SWTOR is a game very much about cosmetics on top of actual gear. I'd expect that you'll be able to pay for the look of your gear but not necessarily the functionality.
But who knows, money is money, and BioWare austin needs to find a way to justify keeping hundreds of people on the payroll . They were at 400 or so this time last year, but well, some of those people had to go (on top of that are the call centre support people).
I fail to see how the purchase of an art history text "forces" someone to actually buy the text.
Generally it doesn't. This likely the parent of a first year who saw 'required' and thought 'required means required'. Not everyone knows these things, and it's not something you normally talk about.
It's also possible however that the textbook is supposed to be actively used in class (where, for example, he may have all of the relevant images on the projector).
I have had, in 1.75 undergrads, 2.5 masters degrees and most of the way through a PhD a few occasions where a 'required' textbook really did mean required, or at least, for all practical purposes meant required. Sure chem 101 had 9 copies of the book on reserve in the library, but there were 2700 students in the class, 9 copies doesn't go very far, and it doesn't take a lot of assholes sabotaging the books for the 9 in the library to be worthless. I had a java professor who used a standard java textbook but he used it in class, every class. He wasn't very good at his job, but I would have been doomed without the textbook there in front of me because everything he did depended on you being able to read the book in front of you. I've had classes where all examinations were open textbook - and not having your own copy poses a lot of problems there. And I've had expensive books (notably my calculus textbook from way back in 1998), which are still useful as a phd student in a different field years later. Claude Cohen-Tannoudji's Photons and Atoms: Introduction to Quantum Electrodynamics is just a pile of dead trees if you're not in the field, but David J. Griffiths Introduction to Electrodynamics has proven enormously valuable in everything from E&M to AI and graphics and hardware engineering.
Schools don't care, because they are making filthy money off of them, that have no incentive to do anything to reduce the prices.
Schools don't make money from the sale of books anymore, if you're dumb enough to buy from the university bookstore without checking online first that's a reasonable stupid tax. Gone are the days of waiting 6 weeks in a 12 week course for the textbook you ordered from amazon. Also, maintaining a storefront on a university campus can be surprisingly expensive, and have shitty sales. You have a captive market of poor people who don't really want to buy anything they don't have to, and no access to foot traffic from elsewhere, also, the bookstores are supposed to guarantee adequate supply for classes so they have huge inventory fees that no one else would have to deal with.
As to the story itself...first of all, it's OCAD, you kind of expect some weird shit if you go to OCAD. Second of all, none of my computer science books have computers in them, lots of them don't have code in them. That is, believe it or not, not the point. My physics textbooks have descriptions of the experiments, usually not pictures of the actual apparatus used, etc. Publications in art don't necessarily have a picture of the image itself (no more than movie critics include a copy of the book with their review). It's a textbook, for whatever reason the professor figured it had the best analysis of the works s/he was going to talk about in class.
Where I am, which is a couple of hours west of OCAD, we have some courses with text books (some expensive) some without, and some with 15 dollar course packs, though those are largely now just done as the raw files on the web. Some profs require books they themselves wrote (which usually has the advantage of them actually covering things only in the texbook), some of us did quite a lot of research to select a book. And sometimes a book is selected
Don't get me wrong, it's a bizarre choice to require a book that looks like it's a broken webpage, but lots of professors are bizarre, and one should be grateful the professor speaks english. It's also possible the 180 dollars is really just the cost of the access code to the website, and the 'book' is just a very inefficient delivery mechanism of that code. In context though, to even go to OCAD you're paying the (by ontario standards average) Sum of 6400* dollars per 2 semesters, sept - may roughly, or about 600 dollars per course to even be allowed to sit in the room. (http://www.ocadu.ca/Assets/pdf_media/Finance/2012+2013+FW+UG+DOM+TUITION.pdf), it's not obvious if this text would have use in only one course or two. But asking students to spend 800 dollars on a book for a 600 dollar course is unlikely to prove any more popular than a 180 dollar book with the right words but no pictures.
*foreign students pay 18K, the difference is subsidized by the government for domestic students, and is roughly the same for all non professional undergraduate programmes across Ontario
No goals. Some may disagree and do not find that appealing and that is fine but give SWTOR for being different.
Without a doubt, that was what BioWare was trying to bring to the genre. That doesn't mean the game stays fun.
Unfortunately when they run out of story they don't know what to do. Blizzard doesn't have a particularly good story (well other than the generic overarching story of the world), but they have people who understand what to do with the 800 hours of play time that come after the questing to level cap is over. Or at least they're better at it than BioWare.
noticed it did not have 8 years of tuning that Wow had and left
Considering they almost verbatim copied WoW that wasn't an issue. That was probably the problem, what they copied wasn't all that good, but worked within the inertia of WoW.
