVER be fixed, at least not by the government. Perhaps some technological innovation will solve them some day, but it won't be by changing government policy. At best, you can satisfy more people then you currently have satisfied. Just take a quick glance around the world. Health care, education, and economics are things that every nation struggles with. Europeans are currently pulling apart their health care systems to keep their governments from going bankrupt, while Americans are clamoring to spend more on the problem. Other nations are walling themselves up economically, while others throwing themselves wide open. In no instance has anyone hit a magical solution for economics. As far as education... well, show me one nation that is happy with its education system, much less think they have it 'solved'.
These problems will never be solved through policy. If there is an amount of money that can be spent to 'solve' these problems, it is far too high for any nation to afford without inciting a tax revolt and destroying their economies. If you look at it objectively and not from ideology, and ask yourself 'what works', the answer is 'nothing'. Every system has trade offs, and no matter how many trade offs you make, it has never worked anywhere even near perfect. At best, you can point to things are were dismal failures by all accounts.
I am not saying we shouldn't keep trying to improve over what we have. Every system has plenty of room for improvement, no matter which direction you feel it should be headed. You just need to recognize that these problems will never be solved, adjust your system as best you can, and move on to other things.
As someone who has written for a scientific journal and has had to read more of these god damn thing then I can count, I call bull shit. The only thing more important in a scientific journal then getting cited, his how many god damn annoyingly large and obscure words you can dredge up that simply do not exist in the English language. The worst is reading journal articles that diverge even a little outside of your field. You have to sit there with a dictionary and google in a futile attempt to translate the drivel they spew forth. Even with a dictionary and google, you quickly find that the 'precise' (read that as 'obscure') words they use either flat out don't exist on google or a full dictionary, have multiple meanings, or no applicable meaning.
That isn't to say they are pulling words out of their ass, just that they are not defined in a dictionary and are actually field specific words. If you are not a member of that field, good luck figuring out what in the hell they mean.
Personally, I find it a little maddening. I need to read journal articles that are not truly in my field on occasion and often times need to grab someone to 'translate' it for me. Some times, I can understand why they used an obscure word, as the translation for it is lengthy. Other times though, you can tell they just wanted to sound smart at the expense of readability, as the translation is quicker then the train wreck of obscure words they use.
Good writing, ESPECIALLY technical writing, is about understandability. You need to assume some level existing knowledge on the part of your reader when writing for a journal, but too often the 'smart' sounding word is used over the understandable word due to poor stylistic judgment when either would have been precise.
Journals are a pain in the ass to read, end of story. Spend some time flipping through even the most top rated journal such as nature and you will quickly realize why some scientist became scientist instead of authors.
Don't take this as me declaring the paper in question bad or not factual, this was just a rant about journal from a poor bastard who has had to read too many.
"Consider this from the perspective of someone who is NOT in the game 20 hours a day. If you've got six hours to play per week, and you diligently grind your way to level 15, then find your character doesn't exist one day..."
First, kill grinding and that one sense of 'loss' can be elminated.
As to the crux of your point, there are ways around it. Not wanting to make characters disappear doesn't have to be a show stopper. If the evil undead army sacks your town while you are out, have everyone who had quit in the area pop up in the next closest city. Unless your game is broken, cities shouldn't be being sacked every day. When it does happen a GM can take the time to snap a few choice moments from the battle and slice them into a cut scen. Everyone who had to be moved gets to watch the cut scene when they log in next. They get the highlights of the battle and be explained the things they should know about what happened. Finish up the cut scene with show how they fled in a wagon or what not.
You don't want to punish players when they are not around, but there are ways around that. It just takes a little imagination.
"Ditto any content which can be consumed once and then is never seen again (burnable orc villages, for example)."
You need a dynamic game, and part of being dynamic is a way to regenerate. Lets say you build an Orc city. This is premium content that some builder had to put together by hand. If players destroy it every three days, you are going to have suicidal builders. Okay, build the city like a city. Give it defenses. No, not uber guards. REAL defenses. The most obvious one would be having guards actually call for help and respond to the fact that a horde of 200 players are preparing to raid.
