"What exactly is enjoyable about a game you cannot lose?"
It's not that you cannot lose, it's that you have to work to succeed. You can grind out XP and gold on easy mobs all day and be bored stiff, or you can try to solo group quests or go into dungeons that actually require a modicum of teamwork and skill to complete.
A low death penalty encourages you to take risks and do fun, challenging stuff because the only real penalty for failure is failure itself. You don't have to go do boring stuff for 2 hours to make up for the failure. You can try to do the fun stuff again, try a different strategy, or a different group of people without having to worry about being forced to go back to boring crap.
Remember the old carrot and stick thing? Death penalties are sticks. EQ had a big stick, WoW has a small one. (Insert obvious phallic joke.) Loot and bragging rights are the carrot. EQ and WoW both have pretty equivalent carrots.
A bigger stick doesn't make the carrot sweeter for most people. It's the challenge you have to overcome to get the carrot that matters there.
Bragging about how big your stick is just masochistic and every bit as shallow as the phallic equivalent.
I always remember that fact and how i learned it - from one of those cheesy science movies they showed when the teacher didn't feel like teaching. The narrator compared the difference in distance to the sun like being 45 feet away from a campfire in summer and 40 feet away in winter. It's not the distance but the angle of the rays coming down and the resultant density of light that heats us up.
Logging off just reinforces the power that the viratual "rapist" holds over his prey. He forced that behavior from you - he is in control of your actions. Running away (IRL or online) doesn't empower you, but it can spare you from the worst the rapist has to offer.
Hell, I'll kill a man in a fair fight... or if I think he's gonna start a fair fight, or if he bothers me, or if there's a woman, or if I'm gettin' paid - mostly only when I'm gettin' paid.
As both a Star Wars and a Firefly fan, my first reaction to this news was disbelief, but as i read a bit and thought a bit, i realized that i agree - Serenity is better. Of course you have to realize that no matter what the poll actually said, both were judged on their entire series, not just on the individual movies. Star Wars includes episodes 1-6 and Serenity includes Firefly. Would you rather watch Episode 2 or any 4 episodes of Firefly? Star Wars was the phenomenon that it was because it was new and amazing. Serenity was better because the story and characters are better.
Plus, be honest, when the Serenity and her 'escorts' come flying out of that nebula, don't shivers just run down your spine? No scene comes close to that "whoa" factor in all of Star Wars, imo. (Blasphemous as it may be to say, the light saber fight between Darth Maul, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Qui-Gon Jin probably comes the closest.)
Whether Serenity (+Firefly) is better than a lot of the others is a much tougher question.
lol - The guild's name was "Roman Legion," but by including brackets i turned it into an html tag and made it disappear. When will i learn to preview?;)
The whole thing is so much more demented than the little snippet quoted here. Thompson is very clearly off his rocker, quoting scripture and praising god for this opportunity to destroy Take-Two. It's a must-read.
I haven't heard too many cases of false positives. I suspect they only have it set up to flag you if you try to log on to one account from two separate IPs at the same time, but it could be something else at work. I think the scamming angle here is a non-issue. A few people might make a little money with it, but before it got to the point that it had any impact on game play i'll bet they would just put a hold on restoration requests.
Oh, and also...according to a friend of mine who had his account hacked, you don't get any money restored. You're lucky if you get all the items you had equipped. You're almost certainly going to lose additional gear sets and crafting mats that you had laying around.
1) The game is prohibited from communicating with outside apps that could get you the data in real-time. You could certainly hack something up to do it, but you'd risk getting your account suspended.
2) You could pre-download all the data for the arena teams in your bracket. I've considered doing this, but in order to make work with any kind of efficiency you would have to more or less write an entire database inside of WoW's scripting language. You'd be dealing with data on potentially thousands of characters. You'd likely experience significant lag while using the mod, perhaps so much so that your PvP performance would be more hindered than it would be flying blind.
It's really not worth the trouble. Best use for the Armory is to go there AFTER you got beat and try to figure out why it happened.
They have no way of knowing when your account was hacked; they have only your word for that.
They can track the IP address you logged on from. They already do that to nail people who are sharing accounts. It's not foolproof, but it's better than nothing.