In wow, its kill 12 boars for a liver pie...
Are you a press release? In SWTOR it's go kill robots or bandits or menacing looking creatures for 12 generic quest items that they name something epic. Same shit, different pile so to speak. I agree, that the idea that you should always face epicish enemies makes some sense, but the alternative, where you're killing boars in hellfire and see a fel reaver and RUN makes killing the fel reaver all that much sweeter. I think both cases have their merits. If you're slogging through korslugs or boars you're not nearly as epic as trying to rescue Kaliyo or dominate a bunch of force goats you tried to absorb.
You can say this about wow if you arleady invested the 100 hours in pvp gear. If you were starting from scratch it would be the same story.
yes, that's why blizzard changed it, and BioWare should have been smart enough not to copy it.
EA rushes shit and did so with SWTOR but it is now improving.
Having been in a lot of testing I disagree with you on this. They could have launched the game 3 months earlier easily. They were waiting on SOE's exclusive licence to drop on Dec 15th.
They launched the game they wanted to launch. That was the wrong game, but it was definitely what they wanted it to be. And even then, if you look the changes they've made since, relatively little of it has been about fixing the things that aren't fun repeatedly and all that 'end game' stuff.
The part about figuring out all the numbers and the number crunching in general was really fun.
and for the people who aren't capable of doing that math how much fun is it?
Crit (towards the end of WOTLK), armour penetration and mastery on tanks in cata all have problems with capping but not. It's not 'hard' to figure out, but not everyone wants to, or is capable of doing that.
The problem with armour pen was partly the hard cutoff at 1400. It was worth more and more until it was worth nothing. That's just bizarre.
You have to design a game for everyone, not just for people who can do math.
Uh, no. Resilience is there because players weapons tend to grow in power faster than their defenses. People notice it more when they do more dps, they don't notice is as much when they take less damage.
Being slightly unbalanced and having most classes wrecking most other classes faces is chaotic, and fucking awesome.
Sure. But that doesn't mean you don't need a resilience stat.
Being on the budgeting side can take a lot of fun out of it. Especially if you have to lay people off in cycles.
It really depends on what you do, I'm a graphics and AI guy, so I can get a fair bit of enjoyment out of development. But if you're in charge of the studio and looking at things like monthly churn, profit margins etc. it can sap all of the fun out of it. These guys were the studio directors, and that generally entails a lot of meetings, a lot of budgets and a lot of HR type stuff. Most of which is generically business regardless of your industry.
EA and Activision are like giant banks that specialize in games. BioWare spent hundreds of millions of dollars on SWTOR. Well probably in the 200 million range, and then advertising etc. That money you can't just conjure out of a hat. Someone needs to take games very seriously and think very hard about where else those hundreds of millions of dollars could come from or go to.
Especially with star wars, if you want a Star Wars game you need to be big enough and to have enough money that LucasArts will even pick up the phone and talk to you.
Ultimately every business is about money, BioWare made a bad game, and a bad ending to a huge franchise, both of those were with the minimum of interference from EA (EA made them start the new studio on sight with an existing EA studio, but that doesn't have much to do with either of the problems at hand). If you fuck up that costs shareholders money, and that costs employees jobs. At least EA is big enough the failure of SWTOR didn't take everyone else at BioWare with it, and they'll be able to keep the game going F2P and maybe even get it back on its feet.
Sadly they spent so much time balancing that PVP was pretty good at first (in beta) and still the most popular feature at release, then turned thier backs on it entirely without taking enough time to properly fix PVE first.
PVP balance is tricky. But the core problem with PVP was more things like Ilum and the progression from battlemaster to War Hero. Lots of people don't want to invest 100 hours of gameplay to be competitive.
In terms of play the game very much plays (and is balanced) as well as WOTLK WoW. The problem is that WOTLK wow had some really bizarre mechanics (stats that capped, stats that were non -obviously better than primary stats to a point), and then the itemization is there, but not all that easy to get your head around etc. Even on the PVP side there's a reason wow is putting 'resilience' (expertise in SWTOR speak) as a base stat that you will always have some of in Pandaria, because not having it really messes things up.
Sure it can. It did in SWTOR even. The suspension of disbelief that comes when everyone else is also the hero of a story isn't really a problem, surprisingly.
And even then, if it's important enough you have to be willing to lose a carrier or two. If it comes down to defending South Korea from a North Korean invasion you're going to want every aircraft you can get to be nearby, and fixed targets can be hit by the other guys missiles. Yes, defending Korea may cost tens of thousands of dead americans, and some of them on aircraft carriers. But if you're willing to look at hundreds of billions if not multiple trillions of dollars in a war one or two aircraft carriers that cost a few billions of dollars well, that's the hard calculus of war isn't it?
