Pickens was further quoted as remarking: "We've already gotten our application for the Darwin Award all filled out, we're just not sure if we should wait until after the experiment to submit it."
I played City of Heroes for a year, and I can certainly see your point. However, I'd argue this is the "Alpha Centauri" effect.
One of the most successful games of all time was Civ, right? Alpha Centauri, as the sequel to Civ II, should have been a huge hit. It was successful, but what was one of the main complaints? Expectations. See, in Civ, people understood (roughly) what happened when you invented Coinage or Religion. Certainly there were specific game effects/numbers, but in any case you knew "Coinage" probably wasn't going to make your armies tougher, and "religion" wasn't going to do much to protect from earthquakes, for example.
In AC, however, people were developing techs like "anti-physics probulator" or "neutronium psionic pleasure ray" and while you COULD drill down into the game and get the numbers, players were on a very basic level unhappy because they didn't instinctively KNOW what things did.
I'd argue the same for CoH. Is "stupendous blast" more or less damaging than "megaboom punch"?
The more I think about it, a game lacking in numbers can't really just be the same-old, same-old dressed in different clothing. It's got to progress differently, and present the information at LEAST as informatively as real life would.
So for example, Joe Warrior learns the basics of using a sword. He's killing rats left and right, and starting to fight tougher things. The next time he's in town, he's checking with the weapons master who surprises him by saying "you know, I think you're ready to learn some of the more advanced moves. Which would you like to focus on: - powerful, smashing attacks - nimble attacks at vital areas - fighting more than one target at a time But again, like real life, these aren't exclusive - if you're finding that the powerful, smashing attacks aren't working well against your opponents, go back and learn the others at a cost of time and $$. You'd only LOSE the power attacks skills as they atrophy if you don't use them regularly.
Think about grouping - instead of a metagamey "Let's go do the Instance of Death!" "OK, let's group" "Well, we're all 20th lvl, you're only 10th you'd get slaughtered, so you can't come." it might be more like "Let's do the Instance of Death!" "Think we're ready?" "Sure! Bill and I just killed a minotaur yesterday, and Glenda's fireballs have really been kicking butt." "Can I come? Yesterday I killed some bandits, and didn't have much trouble." "Much trouble?" "Yeah well I died once, but I got them all." "You mean the bandits north of town?" "Yep." "Look, if you had trouble with them, you probably shouldn't. I fought them a couple of weeks ago and they weren't much challenge for me, I think the Instance of Death is going to be quite a bit more difficult."
Which sounds more REAL?
I think it could be done, it would just take more careful planning and effort than most producers would be interested in putting in, when they could just go the well-worn "levels" route and not worry about that part of the game at all.
I'd love to see a game where the numbers simply aren't available to the players.
Something whose mechanics are derived from Runequest, for example, where every time you try something, you MIGHT succeed and if you do (or even sometimes if you don't) you get better. There's no fixed/limited list of 'talents' available to anyone, although there are some special skills that you can't learn until you reach a certain level of expertise.
You know you're ready to move out of the newbie zone when the creatures you're fighting no longer pose a challenge and the rewards are uninteresting, not because all their names turn green or something.
You know you are a good wall-climber because you've scaled a number of dangerous precipices and survived, not because you're a level 12 rogue and you have the "climb walls" ability.
You know your "inflict agony" spell lasts about 15 seconds because that's what it's done the last five times you've cast it. There was that one creature on whom it only lasted 6 seconds, however....
You know that new sword you got is a sweet one either because you paid to have someone magically investigate it, or more frequently because you killed the last 5 nasties in a single swing, not because the "pluses" are better.
Where is a Darklands MMO?
* truth in commenting note: I don't think this would EVER exist commercially, because not enough people want something that hard. I do think it might be conceivable however to get a CURRENT class-based game to run a mod version where the numbers/details like this are not shown...even that alone would be interesting.
From TFA: The main reason they all acted as if they enjoyed their work was presumably the upper-middle class convention that you're supposed to. It would not merely be bad for your career to say that you despised your job, but a social faux-pas.
Why is it conventional to pretend to like what you do? The first sentence of this essay explains that. If you have to like something to do it well, then the most successful people will all like what they do.