They may not be keeping track of every single change. Sure, you could screenshot their website, but that wouldn't prove anything.
If they're not tracking every single change then they should be in order to fight gold sellers. I'm betting they are and they just don't want to deal with the overhead involved in looking it all up.
Even if they knew with absolute certainty what you had, returning your stuff would be a bad idea. This means they have to track it to whoever has it now, and undo all the transactions that were a result of your account being hacked -- but that could be a fairly large butterfly effect, and could result in a major disruption of all kinds of people who were only very loosely connected to the theft of your items.
Chances are very good that everything you have on your character that would be worth selling or trading is bound to you and cannot be sold or traded to another player. The only significant thing that can come out of your character is gold, and the amounts that most would would produce is a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of gold that is generated every day through quests and drops.
The alternative isn't much better -- simply generate your items out of thin air, which means there are now dupe items. I believe the other poster was suggesting a simple scam -- you let your account be hacked, the hacker gives your equipment away, or sells it or trades it, leaving your char with nothing, then you whine to Blizzard and get all your stuff back -- which means you just GAVE the hacker a pile of free stuff. Rinse and repeat a few times, then you both get rich off of it and start playing the market.
There would be no dupe items, just gold and new items. While you certainly could abuse this, they already have policies in place to prevent it. They track how many restoration requests you make. They warn you that they will only do it a limited number of times if they agree to do it at all. Additionally they usually take days if not weeks to respond to these requests, which can be very frustrated to the person who lost their stuff, but is certainly a deterrant to people who want to make some quick cash and get back to playing.
Anyway, is WoW uniquely "hackable", or are "hacked" accounts still the result of some moron who gave away his password to a phishing site, or snagged by a keylogger, or set it to "LeroyJenkins123"?
No more so than any online account. Keyloggers make up the majority, phishing a significant minority, brute force or "educated guesses" a very miniscule amount.
And again i say...apples and oranges. Sometimes you just have to acknowledge that just because you don't like apples, it doesn't mean they are a ripoff in general.
Some people will never understand the MMO pricing system.
Farther along you said you had been playing Starcraft for 7 years for $40. That's great, but it's apples and oranges. You've been playing the same thing over and over for seven years. I've been playing WoW for 2+ years, and aside from repeats of things that i chose to do to help friends or to get a special piece of gear, i have been doing new stuff the whole time.
Even if i only spent 2 hours a week playing WoW and i paid 1 month at a time (no bulk discount) that's about $1.88 an hour for my amusement on top of the initial cost, which works out to about $0.41 per hour for both the base game and the expansion. $2.29 per hour. You'll have a hard time finding that kind of return for your money anywhere else for a constant stream of new content.
Oh yeah - Blizzard claims 2.4 million units sold during the first 24 hours of their release. I'm sure that includes pre-orders and other inflators, but even so...wow. How can we even be discussing the "amazing January sales numbers" without mentioning that?
I'm sure it's just because the focus of the site of the original story is on consoles and handhelds, but it would be interesting to see how the PC numbers stack up as well. My hunch is that Blizzard's numbers for The Burning Crusade would blow all the others away. Maybe even all of them combined?
It sounds to me like you really just aren't finding classes you want to play, which is a thematic issue, not a class/classless one.
You keep saying that the content/mechanics trade-off doesn't exist, but it quite clearly does. Think of it in terms of preparing for a pnp game. If i have the same set of characters week after week, then i can tailor adventures to their skills and abilities. For example, if i know one of the characters can fly, then i can feel free to put a key to the adventure up on a floating island high in the sky. If i don't know who's going to be playing or what their capabilities are then i have to think about the different types of characters who could be playing and come up with alternative ways for them to get to the key. As a sentient gm i can come up with some of it on the fly - that's a luxury computer game designers don't have, so for every possible combination of skills, they have to consider how that character will approach any given challenge in the game and add content to account for it. More options means every single challenge in the game needs more time devoted to it, which means less time for new stuff.