I would lose all my passion as well if I sold my soul to Electronic Arts...
and now had enough cash I didn't need to work and could actually enjoy games as a player rather than as a developer.
And their studio catastrophically fucked up with SWTOR, and that means heads have to roll.
It's very unlikely that it's a coincidence they're going out at the same time. I suspect between the furore over the ME3 ending and the financial disaster that is SWTOR EA told them 'you have your millions, GTFO, oh, and you have a retention agreement for at least 5 more years, so you can leave, but you can't work for anyone else without losing a boatload of money in shares'. Or it told one of them (Zeschuk, who is ultimately responsible for SWTOR) to leave and the other tried to salvage the situation and said 'if he goes, I go' and EA said 'if you're going to stand with someone who lost us easily 100 million dollars, you go too then'.
None of what is wrong with SWTOR is really an EA issue. It's a game design issue at a basic level (how do you travel around the world, what quests are there to do every day, are they interesting to do more than a couple of times, can players understand how to level up and raid etc.), and that means whomever was in charge of that studio (Zeschuk) hired the wrong people, or trained the ones he hired wrong, or didn't get the right feedback during testing (which they definitely didn't, I was in a lot of the testing and they didn't really understand anything past the first 200 hours of play time, which is the first month for an MMO). If he was still an owner at a private corporation (and Bioware pandemic had been owned by someone else than just the founders for a while I believe) it might have survived as an expensive learning experience, but at a public company when you report to someone else, you don't make mistakes like that and keep your job.
Killed Westwood Studios and C&C / C&C:RA
The list of studios destroyed by EA is a lot longer than just westwood. But, ironically, they are resuscitating the C&C franchise with BioWare montreal. Though I suspect EA has forced a change of direction on that title because they didn't seem to be planning what they say they're doing now.
Which could well be true. But not every war is fought against people who have said missiles. Designing all of your equipment for a war against china that may never materialize leaves you very vulnerable to attacks people who aren't going to fight like that.
Well big ships cannot be fully replaced. Whatever armament you attach to it (guns, aircraft, something else) depends a lot on who you are trying to kill with it.
Missiles barrage barges are a perfectly viable military concept. Cheap expendable, do more damage than they cost in getting blown up. You don't want a whole navy of them, but there is a place for some comparable cabilities.
And once you run out of non nuclear missiles how are you going to bomb ground targets?
Carriers don't rule the oceans. Submarines and missile cruisers rule the oceans. Carriers rule the land near oceans, they are portable airpower, which makes them more cost effective than missile boats for air support and air superiority roles.
Big ships are just platforms. If you put large very heavy guns in them they become of significantly lower versatility - you need to completely rebuild the ship to have something without the guns. Aircraft carriers are as versatile as the aircraft you put on them. Need helicopters to support a naval invasion? Use a carrier. Need airborne surveilance and control? use a carrier. Need some combination of air superiority and ground attack? Use a carrier. In this sense a carrier is just a specific variant of big ship, that happens to be more versatile than the previous two iterations ('pre-dreadnought' battleships that were a mish mash of guns, post dreadnought 'big gun' battleships).
Granted, it depends very much on the type of war you have to fight. But that's the problem. Your 500 nuclear tipped tomahawks is a job for war no one is fighting at the moment. You're not going to nuke Damascus or Tehran to get Assad or the Ayatollahs out of power (in fact using nuclear weapons in this case would be almost diametrically opposed to that goal).
Also, it's not like navies are composed entirely of aircraft carriers. The US has about 50 in total, of nearly 300, and carriers (especially the big ones) are hard to make in a hurry, so you tend to be top heavy and have a disproportionately large inventory of large assets - if it turns out you need 50 destroyers by the end of next year 50 shipyards could probably pull that off, if you need 5 aircraft carriers by the end of next year it isn't going to happen. The Royal navy has 80 ish ships, of which two are supposed to be full blown aircraft carriers, a heli carrier and then some 'landing ships' which are like half heli carriers. With that diverse collection of assets some can be carriers, some can be 'arsenal' ships, some can be all sorts of different things, until you know what war you're fighting it's a matter of being reasonably prepared for whatever.
Carrier operations off pakistan for example, related to Afghanistan, are because Diego Gracia (which doesn't actually belong to the yanks) is the nearest US allied base, and it's in the middle of nowhere. Ok for staging disaster relief and nuclear weapons, not so good for ground support in north western afghanistan. And as we just saw the hard way, aircraft based on the ground in theatre can get blown up.
