Nothing ever changes. This is the exact argument that they made in the 1900's when the FDA was first trying to reduce the number of human body parts that made it into canned meat: "Waaaaaa, you're going to put us out of business! Waaaaaaaa, no one could ever collect this much information!"
Lol, this is exactly what I was talking about; see my post right below yours. I've been sitting in on lectures on the Progressive Era for the last two weeks, and the fact that the large meatpacking companies supported the regulation was one of the more interesting tidbits I learned.
From the summary: "'Lobbyists from corporate mega-agribusiness designed this program to destroy traditional small sustainable agriculture,' says Genell Pridgen"
It's true. When The Jungle was published, TR responded with the Pure Food and Drug Act, which regulated and inspected meat packing plants (he also went vegetarian for a little while, which, if you know TR, shows you how much he was affected by Sinclair's book).
Contrary to what many people might think, the large meat companies supported the act. It 1) Improved public perception of the safety of meat, increasing sales, 2) Opened up American meats to the European market and 3) Added significant costs to the industry, which put their smaller competitors out of business.
>>Someone with a high BMI might be overweight - or they might be in really good shape and have lots of muscle. Just something to think about.
I'm 290 pounds, and 6'6", with a touch over 20% body fat. With 0% body fat, I'd weigh 230 pounds, which would give me an "overweight" BMI of 26.6. At 0% body fat.
It's a hideously broken metric and needs to go. Body fat percentage should be the main standard for calculating obesity.
I believe there has been talk in the past of not including a main game executable on the disk and only copies that have been activated at checkout will be able to download it.
Yeah, Sony is starting to roll this out. Patapon 2 is a download only title, which means that if you buy it at Gamestop, the box only contains a little code that you type in to download at home. So you need to buy your own media (a memory stick) to hold their software on it. It takes up about a third of mine.
Sony allows you to download a product you buy a total of five times (or at least they used to, I haven't looked recently), which means that you don't really own the software at all. But then again, we've been trained that way by Microsoft and all the other big companies with their activation schemes (I had to call Microsoft to explain why I'd activated my copy of Office 5 times - every time my lemon of a laptop broke and I took it in for warranty they gave me a loaner - 6 activations in as many months).
Personally, I think that if you do indeed have a license (as the music and software people claim), and don't actually own your copy of the software, then they should be obligated to provide you with a copy if you lose it, since the license means you have a right to enjoy it for your own personal benefit as long as you like. A law stating this would do the trick nicely.
Unless you're on a multi-year project (and you might be, considering the anonymous posting), coding does take a long time. I'd guess that an average project these days takes minimum 50 people over the course of a year and a half
Pfft. I used to work in the video game industry, and we had exactly two programmers. My friends at Midway San Diego had exactly two programmers (an engine coder and a tools coder). Various playstation games a friend of mine at Sony worked for had a team of like 5 to 10 programmers. ID software has a couple. An independent game studio in Carlsbad a friend of mine used to work at (they did a port for the Cars video game, and various other B-grade games) likewise had a few coders.
Take a look at one of those huge credit listings some times. The actual number of coders is usually quite small. There's just a lot of people on it to account for all the QA/Testing, sound development, art, management, promotions, marketing, community managers, etc.
It's still quite possible to make a successful game out of your garage. Probably not for an Xbox or Playstation or Wii (since the dev kits are more than most groups of friends want to pay), but development for the PC or Xbox arcade has a low barrier to entry. I'd say the minimum size would be a coder and an artsy person.
I wish more games would take the 'more is more' approach to enemies that Serious Sam did. I loved the HUGE SCREAMING HORDES of bad guys that would try to zerg you down. It was a nice change of pace from, say, Unreal's 'kill a bad guy, which triggers another bad guy, because the engine chokes and dies if two mobs are on the screen at the same time'. And I liked Unreal. More games should have more swarms.
Ditto. There was something very satisfying about fighting 800 monsters on screen at once.
