The CATO institute is a super rich, super powerful, "Libertarian" lobbyist group. Well, technically it's a shill for select industries that want the government off its back, but it calls itself "libertarian" as a cover. I don't know whether they've directly contributed to the Libertarian party, but indirectly they are furthering the cause to suit their corporate benefactors' anti-regulatory agenda.
The point is to organize a guild so you can enjoy the game without having bigots call you a fag all the time. That's exactly the behavior that keeps me away from online gaming.
What could you possibly be doing in-game which wouldn't be a violation of the TOS and offensive to others that would justify them calling you a "fag" in the first place?
It's important to note there are two types of "libertarians":
a) There's the person who believes in an ideological abstraction that is the core basis of libertarianism, which is just that: an idea, that has no track record of being practical nor desireable when you look into the reality of a world where everyone is left to fend for themselves.
b) There's the "libertarian movement" and political party which is basically a shill for corporations who want to snowjob people into believing that (a) is attainable, but all they really want is less government regulation so they can pollute the environment, release un-tested drugs, and not have to worry about getting caught or sued. Organizations like the CATO institute propagate the myth and pretend to be "non-partisian" but they're really lobbying organizations that have exploited the notion of a libertarian agenda solely to get the government to lay off select industries.
In either case, the Libertarian movement is a sham.
One reason why there are so many polarized ideals is due to the eradication of The Fairness Doctrine. There will never be a moderate position that is truly moderate in the United States; there will never be equitible debate on a grand scale in the media, until the Fairness Doctrine is reinstated.
In 1987 Reagan destroyed this precious aspect of democracy, which performed two very important things: it acknowledged that holders of valuable broadcast licenses had a duty to report news of interest to their constitutients, and it also gave citizens a right to peititon to have their side of a story heard in the media. When Reagan shot down this law, he paved the way for the new breed of media we see now, where editorial is intermixed with journalism, and we have 24-hour propaganda networks and extremist talk radio. This is why we now have a highly politically polarized populace who is incapable of recognizing 'facts.'
Nothing will change. Nothing. Until the Fairness Doctrine is reinstated. Every other attempt to alter the current course of corporate-dominated political policy will fail until there is a means by which more than one side gets a chance to air their issues in a fair manner.
People really need to understand this. It's THAT simple. It's all about the Fairness Doctrine. You can't organize an opposition party when the media has an interest in discrediting you. You can't even talk about important issues when the media won't report them. You can't create your own extremist broadcast network to counter another extremist broadcast network -- that doesn't work. The mainstream media must be forced to revert back to responsible journalism and giving equal time to opposing points of view. Without the Fairness Doctrine, nothing will change, and nothing else matters.
Let's see, the two main players in this industry aren't making any money. Let's start another venture of the same sort.
What the hell are the people at Motorola thinking?
Oh, let me guess. The stupid executives have convinced each other than the pay-for-radio scheme is mainly impeded by the lack of compatible hardware, and not the fact that people don't want to pay for crappy audio programs that they can improve upon themselves via their own playlists. So since motorola controls a platform/distribution medium, they might as well jump on the pay radio bandwagon because that's all that's holding people back? Yea right. Fools. I wonder.. does wearing a necktie all day choke the blood to peoples' brains?
Never mind. It doesn't matter. I guess it should come as no surprise. The bigger these corporations are, the more bone-headed their ideas seem to be, and the more unreceptive they are towards anything innovative or creative.
You'd think at this point, with Google's success, some of these other companies would have figured out that treating employees very well, paying them very well, and not outsourcing everything to third world countries, might, just might result in some innovative and marketable ideas... I guess it's going to make more time, and more King Kong movies before these companies get a clue.
Maybe it's about performance, security and stability?
There are a million reasons why consumers, if they knew they had a choice over Microsoft operating systems, would prefer an alternative. Price may get them in the door, but not having to have the OS crash, crapped up with spyware, continuously patched or infected with worms and viruses is a pleasure that most non-old-school computerphiles have never had the pleasure of enjoying.
I don't care if Angelina Jolie tattoos the goddam movie poster on the inside of her thigh and gives every moviegoer a peek, I'm NOT going to see this stupid remake-of-a-remake-of-a-remake movie. So stop with the King Kong viral marketing!