One of the lessons sept 11 should have taught americans is that their notions of 'power' are outdated and whimsically useless, you could have nuked Kabul or Riyadh into the ground in retaliation but what would that have gotten you? Capabilities matter, but being capable of doing something useless doesn't translate into power, and sure, a boat with 500 missiles can hit 500 targets - if you're lucky - but those missiles take a long time to go from off shore to wherever you need them, even if they land in the right place the thing you want destroyed might not be there, or might be too well fortified against the size of missile you can launch. They aren't useless by any means, but they aren't a panacea, nor are carrier based assets.
Anyone who you could seriously want to nuke can nuke back (russia, china, north korea, pakistan), and if they can't nuke you they can at least kill millions of your allies. MAD sort of implies *mutually* after all. And anyone else you don't really want to nuke because you're more likely to get something out of conventional overthrow of the government.
Well and the apple logo of course, but I mean even compared to non apple phones, hardware wise this stuff isn't nearly as expensive to make as we pay for it.
Except that the hardware on the iPhone isn't all that expensive. 150 bucks or something. Maybe 200 on the top end, and that cost will go down fairly quickly. The expensive part is the software.
Who regularly get fired for being able to do in 20 minutes what takes incompetent people 2 weeks. And then one party looks like they're working their arses off to get stuff done, and the other guy looks like he sits around all day reading/.
While Solid states have some performance increase.
A factor of 7 or 8 is a lot more than 'some'.
But yes, the side benefits of power and no moving parts are nice too.
But for the most part on the desktop Solid State doesn't make too much sense.
Uh.. ya actually, they do. Put your OS and anything you run regularly on there, put your data on a RAID with big platters. It radically alters the responsiveness of the computer. It makes a big difference*.
* assuming you're going from a single HDD to a full SATA 3 SSD you're going from 70MB/s transfers to 550 or so, with significantly less latency, it's very noticable. Going from a RAID with 140 MB/s transfer rates to SATA 2 at 250 is not nearly as awesome, still a big improvement, but you're starting to run against the convenience of just throwing everything on one drive and not thinking about it. A full SATA3 in a raid is, how shall I put it... impressive is an understatement, but a couple of hundred bucks for 120 gigs in space doesn't really justify itself for a lot of people.
The cloud isn't nearly fast enough or cheap enough to replace any sort of local storage.
it is if all you're ever doing is spreadsheet and word documents that are small.
Lately they way I've been rolling out IT to employee desktops is a 120 Gig SSD (operating system + software), or 60 gig depending, but 60 gig is pushing your luck if they ever want even one or two big files.
And then all of the employee data is hosted on servers.
I agree, cloud storage isn't anywhere near viable for heavy hitting computing tasks, but conceptually it's viable for some problems (depending on what exactly you want to count as a 'cloud', hosting your own servers is the same as the 'cloud' but it's done in house rather than with a third party, if you're small you need a third party running your IT anyway, and if you're big enough your IT department looks a lot like rackspace already so calling rackspace the cloud and you 'centralized servers' isn't helpful).
Well his problem was lack of credentials as a patent officer. I'm getting a PhD in computer science, in a specific branch of computer science (AI/Games), if I needed money and got a job working at IBM on computer languages I'd be years behind my colleagues who are going straight into it from PhD's in languages, I'd even be behind some undergrads because I've done fuck all with the theory of languages in 5 years.
The other thing to keep in mind with this is that 'success' sometimes means 'can recognize projects that are worth doing, and get the money to pay for them'. Being a professor is a lot of management, I don't think my Supervisor has written a line of code for research in 3 years, not for lack of wanting or capability, he just spends most of his time teaching and managing his grad students and making sure we're getting shit done (and there's coding in teaching). In fact I don't think he's done any research that is entirely his own for 3 years, it's all been supervisions and supporting his minions. Finding people early in their career who have a viable balance between personal talent, management skill, and a diverse enough - but not too diverse set of research interests is tricky.
I do actually think, if you look at the research he published, it was a good indication of his capabilities generally, that he had a fill in job at a patent office is immaterial to the fact that he published several papers in 1905 (age 26), which would be about consistent with a PhD in science today publishing several papers as they approach graduation.
I'm in canada and we have this problem with wired networks. where I live today I have a 250 GB cap and 50Mb/s. 100 bucks a month mind you, but it gets the job done.
next week I have to move home with my mother for a month, her monthly caps is 25 GB. So that will be eaten through by the end of the first week. She's going to be stuck with a lot of overages.
Slashdot Mirror
Paying for gear?