After playing a little bit of WoW again after Lich King came out, yeah, it was amazingly tedious after having played AoC and WAR. EVE is the only game with more tedious travel, but the concept of trading off cargo space over time is one of the primary mechanics that drives the economy. Different regions produce different things (like Electrical Engineering datacores) which someone needs to ship to the final destination, unless buyers want to fly over to the place themselves. But they're usually willing to pay a markup on them to avoid having to spend half an hour of real life time flying out and back.
WoW didn't have linked flight paths when it came out, which meant that if you were flying a long distance, not only was it incredibly tedious, but you also couldn't get up to go grab a sandwich or something. It was actually the main reason I played a mage in the game - they could teleport to different cities, which did a lot to eliminate the hated tedium of travel in the game.
And maybe this paper was given the bum's rush, but I think it was less "conspiracy to silence critics of the almighty environmentalists" and more "oh, God, let's just get on with this already."
Funny, when the Bush administration quashed pro-global warming papers, you were all howling about it.
I'm not sure the EPA should be in the business of quashing papers at all, if you ask me.
>>Most drugs that don't get FDA approval do so for a reason.
Sure, but not all reasons are the same. If a drug causes a slight increase in blood pressure, that could be enough to get it blocked from ever seeing the market. But if people took the weight loss drug in question, the loss of fat might counteract it... essentially I think a policy of informed consent should be adopted.
The removal of Vioxx from the market, for example, infuriated my landlord at the time, since the only other drug he could use was liquid morphine, and so he slept 16 hours a day (to control his arthritis of the spine, very painful). He would have been more than happy to accept a slightly increased risk of heart valve damage in exchange for, you know, being able to live his life.
Go to a dance instructor. You've got the money. Pay for lessons. Then go to group dance lessons. Meet people there and then get groups going to dance clubs.
All your problems will disappear.
Unless you're a girl. All the above assumes you're a boy. You're a boy, right? OK, then go learn to dance.
Yep.
I took salsa lessons for a year, and went out to salsa clubs 1-3 nights a week for a year. Did it to impress one girl. That didn't work out, but a tall girl nearly threw herself at me at the lessons (I'm a tall guy), and while that didn't work out, when I went to the ballroom dance club at my college, a hot asian girl came up to talk to me (she was the club greeter, but I didn't know that), we danced, and now here we are married 7 years later.
People are just waiting for the BD-R disc's to come down in price, $15 for 1 disc is too much, blu-ray needs piracy to succeed.
Heh, I don't know why this was modded funny... it's probably true.
Blurays are just too expensive to buy. Planet Earth was certainly worth it, but when I was at Best Buy a couple days ago and looking at buying Taken as a present for my wife, it was ~10 bucks for a DVD, and ~30 bucks for a BD.
So I went home and added the Bluray to my Netflix queue.
No, you live in a fantasy world where drug makers work for the greater good instead of their bottom line. They will charge the amount that makes them the most profit.
I think you're missing the point that profit = gross income - costs. If you develop 10 drugs at a cost of millions per drug, and only one of them make it out of FDA approval, that one drug has to recover the costs of all 10 drugs in order for the company to turn a profit. And they have to do it in the few years they have before it goes generic.
If the drug companies don't think they can sell a drug against a certain medical condition at a price point that's profitable for them, they won't make it. See orphan drugs.
Not exactly. A friend of mine is the lead pharmacist for a company that specializes in making orphan drugs. They are a low production facility, and it takes a lot of grunt work to get the production lines certified, but that's what they do. They're the only source for a couple different chemo drugs in America. Just because large manufacturers won't make them doesn't mean they won't get made.
I think you're more referring to the problem that drug companies won't focus R&D money on treating rare diseases, which is why we have government programs.
>>Because the drug makers can charge whatever they want for them, as long as the patent lasts?
Because you live in a fantasy world where drug costs are set independent of R&D costs, and have to be set high enough to make up for all the vast majority of drugs which fail to make it to market? Look at the cost of brand name drugs versus generics some time.
>>Yes. And before there were rules like that, you were paying with corpses and body parts for them. Literally.