Hasn't King Kong been overhyped enough? Does Slashdot have to stoop so low that these viral marketing diseases have to infiltrate this site? Please, enough with the Kong references already. What's next? Kong condoms? Jack Black appearing on the Muscular Distrophy Telethon in an ape suit? Giant monkey week on the Discovery Channel? Is Orange County Choppers going to build a hairy ape-themed bike for POWs from Kong island? Please give us a fucking break with the Kong shit!
I'm not sure that's the issue. The article in question talks about national newspapers, not local. I agree that local papers are just cut/paste jobs, but the national papers - the NYT, WP and WSJ - have professional journalists writing for them.
Give me a buck and I can be a "professional journalist" too. That doesn't mean that I actually pursue what historically has been called "journalism" and nowhere is that more evident than in the national newspapers, who have all but turned into shills for corporate America. Bob Woodward is a prime example. A once respected "journalist" has now become yet another cog in a corrupted machine powered by political influence and money. This once respected reporter who broke Watergate claims to have known all along about the CIA leak and kept it quiet. He's yet another corrupted sell-out "journalist" who doesn't deserve to have a byline in a high school flyer.
The problem isn't with newspapers. It's with the state of journalism. Most newspapers these days don't have traditional reporters who go out and actually "investigate" stories. And if they do, they have a laundry list of taboo subjects (aka things that might tweak the advertisers) that they can't address or their editors will reject. As a result, most "reporters" just rewrite wire reports and manufacture fluff pieces... for example, I was in Florida last week and picked up the daily paper, and there was a major story on how your personality type can be identified by the way in which you sneeze! Yes, folks, this is apparently big-time news in the capital of Florida smack in the middle of the holiday season!
I do think the two (sandbox and levellers) can co-exist. Yes, they do love to hate each other, but the truth is they need each other. You can't implement a sandbox game without some sort of progressive path, at least as an option. GTA would not work without missions even if the majority of players don't follow the mission path. There has to be structure and there will always be some who exist only to excel at the structure, but most players fall in the middle, which is why I liked the original concept and was confounded at the subsequent changes, none of which seem to make the game appeal better to any specific demographic.
Worse is that both groups do not like each other much. The Levellers see the Sandboxers as a bunch of low level roleplaying freaks, the Sandbox people see the levellers as ill mannered script kiddies always looking for the latest exploit.
Yes however, before the original combat upgrade and other changes, at least the melee types NEEDED these people to heal their battle fatigue, then that was nerfed.... and for what? Talk about completely crippling the game balance.... to this day I couldn't believe how they could arbitrarily employ a patch that effectively nullified the usefulness of an entire class of characters! And SOE did it several times over.
And as you've pointed out, they didn't merely neuter entire classes of characters, SOE effectively excommunicated specific demographic groups of their consumers!
This is not a case of some disgruntled group of power gamers who are shitting bricks because some mob's respawn time has been altered by 10%. Never in the history of any MMORPG have there been such arbitrarily, brainless, massive changes implemented, and this has been happening consistently since the game's inception. We're talking major changes that fundamentally altered the game's basic operations. I never understood it then, and I don't understand it now. The only way it makes any sense is if these people are intentionally trying to kill this universe.
They're suing because that's the only way they can legally find out the identity of the posters. It's not about whether or not they have a case. It's about:
a) Finding out who these people are for obvious reasons
b) Setting a precedent that if you talk shit about the company, your anonyminity may not be guaranteed
...the idea of broadband internet as a utility. It implies that...
a) The Internet will be run as a government-installed monopoly b) There will be little or no competition, therefore there will be no innovation c) Prices will remain high due to no competition d) Service will be spotty and every once in awhile a "commission" will be formed to address some issue, appear on the news, and then nothing changes
What they should do is do a myth about "starting your own myth" online.
They could create an e-mail of some outrageous story, and turn it into a myth.
The cool thing is, they don't reveal that they created the myth until the end. They simply act like they're going to test the myth, but later reveal details on how it was them that created something like a bogus e-mail message and got it propagated around the net.
It would be even cooler if they could get snopes to claim it was true before it was exposed as a farce.
So basically NGE is admission the original system was unsustainable from both a monetary and coding basis.
Not necessarily. SWG only started substantially losing its player base after they radically altered the game design.
