My girlfriend had a Kerry sign in her front yard. It kept disappearing and she kept putting it up. One evening when she was driving home she saw a van plastered with pro-life bumper stickers driving around the neighborhood. The van would stop in front of some house with a democratic yard sign, out would pop a little girl from the passenger seat, she'd pull the sign up and toss it in the back of the van. My girlfriend watched in horror as the driver of this van, presumably the child's mother, had her kid go through the neighborhood picking up these signs. She started to follow them and they got wise they were being followed and sped off. My GF went to the police to report it and they said it wasn't worth reporting because probably no action would be taken even though she got the license number of the van.
It's pretty despicable when people engage their kids in such activities. Unfortunately, you see a lot of this activity among the rabid pro-life crowd: they bring their kids out front of abortion clinics holding up signs with pictures of dead fetuses. There seems to a recurring theme of partisians using children as political tools.
Legit servers report accurate information. It's simple.
All the backtracking is irrelevent IMO. The last SMTP server is the one you look at.
I do admit, for servers that are doing domain forwarding, there exists some potential liability if they end up forwarding spam, which is why I deploy a very hefty RBL that doesn't accept mail from most of the DUL IP space and the rogue APNIC nations that are havens to spammers. It works great.
Why do you think this would work? Its the mail server that generates such mail header content. When the "server" is a compromised home box sitting on a DSL connection, why would the trojan/virus/what have you be honest about the origins of the email it generates?
It does work.
Very few legitimate mail servers can be easily compromised. Gone are the days of open relays. What we are seeing now are "illegal" mail relays operating from DUL IP space where mail relays shouldn't be. Or they're mail relays originating in countries that the user usually has absolutely no business dealing with.
At this point, almost the entire 211,219 and 81.*.*.* class A IP blocks' SMTP traffic to the United States is bogus spam and scams. Most responsible ISPs are already blocking much of this IP space.
Every IP has a physical verifiable location. We can't stop people from being stupid, but we can let them know when they're getting an email claiming to be from FirstUSA bank, that came from South Korea!
You and I know how to do that. Try to get your grandmother, stupid cousin, or technophobe doctor to reveal mail headers and do an IPWHOIS every time they get a mail and you'll appreciate my point.
One easy way to address this situation would be to have a plugin or feature for most e-mail clients that would prominently display the general source of the message (i.e. "China, Brazil, DSL user in Texas, etc.) as a prominent part of the normally-viewable message headers.
It is well known that most spam and phishing e-mails are coming from one of two sets of IP space: China and Korea and related "rogue IP space", and DSL-based zombie proxies. It would not be difficult to use a database or design an algorhythm which could 'flag' e-mail messages as suspicious based on the comparison between the from header information and the SMTP relay.
Users who then received messages could get a color-coded warning when they view the message, i.e.:
"WARNING: This e-mail claims to be from the domain ebay.com but it originated from a system suspected of being located in China - use caution"
Very simple, elegant and helpful solution. Which probably means it would never be adopted.
Spoken like someone who has never played a cleric in a raiding guild. There is a reason more and more clerics are bots.
Actually, I am a cleric in the highest-ranked guild on my server, completely decked out with PoT+ gear.
The reason more and more clerics are bots are because the high-end game is becoming tedious and it's harder to assemble 50+ people at the same time to do some encounters. As for botting, any class can be botted. Clerics may very well be one of the more difficult classes to bot though.
I wish Slashdot would just report political news without the slant. Anyway, while the Summary stated that
Until there are robots that can collect information from other robots, none of whom have any emotions or sentience, everything will be biased. Get used to it and stop your whining.
I wish stupid people on Slashdot would stop complaining about "bias" and recognize that they have brains they can use to research things themselves. We could go around forever in a circular argument over who is biased in what direction. And nothing would get settled.
I have an idea, do your own research. Don't rely on other people to try to match your brain wave patterns when providing you data.
Best EQ feature was discontinued a long time ago
on
Everquest 2 NDA Lifted
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
IMO, one of the coolest, most innovative features of Everquest was introduced for no more than a few weeks, and then quickly removed.
This was called the infamous "Project M".
What it allowed you to do was log into the game and take over a random NPC in a low level zone.