I didn't suggest eliminating all controls. If we could look at case studies on European-approved drugs that have been out for, say, 10 years and use that as a basis to cheaply approve them in America, it'd probably help. (In the case of Thalidomide, a case study analysis on it would have been enough to not get it FDA approved, and probably yanked from European markets as well.)
>>How many people seriously drop the coin to do this?
My motherboard has SLI support (I bought it in December 2004, on the off chance the numbers would make sense in the future.) But when it came time to replace my 6800, it make more sense to buy a 7900 (which was like 10x faster) rather than a second 6800, which probably would have entailed needing a PSU upgrade as well.
When it came time to replace my 7900, it made more sense to get an 8800 than a second 7900. When it came time to replace the 8800, it made more sense to get a 200-series.
At some point, I guess, I'll need to get a new motherboard (though I can run all games just fine, with my CPU upgraded about 2 years back to a 4800+ X2), but since I can run all games at a decent FPU, why bother?
But when I do, I might get SLI support on it anyway. Future proofing.
Eh, kinda. Rebooting your tech two or three times and then redoing the entire thing from scratch two years before launch doesn't really count as 11 years in development. As someone who followed all the news on TF2 over the years... it's nothing like what it was originally supposed to be - a commander class to organize attacks, people cooperating to fire machine guns, a realistic approach to graphics, etc. While all these things are probably inferior to what they actually released, I dunno if it counts as active development. I think TFC counts as their original TF2 mod, actually.
What's bugging me more than the semantics of promises versus expectations? Some people want free, free, free, but mods aren't good enough for them? Have these guys been paying any attention to Valve products for the past 12 years?
TF2 hasn't released its code for modability. Until that happens, then yeah...
Their core product with L4D and TF2 both only held my interest for about 10 hours.
Sometimes youngsters look at a task and go "That's easy, I could totally do that in 2-3 months". Then there are people who have done it who stand back and laugh at them for being naive.
Why, because it would take them even less time?
It's amazing how quickly you can get shit done when you know what you're doing.
There's several orders of magnitude of difference between different coders trying to accomplish the same task. One thing that I thought would take a week has taken over a year for me now (working, well, never on it). One contract job that I had at UCSD (paid for by Proctor and Gamble) took a couple months to write, document, and ship.
Nobody told me it was budgeted for 3 to 5 years to accomplish. And no, my $15/hour, 20 hours/week self didn't get any of the difference... I think the Bioeng department there happily pocketed the million or so left over.
This product needs to be removed from the market. I'd like to see stricter controls on things like this. Anything that attempts to cure or prevent disease needs to be evaluated and tested by the FDA. All supplements, vitamins, these cold prevention products should all have to shown to be safe and do what they claim BEFORE they can be sold.
On a related topic, have you ever wondered why drugs (especially non-generics) are so ungodly expensive in America?
The process of getting a new drug researched, developed, tested, and evaluated, combined with the number of failed drugs that the successful drugs needs to pay for, means that we're getting reasonably safe and effective drugs, but we're paying through our noses for them.
If we had less FDA controls, the price of medicine would go down, and more people would benefit from modern medicine. A certain number would also be damaged by the reduced controls, but I think it would be a net win. On the safety/cost spectrum, we're way to the side of high-cost and higher-safety. Reasonably, we should move it back toward a more balanced risk/benefit ratio.
But nobody wants more Thalidomide babies, so this won't happen. Even if the FDA fails a lot more than we think it does - many, many of our first line drugs have black box warnings on them now.
I think one cheap solution (that will never happen) is to allow Europeans to serve as our human test subjects. They have lots of drugs there not approved for FDA use. Allow the safety data from their citizens to count as safety tests, and we could probably reap significant benefits - cheaper drugs and (arguably) better drug safety.
Although, to be fair, there are certain principles of game design that are crucial for success.