It's not that the game designers don't think anyone would want to play a tank-mage - it's that the costs of allowing it outweigh the benefits. Will the 5% of players who might like to try playing a tank-mage be happy playing something else? Mostly - yes. Can we live without the 1% of players who won't be happy with a game unless it allows them to play a tank-mage? Yes.
They're not doing it to piss you off - they're trying to make the best game that the time and money they have allotted will allow. Sometimes there are trade-offs.
If there ever was a P&P RPG in need of computerized assistance, it was RoleMaster. *sigh*
I hear that! The game is practically unplayable unless you have a gm who is so passionate about the system that he has most of it memorized and what he doesn't have memorized he has indexed and cross-referenced. We used to tell our GM not to give us experience because we didn't want to go through the hassle of levelling up.
Sure, some games are great without them, but in general, classes make games better because they can serve as thematic shorthand, prevent you from making choices that hobble yourself through ignorance about the system, and most importantly, provide simple balance controls that allow the game designers to concentrate more on content than mechanics.
In a single-player game you can get away with a lot less balancing because you can add dynamic scripting to encounters to adjust the difficulty on the fly, though programming that still takes time away from content creation and most companies won't do it. Certain combos that make the challenges of the game trivial almost always crop up. That's not really a huge problem for a single-player game, but as soon as you get into a multiplayer environment, especially in anything that has PvP, balance becomes MUCH more important.
There's nothing about a class system that necessarily favors Tolkien-esque fantasy. Samurai, Ninja, Gunslinger, Inventor, Pilot, Spy - all very non-Tolkien-esque and all very viable classes for games in their respective genres.
There's nothing wrong with class-based or classless systems in general, but there are plenty of good reasons to use or avoid either one.
(BTW, if you've never seen a classless system that had hundreds of skills, you should take a look at GURPS or Rolemaster. The more immersive and detailed the virtual worlds become, the more demand there will be for skill diversification. Table-top games are still a long way ahead of computer games in that respect.)
We have classes because it is easier to balance 12 classes with a finite set of skills for each class than it is to balance every possible combination of 100 different skills. The less time you spend balancing the more time you can spend creating content for those things to be balanced against, and content is king.
I am shocked, SHOCKED, i say, that a game that permits and even celebrates player vs. player griefing and models itself as a cutthroat cpitalist system would be plagued by cheating and corruption!
Please. EVE is a game for bullies and might-makes-right, power-trippers. Is it any wonder that the people who made it and run it would ascribe to those same philosophies and behaviors?
If you took them at their face value, one would mean you are in favor of choice in general, and the other would mean you were in favor of life in general. They don't actually mean anything, and that is why they can never be anything other than marketing speak.
But we don't have to take them at their face value. They don't exist in a vacuum. They are always used in context of the abortion debate, and even if you were walking by a conversation on the street and all you heard was the phrase "pro-choice" or "pro-life" you would know what the topic of discussion was.
I will grant you the point that if i were attempting to explain the issue to someone who came from another planet, those are not the terms i would use to describe the positions, but since the vast majority of situations where those phrases might come up do not exist in a vacuum, the ambiguity of the actual verbiage is irrelevant.
As a follow-up: what would be better. Pro-abortion certainly does not present a better viw of the position for the very reasons we have been discussing.
You could probably convince me that anti-abortion was a more accurate depiction of the position, but using it in the context of the real-world abortion debate does not provide a better picture. As a matter of fact, with context, it provides less information to the listener. Anti-abortion is a term used both by pro-choice parties and by neutral parties. If someone says pro-life, at least you usually know that they are on that side. By the same token, calling someone pro-abortion, in context, usually implies that you are on the opposite side of the debate.
Dictionary-precision is actually less informative than context-driven meaning in this situation.
Most pro-choice people know what an abortion really is.
Uh, isn't the whole debate between so-called pro-choice and pro-life people over what an abortion really is? And don't many people have a wide variety of opinions of what it really is?
Do you really not comprehend that i was talking about the details of the actual medical procedure? Pro-choice people don't kid themselves into thinking that doctors wave a magic wand and a zygote goes *poof*, therefore calling themselves pro-choice doesn't gloss over anything.
The terms are as accurate as short catchphrases that encompass diverse groups of people can be.