An Orc city might realistically have 5,000 full time soldiers. Now, you don't really want 5,000 orcs on screen all the time, as it will kill your servers. But, if a 200 players show up, there is nothing wrong with the game recognizing that 200 players have suddenly shown up in the area and having the orc barracks start spitting out orc soldiers which run to the gates like it is going out of style. So, when the horde of players get to the gates, they find the doors are closed and a horde bigger then their horde is raining down arrows. Further, every time an orc dies, another is spit out from the barracks. The result is that no one is going to raze the city any time soon.
Now, you might think this unfair, but this is just regeneration of content at work. So, an orc city might be next to invulnerable, but the outposts and the scouting parties that it constantly sets out are not. Nor are the smaller villages that it spawns. The idea is this, as you get closer to the orc city, the tougher the opposition you are going to face. There will always be small orc scouting and raiding parties being sent forth. There will always be lightly defended watch towers, moderately defended outposts, and heavily defended villages constantly spilling forth. Let it go unchecked, and you will find your home city surrounded by a grown force of orcs that will eventually attack. Send our mercenaries and soldiers to burn an outposts and raze the occasional village and you can keep the horde at bay. If you find content is being destroyed too quickly or growing too fast, just tweak the rates at which it expands.
Think of it like playing a RTS. Peons under guard are sent out and start building. The building takes time (RL days) and resources. You can disrupt the building with raids, or stop it completely if you gather enough people to completely over take the guards. The closer you are to the orc city, the more guards are with the peons, and the faster the city can send help. Then just tweak how fast things are build, how well protect the buildings are, and how quickly help arrives.
Finally, offer something more then all or nothing. Your six man party will stand no chance to destroy an orc village filled with soldiers. But, your six man raiding party might be perfectly capable of sneaking into the village under the cover of darkness, destroying supplies the village needs to grow quickly, and escaping before the orcs can muster up enough soldiers to kill you.
There is rational depression and chemical depression. Some people are just more inclined to be depressed then others. I got the good end of the genetic stick. I can honestly say I have never contemplated suicide once in my life. Bad things don't get me down for long. Sure, if someone dies I am sad like a normal human, but the pain goes away and I move on pretty damn content with my life. If I had one wish, it would be to live forever.
Contrast this to my best friend. She is bi-polar. Everything in the world could be awesome and she could slashing at her wrists for reasons she doesn't know. Nothing traumatic ever happened in her life and she probably had a much better childhood then I did. Her problem doesn't stem from society, it stems from the chemistry of her head, which is down right fucked up. If she didn't have drugs, she would either live a very miserable life or kill herself. Now, currently she is on a batch of drugs with minimal side effects that let her live an almost completely normal life. She still has her irrational dark moments, they are rare and short lived.
Before she found the right drugs she had to go through a pile of the wrong type of drugs. Some of these drugs had ugly side effects. One drove her temporarily insane after the first does. Another caused her face to break it in terrible acne. Another made her gain weight and always be sick to her stomach. Most just flat out didn't work. More research is needed. The mechanisms by which these drugs work is currently an almost complete mystery. For most drugs, we don't understand how they work, but simply that they do. What we need is an understand of the root cause and the ability to treat it, preferable with a minimal amount of side effects.
People who have never intimately known a truly depressed person can't understand what it is like. Someone who is depressed because of chemistry can not be rationalized with. A depressed person can KNOW that their life is good and nothing is wrong, they can know that their only problem is a chemical imbalance in their head, and they can still want to kill themselves.
Your idea gave me an idea. Imagine this: Similar to what you said, offer an MMORPG where players could create their own content and rules. Hell, this is what NWN is. I am not sure if you were implying this or not, but the next step is to house the actual servers at the MMORPG makers location.
So, basically, the "product" the MMORPG maker is making is a tool to build MMORPGs, and scalable servers. So, Joe six pack could build his own rule set and invite his friends. There are never more then 30 people in his world. His world is small, simple, and really just a place for he and his friends to hang out. A group of dedicated players, or even professionals on the other hand could make 'real' MMORPG plush with content and its own rule system. They might attract so many people that they have thousands of people on at one time.