I contend the system was sustainable and maintainable. However, for some reason or another, instead of tweaking things, subsequent patches started adding more "features" in areas where there weren't problems. I think you got that right. But I don't believe the original design was that bad.
Ultimately, if there was a flaw in the game, it was that the developers didn't have a high-end game defined. So players became powerful and then got bored. Rather than create high-end content, the developers instead decided to cripple the character development design, which screwed everybody over. I'd love to know whose stupid idea was that?
I have played SWG since the beginning, in between taking breaks out of frustration as virtually all players have. I've watched with anticipation the original launch, and had fun exploring the early world, exploits, anomolies, class nuances, glass-eating trials-going-nowhere, and numerous bugs, as well as the later constant uncertainly which accompanied any proposed patch. I had a lot of fun, especially in the early days.
From what I knew of the early, original developers of SWG, I believed what they were trying to do was truly innovative and original. The best and the brightest from Verant wanted to create an all new, much more dynamic world that turned traditional MMORPGs on its side. In the early game you can see their vision in the crafting system, unusual classes and an experience-based system that caused characters to "gravitate" towards specific classes rather than be pidgeonholed into a specific path. There were all sort of seemingly innocuous and peripheral activities one could engage in, that for no logical reason, attracted a lot of participants. The original game was most certainly not some haphazardly put together system. You can tell a lot of thought went into it and it was a lot more balanced than people give it credit. The big problem is that the game *required* a significant routine population of players in order to function properly. But knowing that the design was set with the immensly popular Star Wars universe, and produced by the most successful MMORPG developer, now in concert with SOE's resources, it makes sense that the developers could count on this.
Then came the chaos.
The game started to change. Rather than patch minor glitches, updates started to alter the fundamental aspects of the gameplay.
When I think of SWG, it reminds me of the movie A.I. - you can see Kubrick's vision in the first half of the movie, then somewhere along the way Spielberg steps in and proceeds to turn the whole movie into a worthless pile of shit that makes you embarassed to admit you paid money for this trash.
Looking at things from the outside, it seems obvious to me that SWG was killed by having two groups, with two different visions, fight over the nature of the game. In reality there were probably three: the developers (Verant/SOE), Sony corporate, and Lucas and his minions. My opinion is that the Lucas people, with the support of SOE corporate (who probably didn't want to trash their rep with Lucas because of other areas of collusion) pushed the development team around and forced them to implement this haphazard mess of patches and redesigns, which of course, completely alienated the original player base.
I think what killed SWG was Star Wars; was Lucas and their people. If they had launched this game without Lucas and their meddling people, it probably would have had a much better chance. Instead, there were too many cooks in the kitchen and they fought over how the game was supposed to work and they killed it. And now, I suspect the redesign is merely an attempt to save face in one form or another due to some contractual obligations. At least, this is my opinion, FWIW.
I think it's obvious though, from even examining the game in its early stages, that there were at least two distinct factions pushing and pulling the game in different directions. The original developers wanted to create a more free form world where players weren't primarily directed by missions or levelling, and then others seemed to want to alter the game so that player success could be more easily qualified and quantified -- at the expense of the game's core design. This is a shame because SWG in its early stages was like GTA in that it presented a wide variety of options besides going on missions -- and this model has subsequently proven to be very appealing and lucrative, but someone (IMO the Lucas team) kept whining about this or that and eventually got their way and ruined the game in some kind of effort to reinforce brand identity.
I always suspected that SWG's player base consisted primarily of disabled or mentally-handicapped people. This undoubtedly confirms it. No sense pandering to those of us with full, unrestricted control of our facilities. We're undoubtedly the troublemakers who can post to the web forums complaining about how totally crappy the game has become.
My guess is that all game functions are now exclusively under mouse control except "EXIT", which may bode well for future announcements of an "increase in SWGs player base."
Nobody wants to admit it, but Star Wars Galaxies is probably going to be the next big MMORPG to go down. There are too many resources dedicated to that system and not enough players. The desperation the producers have in trying to keep the game from tanking is evident in the constant changes they make to virtually every system.
It should come as no surprise that AC will be shut down. It's amazing it lasted this long. The game suffered horribly under the strain of its initial launch and complaints that the servers were buggy and unstable. I don't think it ever recovered.