This would really freak out players as the NPC behavior sometimes would become quite erratic and unusual. You couldn't chat while playing a monster, but you could move around and attack.
Unfortunately, guilds figured out how to defeat the random nature of where you were deployed and eventually there rose up, armies of player-controlled giant rats in newbie zones that would terrorize lower-level players.
It was hilarious and very creative. It's a shame they didn't try to tweak this feature and keep it online. It was the perfect short-term distraction for players who otherwise couldn't get grouped or wanted to try something different.
Whoever came up with project M was very creative and innovative. I don't see that kind of creativity in later versions of Everquest or its expansions. Things have become much more formulaic.
A friend in Europe told me that there's at least one supermarket in France where they have different colored carts which supposedly indicate your marital status - kind of like a "singles grocery store". If you're single and looking you have a different colored cart. As goofy as it sounds, it seems like an interesting way for people to meet. Can anyone confirm the existence of such a supermarket?
I've been doing a bit of reading on EQ2 and it seems that many of the characteristics of EQ2 are direct attempts to "nerf" features in EQ that have become core components of the gameplay.
* Complete heal is gone
* Shaman slows are apparently gone or no longer as potent
* Mobs that have helpers/range aggro are now "grouped" and cannot be single-pulled by FD'ing classes
What's disappointing is that both these "features" of the game spawned extensive gameplay strategies and talent. It's sad to see them go... clerics using cooperative ch rots or anticipating cast timing, or pullers with amazing abilities to extract single mobs in very hostile zones.
* When you die, you don't lose your corpse, but you incurr some "debt" that you have to pay off before you can continue to get max experience from kills. Instead of a corpse, you have a spirit shard that needs to be recovered in order to avoid great debt and stat loss. Also these shards get automatically absorbed into your char after 72 hours. Furthermore if someone dies in a group, the entire group shares debt... an interesting approach towards balancing the risk/reward of classes that may end up dying more often.
This seems to be a big improvement over EQ.
* Automatic zone instancing... apparently if some zones get too crowded, the system may create another instance of the zone and people zoning in can select which instance of the zone they want to enter.
I can see the value of instanced zones for isolated adventures and expeditions, but splitting real in-game areas into multiple zones seems a bit freaky and unrealistic.
How do you maintain the immersive nature of the game when, upon entering a dungeon, you're prompted with a menu to choose which alternate reality you want to enter?
* Combat Locking - in order to avoid kill-stealing, once a player/group attacks a mob, nearby players cannot do damage to this mob. Apparently the player can yell for help and disable this "feature" at the cost of xp/loot.
Kill stealing has always been a troubling issue in EQ, but I'm not sure I like this mod. It flies in the face of realism. Furthermore, I see much potential for this feature to be abused.. casters with long-range spells can now easily take a mob away from another group heading to pull it.
And if KS'ing is such a deal that the developers had to hack the system to address it, what have they done about the even more annoying problem of training mobs on other people?
* Less class specialization - I'm under the impression that in EQ2 there is less distinction beteen classes. All the tank hybrids seem to be more comparable in terms of tanking; all the healing classes also have the ability to ressurrect players, etc.
I am not sure what purpose this homogenization of classes and races serves, other than seeming to turn race and class into more an issue of vanity than functionality.
Again, we have core components of the game, not necessarily designed to make a better game, but to address frustrations such as certain classes not being as desireable in groups. This could be a blessing to those who in the past felt in retrospect they chose the wrong class, but it also dulls the unique nature of classes and races.
SWG supports player-built cities, and there are cases where groups of players have "colonized" otherwise hostile areas. This is one very neat feature of SWG.
Star Wars Galaxies goes a step further. You can place automated vendors in homes and guild halls - effectively creating a "mall". The difference between this and EQ2 is that you don't have to be logged in and sitting in Bazaar in order to sell stuff. I never understood the value of this, unless it's a gimmick for SOE to sell more player accounts.
As an existing EQ player since the beginning, but without any direct experience with EQ2 yet, I can't say I find much of the information about EQ2 compelling.
