Re:Does /. want endorsements from the NY Times?
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Buggy Voting Machines
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Who the hell cares if Bush or anyone else tried to get out of being thrown into the slaughter pit that was Vietnam. Bush dodged the draft by joining the reserves and doing everything in his power to get out. I don't see a damn thing wrong with that. I would have done the exact same thing. If I couldn't have gotten the family doctor to find an excuse for me to not get FORCED by the government to go fight in a war I didn't want to fight in, I would have merrily joined the reserves and then done everything to keep from being shipped out.
The political environment is obsessed with one-upping each other with stupid minor political victories. For a politician, a single slip of the tongue or off handed comment that any human would make could be the end of their career. This dumb shit about who tried to dodge what or who said what after they got back is fucking childish and completely irrelevant to real issues.
Kerry came back from his four month tour in Vietnam a left wing nut who wanted to freeze the nuclear arms build up leaving the Soviet Union with the advantage. Bush did just about everything to get out of being shot at, and in the ended succeeded.
Who the fuck cares? They were both CHILDREN. You are talking about two boys who were not old enough to fucking drink. Who gives a shit if Kerry jumped off the left end of the pool and Bush ran away? Hell, I know people who grew up in the 70's that were self declared communist who stuffed every drug into their body they could find, and who are now soccer moms and hold management positions in corporations. No one would dig up their childhood to find all the dumb shit they did before they were men.
Who Bush and Kerry were as CHILDREN is utterly irrelevant. There are a lot of good reasons to dislike Bush and Kerry. I could make a big list for both of them. No where on that list would I bother to mention what they did 40 years ago when they were.
Meh, we're gonna be outbred by the Amish and the fundamentalist Muslim and other assorted backwards religious groups. They'll outbreed the "more enlightened" people, turning democracy against us with sheer numbers, and they'll end up winning with their old fashioned strategy of "making lots of babies so that it doesn't matter if you loose a couple, in the long run".
And by 1950 the blacks will out number the whites 2 to 1 in the US. By 2000 everyone in the US will be speaking Spanish. Please.
The less "enlightened", as you put it, are no threat to the post-industrial nations. The US is exceptionally good at Americanizing its immigrant population quickly such that veils on woman is a pretty slim threat. If anything, the process works in reverse. The US Americanizes people when they come to US universities then send them back less inclined to be follow tradition. Most parts of Europe are not bad at nationalizing their immigrant either. If you haven't noticed, the world is moving away from such practices, even in the so called less "enlightened" parts of the world.
The simple fact of the matter is that in the long run, technology always wins. That rule is even more true in this day and age. The parts of the world where technology is suppressed are little threat to the rest of the world. A Taliban style nation always loses if for no other reason then that they can never dream of keeping up technologically, and the difference between such nations and technological nations only accelerates the more oppressive they are.
Evolution is dead, and that isn't a bad thing. You can't live in a technological society without first doing a number of evolution. In order to have fancy things like computers, you need humans to not only live well past 30, but you need a lot of them, and they need lots of free time. In other words, you need to make people live longer and healthier lives with surviving to do. You need to put them into shelters, give them more food then they need, protect them from infection, and insure that they can crank out lots of babies that all live to see adulthood (instead of suffering terrible childhood mortality rates).
What do you get when this happens? You got a few billion people with the collective capacity to undergo agricultural, industrial, and eventually post industrial revolutions. Sure, your stock might be less discriminating then the stock of the past, but who cares? One the advantages of being a technological species is that you can do evolutions work. For instance, I was a horrible asthmatic when I was young. I should have died 10 times over when I was young. Modern medicine absolutely saved my life on more then one occasion. These days I am a perfectly healthy adult. People with poor eyesight wear glasses. Weak people don't need to run to survive. Half of the population (namely woman) have been freed up to contribute to technology and society of this choose.
The places where this all leads is a good one. Well within the next 100 years, you can almost rest assure that we will start to tinker more with our own genetic code and enhance ourselves further with technology. Things like asthma and diabetes will start to be cured and removed from the population. It wouldn't surprise me if a human 500 years from now is not recognizable as human because it is such a technological and/or genetic wonder.
Evolution is hard at work through technology. For us humans, it is headed for better places.
It is expensive if you are a high school kid with 40 hours a week to blow on a video game. It is less then a one hour worth of wage for most adults. So, it really depends on who you are.
The reason why there is so much bitching and moaning about MMORPGs price is because the target audience are not people with the money. $15 a month is nothing to me, but even spending 10 hours a week on a video game is completely unthinkable to me. That goes triple if any of that 10 hours is less then fun.
I personally love the idea of a massive online world. I would shell out $20 a month without a second thought for it. The difference is that I am not willing to 'spend time' on a game. When I start a game, I want to know that I am going to enjoy it from time zero until it is done. I don't want content denied to me because I don't have the same amount of time to blow as a high school student or someone without a job. My time is too valuable to get off on the slow feeling of 'progression' that MMORPGs almost completely rely on.
So, when an MMORPG can offer me a massive online world that I can simply jump right into and enjoy without ever have to 'pay my dues' (or however you want to word it), I'll shell out as much money as they want without a complaint. Until that day MMORPGs, and yes even WoW, (I was in the beta) will not get a cent. Why pay for a game that revels in drudgery when I can simply give my dollar to Half Life 2, FarCry, Unreal 2004, Counter Strike, and Grand Theft Auto? Massive online worlds are not synonymous with boring drudge work for people with too much time, but you would be hard pressed to tell that from the crap the industry keeps shoveling into a box.
No, I saw the article about the 100,000+ dollar car with the inability to stop at a gas station and quickly recharge, all while having the comfort (and safety) of a coffin. Like I said before, fuel cells are the only thing to make this solar power really do anything to quench oil consumption.
If this is true, this is a pretty interesting advancement. I can't help but be a little skeptical about the price tag they are assigning it, but I am a sour old bastard at heart. Are the prices they are spitting out for one of these things sitting in the Arizona desert or northern Maine? The article threw in some stuff that I found questionable. Namely, it talked about moving away from reliance on foreign oil - utterly ignoring that the US (and most nations for that matter) gets most of its power (in the power grid) from coal. While it would be nice to get away from coal, there are two things stopping this. First, coal is cheap. Second, in recent years they have done a pretty solid job at cleaning up the health risks associated with coal.
I am not saying that this isn't a worthwhile discovery, just that I don't see much in the market that is going to push to adopt this technology other then governments wanting to use something that is cleaner then coal. Oil is good stuff because you can throw it into a car and have it run. The real technology that is going to make solar cells like these worthwhile and get the market onboard would be cheap hydrogen fuel cells you can stuff into a car. Charge up a cheap fuel cell with one of these solar cells, ratchet up the price of gas some more, and now you are talking about cleaner cars and the ability to care about the Middle East about as much as the US cares about Africa (which is to say almost not at all).
