I thought the OJ jury quite reasonably looked at the crappy forensics and decided that thanks to police bungling they couldn't convict without reasonable doubt.
It would be nice for juries to know when to rely on eyewitness testimony, which is basically never, because eyewitness error is so common and severe it should basically never be trusted. See any of a large number of published psych studies on this.
Guess what. Money comes from somewhere. Decrease the cost of products by the cost of ineffective advertising, and spend that money on programming instead.
It's cutting out a middle man, which will actually make the whole economy more efficient.
Actually, I just meant it factually. Bush voters are on average significantly less educated and score more poorly on a range of standardized tests than Kerry voters.
Sadly, more people in this country are poorly educated than well educated. Only about 1 in 8 earns a college degree. More people don't finish high school than do finish college. It's hard for us to out-vote the other 7, even though I think it is fairly safe to say we think more deeply about the issues and what is at stake.
Bad public schools are most definitely not a myth. Most of the k-12 schools in georgia are literally falling apart. The teachers are highly incompetent, and the higher ups promote teaching creation in the schools.
However, the value you save by not having your house burn down is typically proportional to the value of your house, which is typically proportional to your wealth.
That color photographs on most paper will be badly faded in 50 years. The processes that won't fade fast are pretty expensive, and you probably have to find a specialty place to make them.
The problem with sales tax rather than luxury tax is that it disproportionally burdens the lowest earners.
If you will exclude food, shelter, clothing from your sales tax I'm fine. Buying a car is a luxury that many of the poor do not afford, so it's fine with me to tax that.
Personally, I don't really want everyone to base their lives on getting the job that will pay them the most money, but even accepting that as a goal, people somehow manage to seek higher paying jobs in the current system. Generally, the income increases outweigh the tax increases. Obviously mathematically there is a narrow area at each step up where you do get penalized. However, by the time you reach that level, you have a college education, and hopefully can figure out that you need to get an increase of at least X to cover the tax increase. Don't accept a wage increase less than X.
The poor don't need a carrot. They (most) want better paying jobs. The jobs simply don't exist.
The huge debt problems in this country are among the middle class, not the poor (who can't get credit to get started on the problem) so they get much less pity from me since they generally have the tools to avoid the problem or recover from the problem. Many services exist to help them. They may have uncomfortable retirements. The poor don't get to retire.
I'm not sure i understand the point of your post, but if I understand it correctly, you're claiming that something unmeasurable (perhaps knowledge of the game) is making it possible for some players to harass others, and that this attribute is not boundable by the game designer, nor can it be used to separate the players.
The problem is that if this is indeed the problem you're describing, then permanent death cannot possibly solve the problem either, since the same attributes that are not boundable by the designer in the first place remain unbounded by permanent death.
I claim that any attribute or set of attributes or set of dimensions of attributes that is boundable by permanent death can be used to affect the gameplay in more effective ways.
I read the article. However, I should point out that basically everything you wrote in response agrees with my side of the argument.
As I pointed out, some loss is necessary if excitement is part of your game design. Too much loss (permanent death in MMOGS) means unhappy players, which to me is not the point of a game. In any case, the basic point is that permanent death is not required to establish risk or excitement, and is typically abused by designers to solve problems not related to risk or excitement anyway.
The games i've designed have included RPGs, MOG, and MMOGs. The design principles are actually the same for all 3. Specific features in multiplayer have to account for problems brought in by extra players: crowding, abusive behavior, etc. I think the article showed a deep lack of understanding of the basic principles of game design.
Read my response again. Permanent death in the context of MMORGs is the 'hurt the player' solution to players becoming powerful over time. There are at least three well known much better solutions to this problem:
1) Separate the powerful players from the weak. 2) Asymptote the power growth function so that players don't remain weak for long. 3) Add a substantial penalty for fighting out of your power range.
If your game has a problem with powerful characters abusing weak characters, that's because you made a bad game design decision in how powerful and weak characters interact, not because the powerful characters exist.
If you want a successful game, you don't want to punish your players for succeeding.
Everything you wrote about instanceing agrees with my position.
I think it's a bit of a stretch to call nethack a success.
Having a small penalty for death (ala X-Wing etc) is needed to make death have some meaning.
I would categorize death in gameplay into a 2d grid:
Nothing (you are immortal): death is not a challenge factor in such a game.