As I understand it, they've shrunk the world, reduced the number of starting cities, homogenized the race/class arrangement, and added a few extra hamster wheels for crafting and acquiring spell/skills. Nothing exciting IMO. They didn't even get rid of zones.
By their own admission, SOE says that hardware *does not yet exist* which is capable of running the game with max video settings.
The eye-candy aspect may be appealing, but that's something that wears thin after the first half-hour. It seems to me the visual appeal of the game is one of the more substantive characteristics, but really has nothing to do with game play.
The most notable addition seems to be player housing -- that's intriguing. The notion of player and guild cities would seem cool, but it's not enough to encourage me to play.
The general opinion of most around the world is that the current mess is the work of "Bush" and not "America." Most foreigners, especially Europeans think the installation of Bush as President was questionable.
All Kerry basically has to do is, once elected, call a meeting with various heads of state and say, "Well, Bush is gone... let's fix this shit." and we'll have exponentially better international relations and cooperation in Iraq and elsewhere in the world.
Now if Bush gets elected this time around, we're all screwed. If you don't realize this, you're blind and foolish and you deserve what you get.
The public is already desensitized. Hell, I dislike Bush, but Kerry WON'T SHUT UP about Iraq. If you asked him "Do you like kittens?", he'd answer with "Bush Lied to Invade Iraq". Do you know how annoying that is? Make it a point of course, because it is definatly the most serious issue, but don't rattle on and on about it with no break in sight because it annoys people and they stop listening.
You see what your media overlords decide you'll see relative to Kerry. Don't be foolish and think that every word that comes out of his mouth has to do with Iraq, but at least he recognizes the severity of the country employing a policy of preemptive aggression.
You know. I WISH there were a draft. I really do. I wish all these apathetic slackers that don't give a damn about things would get called up to fight. Then they'd suddenly pay a helluva lot more attention to what's going on over there. In the meantime, they'll just sedate themselves with their playstations.
The problem is, I see our political system in a greater crisis than simpletons like the makers of this movie. Their whole political consciousness is like "there are dicks and assholes, and we need the dicks because of the assholes." Which, of course, is errant nonsense. True we need "cops" to put "bad guys" behind bars, but invading other countries on lies, stripping away civil liberties, and skewing the tax code to favour the welathy and bankrupt the treasury is not excusable.
I can appreciate the parody and the humor, but I tend to agree with you on this point. On one hand you can say, "don't take it so seriously - it's just a movie" but on the other, these guys' never-ending attempt to make fun of controversial issues has the insideous side effect of desensitizing the public to important issues and making everything going on in the world today that isn't happening in their backyard seem like detached un-reality that they are better off laughing at than being concerned with.
Sean Penn got it right IMO. I'd be very interested to see how cavalier they'd be about these issues after taking a personal tour of Baghdad. Until they do that, they're a bunch of pussies, pressing peoples buttons from their hollywood armchairs and epitomizing the very system they make fun of.
I for one am glad this suit did not interrupt the debates.
The bottom line is that none of the third-party candidates have a snowball's chance in hell of winning, and the outcome of this election is too important to further muddy the waters. For those of you who don't think there is much difference between Kerry and Bush, don't even bother replying, but a lot more of us recognize that this will probably be the most important election in our lifetime. That various twit third-parties want to create a repeat of the last election's mess where a candidate that had no chance of winning critically upsets the balance, is really disturbing. As disturbing as Nader claiming there was "no difference between Gore and Bush."
I would like to see third parties be allowed in the debates. I would like to see extensive reform of the system, but not this cycle. There's too much on the line, and all the alternative candidates who are exploiting the current scenario instead of endorsing Kerry are showing how completely short-sighted and self-absorbed they are... nobody is more disgustingly representative of such selfishness as the infamous Mr. Nader.
I like much of the agenda of some of the third parties, but I will be taking names and notes on the selfish candidates who show their true colors by trying to compete in this current election when they have no chance. Their political career will be over, just like Nader's.
Third party candidates should drop out in 2004 and prepare for 2008. The way things are going, if they screw up this election, there's a much greater chance many of us may not see 2008, much less feel very free or democratic.