The only other two real problems I see is that first; in the north I imagine that the cost per kilowatt hour is much more expensive. I imagine a few feet of snow and -30 F temperatures render these things pretty useless. Second, to power a place like LA I imagine you would need a massive bank of these things. I wonder if a massive bank of these would have an effect upon the environment or the weather patterns in a noticeable way. That said, I suppose if you just throw them all in a desert no one is going to care.
So, neat technology, but I don't expect an energy revolution over night.
First, go back and look at all the post from mine to its parent. No one mentioned where the car was made. In fact, the story is about Japan to begin with, so I have no idea where you pulled the nationality of the car into it.
Secondly, you have absolutely no idea where the car was built. Japanses car companies have hordes of US citizens working for them and have piles of US factories. All of the Japanese autocomapnies most certainly fall under the title of 'multinational'.
Third, I don't give a shit where the car was built or the nationality of the people that own the company. I'll buy whatever car is best for me from whatever company offers the most value. Anyone who is blowing money on cars every 100k is an idiot for sticking with the same company.
If you bothered to read the fucking web site you would quickly realize that this game is hardly distasteful. It isn't a shooter where you try and whack hordes of secret service guards to kill JFK. It sounds like a project to try and show that the shot was impossible. It is a simulation. Just spend thirty seconds reading the website and it becomes pretty clear that the motive for the game is pretty pure. Hell, just skim the FAQ and you should get an idea what these people are about. If it was some KKK website letting you shoot that liberal panzy, I would agree, but it sounds more like a historian with too much time on his hands.
Maybe that sort of car would fly in Europe, but never in the US. You can't convince the average American to spend more money on a car with drastically reduced capabilities. The US is just too damn big to be stuck to a 200 mile radius.
Battery exchanges might be one way of getting around it, but I don't believe for a second that such an exchange would even come close to rivialing how cheap gas is. For all the talk of gas rising in price, it is still cheap stuff. Hell, it is cheaper then bottled water. One day there will come a time when the cost of gas rises such that electric powered cars are cheaper. The second that day hits the change will happen over night. However, that day is most certainly not here yet.
Personally, I won't worry much about it. People will keep working on electric powered cars as this man has done. He might not sell anything, but the research will go into the big pot. When gas powered cars become to expensive some company (or companies) are going to rise up with eletric cars and reap the reward.
I own a 1990 Honda Accord. I don't know what pieces of shit you are buying, but my nearly 15 year old car has had absolutely no major problems and I take no special car of it. Hell, I don't even know how to change my own oil.
Cars are not computers. When people buy a new car every 3 years, it is because they want to. If they are buying a new car every 3 years, it is because it is breaking down, then they are a god damn idiot because they keep buying crap.
There is no 3vil corporate consipracy to force people to keep getting new cars. Car companies get all of their parts from suppliers. The only thing a car company does is put the stuff together. If a supplier sells a car company bad parts that break down, then they lose their contract. If I buy a car and it turns out to be crap, I just don't buy from that same company again. Take off the tin foil hat. Car companies want to sell cars. If electric cars could be made cheaply and even come close to having the same characteristics as a combustion car in all areas, car companies would be killing each other to sell the most.
I can only speak for American companies so other parts of the world are probably different, but I can say that over the past 10 years, American companies have started to become more fanatical about being 'green', at least with companies that deal with chemicals. 30 years ago in your average American corporate engineering lab they used all manner of horrible chemicals and it generally was not a big deal. They built things using terrible side products.
Over the past few years though, I have noticed a pretty dramatic change. All of the companies I have ended up working for (3) have been fanatically dedicated to 'greening up' and have put major amounts of money into changing processes over so that they use more green materials. In fact, a good way to get your project killed is to request the use of something hazardous when it isn't absolutely necessary.
The major reason this change, from my understanding as an engineer and not a policy marker in a company, is that companies are becoming more and more global. The Internet revolution made global companies much more viable and much more efficient. Even small companies are becoming very global. I worked at a company that had 500 people under it, but was located in something like 20 nations. The Internet and advances in IT has really made this sort of set up not only possible, but very effective. The net result is that whenever a company needs to make a product, they need to meet standards of every nations that they intend to sell it in. So, whoever has the lowest standards really IS the standard.
For instance, I was working with a company that was making power supplies. They used to make the batteries out of lead and some other ugly chemicals. They spent a massive pile of money trying to work the lead and other harmful chemicals out of it to meet an EU law. Another company that I worked for that did capacitor work did something similar when they put a pile of R&D money into meeting a Japanese law. I even was working in a project to meet a Chinese standard once - not that China is the most environmentally friendly nation in the world, but they do have some tough laws that they hold foreign businesses to but not their own domestic industries.
Whatever the case, people boo-hoo globalization for environmental reasons, but I can say that in the chemical industry in the US, globalization can take more credit then anything for the greening of the industry.
This is proof positive that no matter how hard you try, you can't weed out all of the idiots. I don't know how I could possibly make something more of an obvious joke, and yet still some idiot thinks I am serious.
the rest of the more educated america get saddled with an incompetant president and the rest of the morons they share the country with
Psst... you are one of those idiots you complain so bitterly about if you can't see the flashing lights around the previous post that screamed JOKE. Do the world a favor and don't vote next election. I don't care if you voted for the same guy as me or not. Just spare the country of your dumb input into the system.
NO BLOOD FOR OIL!!!!11!! THE USA IS WORSE THEN CHINA>> CHINA LIEKS TO HELP PEOLE WHILE USA RAPES WOMEN IN ABUGRAVE PRISON AND FALUGJA ON PURPOSE> BUSH JUST WANTS TO MAKE LOTS OF MONEY IN IRAQ B Y SHOOTING PEPLE> HALIBERTON.
Oh wait, wrong thread. Hrm, Bush cutting taxes on geeks... if I could just work in an Iraq/Imperialist US/Bush is 3vil angle I am sure I could make a pile of karma...
Bush is doing this to divert attention from Iraq where he is KILLING BABIES!
My understand was that this bill was the beginings of regulating the private space industry. Personally, I see absolutely no loss if that is the case. I would rather leave the field upon and relativly unregulated other then getting a permit to go up until we have a better understanding as to how the industry is shaping up. Let the leaders take the risks and get out in front. If they want to throw their lives away, let that be their choice. The only time the government should step in, is to ensure that public safety is not in danger.