What's even more depressing than entering an empty game world, is entering a game world filled with people and not being able to participate. Everquest I has become like this to some degree now, with the world being so big and so many players at high levels, it's easy to be ignored.
Re:There's better (cooler) stuff
on
Hacking Santa
·
· Score: 1
While that might be cooler, it's not really much "hacking." The guy that put together the impressive Christmas light display did so with off-the-shelf equipment and merely followed the manufacturer's instructions. The whole notion of "hacking" is to expand a product's funtionality beyond its original purpose. The Christmas lights, while really impressive, perform exactly how they're supposed to based on the software and hardware the guy bought. And there are better light shows all over the country from Vegas to Disneyworld. Using a DMX controller isn't some groundbreaking act of hacking.
I think ultimately, the response to the XBox360 has much less to do with the product's specs and line-up, and mostly to do with the distinction that this is the "It" gift for the 2005 Christmas season. I'm unaware of any other new major releases that have the buzz of the XBox360 and its limited availability has created an increased demand as parents and others go to extremes to get the "It" gift to prove how much they "care." If you can give someone something that's hard to get, it's obviously a special gift.
What's more interesting is whether or not the limited availability of the unit is part of a carefully crafted plan to make the XBox360 the "It" gift? It already followed calculated rumors of it being sold at below its manufacturing cost (which is total bullshit, but that didn't stop every major media from propagating the hype). I wouldn't be surprised if the rarity of this unit mysteriously evaporates right before or after Christmas and there's a sea of units in every story. One indication of this is that while the system units are hard to come by, all the hyper-expensive add-ons are not.
Slashdot Mirror
The CATO institute is a super rich, super powerful, "Libertarian" lobbyist group. Well, technically it's a shill for select industries that want the government off its back, but it calls itself "libertarian" as a cover. I don't know whether they've directly contributed to the Libertarian party, but indirectly they are furthering the cause to suit their corporate benefactors' anti-regulatory agenda.
ROFL
One of their WOW guilds is named, "The Spreading Taint"
The point is to organize a guild so you can enjoy the game without having bigots call you a fag all the time. That's exactly the behavior that keeps me away from online gaming.
What could you possibly be doing in-game which wouldn't be a violation of the TOS and offensive to others that would justify them calling you a "fag" in the first place?
Nevermind. I don't want to know.
Why can't Blizzard give them their own server?
A very neat, meticulously-decorated, smartly-color-coordinated, sensitive and compassionate server?
It's important to note there are two types of "libertarians":
a) There's the person who believes in an ideological abstraction that is the core basis of libertarianism, which is just that: an idea, that has no track record of being practical nor desireable when you look into the reality of a world where everyone is left to fend for themselves.
b) There's the "libertarian movement" and political party which is basically a shill for corporations who want to snowjob people into believing that (a) is attainable, but all they really want is less government regulation so they can pollute the environment, release un-tested drugs, and not have to worry about getting caught or sued. Organizations like the CATO institute propagate the myth and pretend to be "non-partisian" but they're really lobbying organizations that have exploited the notion of a libertarian agenda solely to get the government to lay off select industries.
In either case, the Libertarian movement is a sham.
One reason why there are so many polarized ideals is due to the eradication of The Fairness Doctrine. There will never be a moderate position that is truly moderate in the United States; there will never be equitible debate on a grand scale in the media, until the Fairness Doctrine is reinstated.
In 1987 Reagan destroyed this precious aspect of democracy, which performed two very important things: it acknowledged that holders of valuable broadcast licenses had a duty to report news of interest to their constitutients, and it also gave citizens a right to peititon to have their side of a story heard in the media. When Reagan shot down this law, he paved the way for the new breed of media we see now, where editorial is intermixed with journalism, and we have 24-hour propaganda networks and extremist talk radio. This is why we now have a highly politically polarized populace who is incapable of recognizing 'facts.'
Nothing will change. Nothing. Until the Fairness Doctrine is reinstated. Every other attempt to alter the current course of corporate-dominated political policy will fail until there is a means by which more than one side gets a chance to air their issues in a fair manner.