For me, the main ones are: 1) All options should be interesting. Some can be more powerful or less powerful, or situationally powerful, but no choice should dominate another, and all should be useable by someone familiar with the game. This applies if you're talking about writing the next Starcraft, or creating a P&P roleplaying supplement.
2) Players should be challenged. Players should not be crushed by difficulty, and should be able to play your game even with a low skill level, but there should be a high upper ceiling with what they can do with your game. And easy games are boring.
Programmers are a dime a dozen. That ain't nothing but ten-cent coding.
Designers, though, are the core of any game.
I used to work writing video games, and still do some coding in the CustomTF mod.
We had an expression: anyone can design a game. The hard part is implementing it, and implementing it well.
Look at the open source community for proof.
Three times this year so far, I've had people approach me with an idea for a game, but didn't bring anything to the table themselves. Though to be fair one was a CS guy, and another was mostly useless, but knew some other people willing to work on the project with me if I wanted to do it.
>>How about they start to release the code so proper modifications can be made?
Ditto. I wrote CustomTF for the original Team Fortress, and would love to write a CustomTF2, but the tools out there right now aren't really sufficient to my needs.
It's a shame really. Robin used to be a very pro-open source type of guy (if the source for the original TF hadn't been released, it would have been too much work to replicate all their stuff), and Valve is usually pretty good at releasing modable source code, but it's just disappointing that they're not going to do it with TF2 and L4D. I played TF2 for about 10 hours, got bored with the simplistic gameplay, and went back to playing a 10 year old mod again.
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing ever changes. This is the exact argument that they made in the 1900's when the FDA was first trying to reduce the number of human body parts that made it into canned meat: "Waaaaaa, you're going to put us out of business! Waaaaaaaa, no one could ever collect this much information!"
Lol, this is exactly what I was talking about; see my post right below yours. I've been sitting in on lectures on the Progressive Era for the last two weeks, and the fact that the large meatpacking companies supported the regulation was one of the more interesting tidbits I learned.
From the summary: "'Lobbyists from corporate mega-agribusiness designed this program to destroy traditional small sustainable agriculture,' says Genell Pridgen"
It's true. When The Jungle was published, TR responded with the Pure Food and Drug Act, which regulated and inspected meat packing plants (he also went vegetarian for a little while, which, if you know TR, shows you how much he was affected by Sinclair's book).
Contrary to what many people might think, the large meat companies supported the act. It 1) Improved public perception of the safety of meat, increasing sales, 2) Opened up American meats to the European market and 3) Added significant costs to the industry, which put their smaller competitors out of business.
You can learn a lot from history.
>>Someone with a high BMI might be overweight - or they might be in really good shape and have lots of muscle. Just something to think about.
I'm 290 pounds, and 6'6", with a touch over 20% body fat. With 0% body fat, I'd weigh 230 pounds, which would give me an "overweight" BMI of 26.6. At 0% body fat.
It's a hideously broken metric and needs to go. Body fat percentage should be the main standard for calculating obesity.
I believe there has been talk in the past of not including a main game executable on the disk and only copies that have been activated at checkout will be able to download it.
Yeah, Sony is starting to roll this out. Patapon 2 is a download only title, which means that if you buy it at Gamestop, the box only contains a little code that you type in to download at home. So you need to buy your own media (a memory stick) to hold their software on it. It takes up about a third of mine.
Sony allows you to download a product you buy a total of five times (or at least they used to, I haven't looked recently), which means that you don't really own the software at all. But then again, we've been trained that way by Microsoft and all the other big companies with their activation schemes (I had to call Microsoft to explain why I'd activated my copy of Office 5 times - every time my lemon of a laptop broke and I took it in for warranty they gave me a loaner - 6 activations in as many months).
Personally, I think that if you do indeed have a license (as the music and software people claim), and don't actually own your copy of the software, then they should be obligated to provide you with a copy if you lose it, since the license means you have a right to enjoy it for your own personal benefit as long as you like. A law stating this would do the trick nicely.