The RIAA and MPAA should take a lesson. Valve has done a pretty incredible thing. They have done a solid job and snuffing out pirating while managing to avoid pissing off their consumer base. They have offered a product that is not crippled and have managed to protect it without resorting to using the government in the form of the judicial system to act as their personal thugs. This is the way companies should protect their IP, not by using the government as their own private band of thugs.
Europe will never 'pull the fanacial rug', because the rug is mostly American. A full 1/4 of the worlds economy is the American economy. You can't fight a trade war without coming out bloody yourself. Only in the case where a massive economy is crushing a smaller economy (see US vs Cuba) does it work to one side's advantage. Simply put, if it is bad for the American economy, it is hell on earth for the world's economy. The US and Europe are so completely interlinked economically that if either tries to pull away it result in both of them ending up dead. Europe and the US might bicker back and forth about economic issues, but in the end neither of them are going to piss the other off. Europe needs the US as badly, if not more badly then the US needs Europe.
Parent is right. Why just the other day I saw Bush in his citadel of d00m laughing evilly with Cheney.
Bush was like "Har har har! Those puny enviro-freaks in Europe are looking remove the world's dependence on lovely polluting oil! Har har har! Do not worry Cheney, we will stop those enviro-freaks from giving everyone including us power to run our economy."
Joining with Bush's evil laughter, Cheney said, "Har har har! They can not stop us! Only Captain Planet could save them now!"
And at that moment Captain Planet burst through wall, made some witty environmentally friendly retorts, saved the day, and installed Ralph Nader as our new supreme leader.
If Bush really was looking to kiss industries ass, there is no reason why he would block cheap power, no matter where it came from. The oil industry is one very small industry that profits off of oil. EVERY SINGLE OTHER industry is hurt when power is expensive. So, even if Bush eats babies and wants to promote world evil, cheap power is still the name of the game.
What scares me is not what is going to happen in the US. At worst, the US will use it solve a few more crimes and nail everyone and their dog for speeding. I am not saying I like it, but I could think of worse things. Like any institution run by humans, the US government has its fits of stupidity and corruption, but for the most part it tries to be benevolent and more or less succeeds (and no, that was not an invitation to start talking about Iraq). The American propensity towards individualism and a merry fuck you doesn't make a perfect defense against this stuff, but it certainly throws some sand in the cogs.
Now, picture a place like China, North Korea, or Cuba. Imagine if everyone was implanted with one of these bastardly little devices when they are born and the government made no attempt to limit the range which they work at. Now imagine how easy you just made it keep people inside your nation and track their every movement. Throw up detectors around your border and anyone not authorized to cross sounds a pile of alarms. Granted, I am sure people will find a way around it - they always do, but it makes it even uglier for the people trying to escape these nations. Combine tracking with some sick pattern recognition software and a pile of super computers and you can probably create a government with near perfect detection of 'subversive' activities.
All scenarios, without exception, involve corpses. The only questions are how many, who, and how. If the US didn't invade and left UN sanctions in place, the answer would be another 100,000's MORE then had already died, all of which would have been civilian, and they would have died due to shortages caused by sanctions and Saddam's government.
I am not claiming that one options was better then another, but don't be naive enough to think that there was a way out that didn't involve a pile of corpses. If anything bothers me about the debat around Iraq, it is that the body count gets dragged into it with no frame of reference. Being shot is more dramatic and plays up better in the media, but dying due to a simple medical ailment easily treated if sanctions were not in places leaves you just as dead.
So, I am not saying ignore body count, but before you go citing the civilian losses as a reason to take an alternative action, be sure to compare it to the cost of civilian dead resulting in the action you propose. The partisan anti-war group at http://www.iraqbodycount.net/ puts the number of dead to be at most 16,579. Put that number next to the number of Iraq that died due to sanctions and you are talking about a number that is at low end estimates, 1,000% larger.
There were a lot of good reasons to stay the hell out of Iraq. The number of people killed by the US military compared to sanctions was not one of them.
What idiot modded parent insightful? How is a lawsuit and programed to sniff out copywrited stuff different from terrorism? NO ONE FUCKING DIES. For fucks sake people. Grow up and get some perspective. I violently disagree with patent laws as they are, but idiots like the parent don't help our case any.
Everyone likes to blame conservatives for the direction the country is headed, but you know what? I think it has a lot more to do with idiots like the parent. Some idiot spewing that the MPAA is acting like Al Qaeda or some grassroots democrat going door to door declaring Bush to be Hitler reborn DOESN'T HELP. People assume (rightly) that you are a fucking idiot and ignore you.
For fucks sake, you can advocate a position without sounding like some insane religious zealot. Grow the fuck up and keep your mouth shut until you can speak without sounding like a blathering idiot. Your stupid an inane input hurts the cause. Any person who doesn't know much on the subject who would be subjected to parents inane babbling would likely conclude that the MPAA must be doing something right if idiots like parent are against them.
I think that people are missing two very important facts.
1) Iraq will not enforce any such laws any time soon. They could all be using GM seeds and even if soemone did know, the courts wouldn't care. They are far more concerned with police officers getting executed and instability to give two shits about sending out inspectors armed with genetic testing kits and fighting multi-year long legal battles. Simply put, even if this law was to stay, it would be at least another 5 years before anyone would bother to waste manpower to enforce it.
2) Iraq is going to have an election within three months (knock on wood). They can elect whoever they damn well please at that point and the US can't do a damned thing about it. If the new government revokes such rules, then the rules are revoked. Hell, Iraq could scrap every rule the US made if that tickled their fancy.
Look, the 'laws' put in place in Iraq are written in the sand. They are what the US thinks is a good guide line to running a nation. More specifically, they are a neocons wet dream of how to run an economy with a smidgen of practicality thrown in when they are forced to. So, if you want to call it proof that Republicans would turn the world into a dark and evil place if given the chance, then you can certainly make that conclusion. On the other hand, if you want to conclude that the poor Iraqis are fucked because of IP laws, pull your head out of the sand, and pretend you are a geek long enough to actually see what is happening. The laws are not being enforced, and they won't be enforced until long after Iraq has had the chance to change the laws.
Really people. This is Slashdot. I would think geeks could muster enough intelligence to look past their own political views to see forest for the trees. There are lots of conclusions to draw from this story about neocon views on IP laws and the like, but you need to take a massive dose of self delusion to read any further into this. The fact that write ups like the one that was used get through the editors is pathetic.
I think the problem is vastly overstated. In case people have not been watching the news, Iraq is supposed to have an election in January. There is not a thing in the world preventing them from over turning that law, or simply wiping out all American made laws and starting from scratch. On an evil scale of 1 to 10, I give putting in a single stupid and minor law about GM crops into a government which you know ahead of time is going to rewrite its laws a 2, for a 'its the thought that counts evil'.