The two terms are strictly marketing terms for the sake of propaganda. They are not accurate, nor are they intended to be. They are intended to be evocative and to cause people to think a certain way, and this debate has proven just how successful they have been.
What is dinsingenuous about the term "pro-choice"? Yes, it puts a better face on the position than "pro-abortion" or "pro-babykilling", and yes it implies that its opponents are anti-choice, but it is also closer to the truth of a complex position than those other terms are. By that standard, it is accurate, and so is "pro-life".
Slashdot Mirror
"What exactly is enjoyable about a game you cannot lose?"
It's not that you cannot lose, it's that you have to work to succeed. You can grind out XP and gold on easy mobs all day and be bored stiff, or you can try to solo group quests or go into dungeons that actually require a modicum of teamwork and skill to complete.
A low death penalty encourages you to take risks and do fun, challenging stuff because the only real penalty for failure is failure itself. You don't have to go do boring stuff for 2 hours to make up for the failure. You can try to do the fun stuff again, try a different strategy, or a different group of people without having to worry about being forced to go back to boring crap.
Remember the old carrot and stick thing? Death penalties are sticks. EQ had a big stick, WoW has a small one. (Insert obvious phallic joke.) Loot and bragging rights are the carrot. EQ and WoW both have pretty equivalent carrots.
A bigger stick doesn't make the carrot sweeter for most people. It's the challenge you have to overcome to get the carrot that matters there.
Bragging about how big your stick is just masochistic and every bit as shallow as the phallic equivalent.
I always remember that fact and how i learned it - from one of those cheesy science movies they showed when the teacher didn't feel like teaching. The narrator compared the difference in distance to the sun like being 45 feet away from a campfire in summer and 40 feet away in winter. It's not the distance but the angle of the rays coming down and the resultant density of light that heats us up.
Weird how some stuff sticks with you.
Logging off just reinforces the power that the viratual "rapist" holds over his prey. He forced that behavior from you - he is in control of your actions. Running away (IRL or online) doesn't empower you, but it can spare you from the worst the rapist has to offer.
If you're going to start keeping students away from sources of misinformation you're probably going to have to fire a lot of teachers.
Hell, I'll kill a man in a fair fight... or if I think he's gonna start a fair fight, or if he bothers me, or if there's a woman, or if I'm gettin' paid - mostly only when I'm gettin' paid.
- Jayne Cobb
"They won't see this comin'."
As both a Star Wars and a Firefly fan, my first reaction to this news was disbelief, but as i read a bit and thought a bit, i realized that i agree - Serenity is better. Of course you have to realize that no matter what the poll actually said, both were judged on their entire series, not just on the individual movies. Star Wars includes episodes 1-6 and Serenity includes Firefly. Would you rather watch Episode 2 or any 4 episodes of Firefly? Star Wars was the phenomenon that it was because it was new and amazing. Serenity was better because the story and characters are better.
Plus, be honest, when the Serenity and her 'escorts' come flying out of that nebula, don't shivers just run down your spine? No scene comes close to that "whoa" factor in all of Star Wars, imo. (Blasphemous as it may be to say, the light saber fight between Darth Maul, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Qui-Gon Jin probably comes the closest.)
Whether Serenity (+Firefly) is better than a lot of the others is a much tougher question.
But "Are current situation," is par for the course? ;)
lol - The guild's name was "Roman Legion," but by including brackets i turned it into an html tag and made it disappear. When will i learn to preview? ;)
The guild was camping his corpse. He just logged off and came back a few days later when they weren't around.
The whole thing is so much more demented than the little snippet quoted here. Thompson is very clearly off his rocker, quoting scripture and praising god for this opportunity to destroy Take-Two. It's a must-read.
I haven't heard too many cases of false positives. I suspect they only have it set up to flag you if you try to log on to one account from two separate IPs at the same time, but it could be something else at work. I think the scamming angle here is a non-issue. A few people might make a little money with it, but before it got to the point that it had any impact on game play i'll bet they would just put a hold on restoration requests.
Oh, and also...according to a friend of mine who had his account hacked, you don't get any money restored. You're lucky if you get all the items you had equipped. You're almost certainly going to lose additional gear sets and crafting mats that you had laying around.