SWTOR is a game very much about cosmetics on top of actual gear. I'd expect that you'll be able to pay for the look of your gear but not necessarily the functionality.
But who knows, money is money, and BioWare austin needs to find a way to justify keeping hundreds of people on the payroll . They were at 400 or so this time last year, but well, some of those people had to go (on top of that are the call centre support people).
I fail to see how the purchase of an art history text "forces" someone to actually buy the text.
Generally it doesn't. This likely the parent of a first year who saw 'required' and thought 'required means required'. Not everyone knows these things, and it's not something you normally talk about.
It's also possible however that the textbook is supposed to be actively used in class (where, for example, he may have all of the relevant images on the projector).
I have had, in 1.75 undergrads, 2.5 masters degrees and most of the way through a PhD a few occasions where a 'required' textbook really did mean required, or at least, for all practical purposes meant required. Sure chem 101 had 9 copies of the book on reserve in the library, but there were 2700 students in the class, 9 copies doesn't go very far, and it doesn't take a lot of assholes sabotaging the books for the 9 in the library to be worthless. I had a java professor who used a standard java textbook but he used it in class, every class. He wasn't very good at his job, but I would have been doomed without the textbook there in front of me because everything he did depended on you being able to read the book in front of you. I've had classes where all examinations were open textbook - and not having your own copy poses a lot of problems there. And I've had expensive books (notably my calculus textbook from way back in 1998), which are still useful as a phd student in a different field years later. Claude Cohen-Tannoudji's Photons and Atoms: Introduction to Quantum Electrodynamics is just a pile of dead trees if you're not in the field, but David J. Griffiths Introduction to Electrodynamics has proven enormously valuable in everything from E&M to AI and graphics and hardware engineering.
Schools don't care, because they are making filthy money off of them, that have no incentive to do anything to reduce the prices.
Schools don't make money from the sale of books anymore, if you're dumb enough to buy from the university bookstore without checking online first that's a reasonable stupid tax. Gone are the days of waiting 6 weeks in a 12 week course for the textbook you ordered from amazon. Also, maintaining a storefront on a university campus can be surprisingly expensive, and have shitty sales. You have a captive market of poor people who don't really want to buy anything they don't have to, and no access to foot traffic from elsewhere, also, the bookstores are supposed to guarantee adequate supply for classes so they have huge inventory fees that no one else would have to deal with.
As to the story itself.. .first of all, it's OCAD, you kind of expect some weird shit if you go to OCAD. Second of all, none of my computer science books have computers in them, lots of them don't have code in them. That is, believe it or not, not the point. My physics textbooks have descriptions of the experiments, usually not pictures of the actual apparatus used, etc. Publications in art don't necessarily have a picture of the image itself (no more than movie critics include a copy of the book with their review). It's a textbook, for whatever reason the professor figured it had the best analysis of the works s/he was going to talk about in class.
Where I am, which is a couple of hours west of OCAD, we have some courses with text books (some expensive) some without, and some with 15 dollar course packs, though those are largely now just done as the raw files on the web. Some profs require books they themselves wrote (which usually has the advantage of them actually covering things only in the texbook), some of us did quite a lot of research to select a book. And sometimes a book is selected
Don't get me wrong, it's a bizarre choice to require a book that looks like it's a broken webpage, but lots of professors are bizarre, and one should be grateful the professor speaks english. It's also possible the 180 dollars is really just the cost of the access code to the website, and the 'book' is just a very inefficient delivery mechanism of that code. In context though, to even go to OCAD you're paying the (by ontario standards average) Sum of 6400* dollars per 2 semesters, sept - may roughly, or about 600 dollars per course to even be allowed to sit in the room. (http://www.ocadu.ca/Assets/pdf_media/Finance/2012+2013+FW+UG+DOM+TUITION.pdf), it's not obvious if this text would have use in only one course or two. But asking students to spend 800 dollars on a book for a 600 dollar course is unlikely to prove any more popular than a 180 dollar book with the right words but no pictures.
*foreign students pay 18K, the difference is subsidized by the government for domestic students, and is roughly the same for all non professional undergraduate programmes across Ontario
No goals. Some may disagree and do not find that appealing and that is fine but give SWTOR for being different.
Without a doubt, that was what BioWare was trying to bring to the genre. That doesn't mean the game stays fun.
Unfortunately when they run out of story they don't know what to do. Blizzard doesn't have a particularly good story (well other than the generic overarching story of the world), but they have people who understand what to do with the 800 hours of play time that come after the questing to level cap is over. Or at least they're better at it than BioWare.
noticed it did not have 8 years of tuning that Wow had and left
Considering they almost verbatim copied WoW that wasn't an issue. That was probably the problem, what they copied wasn't all that good, but worked within the inertia of WoW.