Why in the hell would an American want a North Korean to have any say what-so-ever in any US affair? Why would an American want China to have any say what-so-ever in the US policy towards Taiwan? Why would the US let people who clearly have no interest in the well being of the US vote on how the US behaves?
Eh, it doesn't matter. The chances of anyone else in the world getting to vote on anything American does is absolutely zero. Americans are about as excited to let the rest of the world control their destiny as they are to pounding nails through their eyes. Hell, the only reason why the US is apart of the UN is because of that big old veto vote they get that says that you can't try and force them to do anything.
Come now, use some imagination. What is the point of content no one will ever see or appreciate? This might come as a surprise, but most people are either unwilling to put in the time to get to level 50 to go on a raid, or simply don't have the time. Eh, it is all well and good for games to exist to for the crack addicts to mindlessly get their fill, but the rest of the world wouldn't mind a game either.
What's the difference between aquiring better armor or aquiring better spells through leveling? Both require you to kill monsters or do quests.
Don't have better armor and the problem is handily solved. If combat is going to be skill based, why would you muddle up the equation by giving someone +100 armor of doom? You don't give the guys in CountStrike +1000 armor, so don't do it in a skill based game. Make armor different. Wear that nice light leather armor and be much quicker. Crawl into some plate mail and feel better protection, but be move slower and get fatigued quicker. Throw on some chain mail and get reasonable mobility and protection from piercing and slashing weapons, but also have absolutely no armor against crushing weapons like war hammers. Do the same for weapons. A 10 foot long pole arm is great for spearing a guy through the gut before he gets close to you or taking down a horse, but utterly worthless if the enemy slips past the tip of the spear and closes with a close range weapon. A dagger has no reach, but if you can get close, a slash across the throat is almost a sure kill.
How do you get spells? Make it so that you just walk into any old mages library and you can collect and memorize 20 spells. Don't have a 'best' spell. Just make them all different and all with massive negative side affects. Maybe you have to hit up a few such mage libraries to get the perfect 20 spell load out. You seem to be under the confused impression that the game MUST require some sort of misery from the player before he or she can have a spell, and that there MUST be better spells and worse spells. You don't need these things.
Don't analyze too deeply into what I say. This is shit plucked from my imagination after a few seconds of thought. There are certainly problems with my ideas that would need to be over come, but for the sake of game design, I sincerely hope that a few seconds of thinking on my part is not the final word imagination. If someone sat down to design an action oriented MMORPG with no levels, I imagine that with a couple more heads and more time then five minutes, they could do better.
Finally, I think you crystallize my argument for me by actually describing a system that is 'levelless'.
Most of the people that bitch about leveling never made it to "the end." In EverQuest, the "end" was when you reached the last level and you joined a raiding guild. Raiding *IS* EverQuest, in my opinion. It takes a shit load of practice, skills, and strategy to defeat encounters in EQ.
When you get to the point where you are doing a raid in EQ, you have all but stopped level, and this is considered to be the fun part? You mean, the game that exists when you are no longer grinding is the best part of the game? The part of the game where it is not levels, but strategy and tactics? Hell, you describe a system where you don't need levels that is fun, and this is based off a game that wasn't balanced to be level less to begin with! And the reason why not everyone can enjoy this?
in a raid in Everquest, no amount of practice would teach them to kill that mob...Through the level grinding of EQ... You know the game mechanics. That only comes with experience.
You are absolutely right in that an EBayed character in EQ is doomed. What you utterly ignore is the fact that Everquest was designed from the ground up to built upon progressive levels. An EBay character is doomed because there is no 'easing in'. The only thing an EBay character can do that is worth while is go fight the big fish, and without experie
Re:It's not the same old grind.
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Everquest 2 Launches
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The last guy said: Insert some boring technical details about tweaks to EQ's basic level for the sake of leveling gameplay here.
Here is the problem with MMORPGs. They are currently about leveling. Period. They are the types of games where if you told someone that today your level will be frozen, they would quit their account on the spot. The entire point of the game is to get more levels. Obviously some people love this dumb crap and are more then happy to shell out 15 a month for it. Good for them. That said, the market for this kind of OCD game play is limited. You will never get me to play a game where the point of the game is to gain levels, get more spells and shits... so that you can gain more levels. That sounds like some sort of sick test you perform on rats, not humans. The fact that people can not conceive of a world without levels is utterly scary, and I hope that developers have equally as limited imaginations.
How do you build a world without levels? Simple, build a world based upon player skill, and offer a variety of player skill sets to pick from. Hell, just make a list of player skills and make it so that the game has games to accommodate them.
Twitch skills - Simple enough, make some combat based upon twitch skills. Acrobatic classes in particular would be very well suited for a 'twitchy' game play.
Tactical skills - Make it so that magic or some other element of combat is based upon tactics. Creating a complex magic system would go a long way to do this. Imagine if when a mage casts, every spell they cast results in good and bad side effects for many other spells.
Example: A mage starts by casting a spell that makes cold spells more likely to catastrophically fumble, and also has the side effect of making fire spells more powerful. He then starts to cast a fire spell that does damage to his opponent, but also leaves him weaker to cold spells. His opponent realizes what tactic is being used and so casts a spell that drastically delays the effect of fire spells from kicking in, giving him time to try and alter the effect into something more pleasant. Rinse and repeat. Instead of making it so that every spell is a boring +10 fire damage, all spells have massive draw backs. Two or three minutes of fighting like this and there could be a few dozen effects that both mages need to consider before spam casting at each other. They might even slow down, stop and think a little before casting. The game becomes far more tactical then just nuking the shit out of the other guy as fast as possible.
Puzzle Skills - Make the crafting system based on something like puzzle pirates or some other type of puzzle.
Social Skills - Create a complex political and leadership system. Throw in some sulk and dagger stuff in to give the twitch and tactical people some fun.
Strategic Skills - Have it so that leaders need to make complex overall decisions about resources and strategic defense and fighting. A person might rise through the social ranks to gain some grand strategic position. Hell, offer lower level strategic positions so that one guy can operate a local mine or what not. Make it so that there is actual depth to decisions, like a financial sim. Let people create trade guilds or other organizations of that nature.
Role playing skills - Throw the role players a bone and let them participate in a moderate in character senate or public debate.
PvP - Give the PvP people an outlet. Have actual wars. No, not those stupid free for alls of WoW and DAoC. Make it so that people can form marching lines. Combine strategy, tactics, and good old fashion twitching once the lines break apart.
Sneaking skills - Create a Thief life game to give the sneakers something to do.