I think MMO sports games would be a bit difficult to target the desires of most sports fans. First, most sports fans tend to think they know what's best for their teams and nobody can tell them otherwise. In a real-time environment, the competition for who would be "king" of the team, controlling the QB or calling the shots would turn off the majority who have no desire to be anything more than the exclusive one in charge/handling the ball. Good luck getting your typical sports fan to play left field or right guard during the course of an entire game.
Second, sports fans never really have their insight or talent challenged. These are the people that would last about 20 seconds in MMO first person shooters, getting killed over and over before they'd give up and head to the pantry for more nachos.
Third, watching sports and playing sports are two different things. A typical sports fan thinks he has the depth of wisdom to select the best approach towards winning, but in a realistic simulation, he'd probably get trounced by people who are less fans than they are technicians and tacticians.
That notwithstanding, I'm sure there will be more sports MMO games coming out, but they'll be more likely to turn a traditionally tactical gamer into a sports afficiando than they will turn a typical sports fan into an online gamer.
As an ex-employee of SOE, I would like to say that I haven't ever seen a more incompetent group of people. The company is short-sighted, money-grubbing, disrespectful towards their customers, and has management filled with more idiots than the RNC
I respectfully disagree. I suspect the poster was probably a disgrunted volunteer-guide who got pissed when he was fired because he got caught ressing his friends in game.
SOE has gone through a number of changes since their inception, and they still IMO are the best MMORPG development group in the world -- at least the Verant portion. They're probably having to play more politics these days than they used to, but Everquest has no equal in terms of logevitity and game balance. No other MMORPG has come close, and no MMORPG is even near to encroaching into SOE's dominance in this area. As an ex-employee who has no great motivation to boast, I cannot deny this fact.
This doesn't take away from my contention that many of these MMORPGs are becoming too complex to attract the mainstream, but the developers are light years ahead of everyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
My girlfriend had a Kerry sign in her front yard. It kept disappearing and she kept putting it up. One evening when she was driving home she saw a van plastered with pro-life bumper stickers driving around the neighborhood. The van would stop in front of some house with a democratic yard sign, out would pop a little girl from the passenger seat, she'd pull the sign up and toss it in the back of the van. My girlfriend watched in horror as the driver of this van, presumably the child's mother, had her kid go through the neighborhood picking up these signs. She started to follow them and they got wise they were being followed and sped off. My GF went to the police to report it and they said it wasn't worth reporting because probably no action would be taken even though she got the license number of the van.
It's pretty despicable when people engage their kids in such activities. Unfortunately, you see a lot of this activity among the rabid pro-life crowd: they bring their kids out front of abortion clinics holding up signs with pictures of dead fetuses. There seems to a recurring theme of partisians using children as political tools.
You gotta love a site that doesn't appear to support Firefox.
It said I lacked the proper plugin. I even installed the latest version of Quicktime and it still didn't work.
Legit servers report accurate information. It's simple.
All the backtracking is irrelevent IMO. The last SMTP server is the one you look at.
I do admit, for servers that are doing domain forwarding, there exists some potential liability if they end up forwarding spam, which is why I deploy a very hefty RBL that doesn't accept mail from most of the DUL IP space and the rogue APNIC nations that are havens to spammers. It works great.
Why do you think this would work? Its the mail server that generates such mail header content. When the "server" is a compromised home box sitting on a DSL connection, why would the trojan/virus/what have you be honest about the origins of the email it generates?
It does work.
Very few legitimate mail servers can be easily compromised. Gone are the days of open relays. What we are seeing now are "illegal" mail relays operating from DUL IP space where mail relays shouldn't be. Or they're mail relays originating in countries that the user usually has absolutely no business dealing with.
At this point, almost the entire 211,219 and 81.*.*.* class A IP blocks' SMTP traffic to the United States is bogus spam and scams. Most responsible ISPs are already blocking much of this IP space.
Every IP has a physical verifiable location. We can't stop people from being stupid, but we can let them know when they're getting an email claiming to be from FirstUSA bank, that came from South Korea!
You and I know how to do that. Try to get your grandmother, stupid cousin, or technophobe doctor to reveal mail headers and do an IPWHOIS every time they get a mail and you'll appreciate my point.