Unless you're on a multi-year project (and you might be, considering the anonymous posting), coding does take a long time. I'd guess that an average project these days takes minimum 50 people over the course of a year and a half
Pfft. I used to work in the video game industry, and we had exactly two programmers. My friends at Midway San Diego had exactly two programmers (an engine coder and a tools coder). Various playstation games a friend of mine at Sony worked for had a team of like 5 to 10 programmers. ID software has a couple. An independent game studio in Carlsbad a friend of mine used to work at (they did a port for the Cars video game, and various other B-grade games) likewise had a few coders.
Take a look at one of those huge credit listings some times. The actual number of coders is usually quite small. There's just a lot of people on it to account for all the QA/Testing, sound development, art, management, promotions, marketing, community managers, etc.
It's still quite possible to make a successful game out of your garage. Probably not for an Xbox or Playstation or Wii (since the dev kits are more than most groups of friends want to pay), but development for the PC or Xbox arcade has a low barrier to entry. I'd say the minimum size would be a coder and an artsy person.
I wish more games would take the 'more is more' approach to enemies that Serious Sam did. I loved the HUGE SCREAMING HORDES of bad guys that would try to zerg you down. It was a nice change of pace from, say, Unreal's 'kill a bad guy, which triggers another bad guy, because the engine chokes and dies if two mobs are on the screen at the same time'. And I liked Unreal. More games should have more swarms.
Ditto. There was something very satisfying about fighting 800 monsters on screen at once.
After playing a little bit of WoW again after Lich King came out, yeah, it was amazingly tedious after having played AoC and WAR. EVE is the only game with more tedious travel, but the concept of trading off cargo space over time is one of the primary mechanics that drives the economy. Different regions produce different things (like Electrical Engineering datacores) which someone needs to ship to the final destination, unless buyers want to fly over to the place themselves. But they're usually willing to pay a markup on them to avoid having to spend half an hour of real life time flying out and back.
WoW didn't have linked flight paths when it came out, which meant that if you were flying a long distance, not only was it incredibly tedious, but you also couldn't get up to go grab a sandwich or something. It was actually the main reason I played a mage in the game - they could teleport to different cities, which did a lot to eliminate the hated tedium of travel in the game.
And maybe this paper was given the bum's rush, but I think it was less "conspiracy to silence critics of the almighty environmentalists" and more "oh, God, let's just get on with this already."
Funny, when the Bush administration quashed pro-global warming papers, you were all howling about it.
I'm not sure the EPA should be in the business of quashing papers at all, if you ask me.
My general state during the movies was "Die Hobbits Die!!!" which they regrettably failed to do which ruined the movies for me.
Yeah. My wife kept yelling, "Go Orcs!" during the premieres.
Damn, I love her sometimes.
>>Most drugs that don't get FDA approval do so for a reason.
Sure, but not all reasons are the same. If a drug causes a slight increase in blood pressure, that could be enough to get it blocked from ever seeing the market. But if people took the weight loss drug in question, the loss of fat might counteract it... essentially I think a policy of informed consent should be adopted.
The removal of Vioxx from the market, for example, infuriated my landlord at the time, since the only other drug he could use was liquid morphine, and so he slept 16 hours a day (to control his arthritis of the spine, very painful). He would have been more than happy to accept a slightly increased risk of heart valve damage in exchange for, you know, being able to live his life.
Go to a dance instructor. You've got the money. Pay for lessons. Then go to group dance lessons. Meet people there and then get groups going to dance clubs.
All your problems will disappear.
Unless you're a girl. All the above assumes you're a boy. You're a boy, right? OK, then go learn to dance.
Yep.
I took salsa lessons for a year, and went out to salsa clubs 1-3 nights a week for a year. Did it to impress one girl. That didn't work out, but a tall girl nearly threw herself at me at the lessons (I'm a tall guy), and while that didn't work out, when I went to the ballroom dance club at my college, a hot asian girl came up to talk to me (she was the club greeter, but I didn't know that), we danced, and now here we are married 7 years later.
I've got both a mortgage and car lease, neither of which required me handing over my SIN (our analogue to your SSN).
