#5 does, think about a "Members Only" club, lets say you get a little too drunk, and end up getting tossed out and banned for a week... Do you still have to pay your monthly dues or membership fees?
Another part of the puzzle is the war must be against another superpower. Fighting non-superpowers has gotten has really nowhere, 'Nam, Iraq, and the South.
That is of course if it scales up as you imagine. Also the amount of payload it fires at that speed is also a different story. Sadly I think the faster you try to fire something the more energy it will require. But IANARGS, I am not a rail gun scientist, nor have I ever taken a physics course but this is my best educated guess.
Ah yes, I forgot about that issue too. Former friend's mother had that issue happened. And the bumper was so smashed in that it was impossible to tell whether the tail lights broke in the accident or not.
1. What if the driver in front is drunk? I am sure there are other circumstances that might make it the person in fronts fault, alas IANAL nor do I have much experience with traffic accidents. Do I think its a good law? Yes. Do I think it is going to be right 100% of the time? Most certainly not.
2. Pileup as in, I get hit by a bus from behind, and my stopped car ends up running into the car in front of me. Most normal people would understand that this is the fault of the bus, but as the law is written it sees that it my fault, so you have to get the actual blame placed on the bus. Which can be easy, if the bus company decides to take the blame or difficult if they decide to fight it. This is my personal experience.
In the great commonwealth of Pennslyvania, anytime you are hit from behind, it is the fault of the person hitting you from behind. This can make it a nightmare for pileup accidents. I tend to slam on my breaks a ton when someone is behind me, following a little too closely. They tend to wake up.
Those "issues" all sound like natural problems that happen. Blizzard has offered free server transfers IIRC for those on the crowded servers. I am playing on one of the new servers and have never seen a queue. So they didn't have battlegrounds from day 1, or honor, or many instances. You can't expect to have all content ready for launch. Its better to launch with a system not in the game, then to launch with a system that isn't working 100% and maybe buggy and unbalanced.
Nerfs and class unbalances also happen naturally even Diablo II has patches to this day to balance classes better despite it being released many years ago. Starcraft the same, you cannot have things come out of the box perfectly balanced or you wind up with Warcraft I, both sides exactly the same the graphics are just an ogre instead of a peon. I was in the large beta of WoW and was largely nonplussed about the game. It just didn't seem to interesting.
Take a look at Diablo II, at release it did not have synergies, but in one patch they added this really cool system for people to now use.
In comparison to other MMO's WoW's problems are tiny, and fixable. Don't play on the crowded servers! Voice your opinion on the forums about class balance, worst that can happen is a dev might read it and take a look at the issue you think is there. All content was not ready at launch, and content is added in patches as time goes on, sounds like typical MMO behavior and not really an issue.
But to be perfectly honest, I think the battlegrounds are still not right, they seem thrown together to appease players. On my battleground out of all the times I have played and of all the levels of BG only once or twice have alliance won. What does that mean to me? It means the BG need more work. I think Blizzard should investigate a better solution. (it would be nice to have BG's where no matter what server you play on, you can "find a friend/friends" and play with them or against them!
What exactly do you mean by "General Issues"? Almost everything has "general issues" related to it, and the reason why is because its a nonspecific term. I am sure most things have general issues, especially in the beginning because it takes time to figure out what is expected behavior and what isn't. Can't expect to put together an engine and expect it to run the first time perfectly.
The queue was simply and issue to solve the temporary problem of unexpected demand. Thats a simple logistics issues, you can't just ship brand new spanking supercomputer servers overnight and have them up and running with no problems. You order them, wait awhile and then receive them, assemble, test, and the whole deal.
Now to release a game early because you ran out of funds to continue creating a game is a different story. Its like receiving a webserver for a banking website, and then building the webpage and then just saying we will add security, features, gui, and the like in patches. While leaving the site open to the public, it would be considered totally unprofessional.
Community come up with an unofficial patch? You know we are talking MMO's here, that means you connect to one of the game company's servers and pay a monthly fee, and must use their patches.
Your idea of of buying it will fund future patches is also faulty. That money goes directly to paying the current debt, and any money left over goes to the investors, and they MIGHT think about reinvesting it back into the project but would you want to depend on that all the time?
Worst case scenario is you end up with a story like Star Wars Galaxies, which is a story in and of itself.