One easy way to address this situation would be to have a plugin or feature for most e-mail clients that would prominently display the general source of the message (i.e. "China, Brazil, DSL user in Texas, etc.) as a prominent part of the normally-viewable message headers.
It is well known that most spam and phishing e-mails are coming from one of two sets of IP space: China and Korea and related "rogue IP space", and DSL-based zombie proxies. It would not be difficult to use a database or design an algorhythm which could 'flag' e-mail messages as suspicious based on the comparison between the from header information and the SMTP relay.
Users who then received messages could get a color-coded warning when they view the message, i.e.:
"WARNING: This e-mail claims to be from the domain ebay.com but it originated from a system suspected of being located in China - use caution"
Very simple, elegant and helpful solution. Which probably means it would never be adopted.
Spoken like someone who has never played a cleric in a raiding guild. There is a reason more and more clerics are bots.
Actually, I am a cleric in the highest-ranked guild on my server, completely decked out with PoT+ gear.
The reason more and more clerics are bots are because the high-end game is becoming tedious and it's harder to assemble 50+ people at the same time to do some encounters. As for botting, any class can be botted. Clerics may very well be one of the more difficult classes to bot though.
I wish Slashdot would just report political news without the slant. Anyway, while the Summary stated that
Until there are robots that can collect information from other robots, none of whom have any emotions or sentience, everything will be biased. Get used to it and stop your whining.
I wish stupid people on Slashdot would stop complaining about "bias" and recognize that they have brains they can use to research things themselves. We could go around forever in a circular argument over who is biased in what direction. And nothing would get settled.
I have an idea, do your own research. Don't rely on other people to try to match your brain wave patterns when providing you data.
IMO, one of the coolest, most innovative features of Everquest was introduced for no more than a few weeks, and then quickly removed.
This was called the infamous "Project M".
What it allowed you to do was log into the game and take over a random NPC in a low level zone.
This would really freak out players as the NPC behavior sometimes would become quite erratic and unusual. You couldn't chat while playing a monster, but you could move around and attack.
Unfortunately, guilds figured out how to defeat the random nature of where you were deployed and eventually there rose up, armies of player-controlled giant rats in newbie zones that would terrorize lower-level players.
It was hilarious and very creative. It's a shame they didn't try to tweak this feature and keep it online. It was the perfect short-term distraction for players who otherwise couldn't get grouped or wanted to try something different.
Whoever came up with project M was very creative and innovative. I don't see that kind of creativity in later versions of Everquest or its expansions. Things have become much more formulaic.
A friend in Europe told me that there's at least one supermarket in France where they have different colored carts which supposedly indicate your marital status - kind of like a "singles grocery store". If you're single and looking you have a different colored cart. As goofy as it sounds, it seems like an interesting way for people to meet. Can anyone confirm the existence of such a supermarket?
I've been doing a bit of reading on EQ2 and it seems that many of the characteristics of EQ2 are direct attempts to "nerf" features in EQ that have become core components of the gameplay.
* Complete heal is gone
* Shaman slows are apparently gone or no longer as potent
* Mobs that have helpers/range aggro are now "grouped" and cannot be single-pulled by FD'ing classes
What's disappointing is that both these "features" of the game spawned extensive gameplay strategies and talent. It's sad to see them go... clerics using cooperative ch rots or anticipating cast timing, or pullers with amazing abilities to extract single mobs in very hostile zones.
* When you die, you don't lose your corpse, but you incurr some "debt" that you have to pay off before you can continue to get max experience from kills. Instead of a corpse, you have a spirit shard that needs to be recovered in order to avoid great debt and stat loss. Also these shards get automatically absorbed into your char after 72 hours. Furthermore if someone dies in a group, the entire group shares debt... an interesting approach towards balancing the risk/reward of classes that may end up dying more often.
This seems to be a big improvement over EQ.
* Automatic zone instancing... apparently if some zones get too crowded, the system may create another instance of the zone and people zoning in can select which instance of the zone they want to enter.
I can see the value of instanced zones for isolated adventures and expeditions, but splitting real in-game areas into multiple zones seems a bit freaky and unrealistic.
How do you maintain the immersive nature of the game when, upon entering a dungeon, you're prompted with a menu to choose which alternate reality you want to enter?