Holy crap, I thought the SIN System Identification Number was just a term from Shadowrun.
You're a SINner. Damn. That's a 5 point penalty.
People are just waiting for the BD-R disc's to come down in price, $15 for 1 disc is too much, blu-ray needs piracy to succeed.
Heh, I don't know why this was modded funny... it's probably true.
Blurays are just too expensive to buy. Planet Earth was certainly worth it, but when I was at Best Buy a couple days ago and looking at buying Taken as a present for my wife, it was ~10 bucks for a DVD, and ~30 bucks for a BD.
So I went home and added the Bluray to my Netflix queue.
No, you live in a fantasy world where drug makers work for the greater good instead of their bottom line. They will charge the amount that makes them the most profit.
I think you're missing the point that profit = gross income - costs. If you develop 10 drugs at a cost of millions per drug, and only one of them make it out of FDA approval, that one drug has to recover the costs of all 10 drugs in order for the company to turn a profit. And they have to do it in the few years they have before it goes generic.
If the drug companies don't think they can sell a drug against a certain medical condition at a price point that's profitable for them, they won't make it. See orphan drugs.
Not exactly. A friend of mine is the lead pharmacist for a company that specializes in making orphan drugs. They are a low production facility, and it takes a lot of grunt work to get the production lines certified, but that's what they do. They're the only source for a couple different chemo drugs in America. Just because large manufacturers won't make them doesn't mean they won't get made.
I think you're more referring to the problem that drug companies won't focus R&D money on treating rare diseases, which is why we have government programs.
>>Because the drug makers can charge whatever they want for them, as long as the patent lasts?
Because you live in a fantasy world where drug costs are set independent of R&D costs, and have to be set high enough to make up for all the vast majority of drugs which fail to make it to market? Look at the cost of brand name drugs versus generics some time.
>>Yes. And before there were rules like that, you were paying with corpses and body parts for them. Literally.
I didn't suggest eliminating all controls. If we could look at case studies on European-approved drugs that have been out for, say, 10 years and use that as a basis to cheaply approve them in America, it'd probably help. (In the case of Thalidomide, a case study analysis on it would have been enough to not get it FDA approved, and probably yanked from European markets as well.)
>>How many people seriously drop the coin to do this?
My motherboard has SLI support (I bought it in December 2004, on the off chance the numbers would make sense in the future.) But when it came time to replace my 6800, it make more sense to buy a 7900 (which was like 10x faster) rather than a second 6800, which probably would have entailed needing a PSU upgrade as well.
When it came time to replace my 7900, it made more sense to get an 8800 than a second 7900. When it came time to replace the 8800, it made more sense to get a 200-series.
At some point, I guess, I'll need to get a new motherboard (though I can run all games just fine, with my CPU upgraded about 2 years back to a 4800+ X2), but since I can run all games at a decent FPU, why bother?
But when I do, I might get SLI support on it anyway. Future proofing.
TF2 was 11 years in the making.
Eh, kinda. Rebooting your tech two or three times and then redoing the entire thing from scratch two years before launch doesn't really count as 11 years in development. As someone who followed all the news on TF2 over the years... it's nothing like what it was originally supposed to be - a commander class to organize attacks, people cooperating to fire machine guns, a realistic approach to graphics, etc. While all these things are probably inferior to what they actually released, I dunno if it counts as active development. I think TFC counts as their original TF2 mod, actually.
What's bugging me more than the semantics of promises versus expectations? Some people want free, free, free, but mods aren't good enough for them? Have these guys been paying any attention to Valve products for the past 12 years?
TF2 hasn't released its code for modability. Until that happens, then yeah...
Their core product with L4D and TF2 both only held my interest for about 10 hours.
Sometimes youngsters look at a task and go "That's easy, I could totally do that in 2-3 months". Then there are people who have done it who stand back and laugh at them for being naive.
Why, because it would take them even less time?
It's amazing how quickly you can get shit done when you know what you're doing.