In wow, its kill 12 boars for a liver pie ...
Are you a press release? In SWTOR it's go kill robots or bandits or menacing looking creatures for 12 generic quest items that they name something epic. Same shit, different pile so to speak. I agree, that the idea that you should always face epicish enemies makes some sense, but the alternative, where you're killing boars in hellfire and see a fel reaver and RUN makes killing the fel reaver all that much sweeter. I think both cases have their merits. If you're slogging through korslugs or boars you're not nearly as epic as trying to rescue Kaliyo or dominate a bunch of force goats you tried to absorb.
You can say this about wow if you arleady invested the 100 hours in pvp gear. If you were starting from scratch it would be the same story.
yes, that's why blizzard changed it, and BioWare should have been smart enough not to copy it.
EA rushes shit and did so with SWTOR but it is now improving.
Having been in a lot of testing I disagree with you on this. They could have launched the game 3 months earlier easily. They were waiting on SOE's exclusive licence to drop on Dec 15th.
They launched the game they wanted to launch. That was the wrong game, but it was definitely what they wanted it to be. And even then, if you look the changes they've made since, relatively little of it has been about fixing the things that aren't fun repeatedly and all that 'end game' stuff.
The part about figuring out all the numbers and the number crunching in general was really fun.
and for the people who aren't capable of doing that math how much fun is it?
Crit (towards the end of WOTLK), armour penetration and mastery on tanks in cata all have problems with capping but not. It's not 'hard' to figure out, but not everyone wants to, or is capable of doing that.
The problem with armour pen was partly the hard cutoff at 1400. It was worth more and more until it was worth nothing. That's just bizarre.
You have to design a game for everyone, not just for people who can do math.
Uh, no. Resilience is there because players weapons tend to grow in power faster than their defenses. People notice it more when they do more dps, they don't notice is as much when they take less damage.
Being slightly unbalanced and having most classes wrecking most other classes faces is chaotic, and fucking awesome.
Sure. But that doesn't mean you don't need a resilience stat.
Being on the budgeting side can take a lot of fun out of it. Especially if you have to lay people off in cycles.
It really depends on what you do, I'm a graphics and AI guy, so I can get a fair bit of enjoyment out of development. But if you're in charge of the studio and looking at things like monthly churn, profit margins etc. it can sap all of the fun out of it. These guys were the studio directors, and that generally entails a lot of meetings, a lot of budgets and a lot of HR type stuff. Most of which is generically business regardless of your industry.
EA and Activision are like giant banks that specialize in games. BioWare spent hundreds of millions of dollars on SWTOR. Well probably in the 200 million range, and then advertising etc. That money you can't just conjure out of a hat. Someone needs to take games very seriously and think very hard about where else those hundreds of millions of dollars could come from or go to.
Especially with star wars, if you want a Star Wars game you need to be big enough and to have enough money that LucasArts will even pick up the phone and talk to you.
Ultimately every business is about money, BioWare made a bad game, and a bad ending to a huge franchise, both of those were with the minimum of interference from EA (EA made them start the new studio on sight with an existing EA studio, but that doesn't have much to do with either of the problems at hand). If you fuck up that costs shareholders money, and that costs employees jobs. At least EA is big enough the failure of SWTOR didn't take everyone else at BioWare with it, and they'll be able to keep the game going F2P and maybe even get it back on its feet.
Sadly they spent so much time balancing that PVP was pretty good at first (in beta) and still the most popular feature at release, then turned thier backs on it entirely without taking enough time to properly fix PVE first.
PVP balance is tricky. But the core problem with PVP was more things like Ilum and the progression from battlemaster to War Hero. Lots of people don't want to invest 100 hours of gameplay to be competitive.
In terms of play the game very much plays (and is balanced) as well as WOTLK WoW. The problem is that WOTLK wow had some really bizarre mechanics (stats that capped, stats that were non -obviously better than primary stats to a point), and then the itemization is there, but not all that easy to get your head around etc. Even on the PVP side there's a reason wow is putting 'resilience' (expertise in SWTOR speak) as a base stat that you will always have some of in Pandaria, because not having it really messes things up.
Sure it can. It did in SWTOR even. The suspension of disbelief that comes when everyone else is also the hero of a story isn't really a problem, surprisingly.
I speak from experience on that one as well. I'm finishing up my PhD in game development.