* Combat Locking - in order to avoid kill-stealing, once a player/group attacks a mob, nearby players cannot do damage to this mob. Apparently the player can yell for help and disable this "feature" at the cost of xp/loot.
Kill stealing has always been a troubling issue in EQ, but I'm not sure I like this mod. It flies in the face of realism. Furthermore, I see much potential for this feature to be abused.. casters with long-range spells can now easily take a mob away from another group heading to pull it.
And if KS'ing is such a deal that the developers had to hack the system to address it, what have they done about the even more annoying problem of training mobs on other people?
* Less class specialization - I'm under the impression that in EQ2 there is less distinction beteen classes. All the tank hybrids seem to be more comparable in terms of tanking; all the healing classes also have the ability to ressurrect players, etc.
I am not sure what purpose this homogenization of classes and races serves, other than seeming to turn race and class into more an issue of vanity than functionality.
Again, we have core components of the game, not necessarily designed to make a better game, but to address frustrations such as certain classes not being as desireable in groups. This could be a blessing to those who in the past felt in retrospect they chose the wrong class, but it also dulls the unique nature of classes and races.
SWG supports player-built cities, and there are cases where groups of players have "colonized" otherwise hostile areas. This is one very neat feature of SWG.
Star Wars Galaxies goes a step further. You can place automated vendors in homes and guild halls - effectively creating a "mall". The difference between this and EQ2 is that you don't have to be logged in and sitting in Bazaar in order to sell stuff. I never understood the value of this, unless it's a gimmick for SOE to sell more player accounts.
As an existing EQ player since the beginning, but without any direct experience with EQ2 yet, I can't say I find much of the information about EQ2 compelling.
As I understand it, they've shrunk the world, reduced the number of starting cities, homogenized the race/class arrangement, and added a few extra hamster wheels for crafting and acquiring spell/skills. Nothing exciting IMO. They didn't even get rid of zones.
By their own admission, SOE says that hardware *does not yet exist* which is capable of running the game with max video settings.
The eye-candy aspect may be appealing, but that's something that wears thin after the first half-hour. It seems to me the visual appeal of the game is one of the more substantive characteristics, but really has nothing to do with game play.
The most notable addition seems to be player housing -- that's intriguing. The notion of player and guild cities would seem cool, but it's not enough to encourage me to play.
What we need is a robot guitarist... something that can be programmed to TURN HIS DAMN VOLUME DOWN!!
Q: How do you get a guitarist to turn down?
A: Put sheet music in front of him.
What do you call a drummer who breaks up with his girlfriend?
Homeless.
This is great... when executives meet to figure out ways to drive the company over a cliff, they can also do it literally.
The general opinion of most around the world is that the current mess is the work of "Bush" and not "America." Most foreigners, especially Europeans think the installation of Bush as President was questionable.
All Kerry basically has to do is, once elected, call a meeting with various heads of state and say, "Well, Bush is gone... let's fix this shit." and we'll have exponentially better international relations and cooperation in Iraq and elsewhere in the world.
Now if Bush gets elected this time around, we're all screwed. If you don't realize this, you're blind and foolish and you deserve what you get.
The public is already desensitized.
Hell, I dislike Bush, but Kerry WON'T SHUT UP about Iraq. If you asked him "Do you like kittens?", he'd answer with "Bush Lied to Invade Iraq". Do you know how annoying that is? Make it a point of course, because it is definatly the most serious issue, but don't rattle on and on about it with no break in sight because it annoys people and they stop listening.
You see what your media overlords decide you'll see relative to Kerry. Don't be foolish and think that every word that comes out of his mouth has to do with Iraq, but at least he recognizes the severity of the country employing a policy of preemptive aggression.
You know. I WISH there were a draft. I really do. I wish all these apathetic slackers that don't give a damn about things would get called up to fight. Then they'd suddenly pay a helluva lot more attention to what's going on over there. In the meantime, they'll just sedate themselves with their playstations.
The problem is, I see our political system in a greater crisis than simpletons like the makers of this movie. Their whole political consciousness is like "there are dicks and assholes, and we need the dicks because of the assholes." Which, of course, is errant nonsense. True we need "cops" to put "bad guys" behind bars, but invading other countries on lies, stripping away civil liberties, and skewing the tax code to favour the welathy and bankrupt the treasury is not excusable.