Hell, even give them a cut of the profits. Chop up the time people spend on each server per month, then divvy out 5% (or whatever) of the fees. So, if a person spends 50% of his time in one world, and the fee is $10 per month, then the owners of the world where he spent 50% of his time gets $10*5%*50%. That is 25 cents per month for that player. Get 6000 people spend all of their time on your server and that is $1500 per month. That isn't enough to quit your day job, but it is a pretty nice incentive to lead a project and create a world that people like.
Next, make then entire thing open source. If you see something you like in one world and want to copy it, go for it. You have solved a number of problems all at once. First, you have created a massive amount of diversity in games. You can have your perm death RP servers right next to your all PvP all the time servers, next to your grinding only server. Next, you have made it easy to build off success. No need to start from scratch. Take the entire source of a server you like and start building your own. This allows content to expand exponentially by making it so that people never need to start from scratch if they don't want to. You also throw the door wide open to letting small contributors add content. In my favorite world I might decide that they need a dungeon, an improved law code, or NPC wolves in the forest. I can make the code and submit it to the owners of the world. Your entire user bases suddenly becomes potential assets. Finally, this system will be the best damn interview you could ever give. If someone manages to create a wildly successful world you can contact them about a job so as to make it full time.
There are some challenges to this system.
First, you need to build everything scalable. You would probably want some sort of scaling curve for the resources you hand out to each world to be based on the number of players. So, if you have a world with just 4 people, you will get just enough resources to run a game with so few people. On the other hand, if you have 10,000 people in your world, you will get resources approaching what a standard MMORPG server farm eats. Further, you need to build it in such a way that one idiot with bad code can't bring down a dozen other worlds.
Second, you really want building tools that scale to the complexity that the user asks for. So, any idiot should be able to fiddle with the stats of a stock NPC or make a simple dungeon, but a dedicated programmer should also be able to build complex law code, GMing tools, a whole new combat engine, or a completely redesigned user interface. You want the maximum amount of customizability possible, but at the same time want it so that any n00b can make minor content additions.
With the right pricing system you could likely make a killing. Offer the building tools for free, even before the game is released. Offer access to the service and the server farm for a monthly fee (whatever is competitive). The monthly fee lets you play in any of the created worlds and lets you build your own. Next, let people buy more resources. If I decide I am serious about building the ultimate worl
I canceled my WoW account a few days ago, leaving the guild I was in. I played EQ, AO, AC, UO, and old sk00l MUDs, in addition to WoW.
"Most of the people I know play for the social endeavor - to be able to spend time with people that they know in what they consider to be a fun and interesting world."
Freeze their ability to level and gain better equipment and most people would quit before their next billing cycle. True, the social aspect of the game is there, but the social aspect of the game is almost an accident. What features does WoW have to actually facilitate any sort of social interaction beyond the ability to form guilds and have access to a few lines of chat? Kill the ability to advance and you have a chat room.
"The story line exists through SEVERAL previous titles and continues throughout World of Warcraft. The history and storylines are a work of art in and of themselves."
There is a story line for sure. I don't recall it reconciling the fact that everyone is an immortal warrior who can't be killed for more then a few minutes... but those anachronisms can be discussed a different day. The story line, while certainly pleasant when they sneak it in, is hardly the focus of the game. Hell, it isn't even a side feature. I can't ever recall seeing a good piece of historical literature go up for sale in the AH for more then a few silver unless someone was going to use it for a quest to get their sw0rd of l33tness. I have never met anyone so enthralled by the story that they cast aside leveling in favor of being a scholar studying the history of the game.
"Concurrently - if you have played the game and just didn't care for it, good luck to you outside of it. I don't play games according to your definition as it stands and appreciate you not being around in WoW to fuck up the experience for the rest of us."
Clearly, you don't need my permission to play, and clearly I don't need to play if I find the game to be simplistic, boring, and nothing more then an addiction. That said, I personally would like a developer to grow a pair and offer something more interesting then a mundane NPC slaughterfest where I get to watch my stats slowly rise. MMORPGs are a great idea. Imagine a massive dynamic online world teeming with purpose and content. Imagine a world with interesting events, politics, wars, history, and a verity of things for people to do such that all tastes are met. Now keep imaging, because with the current crop of MMORPGs and the monkey shit they are set to fling for the next generation of games, imagining is about as close as anyone is going to get.