And even then, if it's important enough you have to be willing to lose a carrier or two. If it comes down to defending South Korea from a North Korean invasion you're going to want every aircraft you can get to be nearby, and fixed targets can be hit by the other guys missiles. Yes, defending Korea may cost tens of thousands of dead americans, and some of them on aircraft carriers. But if you're willing to look at hundreds of billions if not multiple trillions of dollars in a war one or two aircraft carriers that cost a few billions of dollars well, that's the hard calculus of war isn't it?
I would lose all my passion as well if I sold my soul to Electronic Arts...
and now had enough cash I didn't need to work and could actually enjoy games as a player rather than as a developer.
And their studio catastrophically fucked up with SWTOR, and that means heads have to roll.
It's very unlikely that it's a coincidence they're going out at the same time. I suspect between the furore over the ME3 ending and the financial disaster that is SWTOR EA told them 'you have your millions, GTFO, oh, and you have a retention agreement for at least 5 more years, so you can leave, but you can't work for anyone else without losing a boatload of money in shares'. Or it told one of them (Zeschuk, who is ultimately responsible for SWTOR) to leave and the other tried to salvage the situation and said 'if he goes, I go' and EA said 'if you're going to stand with someone who lost us easily 100 million dollars, you go too then'.
None of what is wrong with SWTOR is really an EA issue. It's a game design issue at a basic level (how do you travel around the world, what quests are there to do every day, are they interesting to do more than a couple of times, can players understand how to level up and raid etc.), and that means whomever was in charge of that studio (Zeschuk) hired the wrong people, or trained the ones he hired wrong, or didn't get the right feedback during testing (which they definitely didn't, I was in a lot of the testing and they didn't really understand anything past the first 200 hours of play time, which is the first month for an MMO). If he was still an owner at a private corporation (and Bioware pandemic had been owned by someone else than just the founders for a while I believe) it might have survived as an expensive learning experience, but at a public company when you report to someone else, you don't make mistakes like that and keep your job.
Killed Westwood Studios and C&C / C&C:RA
The list of studios destroyed by EA is a lot longer than just westwood. But, ironically, they are resuscitating the C&C franchise with BioWare montreal. Though I suspect EA has forced a change of direction on that title because they didn't seem to be planning what they say they're doing now.
Which could well be true. But not every war is fought against people who have said missiles. Designing all of your equipment for a war against china that may never materialize leaves you very vulnerable to attacks people who aren't going to fight like that.
Well big ships cannot be fully replaced. Whatever armament you attach to it (guns, aircraft, something else) depends a lot on who you are trying to kill with it.
Missiles barrage barges are a perfectly viable military concept. Cheap expendable, do more damage than they cost in getting blown up. You don't want a whole navy of them, but there is a place for some comparable cabilities.
And once you run out of non nuclear missiles how are you going to bomb ground targets?
Carriers don't rule the oceans. Submarines and missile cruisers rule the oceans. Carriers rule the land near oceans, they are portable airpower, which makes them more cost effective than missile boats for air support and air superiority roles.
Big ships are just platforms. If you put large very heavy guns in them they become of significantly lower versatility - you need to completely rebuild the ship to have something without the guns. Aircraft carriers are as versatile as the aircraft you put on them. Need helicopters to support a naval invasion? Use a carrier. Need airborne surveilance and control? use a carrier. Need some combination of air superiority and ground attack? Use a carrier. In this sense a carrier is just a specific variant of big ship, that happens to be more versatile than the previous two iterations ('pre-dreadnought' battleships that were a mish mash of guns, post dreadnought 'big gun' battleships).
Granted, it depends very much on the type of war you have to fight. But that's the problem. Your 500 nuclear tipped tomahawks is a job for war no one is fighting at the moment. You're not going to nuke Damascus or Tehran to get Assad or the Ayatollahs out of power (in fact using nuclear weapons in this case would be almost diametrically opposed to that goal).
Also, it's not like navies are composed entirely of aircraft carriers. The US has about 50 in total, of nearly 300, and carriers (especially the big ones) are hard to make in a hurry, so you tend to be top heavy and have a disproportionately large inventory of large assets - if it turns out you need 50 destroyers by the end of next year 50 shipyards could probably pull that off, if you need 5 aircraft carriers by the end of next year it isn't going to happen. The Royal navy has 80 ish ships, of which two are supposed to be full blown aircraft carriers, a heli carrier and then some 'landing ships' which are like half heli carriers. With that diverse collection of assets some can be carriers, some can be 'arsenal' ships, some can be all sorts of different things, until you know what war you're fighting it's a matter of being reasonably prepared for whatever.
Carrier operations off pakistan for example, related to Afghanistan, are because Diego Gracia (which doesn't actually belong to the yanks) is the nearest US allied base, and it's in the middle of nowhere. Ok for staging disaster relief and nuclear weapons, not so good for ground support in north western afghanistan. And as we just saw the hard way, aircraft based on the ground in theatre can get blown up.