Normal (you lose something, are set back a bit, etc): hopefully finds a happy balance making the game fun.
Maximum (death means start the game over): typically not fun.
The exception for the max penalty is in fast action games where the amount of lost investment per death is very very low.
The question I would ask myself as a game designer is how much _time_ am I willing to set the player back. My rule is typically no more than one hour. Any more than that and you are making your players angry over their loss, and angry isn't as fun as you might think.
Wow... he is way off in what makes game design fun.
Permanent Death: Yes, a lot of game designers love this one. However, go make a list of the successful games with this 'feature'. It's short because people don't enjoy losing their investments. Permanent Death closes exactly one door. It does not open any that aren't already typically available to the players who want them.
Instanceing: This is an adequate solution to the crowding problem. A better one is to provide sufficiently breadth not to need instanceing. Build a game without need for instanceing and you'll have a hit, guaranteed.
Teleportation: This is a solution to the problem of how do I play with my friends. When to make new friends and when to play a game with your existing friends is a decision best left to the player.
Treadmill: Every game requires goals. A treadmill is one kind of goal that is very appealing to certain kinds of players. Make a game in which the other goals are super fun, and players won't demand a treadmill.
Bottom line, this guy just doesn't know game design. (And yes, I do, I did game design on multiple multi-million sellers).
on this topic, does anyone know how to:
on
Decompiling Java
·
· Score: 1
Capture a java applet?
By which I mean, there is a java applet running in my web browser. I'd like to decompile it and look over the source code. It's small enough I believe this would be informative. Is there a good way to do this?
Well, I had two friends who were participating in peaceful protests with permits who were arrested for it last year. They were inconveniently embarassing to more important people apparently.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought the OJ jury quite reasonably looked at the crappy forensics and decided that thanks to police bungling they couldn't convict without reasonable doubt.
It would be nice for juries to know when to rely on eyewitness testimony, which is basically never, because eyewitness error is so common and severe it should basically never be trusted. See any of a large number of published psych studies on this.
Guess what. Money comes from somewhere. Decrease the cost of products by the cost of ineffective advertising, and spend that money on programming instead.
It's cutting out a middle man, which will actually make the whole economy more efficient.
Actually, I just meant it factually. Bush voters are on average significantly less educated and score more poorly on a range of standardized tests than Kerry voters.
Sadly, more people in this country are poorly educated than well educated. Only about 1 in 8 earns a college degree. More people don't finish high school than do finish college. It's hard for us to out-vote the other 7, even though I think it is fairly safe to say we think more deeply about the issues and what is at stake.
Well, apparently 53% of us are stupid anyway.
Actually, the parents do care, but don't have the resources or the legal access to improve the schools.
And the private schools are teaching it, but I don't think that's a reflection on the poorness of the public schools.
Bad public schools are most definitely not a myth. Most of the k-12 schools in georgia are literally falling apart. The teachers are highly incompetent, and the higher ups promote teaching creation in the schools.
However, the value you save by not having your house burn down is typically proportional to the value of your house, which is typically proportional to your wealth.
Thanks for the support. I didn't actually know the tax code worked that way. Thankfully it helps my argument. :-)
Professional wrestling is real, I've seen it performed live.
That color photographs on most paper will be badly faded in 50 years. The processes that won't fade fast are pretty expensive, and you probably have to find a specialty place to make them.
Because you're about that far from getting a taste of what it is like to actually be poor.
The problem with sales tax rather than luxury tax is that it disproportionally burdens the lowest earners.
If you will exclude food, shelter, clothing from your sales tax I'm fine. Buying a car is a luxury that many of the poor do not afford, so it's fine with me to tax that.
Personally, I don't really want everyone to base their lives on getting the job that will pay them the most money, but even accepting that as a goal, people somehow manage to seek higher paying jobs in the current system. Generally, the income increases outweigh the tax increases. Obviously mathematically there is a narrow area at each step up where you do get penalized. However, by the time you reach that level, you have a college education, and hopefully can figure out that you need to get an increase of at least X to cover the tax increase. Don't accept a wage increase less than X.
The poor don't need a carrot. They (most) want better paying jobs. The jobs simply don't exist.
The huge debt problems in this country are among the middle class, not the poor (who can't get credit to get started on the problem) so they get much less pity from me since they generally have the tools to avoid the problem or recover from the problem. Many services exist to help them. They may have uncomfortable retirements. The poor don't get to retire.