"Random" searchs just means there will be an exact percentage of people that will get "randomly" searched. That would mean, if 10% of people were "randomly" searched, there would be 1 in 10 chance if you went through the security to getting searched.(Note: this is back of the napkin type style, without even a class in statistics or probability).
Would someone take that risk to getting "randomly" searched, especially if they knew the system was completely random. More than likely I would say yes, they are playing an odds game. Now the thing with "profiling" is will they do it even if they know certain passengers are profiled to get inspected. I think the answer will be a yes there too. Profiling might be the more inconvient method of selecting passengers for all passengers involved, but I bet its the more effective one. Random is just that, random, now random searches with profiled searches is going to the most effective.
Or at least I would imagine. I ain't no security person.
Why was this marked funny? I came here for the funny, and I find it not funny.
CCCPO makes no sense. Or if it does please explain. CCCP makes some sort of lame sense, but why is the old name for the former Russian goverment funny?
Note: Raph Koster wasn't really involved with SWG from October 2003 on. Essentially after release, he wasn't really part of the team that screwed SWG up.
Plenty of things went wrong with SWG. Such as, released too early, in beta there are a ton of things you can change, that you can't change after release, take combat for example. The other thing is lots of game systems were rushed or cut, just to meet the release deadline(release deadlines don't work for MMOs, you are making a game that should be used for years onwards by at least a hundred thousand users). The skill system was not the ideal one that Raph had in mind, he said the first guy that worked on the skill system left the company the second guy had no idea how to do it, and by then Raph said he would do it the way he wanted, but they ran out of time, so they it the way it was, "the onion" skill system. The way it was supposed to be, was like you take up some scout skills, and some marksmen skills, and soundly, you have a title of sniper, and with that gain some minor abilities. And the way this system worked, is players may take branches that didn't give them any title, but the devs could always add that later on quite easily, they may see players take dancing and hand to hand fighting, and they could add a special title there for those that did that, with some minor abilities and stats added.
And just a note, what he did, was made a game people love. Its been well over 9 months since the NGE, and people are still calling out for the "pre-CU" game of SWG on the SWG forums, and other forums themselves. To me, that screams that they had a loyal community and SOE abandoned them on the roadside.
The only time I remember being able to solo anything was during the buffs and comp armor debacle. One of the darkest times in SWG, essentially you needed buffs just to put on comp armor, and buffs were so strong, you could solo almost any MOB in the game and never die because you regened health too fast. Although the recent CU and NGE, I heard you could solo a ton then too even though buffs were essentially removed. This is not what SWG was meant to be, but this is the direction it was pulled into,
AI in almost all MMOs are notoriously weak, and some did require special tactics, those tactics mostly being, the MOB had high resists to some types of damage, so you had to use other types of damage to actually damage him. As a rifleman I was limited in my damage types, but when I did damage I really could pound it out.
He was also responsible for Pre-Trammel UO, and I still hear people talk about that game. So yes this man deserves an article.
I still don't see the difference. Take a game like "The Dig", which IIRC was basically a SCUMM based Story driven game(I really enjoyed it but never got to play Monkey Island myself), like Monkey Island, and compare it to KOTOR and the differences are minor.
KOTOR adds an RPG element, and the battle element, but it has puzzles to solve, and ways to do it non-violently via conversation. And the plot isn't put on hold till you get out of the academy, its more like part of the story, you are stuck on a planet under blockade, and there is no way off. So how do you get off? That doesn't seem to be too different from the story the "adventure" games tell, "hey you are stuck in a burning building, better get out!" Plus the one person that can help you get off is captured isn't she? Thats like one of the chapters in a book, and each planet you visit after is another chapter adding to the story. I don't see how it is different or how the plot in a game like Monkey Island or Mansion is much different...
I guess you might be suggesting that the games he is talking about are like a book in how they are unchanging to progress through the story you have to read the next line, and the next line is always the same, which to me tells me you should write a book, make a comic or cartoon. Games are unique in that they can be dynamic and can change quite readily.
From what I remember of Dig, and Full Throttle, is they were essentially a giant puzzle game, and you had to figure out what parts went where to advance to the next section of the game. Not really a story in my opinion but just a game. And there doesn't seem to be much difference from that and KOTOR, you have to find things and do stuff to advance the storyline.