People really need to understand this. It's THAT simple. It's all about the Fairness Doctrine. You can't organize an opposition party when the media has an interest in discrediting you. You can't even talk about important issues when the media won't report them. You can't create your own extremist broadcast network to counter another extremist broadcast network -- that doesn't work. The mainstream media must be forced to revert back to responsible journalism and giving equal time to opposing points of view. Without the Fairness Doctrine, nothing will change, and nothing else matters.
Let's see, the two main players in this industry aren't making any money. Let's start another venture of the same sort.
What the hell are the people at Motorola thinking?
Oh, let me guess. The stupid executives have convinced each other than the pay-for-radio scheme is mainly impeded by the lack of compatible hardware, and not the fact that people don't want to pay for crappy audio programs that they can improve upon themselves via their own playlists. So since motorola controls a platform/distribution medium, they might as well jump on the pay radio bandwagon because that's all that's holding people back? Yea right. Fools. I wonder.. does wearing a necktie all day choke the blood to peoples' brains?
Never mind. It doesn't matter. I guess it should come as no surprise. The bigger these corporations are, the more bone-headed their ideas seem to be, and the more unreceptive they are towards anything innovative or creative.
You'd think at this point, with Google's success, some of these other companies would have figured out that treating employees very well, paying them very well, and not outsourcing everything to third world countries, might, just might result in some innovative and marketable ideas... I guess it's going to make more time, and more King Kong movies before these companies get a clue.
What makes you think this is all about price?
Maybe it's about performance, security and stability?
There are a million reasons why consumers, if they knew they had a choice over Microsoft operating systems, would prefer an alternative. Price may get them in the door, but not having to have the OS crash, crapped up with spyware, continuously patched or infected with worms and viruses is a pleasure that most non-old-school computerphiles have never had the pleasure of enjoying.
Here's how the Kong movie hype gets exploited on the web:
Slashdot: "Kong Mirrors Real Evolutionary Paths"
Something Awful: "After watching King Kong, how many times did you cut yourself?"
Digg: "Kong-inspired PC Case Mod! OMFG!!"
Craigslist: "I will have sex with you for two tickets to King Kong premier."
eBay: "Folding table used by catering company on Kong movie set to be auctioned off starting at US$50,000"
Fark: "Man sues waffle house for refusing service to him while dressed as a giant ape. Your dog wants to see King Kong."
If anyone's interested, the principal described in the article is a special case of something called Foster's rule
Is Foster the head of the PR company that has minions of underlings invading all media with King Kong marketing propaganda?
I don't care if Angelina Jolie tattoos the goddam movie poster on the inside of her thigh and gives every moviegoer a peek, I'm NOT going to see this stupid remake-of-a-remake-of-a-remake movie. So stop with the King Kong viral marketing!
Hasn't King Kong been overhyped enough? Does Slashdot have to stoop so low that these viral marketing diseases have to infiltrate this site? Please, enough with the Kong references already. What's next? Kong condoms? Jack Black appearing on the Muscular Distrophy Telethon in an ape suit? Giant monkey week on the Discovery Channel? Is Orange County Choppers going to build a hairy ape-themed bike for POWs from Kong island? Please give us a fucking break with the Kong shit!
I'm not sure that's the issue. The article in question talks about national newspapers, not local. I agree that local papers are just cut/paste jobs, but the national papers - the NYT, WP and WSJ - have professional journalists writing for them.
Give me a buck and I can be a "professional journalist" too. That doesn't mean that I actually pursue what historically has been called "journalism" and nowhere is that more evident than in the national newspapers, who have all but turned into shills for corporate America. Bob Woodward is a prime example. A once respected "journalist" has now become yet another cog in a corrupted machine powered by political influence and money. This once respected reporter who broke Watergate claims to have known all along about the CIA leak and kept it quiet. He's yet another corrupted sell-out "journalist" who doesn't deserve to have a byline in a high school flyer.
The problem isn't with newspapers. It's with the state of journalism. Most newspapers these days don't have traditional reporters who go out and actually "investigate" stories. And if they do, they have a laundry list of taboo subjects (aka things that might tweak the advertisers) that they can't address or their editors will reject. As a result, most "reporters" just rewrite wire reports and manufacture fluff pieces... for example, I was in Florida last week and picked up the daily paper, and there was a major story on how your personality type can be identified by the way in which you sneeze! Yes, folks, this is apparently big-time news in the capital of Florida smack in the middle of the holiday season!