I can appreciate the parody and the humor, but I tend to agree with you on this point. On one hand you can say, "don't take it so seriously - it's just a movie" but on the other, these guys' never-ending attempt to make fun of controversial issues has the insideous side effect of desensitizing the public to important issues and making everything going on in the world today that isn't happening in their backyard seem like detached un-reality that they are better off laughing at than being concerned with.
Sean Penn got it right IMO. I'd be very interested to see how cavalier they'd be about these issues after taking a personal tour of Baghdad. Until they do that, they're a bunch of pussies, pressing peoples buttons from their hollywood armchairs and epitomizing the very system they make fun of.
Salon has an interview with Tray and Matt about this where they talk about their intent and how people react to the movie.
I for one am glad this suit did not interrupt the debates.
The bottom line is that none of the third-party candidates have a snowball's chance in hell of winning, and the outcome of this election is too important to further muddy the waters. For those of you who don't think there is much difference between Kerry and Bush, don't even bother replying, but a lot more of us recognize that this will probably be the most important election in our lifetime. That various twit third-parties want to create a repeat of the last election's mess where a candidate that had no chance of winning critically upsets the balance, is really disturbing. As disturbing as Nader claiming there was "no difference between Gore and Bush."
I would like to see third parties be allowed in the debates. I would like to see extensive reform of the system, but not this cycle. There's too much on the line, and all the alternative candidates who are exploiting the current scenario instead of endorsing Kerry are showing how completely short-sighted and self-absorbed they are... nobody is more disgustingly representative of such selfishness as the infamous Mr. Nader.
I like much of the agenda of some of the third parties, but I will be taking names and notes on the selfish candidates who show their true colors by trying to compete in this current election when they have no chance. Their political career will be over, just like Nader's.
Third party candidates should drop out in 2004 and prepare for 2008. The way things are going, if they screw up this election, there's a much greater chance many of us may not see 2008, much less feel very free or democratic.
I think MMO sports games would be a bit difficult to target the desires of most sports fans. First, most sports fans tend to think they know what's best for their teams and nobody can tell them otherwise. In a real-time environment, the competition for who would be "king" of the team, controlling the QB or calling the shots would turn off the majority who have no desire to be anything more than the exclusive one in charge/handling the ball. Good luck getting your typical sports fan to play left field or right guard during the course of an entire game.
Second, sports fans never really have their insight or talent challenged. These are the people that would last about 20 seconds in MMO first person shooters, getting killed over and over before they'd give up and head to the pantry for more nachos.
Third, watching sports and playing sports are two different things. A typical sports fan thinks he has the depth of wisdom to select the best approach towards winning, but in a realistic simulation, he'd probably get trounced by people who are less fans than they are technicians and tacticians.
That notwithstanding, I'm sure there will be more sports MMO games coming out, but they'll be more likely to turn a traditionally tactical gamer into a sports afficiando than they will turn a typical sports fan into an online gamer.
Which third world are we talking about? According to Bush in his latest debate, there are apparently several third worlds.
As an ex-employee of SOE, I would like to say that I haven't ever seen a more incompetent group of people. The company is short-sighted, money-grubbing, disrespectful towards their customers, and has management filled with more idiots than the RNC
I respectfully disagree. I suspect the poster was probably a disgrunted volunteer-guide who got pissed when he was fired because he got caught ressing his friends in game.
SOE has gone through a number of changes since their inception, and they still IMO are the best MMORPG development group in the world -- at least the Verant portion. They're probably having to play more politics these days than they used to, but Everquest has no equal in terms of logevitity and game balance. No other MMORPG has come close, and no MMORPG is even near to encroaching into SOE's dominance in this area. As an ex-employee who has no great motivation to boast, I cannot deny this fact.
This doesn't take away from my contention that many of these MMORPGs are becoming too complex to attract the mainstream, but the developers are light years ahead of everyone else.
Is this in praise of the fun of Ms. Pac-Man or an insult to the fun of the club?
Take your pick... lol