My point? Levels are far from needed. You could build an action oriented MMORPG with all the fillings of a normal MMORPG, and do it completely without boring as shit levels. It doesn't have to be ATID, it could be exciting in wa
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Who the hell cares if Bush or anyone else tried to get out of being thrown into the slaughter pit that was Vietnam. Bush dodged the draft by joining the reserves and doing everything in his power to get out. I don't see a damn thing wrong with that. I would have done the exact same thing. If I couldn't have gotten the family doctor to find an excuse for me to not get FORCED by the government to go fight in a war I didn't want to fight in, I would have merrily joined the reserves and then done everything to keep from being shipped out.
The political environment is obsessed with one-upping each other with stupid minor political victories. For a politician, a single slip of the tongue or off handed comment that any human would make could be the end of their career. This dumb shit about who tried to dodge what or who said what after they got back is fucking childish and completely irrelevant to real issues.
Kerry came back from his four month tour in Vietnam a left wing nut who wanted to freeze the nuclear arms build up leaving the Soviet Union with the advantage. Bush did just about everything to get out of being shot at, and in the ended succeeded.
Who the fuck cares? They were both CHILDREN. You are talking about two boys who were not old enough to fucking drink. Who gives a shit if Kerry jumped off the left end of the pool and Bush ran away? Hell, I know people who grew up in the 70's that were self declared communist who stuffed every drug into their body they could find, and who are now soccer moms and hold management positions in corporations. No one would dig up their childhood to find all the dumb shit they did before they were men.
Who Bush and Kerry were as CHILDREN is utterly irrelevant. There are a lot of good reasons to dislike Bush and Kerry. I could make a big list for both of them. No where on that list would I bother to mention what they did 40 years ago when they were.
Meh, we're gonna be outbred by the Amish and the fundamentalist Muslim and other assorted backwards religious groups. They'll outbreed the "more enlightened" people, turning democracy against us with sheer numbers, and they'll end up winning with their old fashioned strategy of "making lots of babies so that it doesn't matter if you loose a couple, in the long run".
And by 1950 the blacks will out number the whites 2 to 1 in the US. By 2000 everyone in the US will be speaking Spanish. Please.
The less "enlightened", as you put it, are no threat to the post-industrial nations. The US is exceptionally good at Americanizing its immigrant population quickly such that veils on woman is a pretty slim threat. If anything, the process works in reverse. The US Americanizes people when they come to US universities then send them back less inclined to be follow tradition. Most parts of Europe are not bad at nationalizing their immigrant either. If you haven't noticed, the world is moving away from such practices, even in the so called less "enlightened" parts of the world.
The simple fact of the matter is that in the long run, technology always wins. That rule is even more true in this day and age. The parts of the world where technology is suppressed are little threat to the rest of the world. A Taliban style nation always loses if for no other reason then that they can never dream of keeping up technologically, and the difference between such nations and technological nations only accelerates the more oppressive they are.
Evolution is dead, and that isn't a bad thing. You can't live in a technological society without first doing a number of evolution. In order to have fancy things like computers, you need humans to not only live well past 30, but you need a lot of them, and they need lots of free time. In other words, you need to make people live longer and healthier lives with surviving to do. You need to put them into shelters, give them more food then they need, protect them from infection, and insure that they can crank out lots of babies that all live to see adulthood (instead of suffering terrible childhood mortality rates).
What do you get when this happens? You got a few billion people with the collective capacity to undergo agricultural, industrial, and eventually post industrial revolutions. Sure, your stock might be less discriminating then the stock of the past, but who cares? One the advantages of being a technological species is that you can do evolutions work. For instance, I was a horrible asthmatic when I was young. I should have died 10 times over when I was young. Modern medicine absolutely saved my life on more then one occasion. These days I am a perfectly healthy adult. People with poor eyesight wear glasses. Weak people don't need to run to survive. Half of the population (namely woman) have been freed up to contribute to technology and society of this choose.
The places where this all leads is a good one. Well within the next 100 years, you can almost rest assure that we will start to tinker more with our own genetic code and enhance ourselves further with technology. Things like asthma and diabetes will start to be cured and removed from the population. It wouldn't surprise me if a human 500 years from now is not recognizable as human because it is such a technological and/or genetic wonder.
Evolution is hard at work through technology. For us humans, it is headed for better places.
It is expensive if you are a high school kid with 40 hours a week to blow on a video game. It is less then a one hour worth of wage for most adults. So, it really depends on who you are.
The reason why there is so much bitching and moaning about MMORPGs price is because the target audience are not people with the money. $15 a month is nothing to me, but even spending 10 hours a week on a video game is completely unthinkable to me. That goes triple if any of that 10 hours is less then fun.
I personally love the idea of a massive online world. I would shell out $20 a month without a second thought for it. The difference is that I am not willing to 'spend time' on a game. When I start a game, I want to know that I am going to enjoy it from time zero until it is done. I don't want content denied to me because I don't have the same amount of time to blow as a high school student or someone without a job. My time is too valuable to get off on the slow feeling of 'progression' that MMORPGs almost completely rely on.
So, when an MMORPG can offer me a massive online world that I can simply jump right into and enjoy without ever have to 'pay my dues' (or however you want to word it), I'll shell out as much money as they want without a complaint. Until that day MMORPGs, and yes even WoW, (I was in the beta) will not get a cent. Why pay for a game that revels in drudgery when I can simply give my dollar to Half Life 2, FarCry, Unreal 2004, Counter Strike, and Grand Theft Auto? Massive online worlds are not synonymous with boring drudge work for people with too much time, but you would be hard pressed to tell that from the crap the industry keeps shoveling into a box.
No, I saw the article about the 100,000+ dollar car with the inability to stop at a gas station and quickly recharge, all while having the comfort (and safety) of a coffin. Like I said before, fuel cells are the only thing to make this solar power really do anything to quench oil consumption.
If this is true, this is a pretty interesting advancement. I can't help but be a little skeptical about the price tag they are assigning it, but I am a sour old bastard at heart. Are the prices they are spitting out for one of these things sitting in the Arizona desert or northern Maine? The article threw in some stuff that I found questionable. Namely, it talked about moving away from reliance on foreign oil - utterly ignoring that the US (and most nations for that matter) gets most of its power (in the power grid) from coal. While it would be nice to get away from coal, there are two things stopping this. First, coal is cheap. Second, in recent years they have done a pretty solid job at cleaning up the health risks associated with coal.
I am not saying that this isn't a worthwhile discovery, just that I don't see much in the market that is going to push to adopt this technology other then governments wanting to use something that is cleaner then coal. Oil is good stuff because you can throw it into a car and have it run. The real technology that is going to make solar cells like these worthwhile and get the market onboard would be cheap hydrogen fuel cells you can stuff into a car. Charge up a cheap fuel cell with one of these solar cells, ratchet up the price of gas some more, and now you are talking about cleaner cars and the ability to care about the Middle East about as much as the US cares about Africa (which is to say almost not at all).