Tougher than you think.
1) The game is prohibited from communicating with outside apps that could get you the data in real-time. You could certainly hack something up to do it, but you'd risk getting your account suspended.
2) You could pre-download all the data for the arena teams in your bracket. I've considered doing this, but in order to make work with any kind of efficiency you would have to more or less write an entire database inside of WoW's scripting language. You'd be dealing with data on potentially thousands of characters. You'd likely experience significant lag while using the mod, perhaps so much so that your PvP performance would be more hindered than it would be flying blind.
It's really not worth the trouble. Best use for the Armory is to go there AFTER you got beat and try to figure out why it happened.
RP'ers should not be looking up each other on the armory - it's ooc info.
They have no way of knowing when your account was hacked; they have only your word for that.
They can track the IP address you logged on from. They already do that to nail people who are sharing accounts. It's not foolproof, but it's better than nothing.
They may not be keeping track of every single change. Sure, you could screenshot their website, but that wouldn't prove anything.
If they're not tracking every single change then they should be in order to fight gold sellers. I'm betting they are and they just don't want to deal with the overhead involved in looking it all up.
Even if they knew with absolute certainty what you had, returning your stuff would be a bad idea. This means they have to track it to whoever has it now, and undo all the transactions that were a result of your account being hacked -- but that could be a fairly large butterfly effect, and could result in a major disruption of all kinds of people who were only very loosely connected to the theft of your items.
Chances are very good that everything you have on your character that would be worth selling or trading is bound to you and cannot be sold or traded to another player. The only significant thing that can come out of your character is gold, and the amounts that most would would produce is a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of gold that is generated every day through quests and drops.
The alternative isn't much better -- simply generate your items out of thin air, which means there are now dupe items. I believe the other poster was suggesting a simple scam -- you let your account be hacked, the hacker gives your equipment away, or sells it or trades it, leaving your char with nothing, then you whine to Blizzard and get all your stuff back -- which means you just GAVE the hacker a pile of free stuff. Rinse and repeat a few times, then you both get rich off of it and start playing the market.
There would be no dupe items, just gold and new items. While you certainly could abuse this, they already have policies in place to prevent it. They track how many restoration requests you make. They warn you that they will only do it a limited number of times if they agree to do it at all. Additionally they usually take days if not weeks to respond to these requests, which can be very frustrated to the person who lost their stuff, but is certainly a deterrant to people who want to make some quick cash and get back to playing.
Anyway, is WoW uniquely "hackable", or are "hacked" accounts still the result of some moron who gave away his password to a phishing site, or snagged by a keylogger, or set it to "LeroyJenkins123"?
No more so than any online account. Keyloggers make up the majority, phishing a significant minority, brute force or "educated guesses" a very miniscule amount.
And again i say...apples and oranges. Sometimes you just have to acknowledge that just because you don't like apples, it doesn't mean they are a ripoff in general.
Some people will never understand the MMO pricing system.
Farther along you said you had been playing Starcraft for 7 years for $40. That's great, but it's apples and oranges. You've been playing the same thing over and over for seven years. I've been playing WoW for 2+ years, and aside from repeats of things that i chose to do to help friends or to get a special piece of gear, i have been doing new stuff the whole time.
Even if i only spent 2 hours a week playing WoW and i paid 1 month at a time (no bulk discount) that's about $1.88 an hour for my amusement on top of the initial cost, which works out to about $0.41 per hour for both the base game and the expansion. $2.29 per hour. You'll have a hard time finding that kind of return for your money anywhere else for a constant stream of new content.
Oh yeah - Blizzard claims 2.4 million units sold during the first 24 hours of their release. I'm sure that includes pre-orders and other inflators, but even so...wow. How can we even be discussing the "amazing January sales numbers" without mentioning that?
I'm sure it's just because the focus of the site of the original story is on consoles and handhelds, but it would be interesting to see how the PC numbers stack up as well. My hunch is that Blizzard's numbers for The Burning Crusade would blow all the others away. Maybe even all of them combined?