I personally completely disagree with the article. The articles argument is basically that in order to build the ultimate MMORPG, you just need to combine all the best points of the current MMORPGs. This is complete and utter crap.
MMORPGs are currently suffering from unoriginality. No, I am not talking about the setting. I am talking about core game play. MMORPGs boil down to one thing. If you don't think watching your levels go up and collecting better equipment is awesome, you are going to hate any MMORPG, even a combination of them all, in a few months, if not weeks. What MMORPGs need are some fresh ideas. The sad truth is that to this day UO has a monopoly on originality. How can a game nearly a decade old have more originality then all the current crop of MMORPGs combined?
What MMORPGs need are some real changes. I suggest the following.
Kill the exponential power curve: What kills 99% of most MMORPG content? The power curve. The fact that a level 50 could go to sleep and a level 5 couldn't even land a hit destroys the ability to produce content, slaughters the enjoyment of casual players, renders PvP impossible for anyone not at the cap, and results in a content being completely inaccessible to most players. Further, the exponential power curve really is just a substitute for content. You drive players forward to mindlessly kill NPCs because they think they are working their way up the curve. Kill the curve and find another way to entertain your players.
Dynamic Worlds:
No, I do NOT mean monthly or even weekly events. I don't mean GM run stories. I mean true living and breathing worlds. Start an undead army in the artic of your world and have it march south into inhabited regions. Have it physically march. Have it set up camp at dawn, and march at night. If it comes to a city, have it lay siege. If it runs across a corpse, have it raise the corpse into another soldier. The army might not be completely running on auto polite. A GM might lay out way points for it follow each week. From that point on though, the army moves on its own. Make it a long term event. So, at any point, you could ride out from your city, kill some forward scouts, then run off. If someone tries to 'camp' the army, make it behave realistically and swarm. If people in small groups are only willing to do hit and runs, then you did something right.
Build the world to be as dynamic as possible. This should be priority number one. Build it so that GMs can jump in and tweak things, but the real goal is build a world that naturally constantly changes. This in it of itself should do a lot of content building for you.
Let Us Lose:
You know the worst thing about MMORPGs? The absolute inability to lose. If you play for a month in any MMORPG, at the end of the month, you will be better and more powerful then you were the month before. This translates into two things. First, you degrade any sense of accomplishment. Second, you condition the player to go absolutely nuts whenever he does lose. Imagine the army of undead scenario again. What if the army kept marching and took over city after city? What if it boiled down to just a few cities left and they were forced to pool their resources to make a last ditch stand? What if they could actually lose and have the entire world taken over and the force the game to reset? That would surely suck, but I bet most people would kill themselves to be apart of the final battle to save the world, and I bet they would feel pretty damn good if they actually won. Any real sense of accomplishment is lost in MMORPGs due to the inability to actually lose. Let people lose.
Politics, Wars, Survival, Wealth - Dear God, Anything But Grinding:
Build a game with TRUE content. Arenas for PvP, politics for socialites, trade empires for merchants, and some mundane hunting to fill in the niches. If people run off to go kill stuff to get exp and l00t, something is deeply wrong with your game. Bui
I had to go back and reread my own post, because I was pretty fucking sure every point you responded to was not something I said. Your response to my entire argument was:
"Real civilized nations have stringent immigration policies"
Ohh, that is damning.
As to the other two paragraphs, I am pretty fucking sure that I never once said the work taxes, medicine, welfare, yet you managed to write up a two page rant on the subject.
So, if you have something constructive to add, other then attacking strawman arguments that you created, go take a peek at my original post, then try responding.
Most of your rant I am indifferent to. Realism in weapons in a game like this is not high on my list. The game isn't supposed to be terribly realistic. I mean hell, I know if someone tears me apart in real life with a 50 cal gun, a medic isn't going to shock me with the paddles and make everything okay. A sniper round will leave me dead, exc, exc. The game just wasn't built with those things in mind. It would have been neat if they had had an option to make realistic weapon effects, but I won't shed too many tears. Hopefully they will let modders in soon and let them work their magic.