The only other two real problems I see is that first; in the north I imagine that the cost per kilowatt hour is much more expensive. I imagine a few feet of snow and -30 F temperatures render these things pretty useless. Second, to power a place like LA I imagine you would need a massive bank of these things. I wonder if a massive bank of these would have an effect upon the environment or the weather patterns in a noticeable way. That said, I suppose if you just throw them all in a desert no one is going to care.
So, neat technology, but I don't expect an energy revolution over night.
First, go back and look at all the post from mine to its parent. No one mentioned where the car was made. In fact, the story is about Japan to begin with, so I have no idea where you pulled the nationality of the car into it.
Secondly, you have absolutely no idea where the car was built. Japanses car companies have hordes of US citizens working for them and have piles of US factories. All of the Japanese autocomapnies most certainly fall under the title of 'multinational'.
Third, I don't give a shit where the car was built or the nationality of the people that own the company. I'll buy whatever car is best for me from whatever company offers the most value. Anyone who is blowing money on cars every 100k is an idiot for sticking with the same company.
If you bothered to read the fucking web site you would quickly realize that this game is hardly distasteful. It isn't a shooter where you try and whack hordes of secret service guards to kill JFK. It sounds like a project to try and show that the shot was impossible. It is a simulation. Just spend thirty seconds reading the website and it becomes pretty clear that the motive for the game is pretty pure. Hell, just skim the FAQ and you should get an idea what these people are about. If it was some KKK website letting you shoot that liberal panzy, I would agree, but it sounds more like a historian with too much time on his hands.
Maybe that sort of car would fly in Europe, but never in the US. You can't convince the average American to spend more money on a car with drastically reduced capabilities. The US is just too damn big to be stuck to a 200 mile radius.
Battery exchanges might be one way of getting around it, but I don't believe for a second that such an exchange would even come close to rivialing how cheap gas is. For all the talk of gas rising in price, it is still cheap stuff. Hell, it is cheaper then bottled water. One day there will come a time when the cost of gas rises such that electric powered cars are cheaper. The second that day hits the change will happen over night. However, that day is most certainly not here yet.
Personally, I won't worry much about it. People will keep working on electric powered cars as this man has done. He might not sell anything, but the research will go into the big pot. When gas powered cars become to expensive some company (or companies) are going to rise up with eletric cars and reap the reward.
I own a 1990 Honda Accord. I don't know what pieces of shit you are buying, but my nearly 15 year old car has had absolutely no major problems and I take no special car of it. Hell, I don't even know how to change my own oil.
Cars are not computers. When people buy a new car every 3 years, it is because they want to. If they are buying a new car every 3 years, it is because it is breaking down, then they are a god damn idiot because they keep buying crap.
There is no 3vil corporate consipracy to force people to keep getting new cars. Car companies get all of their parts from suppliers. The only thing a car company does is put the stuff together. If a supplier sells a car company bad parts that break down, then they lose their contract. If I buy a car and it turns out to be crap, I just don't buy from that same company again. Take off the tin foil hat. Car companies want to sell cars. If electric cars could be made cheaply and even come close to having the same characteristics as a combustion car in all areas, car companies would be killing each other to sell the most.
I can only speak for American companies so other parts of the world are probably different, but I can say that over the past 10 years, American companies have started to become more fanatical about being 'green', at least with companies that deal with chemicals. 30 years ago in your average American corporate engineering lab they used all manner of horrible chemicals and it generally was not a big deal. They built things using terrible side products.
Over the past few years though, I have noticed a pretty dramatic change. All of the companies I have ended up working for (3) have been fanatically dedicated to 'greening up' and have put major amounts of money into changing processes over so that they use more green materials. In fact, a good way to get your project killed is to request the use of something hazardous when it isn't absolutely necessary.
The major reason this change, from my understanding as an engineer and not a policy marker in a company, is that companies are becoming more and more global. The Internet revolution made global companies much more viable and much more efficient. Even small companies are becoming very global. I worked at a company that had 500 people under it, but was located in something like 20 nations. The Internet and advances in IT has really made this sort of set up not only possible, but very effective. The net result is that whenever a company needs to make a product, they need to meet standards of every nations that they intend to sell it in. So, whoever has the lowest standards really IS the standard.
For instance, I was working with a company that was making power supplies. They used to make the batteries out of lead and some other ugly chemicals. They spent a massive pile of money trying to work the lead and other harmful chemicals out of it to meet an EU law. Another company that I worked for that did capacitor work did something similar when they put a pile of R&D money into meeting a Japanese law. I even was working in a project to meet a Chinese standard once - not that China is the most environmentally friendly nation in the world, but they do have some tough laws that they hold foreign businesses to but not their own domestic industries.
Whatever the case, people boo-hoo globalization for environmental reasons, but I can say that in the chemical industry in the US, globalization can take more credit then anything for the greening of the industry.
This is proof positive that no matter how hard you try, you can't weed out all of the idiots. I don't know how I could possibly make something more of an obvious joke, and yet still some idiot thinks I am serious.
the rest of the more educated america get saddled with an incompetant president and the rest of the morons they share the country with
Psst... you are one of those idiots you complain so bitterly about if you can't see the flashing lights around the previous post that screamed JOKE. Do the world a favor and don't vote next election. I don't care if you voted for the same guy as me or not. Just spare the country of your dumb input into the system.
- Karma to burn baby.
NO BLOOD FOR OIL!!!!11!! THE USA IS WORSE THEN CHINA>> CHINA LIEKS TO HELP PEOLE WHILE USA RAPES WOMEN IN ABUGRAVE PRISON AND FALUGJA ON PURPOSE> BUSH JUST WANTS TO MAKE LOTS OF MONEY IN IRAQ B Y SHOOTING PEPLE> HALIBERTON.
Oh wait, wrong thread. Hrm, Bush cutting taxes on geeks... if I could just work in an Iraq/Imperialist US/Bush is 3vil angle I am sure I could make a pile of karma...
Bush is doing this to divert attention from Iraq where he is KILLING BABIES!
w00t, no troll karma for me. All +5 insightful.
My understand was that this bill was the beginings of regulating the private space industry. Personally, I see absolutely no loss if that is the case. I would rather leave the field upon and relativly unregulated other then getting a permit to go up until we have a better understanding as to how the industry is shaping up. Let the leaders take the risks and get out in front. If they want to throw their lives away, let that be their choice. The only time the government should step in, is to ensure that public safety is not in danger.