Adventure games are out there, but they have hybridized with other games and been made into 3D adventures.
The Wii not being in the same class as the Xbox360 and PS3, is really good for 3rd party developers, it means they won't have to spend as much on the graphics budget. Development wise the Wii is going to be cheaper to develop for.
interactive civillian said: So do you think it is a good idea to keep all of our eggs in one basket? There's not much we can do as a species if something from the outside, like an asteroid, comes along and makes the planet unhabitable for humans. However, if we can get off this planet and colonize other worlds, humanity will survive regardless of what happens to the Earth.
I agree that we should be taking care of this planet as best as we can, but that should not stop us for pursuing the means to find and reach others.
Its not like we can wait till we fix everything down here. Humans are naturally imperfect and make many mistakes, sometimes even repeatedly. We will never be perfect. This world down here on Earth is plenty screwed up, but my guess is the humanity of the future 1000 years will still be pretty screwed up in many ways. Hopefully we will have learned much more and dealt with the problems we have today by then though, or at least one hopes.
We will never completely fix Earth or even get close to fixing Humanity's main problems. Poverty, Hunger, and so many other issues that relate just to humans themselves, let alone the enviroment we live in.
Who knows maybe an asteroid will hit Earth, but not before we have colonized other worlds, and then maybe they will realize the importance of life.
Slashdot Mirror
"The result of this is that you can easily have multiple Warriors in a group"
I thought it was single player till I read that line in the review.
#5 does, think about a "Members Only" club, lets say you get a little too drunk, and end up getting tossed out and banned for a week... Do you still have to pay your monthly dues or membership fees?
Another part of the puzzle is the war must be against another superpower. Fighting non-superpowers has gotten has really nowhere, 'Nam, Iraq, and the South.
Galaxies is not still around. What remains of Galaxies is a gravestone on how to not make an MMORPG.
But if you don't have friends who are you going to tell the password too so you aren't playing alone?
I remember the old days when the games asked you to find the 23rd word in the 7th paragraph on page 18 in the game manual.
That really sucked when you didn't actually buy the game. Because it didn't come with a manual, you just copied a floppy.
That is of course if it scales up as you imagine. Also the amount of payload it fires at that speed is also a different story. Sadly I think the faster you try to fire something the more energy it will require. But IANARGS, I am not a rail gun scientist, nor have I ever taken a physics course but this is my best educated guess.
Another way you are required is if you match the description of an actor that committed a crime nearby and they are looking for that subject.
Ah yes, I forgot about that issue too. Former friend's mother had that issue happened. And the bumper was so smashed in that it was impossible to tell whether the tail lights broke in the accident or not.
1. What if the driver in front is drunk? I am sure there are other circumstances that might make it the person in fronts fault, alas IANAL nor do I have much experience with traffic accidents. Do I think its a good law? Yes. Do I think it is going to be right 100% of the time? Most certainly not.
2. Pileup as in, I get hit by a bus from behind, and my stopped car ends up running into the car in front of me. Most normal people would understand that this is the fault of the bus, but as the law is written it sees that it my fault, so you have to get the actual blame placed on the bus. Which can be easy, if the bus company decides to take the blame or difficult if they decide to fight it. This is my personal experience.
In the great commonwealth of Pennslyvania, anytime you are hit from behind, it is the fault of the person hitting you from behind. This can make it a nightmare for pileup accidents. I tend to slam on my breaks a ton when someone is behind me, following a little too closely. They tend to wake up.
Those "issues" all sound like natural problems that happen. Blizzard has offered free server transfers IIRC for those on the crowded servers. I am playing on one of the new servers and have never seen a queue. So they didn't have battlegrounds from day 1, or honor, or many instances. You can't expect to have all content ready for launch. Its better to launch with a system not in the game, then to launch with a system that isn't working 100% and maybe buggy and unbalanced.
Nerfs and class unbalances also happen naturally even Diablo II has patches to this day to balance classes better despite it being released many years ago. Starcraft the same, you cannot have things come out of the box perfectly balanced or you wind up with Warcraft I, both sides exactly the same the graphics are just an ogre instead of a peon. I was in the large beta of WoW and was largely nonplussed about the game. It just didn't seem to interesting.