All of that said, there is one piece of your rant that rings so true I don't think anyone can deny it. Mother fucking helicopters eating tank rounds. Holy fucking shit. I think the most jarring moment playing this game was when a transport helicopter was tearing apart a base and I managed to pop off a shot with my tank. The round hit in the windshield of the helicopter despite the fact that it was moving. Nothing happened. There is stretching realism for the sake of gameplay, then there is taking basic common sense out back and brutally raping it.
If they would make just the following two changes, I would be happy.
Glass does not act as armor. Shoot at someone's head behind glass in a helicopter or a any other vehicle in the game, and the guy inside gets hit. Shrink the protection zones that weapons provide. I know gunners can be killed out of helicopters, but it happens rarely enough despite having twelve support guys all gunning away that I think sitting behind a gun offers undo protection. The people not behind guns seem to die just find.
If a tank round hits a helicopter, the helicopter dies. Period. As it stands, the best way to kill a helicopter if you don't have AA or a plan is to load up a jeep with C4, wait for the helicopter to drop low, and flip the switch. Really now... if a helicopter is just sitting there hovering over a flag, it is asking for a tank round, and it shouldn't be disappointed.
"The only way to fix it is to pass new laws. No more outsourcing of jobs. All companies must have a pension package. No lay offs unless the union okay's it. And every company must have a union, or the workers must collectivly agree on pay and terms."
This has been tried. See France. Last time I checked France was in the middle of tremendous social turmoil because their economy is tanking, unemployment is over 10%, and their government is broke. Germany is in the same position. Right now things have gotten so bad that the two top candidates for chancellor are not arguing if they should start to undo their social policies, but how much do they want to undo them.
"The problem the comp sci students are going to face is the same problem the auto workers are facing. Companies don't give a crap about americans, even though the companies started in the USA, the CEO and board of directors are American, and they sell their product to Americans. They will move their factories and tech support and anything they can to Mexico or India or anywhere they can find cheap labor. The CEO's are pretty much trators and they are crapping on the USA."
Move to France. Well, I suppose that is difficult as their immigration policies are a real bitch, but you would feel at home there. You could sit around be pissed off that there are other humans in the world willing to work and declare anyone of the same nationality who doesn't give out jobs based upon nationality is an ass hole. They have dozens of political parties that argue for sealing up the borders from both the left and the right of the argument such that I am sure you could feel at home.
The world is vastly unequal. Some places in this world are richer then others. In some places, $10,000 a year makes you rich; in others it puts you in relative poverty. What is changing is that the inequality between nations is vanishing. Indians, Chinese, and people all over the world can compete against Americans when before they stood no chance. Today, an Indian can get a technical education and get a job in America or at home fulfilling a job that only Americans, European, and Japanese used to be able to fulfill and get paid more then the traditional sweatshop jobs of their native nations.
What exactly are you proposing? Bar immigrants from entering a nation of immigrants, denying them the privilege that your ancestors seemed to have enjoyed so much? Enact some policy to keep these rising nations too poor produce technically minded people to protect American jobs?
The wheels of globalization are turning and they are not going to stop. These nations are rising and they WILL reach higher standards of living. They likely will not surpass American or Western European standards any time soon, but the gap is going to start to close. There are two ways you can look at this. You can bitch and moan that others in the world are rising to your level, or you can look on it as an opportunity. It is opportunity to strike out further ahead and do what Americans have always done. See the next wave coming and ride it before everyone else. Abandon agriculture for industry, industry for miniaturization, and miniaturization for information. That, or you can recognize that the amount of people in the world spending like Americans is rocketing up and that you can reap profit from their demand. An Indian without power has no effect on anyone's economy. An Indian with a power outlet and need for software and electronics DOES effect the economy.