I do think the two (sandbox and levellers) can co-exist. Yes, they do love to hate each other, but the truth is they need each other. You can't implement a sandbox game without some sort of progressive path, at least as an option. GTA would not work without missions even if the majority of players don't follow the mission path. There has to be structure and there will always be some who exist only to excel at the structure, but most players fall in the middle, which is why I liked the original concept and was confounded at the subsequent changes, none of which seem to make the game appeal better to any specific demographic.
Worse is that both groups do not like each other much. The Levellers see the Sandboxers as a bunch of low level roleplaying freaks, the Sandbox people see the levellers as ill mannered script kiddies always looking for the latest exploit.
Yes however, before the original combat upgrade and other changes, at least the melee types NEEDED these people to heal their battle fatigue, then that was nerfed.... and for what? Talk about completely crippling the game balance.... to this day I couldn't believe how they could arbitrarily employ a patch that effectively nullified the usefulness of an entire class of characters! And SOE did it several times over.
And as you've pointed out, they didn't merely neuter entire classes of characters, SOE effectively excommunicated specific demographic groups of their consumers!
This is not a case of some disgruntled group of power gamers who are shitting bricks because some mob's respawn time has been altered by 10%. Never in the history of any MMORPG have there been such arbitrarily, brainless, massive changes implemented, and this has been happening consistently since the game's inception. We're talking major changes that fundamentally altered the game's basic operations. I never understood it then, and I don't understand it now. The only way it makes any sense is if these people are intentionally trying to kill this universe.
Haven't you figured it out?
They're suing because that's the only way they can legally find out the identity of the posters. It's not about whether or not they have a case. It's about:
a) Finding out who these people are for obvious reasons
b) Setting a precedent that if you talk shit about the company, your anonyminity may not be guaranteed
...the idea of broadband internet as a utility. It implies that...
a) The Internet will be run as a government-installed monopoly
b) There will be little or no competition, therefore there will be no innovation
c) Prices will remain high due to no competition
d) Service will be spotty and every once in awhile a "commission" will be formed to address some issue, appear on the news, and then nothing changes
What they should do is do a myth about "starting your own myth" online.
They could create an e-mail of some outrageous story, and turn it into a myth.
The cool thing is, they don't reveal that they created the myth until the end. They simply act like they're going to test the myth, but later reveal details on how it was them that created something like a bogus e-mail message and got it propagated around the net.
It would be even cooler if they could get snopes to claim it was true before it was exposed as a farce.
So basically NGE is admission the original system was unsustainable from both a monetary and coding basis.
Not necessarily. SWG only started substantially losing its player base after they radically altered the game design.
I contend the system was sustainable and maintainable. However, for some reason or another, instead of tweaking things, subsequent patches started adding more "features" in areas where there weren't problems. I think you got that right. But I don't believe the original design was that bad.
Ultimately, if there was a flaw in the game, it was that the developers didn't have a high-end game defined. So players became powerful and then got bored. Rather than create high-end content, the developers instead decided to cripple the character development design, which screwed everybody over. I'd love to know whose stupid idea was that?
I have played SWG since the beginning, in between taking breaks out of frustration as virtually all players have. I've watched with anticipation the original launch, and had fun exploring the early world, exploits, anomolies, class nuances, glass-eating trials-going-nowhere, and numerous bugs, as well as the later constant uncertainly which accompanied any proposed patch. I had a lot of fun, especially in the early days.
From what I knew of the early, original developers of SWG, I believed what they were trying to do was truly innovative and original. The best and the brightest from Verant wanted to create an all new, much more dynamic world that turned traditional MMORPGs on its side. In the early game you can see their vision in the crafting system, unusual classes and an experience-based system that caused characters to "gravitate" towards specific classes rather than be pidgeonholed into a specific path. There were all sort of seemingly innocuous and peripheral activities one could engage in, that for no logical reason, attracted a lot of participants. The original game was most certainly not some haphazardly put together system. You can tell a lot of thought went into it and it was a lot more balanced than people give it credit. The big problem is that the game *required* a significant routine population of players in order to function properly. But knowing that the design was set with the immensly popular Star Wars universe, and produced by the most successful MMORPG developer, now in concert with SOE's resources, it makes sense that the developers could count on this.
Then came the chaos.