It sounds to me like you really just aren't finding classes you want to play, which is a thematic issue, not a class/classless one.
You keep saying that the content/mechanics trade-off doesn't exist, but it quite clearly does. Think of it in terms of preparing for a pnp game. If i have the same set of characters week after week, then i can tailor adventures to their skills and abilities. For example, if i know one of the characters can fly, then i can feel free to put a key to the adventure up on a floating island high in the sky. If i don't know who's going to be playing or what their capabilities are then i have to think about the different types of characters who could be playing and come up with alternative ways for them to get to the key. As a sentient gm i can come up with some of it on the fly - that's a luxury computer game designers don't have, so for every possible combination of skills, they have to consider how that character will approach any given challenge in the game and add content to account for it. More options means every single challenge in the game needs more time devoted to it, which means less time for new stuff.
It's not that the game designers don't think anyone would want to play a tank-mage - it's that the costs of allowing it outweigh the benefits. Will the 5% of players who might like to try playing a tank-mage be happy playing something else? Mostly - yes. Can we live without the 1% of players who won't be happy with a game unless it allows them to play a tank-mage? Yes.
They're not doing it to piss you off - they're trying to make the best game that the time and money they have allotted will allow. Sometimes there are trade-offs.
If there ever was a P&P RPG in need of computerized assistance, it was RoleMaster. *sigh*
I hear that! The game is practically unplayable unless you have a gm who is so passionate about the system that he has most of it memorized and what he doesn't have memorized he has indexed and cross-referenced. We used to tell our GM not to give us experience because we didn't want to go through the hassle of levelling up.
Sure, some games are great without them, but in general, classes make games better because they can serve as thematic shorthand, prevent you from making choices that hobble yourself through ignorance about the system, and most importantly, provide simple balance controls that allow the game designers to concentrate more on content than mechanics.
In a single-player game you can get away with a lot less balancing because you can add dynamic scripting to encounters to adjust the difficulty on the fly, though programming that still takes time away from content creation and most companies won't do it. Certain combos that make the challenges of the game trivial almost always crop up. That's not really a huge problem for a single-player game, but as soon as you get into a multiplayer environment, especially in anything that has PvP, balance becomes MUCH more important.
There's nothing about a class system that necessarily favors Tolkien-esque fantasy. Samurai, Ninja, Gunslinger, Inventor, Pilot, Spy - all very non-Tolkien-esque and all very viable classes for games in their respective genres.
There's nothing wrong with class-based or classless systems in general, but there are plenty of good reasons to use or avoid either one.
(BTW, if you've never seen a classless system that had hundreds of skills, you should take a look at GURPS or Rolemaster. The more immersive and detailed the virtual worlds become, the more demand there will be for skill diversification. Table-top games are still a long way ahead of computer games in that respect.)
We have classes because it is easier to balance 12 classes with a finite set of skills for each class than it is to balance every possible combination of 100 different skills. The less time you spend balancing the more time you can spend creating content for those things to be balanced against, and content is king.
I am shocked, SHOCKED, i say, that a game that permits and even celebrates player vs. player griefing and models itself as a cutthroat cpitalist system would be plagued by cheating and corruption!
Please. EVE is a game for bullies and might-makes-right, power-trippers. Is it any wonder that the people who made it and run it would ascribe to those same philosophies and behaviors?
I will grant you the point that if i were attempting to explain the issue to someone who came from another planet, those are not the terms i would use to describe the positions, but since the vast majority of situations where those phrases might come up do not exist in a vacuum, the ambiguity of the actual verbiage is irrelevant.
As a follow-up: what would be better. Pro-abortion certainly does not present a better viw of the position for the very reasons we have been discussing.
You could probably convince me that anti-abortion was a more accurate depiction of the position, but using it in the context of the real-world abortion debate does not provide a better picture. As a matter of fact, with context, it provides less information to the listener. Anti-abortion is a term used both by pro-choice parties and by neutral parties. If someone says pro-life, at least you usually know that they are on that side. By the same token, calling someone pro-abortion, in context, usually implies that you are on the opposite side of the debate.
Dictionary-precision is actually less informative than context-driven meaning in this situation.