Take a look at Diablo II, at release it did not have synergies, but in one patch they added this really cool system for people to now use.
In comparison to other MMO's WoW's problems are tiny, and fixable. Don't play on the crowded servers! Voice your opinion on the forums about class balance, worst that can happen is a dev might read it and take a look at the issue you think is there. All content was not ready at launch, and content is added in patches as time goes on, sounds like typical MMO behavior and not really an issue.
But to be perfectly honest, I think the battlegrounds are still not right, they seem thrown together to appease players. On my battleground out of all the times I have played and of all the levels of BG only once or twice have alliance won. What does that mean to me? It means the BG need more work. I think Blizzard should investigate a better solution. (it would be nice to have BG's where no matter what server you play on, you can "find a friend/friends" and play with them or against them!
What exactly do you mean by "General Issues"? Almost everything has "general issues" related to it, and the reason why is because its a nonspecific term. I am sure most things have general issues, especially in the beginning because it takes time to figure out what is expected behavior and what isn't. Can't expect to put together an engine and expect it to run the first time perfectly.
The queue was simply and issue to solve the temporary problem of unexpected demand. Thats a simple logistics issues, you can't just ship brand new spanking supercomputer servers overnight and have them up and running with no problems. You order them, wait awhile and then receive them, assemble, test, and the whole deal.
Now to release a game early because you ran out of funds to continue creating a game is a different story. Its like receiving a webserver for a banking website, and then building the webpage and then just saying we will add security, features, gui, and the like in patches. While leaving the site open to the public, it would be considered totally unprofessional.
Community come up with an unofficial patch? You know we are talking MMO's here, that means you connect to one of the game company's servers and pay a monthly fee, and must use their patches.
Your idea of of buying it will fund future patches is also faulty. That money goes directly to paying the current debt, and any money left over goes to the investors, and they MIGHT think about reinvesting it back into the project but would you want to depend on that all the time?
Worst case scenario is you end up with a story like Star Wars Galaxies, which is a story in and of itself.
Robots with television sets for heads are cool too... THERE ARE FIVE LIGHTS.
Is profiling effective in keeping everyone safe?
"Random" searchs just means there will be an exact percentage of people that will get "randomly" searched. That would mean, if 10% of people were "randomly" searched, there would be 1 in 10 chance if you went through the security to getting searched.(Note: this is back of the napkin type style, without even a class in statistics or probability).
Would someone take that risk to getting "randomly" searched, especially if they knew the system was completely random. More than likely I would say yes, they are playing an odds game. Now the thing with "profiling" is will they do it even if they know certain passengers are profiled to get inspected. I think the answer will be a yes there too. Profiling might be the more inconvient method of selecting passengers for all passengers involved, but I bet its the more effective one. Random is just that, random, now random searches with profiled searches is going to the most effective.
Or at least I would imagine. I ain't no security person.
I think we got it by now... You might notice my reference to Episode 1... You know the worst Star Wars movie ever made.
We tend to abbreviate EEE as E3. Ergo CCC turns into C3... I admit it took me a minute too. :-)
Oh, well then, that joke was almost as bad as Episode 1.
Why was this marked funny? I came here for the funny, and I find it not funny.
CCCPO makes no sense. Or if it does please explain. CCCP makes some sort of lame sense, but why is the old name for the former Russian goverment funny?
Note: Raph Koster wasn't really involved with SWG from October 2003 on. Essentially after release, he wasn't really part of the team that screwed SWG up.
i lding/#comments is an article where he talks about such things and responds to comments.
Plenty of things went wrong with SWG. Such as, released too early, in beta there are a ton of things you can change, that you can't change after release, take combat for example. The other thing is lots of game systems were rushed or cut, just to meet the release deadline(release deadlines don't work for MMOs, you are making a game that should be used for years onwards by at least a hundred thousand users). The skill system was not the ideal one that Raph had in mind, he said the first guy that worked on the skill system left the company the second guy had no idea how to do it, and by then Raph said he would do it the way he wanted, but they ran out of time, so they it the way it was, "the onion" skill system. The way it was supposed to be, was like you take up some scout skills, and some marksmen skills, and soundly, you have a title of sniper, and with that gain some minor abilities. And the way this system worked, is players may take branches that didn't give them any title, but the devs could always add that later on quite easily, they may see players take dancing and hand to hand fighting, and they could add a special title there for those that did that, with some minor abilities and stats added.
http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/07/19/community-bu
And just a note, what he did, was made a game people love. Its been well over 9 months since the NGE, and people are still calling out for the "pre-CU" game of SWG on the SWG forums, and other forums themselves. To me, that screams that they had a loyal community and SOE abandoned them on the roadside.