The game started to change. Rather than patch minor glitches, updates started to alter the fundamental aspects of the gameplay.
When I think of SWG, it reminds me of the movie A.I. - you can see Kubrick's vision in the first half of the movie, then somewhere along the way Spielberg steps in and proceeds to turn the whole movie into a worthless pile of shit that makes you embarassed to admit you paid money for this trash.
Looking at things from the outside, it seems obvious to me that SWG was killed by having two groups, with two different visions, fight over the nature of the game. In reality there were probably three: the developers (Verant/SOE), Sony corporate, and Lucas and his minions. My opinion is that the Lucas people, with the support of SOE corporate (who probably didn't want to trash their rep with Lucas because of other areas of collusion) pushed the development team around and forced them to implement this haphazard mess of patches and redesigns, which of course, completely alienated the original player base.
I think what killed SWG was Star Wars; was Lucas and their people. If they had launched this game without Lucas and their meddling people, it probably would have had a much better chance. Instead, there were too many cooks in the kitchen and they fought over how the game was supposed to work and they killed it. And now, I suspect the redesign is merely an attempt to save face in one form or another due to some contractual obligations. At least, this is my opinion, FWIW.
I think it's obvious though, from even examining the game in its early stages, that there were at least two distinct factions pushing and pulling the game in different directions. The original developers wanted to create a more free form world where players weren't primarily directed by missions or levelling, and then others seemed to want to alter the game so that player success could be more easily qualified and quantified -- at the expense of the game's core design. This is a shame because SWG in its early stages was like GTA in that it presented a wide variety of options besides going on missions -- and this model has subsequently proven to be very appealing and lucrative, but someone (IMO the Lucas team) kept whining about this or that and eventually got their way and ruined the game in some kind of effort to reinforce brand identity.
So now SWG has been turned into a ki
I always suspected that SWG's player base consisted primarily of disabled or mentally-handicapped people. This undoubtedly confirms it. No sense pandering to those of us with full, unrestricted control of our facilities. We're undoubtedly the troublemakers who can post to the web forums complaining about how totally crappy the game has become.
My guess is that all game functions are now exclusively under mouse control except "EXIT", which may bode well for future announcements of an "increase in SWGs player base."
Nobody wants to admit it, but Star Wars Galaxies is probably going to be the next big MMORPG to go down. There are too many resources dedicated to that system and not enough players. The desperation the producers have in trying to keep the game from tanking is evident in the constant changes they make to virtually every system.
It should come as no surprise that AC will be shut down. It's amazing it lasted this long. The game suffered horribly under the strain of its initial launch and complaints that the servers were buggy and unstable. I don't think it ever recovered.
What's even more depressing than entering an empty game world, is entering a game world filled with people and not being able to participate. Everquest I has become like this to some degree now, with the world being so big and so many players at high levels, it's easy to be ignored.
While that might be cooler, it's not really much "hacking." The guy that put together the impressive Christmas light display did so with off-the-shelf equipment and merely followed the manufacturer's instructions. The whole notion of "hacking" is to expand a product's funtionality beyond its original purpose. The Christmas lights, while really impressive, perform exactly how they're supposed to based on the software and hardware the guy bought. And there are better light shows all over the country from Vegas to Disneyworld. Using a DMX controller isn't some groundbreaking act of hacking.
I think ultimately, the response to the XBox360 has much less to do with the product's specs and line-up, and mostly to do with the distinction that this is the "It" gift for the 2005 Christmas season. I'm unaware of any other new major releases that have the buzz of the XBox360 and its limited availability has created an increased demand as parents and others go to extremes to get the "It" gift to prove how much they "care." If you can give someone something that's hard to get, it's obviously a special gift.
What's more interesting is whether or not the limited availability of the unit is part of a carefully crafted plan to make the XBox360 the "It" gift? It already followed calculated rumors of it being sold at below its manufacturing cost (which is total bullshit, but that didn't stop every major media from propagating the hype). I wouldn't be surprised if the rarity of this unit mysteriously evaporates right before or after Christmas and there's a sea of units in every story. One indication of this is that while the system units are hard to come by, all the hyper-expensive add-ons are not.
I love how Microsoft characterizes scenarios where companies use their products as "evidence", as if it seems crminal. How apropos.