There's several orders of magnitude of difference between different coders trying to accomplish the same task. One thing that I thought would take a week has taken over a year for me now (working, well, never on it). One contract job that I had at UCSD (paid for by Proctor and Gamble) took a couple months to write, document, and ship.
Nobody told me it was budgeted for 3 to 5 years to accomplish. And no, my $15/hour, 20 hours/week self didn't get any of the difference... I think the Bioeng department there happily pocketed the million or so left over.
This product needs to be removed from the market. I'd like to see stricter controls on things like this. Anything that attempts to cure or prevent disease needs to be evaluated and tested by the FDA. All supplements, vitamins, these cold prevention products should all have to shown to be safe and do what they claim BEFORE they can be sold.
On a related topic, have you ever wondered why drugs (especially non-generics) are so ungodly expensive in America?
The process of getting a new drug researched, developed, tested, and evaluated, combined with the number of failed drugs that the successful drugs needs to pay for, means that we're getting reasonably safe and effective drugs, but we're paying through our noses for them.
If we had less FDA controls, the price of medicine would go down, and more people would benefit from modern medicine. A certain number would also be damaged by the reduced controls, but I think it would be a net win. On the safety/cost spectrum, we're way to the side of high-cost and higher-safety. Reasonably, we should move it back toward a more balanced risk/benefit ratio.
But nobody wants more Thalidomide babies, so this won't happen. Even if the FDA fails a lot more than we think it does - many, many of our first line drugs have black box warnings on them now.
I think one cheap solution (that will never happen) is to allow Europeans to serve as our human test subjects. They have lots of drugs there not approved for FDA use. Allow the safety data from their citizens to count as safety tests, and we could probably reap significant benefits - cheaper drugs and (arguably) better drug safety.
>>The study you mention has since been discredited
Has it?
Here's the study (or a similar study):
http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/short/25/45/10390
Post a reference showing it discredited, please.
The placebo effect is quite real, even if placebos are not.
Although, to be fair, there are certain principles of game design that are crucial for success.
For me, the main ones are:
1) All options should be interesting. Some can be more powerful or less powerful, or situationally powerful, but no choice should dominate another, and all should be useable by someone familiar with the game. This applies if you're talking about writing the next Starcraft, or creating a P&P roleplaying supplement.
2) Players should be challenged. Players should not be crushed by difficulty, and should be able to play your game even with a low skill level, but there should be a high upper ceiling with what they can do with your game. And easy games are boring.
Programmers are a dime a dozen. That ain't nothing but ten-cent coding.
Designers, though, are the core of any game.
I used to work writing video games, and still do some coding in the CustomTF mod.
We had an expression: anyone can design a game. The hard part is implementing it, and implementing it well.
Look at the open source community for proof.
Three times this year so far, I've had people approach me with an idea for a game, but didn't bring anything to the table themselves. Though to be fair one was a CS guy, and another was mostly useless, but knew some other people willing to work on the project with me if I wanted to do it.
Do you mind if I borrow that for my sig? I imagine you saying that in a sort of angry condescending tone, and I love it.
Sure, no problem.
Remember, Jesus tells us to love the stupid person, but hate the stupidity.
>>How about they start to release the code so proper modifications can be made?
Ditto. I wrote CustomTF for the original Team Fortress, and would love to write a CustomTF2, but the tools out there right now aren't really sufficient to my needs.
It's a shame really. Robin used to be a very pro-open source type of guy (if the source for the original TF hadn't been released, it would have been too much work to replicate all their stuff), and Valve is usually pretty good at releasing modable source code, but it's just disappointing that they're not going to do it with TF2 and L4D. I played TF2 for about 10 hours, got bored with the simplistic gameplay, and went back to playing a 10 year old mod again.
>>Francis Collins also believes that Jesus rode dinosaurs.
I've actually read his book, and he actually is pro-evolution, and thinks Christians shouldn't tie their belief in God to belief in evolution.
So, in other words, you're completely fucking wrong, you idiot retard.
God bless.