Finally, recognize what you have. Last time I checked, Americans are not dying of starvation. In fact, last time I checked poor Americans are more likely to die of a heart attack from eating too much fatty food then anything resembling starvation. When the poor of your nation are more likely to die from being overfed... it is time a get a grip on reality and recognize how much you have.
I can't answer your first questions, but I can answer your second one.
"Did they ever even actually find ice/water on Mars or is this just more speculation?"
You know those big white caps on the poles of Mars? Yeah... that is ice. Well, frozen CO2 as well, but also ice. There is absolutely no question that Mars has ice.
You said... "And this is different from PvP... how?"
Lets go point by point what I said.
"You are killing brain dead NPCs..."
Granted, there are stupid people out there, but rarely are they as stupid as NPCs. Even the most elegantly scripted NPCs in the MMORPG world today are brain dead. Further more, most of the time the toughest of NPCs are beaten through exploitation of the stupidity of the NPC, and by toughest I should clarify that I mean the ones with the most jacked up stats, not the ones with any grand strategy. Put a human in charge and they would recognize tactics being used, and instead of mindlessly continuing to employ loosing tactics try and change.
"...by the hundreds of thousands for thousands of hours of your life so that you can watch you stats go up."
I am not sure what PvP games you are playing, but I have seen very few where the point of PvP is to watch your stats go up. At worst, PvP some times keeps track of some statistics in terms of how you perform, and the removal of these statistics would not spell doom for that game. Remove the ranking and the stats from Battlefield 2 and no one is going to stop playing.
"Your satisfaction could be mimed with a chat program and a spreadsheet that occasionally up some arbitrary numbers."
Again, spread sheet watching your numbers go up, verses competition against humans.
"MMORPGs are for addicts and no one else."
The 'fun' of an MMORPG is the addiction that is developed around it. When you are doing things that could not be considered fun by any definition of the word simply to achieve some minor goal, you have likely developed an addition. Hell, the words that MMORPG players use scream of nothing but a mindless addiction. "Grinding"? "Camping"? "Farming"? Are you joking me? They very language used is pretty explicit about the 'fun' of the game.
"Someone give me a call when an MMORPG finds the time to make some gameplay."
MMORPGs are games practically devoid of content. They replace content with time consuming activities and rely on addiction to keep players. I have nothing against the concept of a Massive Multiplayer Online World. I would be giddy to play a game, even a fantasy game, set in a changing and dynamic world with deep content. Let me give you a word of advice though; if the entire game revolves around whacking NPCs for l00t and exp, it isn't a dynamic game with deep content. You will know MMORPGs have managed to come up with something golden when they can offer up a game, strip it of stats, levels, and exp, and people would still play it. Strip any MMORPG right now of the ability to level or collect progressively stronger equipment and they would be empty in a week. The day that isn't true is the day I pick up an MMORPG again and merrily shell out my monthly subscription.
"Well that's constructive. Would you care to explain why?"
You are killing brain dead NPCs by the hundreds of thousands for thousands of hours of your life so that you can watch you stats go up. Your satisfaction could be mimmed with a chat program and a spreadsheet that occasionally up some arbitrary numbers. MMORPGs are for addicts and no one else. Someone give me a call when an MMORPG finds the time to make some gameplay.
Should I be able to force a corporation sell a fetish porn magazine in a Toy store? Should vegan stores be required to sell meat? It is a stupid argument. If a store doesn't want to sell a product because they think it will offend the people that shop there, that is their right. Walmart is well within its right to declare that they only want stuff that any kid can grab, bring to mommy, and mommy doesn't have to worry that he just got something of questionable content. Walmart wants to be a place for families. Let them.
Now, I personally disagree with it. I LIKE violent movies and games. If anything, I am irritated with how few games have really had the balls to approach sex and violence. That said, I just don't shop at Walmart.
"When I have killed 50 rabbits, if I know I need to kill 10 more rabbits before being able to take on boss rabbit, I am driven to seek out those rabbits. If I don't know that, I will probably be bored with the game because I have no idea how much longer I need to continue killing rabbits before I am finally able to proceed. Especially MMOGs will be very boring without stats. "
I think that is the entire point. If your game is so dull that showing a spreadsheet is the only way to make people play it... well, it might be an MMO"RPG" in name, but it sure as shit isn't any "RPG" unless you are role playing an accountant watching numbers go up.