The only time I remember being able to solo anything was during the buffs and comp armor debacle. One of the darkest times in SWG, essentially you needed buffs just to put on comp armor, and buffs were so strong, you could solo almost any MOB in the game and never die because you regened health too fast. Although the recent CU and NGE, I heard you could solo a ton then too even though buffs were essentially removed. This is not what SWG was meant to be, but this is the direction it was pulled into,
AI in almost all MMOs are notoriously weak, and some did require special tactics, those tactics mostly being, the MOB had high resists to some types of damage, so you had to use other types of damage to actually damage him. As a rifleman I was limited in my damage types, but when I did damage I really could pound it out.
He was also responsible for Pre-Trammel UO, and I still hear people talk about that game. So yes this man deserves an article.
This game is based off of "Narbacular Drop". The guy that made "Narbacular Drop" got hired to Valve, and went on to make this.
Lots of people keep calling it a "Prey" ripoff, whether his idea came from "Prey" or not, its a completely different game imho.
I still don't see the difference. Take a game like "The Dig", which IIRC was basically a SCUMM based Story driven game(I really enjoyed it but never got to play Monkey Island myself), like Monkey Island, and compare it to KOTOR and the differences are minor.
KOTOR adds an RPG element, and the battle element, but it has puzzles to solve, and ways to do it non-violently via conversation. And the plot isn't put on hold till you get out of the academy, its more like part of the story, you are stuck on a planet under blockade, and there is no way off. So how do you get off? That doesn't seem to be too different from the story the "adventure" games tell, "hey you are stuck in a burning building, better get out!" Plus the one person that can help you get off is captured isn't she? Thats like one of the chapters in a book, and each planet you visit after is another chapter adding to the story. I don't see how it is different or how the plot in a game like Monkey Island or Mansion is much different...
I guess you might be suggesting that the games he is talking about are like a book in how they are unchanging to progress through the story you have to read the next line, and the next line is always the same, which to me tells me you should write a book, make a comic or cartoon. Games are unique in that they can be dynamic and can change quite readily.
From what I remember of Dig, and Full Throttle, is they were essentially a giant puzzle game, and you had to figure out what parts went where to advance to the next section of the game. Not really a story in my opinion but just a game. And there doesn't seem to be much difference from that and KOTOR, you have to find things and do stuff to advance the storyline.
Adventure games are out there, but they have hybridized with other games and been made into 3D adventures.
Could these make up the hypothesized "Dark Matter"? Not these 6 objects specifically but objects like them.
I guess the question is how many of these would it take fill up the "dark matter" quotient we think exists.
The Wii not being in the same class as the Xbox360 and PS3, is really good for 3rd party developers, it means they won't have to spend as much on the graphics budget. Development wise the Wii is going to be cheaper to develop for.
interactive civillian said:
So do you think it is a good idea to keep all of our eggs in one basket? There's not much we can do as a species if something from the outside, like an asteroid, comes along and makes the planet unhabitable for humans. However, if we can get off this planet and colonize other worlds, humanity will survive regardless of what happens to the Earth.
I agree that we should be taking care of this planet as best as we can, but that should not stop us for pursuing the means to find and reach others.
Its not like we can wait till we fix everything down here. Humans are naturally imperfect and make many mistakes, sometimes even repeatedly. We will never be perfect. This world down here on Earth is plenty screwed up, but my guess is the humanity of the future 1000 years will still be pretty screwed up in many ways. Hopefully we will have learned much more and dealt with the problems we have today by then though, or at least one hopes.
We will never completely fix Earth or even get close to fixing Humanity's main problems. Poverty, Hunger, and so many other issues that relate just to humans themselves, let alone the enviroment we live in.
Who knows maybe an asteroid will hit Earth, but not before we have colonized other worlds, and then maybe they will realize the importance of life.