The RIAA and MPAA should take a lesson. Valve has done a pretty incredible thing. They have done a solid job and snuffing out pirating while managing to avoid pissing off their consumer base. They have offered a product that is not crippled and have managed to protect it without resorting to using the government in the form of the judicial system to act as their personal thugs. This is the way companies should protect their IP, not by using the government as their own private band of thugs.
Europe will never 'pull the fanacial rug', because the rug is mostly American. A full 1/4 of the worlds economy is the American economy. You can't fight a trade war without coming out bloody yourself. Only in the case where a massive economy is crushing a smaller economy (see US vs Cuba) does it work to one side's advantage. Simply put, if it is bad for the American economy, it is hell on earth for the world's economy. The US and Europe are so completely interlinked economically that if either tries to pull away it result in both of them ending up dead. Europe and the US might bicker back and forth about economic issues, but in the end neither of them are going to piss the other off. Europe needs the US as badly, if not more badly then the US needs Europe.
Parent is right. Why just the other day I saw Bush in his citadel of d00m laughing evilly with Cheney.
Bush was like "Har har har! Those puny enviro-freaks in Europe are looking remove the world's dependence on lovely polluting oil! Har har har! Do not worry Cheney, we will stop those enviro-freaks from giving everyone including us power to run our economy."
Joining with Bush's evil laughter, Cheney said, "Har har har! They can not stop us! Only Captain Planet could save them now!"
And at that moment Captain Planet burst through wall, made some witty environmentally friendly retorts, saved the day, and installed Ralph Nader as our new supreme leader.
If Bush really was looking to kiss industries ass, there is no reason why he would block cheap power, no matter where it came from. The oil industry is one very small industry that profits off of oil. EVERY SINGLE OTHER industry is hurt when power is expensive. So, even if Bush eats babies and wants to promote world evil, cheap power is still the name of the game.
What scares me is not what is going to happen in the US. At worst, the US will use it solve a few more crimes and nail everyone and their dog for speeding. I am not saying I like it, but I could think of worse things. Like any institution run by humans, the US government has its fits of stupidity and corruption, but for the most part it tries to be benevolent and more or less succeeds (and no, that was not an invitation to start talking about Iraq). The American propensity towards individualism and a merry fuck you doesn't make a perfect defense against this stuff, but it certainly throws some sand in the cogs.
Now, picture a place like China, North Korea, or Cuba. Imagine if everyone was implanted with one of these bastardly little devices when they are born and the government made no attempt to limit the range which they work at. Now imagine how easy you just made it keep people inside your nation and track their every movement. Throw up detectors around your border and anyone not authorized to cross sounds a pile of alarms. Granted, I am sure people will find a way around it - they always do, but it makes it even uglier for the people trying to escape these nations. Combine tracking with some sick pattern recognition software and a pile of super computers and you can probably create a government with near perfect detection of 'subversive' activities.
All scenarios, without exception, involve corpses. The only questions are how many, who, and how. If the US didn't invade and left UN sanctions in place, the answer would be another 100,000's MORE then had already died, all of which would have been civilian, and they would have died due to shortages caused by sanctions and Saddam's government.
I am not claiming that one options was better then another, but don't be naive enough to think that there was a way out that didn't involve a pile of corpses. If anything bothers me about the debat around Iraq, it is that the body count gets dragged into it with no frame of reference. Being shot is more dramatic and plays up better in the media, but dying due to a simple medical ailment easily treated if sanctions were not in places leaves you just as dead.
So, I am not saying ignore body count, but before you go citing the civilian losses as a reason to take an alternative action, be sure to compare it to the cost of civilian dead resulting in the action you propose. The partisan anti-war group at http://www.iraqbodycount.net/ puts the number of dead to be at most 16,579. Put that number next to the number of Iraq that died due to sanctions and you are talking about a number that is at low end estimates, 1,000% larger.
There were a lot of good reasons to stay the hell out of Iraq. The number of people killed by the US military compared to sanctions was not one of them.
What idiot modded parent insightful? How is a lawsuit and programed to sniff out copywrited stuff different from terrorism? NO ONE FUCKING DIES. For fucks sake people. Grow up and get some perspective. I violently disagree with patent laws as they are, but idiots like the parent don't help our case any.
Everyone likes to blame conservatives for the direction the country is headed, but you know what? I think it has a lot more to do with idiots like the parent. Some idiot spewing that the MPAA is acting like Al Qaeda or some grassroots democrat going door to door declaring Bush to be Hitler reborn DOESN'T HELP. People assume (rightly) that you are a fucking idiot and ignore you.
For fucks sake, you can advocate a position without sounding like some insane religious zealot. Grow the fuck up and keep your mouth shut until you can speak without sounding like a blathering idiot. Your stupid an inane input hurts the cause. Any person who doesn't know much on the subject who would be subjected to parents inane babbling would likely conclude that the MPAA must be doing something right if idiots like parent are against them.
I think that people are missing two very important facts.
1) Iraq will not enforce any such laws any time soon. They could all be using GM seeds and even if soemone did know, the courts wouldn't care. They are far more concerned with police officers getting executed and instability to give two shits about sending out inspectors armed with genetic testing kits and fighting multi-year long legal battles. Simply put, even if this law was to stay, it would be at least another 5 years before anyone would bother to waste manpower to enforce it.
2) Iraq is going to have an election within three months (knock on wood). They can elect whoever they damn well please at that point and the US can't do a damned thing about it. If the new government revokes such rules, then the rules are revoked. Hell, Iraq could scrap every rule the US made if that tickled their fancy.
Look, the 'laws' put in place in Iraq are written in the sand. They are what the US thinks is a good guide line to running a nation. More specifically, they are a neocons wet dream of how to run an economy with a smidgen of practicality thrown in when they are forced to. So, if you want to call it proof that Republicans would turn the world into a dark and evil place if given the chance, then you can certainly make that conclusion. On the other hand, if you want to conclude that the poor Iraqis are fucked because of IP laws, pull your head out of the sand, and pretend you are a geek long enough to actually see what is happening. The laws are not being enforced, and they won't be enforced until long after Iraq has had the chance to change the laws.
Really people. This is Slashdot. I would think geeks could muster enough intelligence to look past their own political views to see forest for the trees. There are lots of conclusions to draw from this story about neocon views on IP laws and the like, but you need to take a massive dose of self delusion to read any further into this. The fact that write ups like the one that was used get through the editors is pathetic.
I think the problem is vastly overstated. In case people have not been watching the news, Iraq is supposed to have an election in January. There is not a thing in the world preventing them from over turning that law, or simply wiping out all American made laws and starting from scratch. On an evil scale of 1 to 10, I give putting in a single stupid and minor law about GM crops into a government which you know ahead of time is going to rewrite its laws a 2, for a 'its the thought that counts evil'.