The problem is shitty game play, pure and simple. MMORPGs have absolutely horrible game play. The game play is so bad that taking out the raw numbers that show that something is happening would destroy the game. These games cater to addicts. Score for MMORPGs for managing to find such a lucerative addict market, but for the rest of us, it really would be nice to have a REAL RPG.
I don't even know where to begin. Lets start this way: stat based combat does NOT equal an RPG. Stat based combat is the shitty filler that bad RPGs used to fill in their dull and uninteresting stories.
The ultimate RPG would be a simulator of a world. The world might be nonsense, like D&D with Dragons and and magic, but within the 'rules' you accept, the world would be completely coherent. It wouldn't have stats or numbers, at least not any that the player would see. There would be a story, and that player could affect the story.
It is the idea of Diablo vs Planescape: Torment. Diablo was a game about whacking the moles for exp and l00tl. Planescape: Torment had a combat system that was at best medicore, but a truly awesome story and a coherent world. The problem is that Diablo is a hell of a lot easier to build then Torment. Diablo just requires fiddling with the numbers until the game starts to be balanced. Hell, an intilligent enough computer could balance one of these games. Torment requires a team of writers to not only write a story, but to keep them consistent and interesting.
The difference between the mindless numbers game of Diablo and a true RPG is that you could make an AI using todays technology to play that game for you. Until AIs start passing the turning test, no AI will ever be able to play Torment. The same goes for the shitty MMORPGs out today. You could write AI programs to play those mindless games for you. Those are not MMORPGs, those are number counting games. They are awesome if you are addicted to watching numbers go up. They suck if you want an RPG.
My mistake. It was the fall of the Berlin wall that happened first, followed by McDonalds, followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Once the Berlin wall fell, everyone knew it was pretty much the end, hence the confusion in my memory.
I think one of the problems that Sci-Fi is running into is that viewers better understand what is fantasy and what is realistic. Sci-fi can take one of two directions. You can either go in the Star Wars direction where you basically throw realism to the wind and have World War II fighters dog fighting each other in space, or you go the 2001 a Space Odyssey rout. Going the 'realistic' rout is hard. How do you deal with the fact that given just another 100 years computers are going to be significantly smarter then humans? Hell, how do you deal with the fact that there simply might not BE any humans? It is a tough place to write it, and I imagine an even harder place to film in.
BSG is great because it has managed to error more on the side of 2001 then Star Wars. Sure, you can poke holes at it, but for the most part they strive to make a world you believe could exist. I don't know about you, but I watched the first season, and every time the humans won, I was left thinking, "Nah, they didn't win, the Silons are just fucking with them for their own purposes." I believe that the Silons are smarter and better then the humans, which is how it should be. You could almost call BSG an exploration of a Post-Human universe.
Whatever the case, I think sci-fi writers have their work cut out, especially if they don't take the slap stick Star Wars rout. You already see them starting to work around these problems with the sudden glut of post singularity and post human books coming out. Given a few more years we might see some truly great stuff starting to hit books, and eventually the TV and movies.
Maybe China will have a moon base first. That said, Americans always get the last laugh. There might be a Chinese flag on the moon, but I bet the good old McDonalds gold arches won't be far behind it. Honestly, the most ironic thing I have ever seen in my entire life was after the Soviet Union collapsed. They showed footage from a helocopter of a line that wrapped around 5 city blocks to get into the first McDonalds in Moscow...
Sure, NASA will sit there scratching their balls, but my money isn't on NASA. It isn't on China, India, or Japan either. I'll place my bets on good old fashion 100% American corporate greed. Eh, if we are stuck with this capitalist system, might as well use it. Honestly though, I think the corporations are going to be the ones to win this race. I bet while NASA and Russia are still dicking around with the ISS, China is trying to figure out how you can combine a ICBM and a tin can to make a rocket to the moon, and India is trying to justify to its people why they should spend money on space when there are still millions of people that don't have power, someone is going to send up a hotel and start cashing in.