I've often thought that the online gaming experience could be greatly improved by the incorporation of consistent rating system, such as the one used by the U.S. Chess Federation. It would be hopeless to walk into a room full of mixed-skill chess players and just play some pick up games. In order to have an enjoyable game, it's vital that you play someone in the same skill range as you. If the difference is too great one way or the other, one person will win with such regularity as to make the game boring. Sound familiar?
This is exactly the situation with online gaming. I am very good at some games, to the point at which I am accused of cheating. At others, I'm fair to middling. And I'm hopeless at some. All of these games would be more enjoyable for me if there were an online rating system that matched me up with players of similar skill. I've seen the fledgling effort in Warcraft III, but it doesn't seem to work very well. Why not just have a USCF-like rating system, where, if my UT2k3 rating is, say, 1643, I could get on a server for people rated 1600-1800? And for Q3, I'd be unrated, so I could get on a 0-1000 server until my performance had been logged for a while, so that the rating bot could assign me a provisional rating.
This would certainly require some effort on the part of online game developers, but the general problem of rating systems is well understood. The developers could choose to "stand on the shoulders of giants", rather than on their toes, by adopting these proven solutions into their online games, making more fun for all of us, and more sales for all of them.
If you're not averse to using a commercial product, you may want to look into Adobe FrameMaker. It's certainly not a panacea, but I use it for all my technical and business writing, and I'm quite happy with it.
The primary disadvantages to FrameMaker, in my opinion, are:
Cost: If money is tight, FrameMaker will probably not be to your liking, as it costs about $800.
Age: Adobe does not appear to be putting much effort into FrameMaker. It is a very powerful program, but it 'feels' old.
Learning Curve: It takes quite a bit of study to become productive with FrameMaker.
And the advantages:
Predictability: My initial reason for switching to FrameMaker was that I was tired of pulling my hair out in frustration as a result of MS-Word's tendency to secretly modify my docment layout behind my back (e.g. randomly moving figures around when I'd made no changes to the document). FrameMaker's layout results are rock solid.
Multiple-Format Output: You can save your docment as text, pdf, postscript, html, and, with the high-end version, SGML. It does this correctly and well, too -- for example, cross references all turn into hyperlinks in PDF output.
Frame-Based Layout: The "frames-glued-on-top-of-a-text-flow" layout system of MS-Word is terribly annoying if you're trying to write anything more ambitious than a simple memo. FrameMaker's basic element is a frame, which can contain text, grapics, images, whatever. Text frames can be linked together to form disjoint text flows. Figures don't wander around your document while you're not looking. And so on.
Power: Features like smart (i.e. working) cross references, good table of contents and index support, scriptability, versioning.
Cross-Platform: It runs on Solaris, HPUX, AIX, Windows, and MacOS. The document format is the same on all platforms.
O'Reilly Can't Be Wrong: Most O'Reilly books, as well as much of the documentation from vendors I work with (Sun, Cisco,...) are written in FrameMaker. Look at the 'colophon' in an O'Reilly book, or the PDF information in PDF-formatted documentation you receive from your vendor.
I know FrameMaker is far from perfect, but it's the only documentation authoring tool that doesn't make me want to quit my job and become an organic vegetable farmer.
Slashdot Mirror
I've often thought that the online gaming experience could be greatly improved by the incorporation of consistent rating system, such as the one used by the U.S. Chess Federation. It would be hopeless to walk into a room full of mixed-skill chess players and just play some pick up games. In order to have an enjoyable game, it's vital that you play someone in the same skill range as you. If the difference is too great one way or the other, one person will win with such regularity as to make the game boring. Sound familiar?
This is exactly the situation with online gaming. I am very good at some games, to the point at which I am accused of cheating. At others, I'm fair to middling. And I'm hopeless at some. All of these games would be more enjoyable for me if there were an online rating system that matched me up with players of similar skill. I've seen the fledgling effort in Warcraft III, but it doesn't seem to work very well. Why not just have a USCF-like rating system, where, if my UT2k3 rating is, say, 1643, I could get on a server for people rated 1600-1800? And for Q3, I'd be unrated, so I could get on a 0-1000 server until my performance had been logged for a while, so that the rating bot could assign me a provisional rating.
This would certainly require some effort on the part of online game developers, but the general problem of rating systems is well understood. The developers could choose to "stand on the shoulders of giants", rather than on their toes, by adopting these proven solutions into their online games, making more fun for all of us, and more sales for all of them.
If you're not averse to using a commercial product, you may want to look into Adobe FrameMaker. It's certainly not a panacea, but I use it for all my technical and business writing, and I'm quite happy with it.
The primary disadvantages to FrameMaker, in my opinion, are:
And the advantages:
I know FrameMaker is far from perfect, but it's the only documentation authoring tool that doesn't make me want to quit my job and become an organic vegetable farmer.