Why in the hell would an American want a North Korean to have any say what-so-ever in any US affair? Why would an American want China to have any say what-so-ever in the US policy towards Taiwan? Why would the US let people who clearly have no interest in the well being of the US vote on how the US behaves?
Eh, it doesn't matter. The chances of anyone else in the world getting to vote on anything American does is absolutely zero. Americans are about as excited to let the rest of the world control their destiny as they are to pounding nails through their eyes. Hell, the only reason why the US is apart of the UN is because of that big old veto vote they get that says that you can't try and force them to do anything.
Come now, use some imagination. What is the point of content no one will ever see or appreciate? This might come as a surprise, but most people are either unwilling to put in the time to get to level 50 to go on a raid, or simply don't have the time. Eh, it is all well and good for games to exist to for the crack addicts to mindlessly get their fill, but the rest of the world wouldn't mind a game either.
What's the difference between aquiring better armor or aquiring better spells through leveling? Both require you to kill monsters or do quests.
Don't have better armor and the problem is handily solved. If combat is going to be skill based, why would you muddle up the equation by giving someone +100 armor of doom? You don't give the guys in CountStrike +1000 armor, so don't do it in a skill based game. Make armor different. Wear that nice light leather armor and be much quicker. Crawl into some plate mail and feel better protection, but be move slower and get fatigued quicker. Throw on some chain mail and get reasonable mobility and protection from piercing and slashing weapons, but also have absolutely no armor against crushing weapons like war hammers. Do the same for weapons. A 10 foot long pole arm is great for spearing a guy through the gut before he gets close to you or taking down a horse, but utterly worthless if the enemy slips past the tip of the spear and closes with a close range weapon. A dagger has no reach, but if you can get close, a slash across the throat is almost a sure kill.
How do you get spells? Make it so that you just walk into any old mages library and you can collect and memorize 20 spells. Don't have a 'best' spell. Just make them all different and all with massive negative side affects. Maybe you have to hit up a few such mage libraries to get the perfect 20 spell load out. You seem to be under the confused impression that the game MUST require some sort of misery from the player before he or she can have a spell, and that there MUST be better spells and worse spells. You don't need these things.
Don't analyze too deeply into what I say. This is shit plucked from my imagination after a few seconds of thought. There are certainly problems with my ideas that would need to be over come, but for the sake of game design, I sincerely hope that a few seconds of thinking on my part is not the final word imagination. If someone sat down to design an action oriented MMORPG with no levels, I imagine that with a couple more heads and more time then five minutes, they could do better.
Finally, I think you crystallize my argument for me by actually describing a system that is 'levelless'.
Most of the people that bitch about leveling never made it to "the end." In EverQuest, the "end" was when you reached the last level and you joined a raiding guild. Raiding *IS* EverQuest, in my opinion. It takes a shit load of practice, skills, and strategy to defeat encounters in EQ.
When you get to the point where you are doing a raid in EQ, you have all but stopped level, and this is considered to be the fun part? You mean, the game that exists when you are no longer grinding is the best part of the game? The part of the game where it is not levels, but strategy and tactics? Hell, you describe a system where you don't need levels that is fun, and this is based off a game that wasn't balanced to be level less to begin with! And the reason why not everyone can enjoy this?
in a raid in Everquest, no amount of practice would teach them to kill that mob...Through the level grinding of EQ... You know the game mechanics. That only comes with experience.
You are absolutely right in that an EBayed character in EQ is doomed. What you utterly ignore is the fact that Everquest was designed from the ground up to built upon progressive levels. An EBay character is doomed because there is no 'easing in'. The only thing an EBay character can do that is worth while is go fight the big fish, and without experie
The last guy said:
Insert some boring technical details about tweaks to EQ's basic level for the sake of leveling gameplay here.
Here is the problem with MMORPGs. They are currently about leveling. Period. They are the types of games where if you told someone that today your level will be frozen, they would quit their account on the spot. The entire point of the game is to get more levels. Obviously some people love this dumb crap and are more then happy to shell out 15 a month for it. Good for them. That said, the market for this kind of OCD game play is limited. You will never get me to play a game where the point of the game is to gain levels, get more spells and shits... so that you can gain more levels. That sounds like some sort of sick test you perform on rats, not humans. The fact that people can not conceive of a world without levels is utterly scary, and I hope that developers have equally as limited imaginations.
How do you build a world without levels? Simple, build a world based upon player skill, and offer a variety of player skill sets to pick from. Hell, just make a list of player skills and make it so that the game has games to accommodate them.
Twitch skills - Simple enough, make some combat based upon twitch skills. Acrobatic classes in particular would be very well suited for a 'twitchy' game play.
Tactical skills - Make it so that magic or some other element of combat is based upon tactics. Creating a complex magic system would go a long way to do this. Imagine if when a mage casts, every spell they cast results in good and bad side effects for many other spells.
Example: A mage starts by casting a spell that makes cold spells more likely to catastrophically fumble, and also has the side effect of making fire spells more powerful. He then starts to cast a fire spell that does damage to his opponent, but also leaves him weaker to cold spells. His opponent realizes what tactic is being used and so casts a spell that drastically delays the effect of fire spells from kicking in, giving him time to try and alter the effect into something more pleasant. Rinse and repeat. Instead of making it so that every spell is a boring +10 fire damage, all spells have massive draw backs. Two or three minutes of fighting like this and there could be a few dozen effects that both mages need to consider before spam casting at each other. They might even slow down, stop and think a little before casting. The game becomes far more tactical then just nuking the shit out of the other guy as fast as possible.
Puzzle Skills - Make the crafting system based on something like puzzle pirates or some other type of puzzle.
Social Skills - Create a complex political and leadership system. Throw in some sulk and dagger stuff in to give the twitch and tactical people some fun.
Strategic Skills - Have it so that leaders need to make complex overall decisions about resources and strategic defense and fighting. A person might rise through the social ranks to gain some grand strategic position. Hell, offer lower level strategic positions so that one guy can operate a local mine or what not. Make it so that there is actual depth to decisions, like a financial sim. Let people create trade guilds or other organizations of that nature.
Role playing skills - Throw the role players a bone and let them participate in a moderate in character senate or public debate.
PvP - Give the PvP people an outlet. Have actual wars. No, not those stupid free for alls of WoW and DAoC. Make it so that people can form marching lines. Combine strategy, tactics, and good old fashion twitching once the lines break apart.
Sneaking skills - Create a Thief life game to give the sneakers something to do.
My point? Levels are far from needed. You could build an action oriented MMORPG with all the fillings of a normal MMORPG, and do it completely without boring as shit levels. It doesn't have to be ATID, it could be exciting in wa