Sounds to me like you're about 2 years away from having a sudden change of mind.
You obviously haven't spent much of your life where food, shelter, and clothing represented a significant fraction of your expenditures.
I'd be more than happy to have a luxury tax defined as everything else, that would be fine for protecting the poor, thanks.
Yuck, before advocating more sales tax please realize it is one of the most regressive types of taxes possible.
Advocate for luxury taxes instead.
To the day we won't need the poor.
Still, it's 2 more PCI-E lanes than anyone else has on their board.
The only SLI competitor, the nforce4 also uses 8x2 in SLI mode.
So there's no downside in terms of PCI-E lanes with this chipset vs any other current chipset.
I'm not sure i understand the point of your post, but if I understand it correctly, you're claiming that something unmeasurable (perhaps knowledge of the game) is making it possible for some players to harass others, and that this attribute is not boundable by the game designer, nor can it be used to separate the players.
The problem is that if this is indeed the problem you're describing, then permanent death cannot possibly solve the problem either, since the same attributes that are not boundable by the designer in the first place remain unbounded by permanent death.
I claim that any attribute or set of attributes or set of dimensions of attributes that is boundable by permanent death can be used to affect the gameplay in more effective ways.
I read the article. However, I should point out that basically everything you wrote in response agrees with my side of the argument.
As I pointed out, some loss is necessary if excitement is part of your game design. Too much loss (permanent death in MMOGS) means unhappy players, which to me is not the point of a game. In any case, the basic point is that permanent death is not required to establish risk or excitement, and is typically abused by designers to solve problems not related to risk or excitement anyway.
The games i've designed have included RPGs, MOG, and MMOGs. The design principles are actually the same for all 3. Specific features in multiplayer have to account for problems brought in by extra players: crowding, abusive behavior, etc. I think the article showed a deep lack of understanding of the basic principles of game design.
Read my response again. Permanent death in the context of MMORGs is the 'hurt the player' solution to players becoming powerful over time. There are at least three well known much better solutions to this problem:
1) Separate the powerful players from the weak.
2) Asymptote the power growth function so that players don't remain weak for long.
3) Add a substantial penalty for fighting out of your power range.
If your game has a problem with powerful characters abusing weak characters, that's because you made a bad game design decision in how powerful and weak characters interact, not because the powerful characters exist.
If you want a successful game, you don't want to punish your players for succeeding.
Everything you wrote about instanceing agrees with my position.
I think it's a bit of a stretch to call nethack a success.
Having a small penalty for death (ala X-Wing etc) is needed to make death have some meaning.
I would categorize death in gameplay into a 2d grid:
Nothing (you are immortal): death is not a challenge factor in such a game.
Normal (you lose something, are set back a bit, etc): hopefully finds a happy balance making the game fun.
Maximum (death means start the game over): typically not fun.
The exception for the max penalty is in fast action games where the amount of lost investment per death is very very low.
The question I would ask myself as a game designer is how much _time_ am I willing to set the player back. My rule is typically no more than one hour. Any more than that and you are making your players angry over their loss, and angry isn't as fun as you might think.
Wow ... he is way off in what makes game design fun.
Permanent Death: Yes, a lot of game designers love this one. However, go make a list of the successful games with this 'feature'. It's short because people don't enjoy losing their investments. Permanent Death closes exactly one door. It does not open any that aren't already typically available to the players who want them.
Instanceing: This is an adequate solution to the crowding problem. A better one is to provide sufficiently breadth not to need instanceing. Build a game without need for instanceing and you'll have a hit, guaranteed.
Teleportation: This is a solution to the problem of how do I play with my friends. When to make new friends and when to play a game with your existing friends is a decision best left to the player.
Treadmill: Every game requires goals. A treadmill is one kind of goal that is very appealing to certain kinds of players. Make a game in which the other goals are super fun, and players won't demand a treadmill.
Bottom line, this guy just doesn't know game design. (And yes, I do, I did game design on multiple multi-million sellers).
Capture a java applet?
By which I mean, there is a java applet running in my web browser. I'd like to decompile it and look over the source code. It's small enough I believe this would be informative. Is there a good way to do this?
Well, I had two friends who were participating in peaceful protests with permits who were arrested for it last year. They were inconveniently embarassing to more important people apparently.
Except that the current system actually resulted in neither candidate visiting quite a few undisputed states.