One of the lessons sept 11 should have taught americans is that their notions of 'power' are outdated and whimsically useless, you could have nuked Kabul or Riyadh into the ground in retaliation but what would that have gotten you? Capabilities matter, but being capable of doing something useless doesn't translate into power, and sure, a boat with 500 missiles can hit 500 targets - if you're lucky - but those missiles take a long time to go from off shore to wherever you need them, even if they land in the right place the thing you want destroyed might not be there, or might be too well fortified against the size of missile you can launch. They aren't useless by any means, but they aren't a panacea, nor are carrier based assets.
Anyone who you could seriously want to nuke can nuke back (russia, china, north korea, pakistan), and if they can't nuke you they can at least kill millions of your allies. MAD sort of implies *mutually* after all. And anyone else you don't really want to nuke because you're more likely to get something out of conventional overthrow of the government.
Well and the apple logo of course, but I mean even compared to non apple phones, hardware wise this stuff isn't nearly as expensive to make as we pay for it.
Except that the hardware on the iPhone isn't all that expensive. 150 bucks or something. Maybe 200 on the top end, and that cost will go down fairly quickly. The expensive part is the software.
Who regularly get fired for being able to do in 20 minutes what takes incompetent people 2 weeks. And then one party looks like they're working their arses off to get stuff done, and the other guy looks like he sits around all day reading /.
While Solid states have some performance increase.
A factor of 7 or 8 is a lot more than 'some'.
But yes, the side benefits of power and no moving parts are nice too.
But for the most part on the desktop Solid State doesn't make too much sense.
Uh.. ya actually, they do. Put your OS and anything you run regularly on there, put your data on a RAID with big platters. It radically alters the responsiveness of the computer. It makes a big difference*.
* assuming you're going from a single HDD to a full SATA 3 SSD you're going from 70MB/s transfers to 550 or so, with significantly less latency, it's very noticable. Going from a RAID with 140 MB/s transfer rates to SATA 2 at 250 is not nearly as awesome, still a big improvement, but you're starting to run against the convenience of just throwing everything on one drive and not thinking about it. A full SATA3 in a raid is, how shall I put it... impressive is an understatement, but a couple of hundred bucks for 120 gigs in space doesn't really justify itself for a lot of people.
The cloud isn't nearly fast enough or cheap enough to replace any sort of local storage.
it is if all you're ever doing is spreadsheet and word documents that are small.
Lately they way I've been rolling out IT to employee desktops is a 120 Gig SSD (operating system + software), or 60 gig depending, but 60 gig is pushing your luck if they ever want even one or two big files.
And then all of the employee data is hosted on servers.
I agree, cloud storage isn't anywhere near viable for heavy hitting computing tasks, but conceptually it's viable for some problems (depending on what exactly you want to count as a 'cloud', hosting your own servers is the same as the 'cloud' but it's done in house rather than with a third party, if you're small you need a third party running your IT anyway, and if you're big enough your IT department looks a lot like rackspace already so calling rackspace the cloud and you 'centralized servers' isn't helpful).
Well his problem was lack of credentials as a patent officer. I'm getting a PhD in computer science, in a specific branch of computer science (AI/Games), if I needed money and got a job working at IBM on computer languages I'd be years behind my colleagues who are going straight into it from PhD's in languages, I'd even be behind some undergrads because I've done fuck all with the theory of languages in 5 years.
The other thing to keep in mind with this is that 'success' sometimes means 'can recognize projects that are worth doing, and get the money to pay for them'. Being a professor is a lot of management, I don't think my Supervisor has written a line of code for research in 3 years, not for lack of wanting or capability, he just spends most of his time teaching and managing his grad students and making sure we're getting shit done (and there's coding in teaching). In fact I don't think he's done any research that is entirely his own for 3 years, it's all been supervisions and supporting his minions. Finding people early in their career who have a viable balance between personal talent, management skill, and a diverse enough - but not too diverse set of research interests is tricky.
I do actually think, if you look at the research he published, it was a good indication of his capabilities generally, that he had a fill in job at a patent office is immaterial to the fact that he published several papers in 1905 (age 26), which would be about consistent with a PhD in science today publishing several papers as they approach graduation.
They do.
I'm in canada and we have this problem with wired networks. where I live today I have a 250 GB cap and 50Mb/s. 100 bucks a month mind you, but it gets the job done.
next week I have to move home with my mother for a month, her monthly caps is 25 GB. So that will be eaten through by the end of the first week. She's going to be stuck with a lot of overages.