Begged question. I pretend that I like what I do for a couple of reasons, neither of which he lists. 1) rationalization. Maybe it's psychotic, but at a certain point there's a value to pretending you like taking out the stinky, dirty trash because, well, you have to do it anyway, you might as well at least TRY to find ways to enjoy it "oh, look, I'm outside in the fresh air" 2) courtesy. If all I ever did was talk about how much I dislike what I do, I wouldn't have any friends and I wouldn't blame them. Speaking about something that they can fix/change is constructive; speaking about something that they can have no impact on is pointless bitching, aka whining. 3) my dependants. For those who depend on my daily income to live, how would it make them feel if I were to carp about how much I hate my work? Something parallel to "you know, I could be off having fun doing what I want except I have feed your damn face every day!" 4) my boss. If you had a choice of hiring someone who convincingly says they love this work, and someone who says that they don't, which would you hire? I already despise the type-As that spend 80 hours a week at work and expect everyone else to as well (not-so-coincidentally, these guys/gals generally have no family, and no non-work life). Suggesting to them that I might not enjoy what I'm doing is a good way to make sure I'm on that "to be replaced when possible" list no matter how competently I do my job.
I read the article, and just got this overwhelming sense that the author is disconnected with the reality of most people's daily lives. Sure, it would be great to do what you love. In my experience, it's only a vanishingly small % of people that get to do that, because its rare that a person's passion intersects with the connections, the pay, the job, and the circumstances to make it all their occupation. Would I like to do something I love? Sure. But the people I love are more important than my own happiness.
As a side note, let's also recognize that as a male American, I've been brought up to understand THAT'S MY NECESSARY SACRIFICE for my family. Women go through childbirth and generally end up doing the most work for a family. But they get to spend more time with the children too. Perhaps I wasn't there to see the kids' first steps, or hear their first word. But they are clothed, fed, and sheltered - I have to take pride in that, no matter the cost to my own well-being.
Example: I had a course from a professor Nye at the University of MN. He was a deeply leftist Professor Emeritus, who felt that his early work on the atom bomb project therefore allowed him full rein to espouse his (anti-Reagan) politics. My girlfriend (now wife) and I were in Astronomy 1001. This was an INCREDIBLY simple course, clearly meant to be for the athletes who didn't really want to be there. One of the assignments was to write a 2 page paper on "anything space" - could be science fiction, about rocketships, could be astronomy, whatever. Anything was acceptable. The professor and his 2 TAs would review it, each giving it a score of 1-10, for a total of 3-30. Not terribly tough. My g/f hated writing papers, and I was good at churning them out. So I wrote hers. (Freely acknowledge that what I did was wrong.) For hers, I wrote some shallow pap about the possibility of colonizing Mars. Real optimistic pro-space-exploration stuff. For my paper I decided to tweak his politics, and discuss the implementation of the SDI space-based antimissile system. Particularly, I touched on the hypocrisy of scientists who were happy to spend $millions$ in gov't grants on mating African Violets, but objected to the spending of these dollars on OTHER projects. Two papers, written the same night by the same person. Hers? 26 (9+9+8). Comments like "Great!" and "Really well explained!" lots of very nice things. Mine? 7 (2+2+1) Comments like "Haven't you ever heard of PEACE!!?!?!?!?!?!?" in giant red letters across the paper. I seem to recall, but can't be sure, the word 'fascist' was used.
Anyway when I waved them in front of the student ombudsman, he said it was obvious to him too but it wasn't worth pursuing since I still got an A by the end of the class (the final test was a little more fact-based).
No, no bias there. I still laugh that I got an F on a paper in an ASTRONOMY class because of politics.
And that's NOTHING compared to the leftists in the PolyScit and International Relations departments. OMFG.
When fringe elements are in a position of relatively unassailable authority (who invented tenure anyway?) the ONLY way that they can be brought to conform to the social norm is through pressure of the group and social / occupational ostracism.
And yes, I do mean brought back to the norm. IMO college-level education SHOULD be about exposure to different and interesting and even disagreeable ideas, not necessarily the indoctrination into those ideas. Too many professors use their classes as agitprop sessions, in which they can spout all sorts of crap without fear of contradiction, because their audience is beholden to them for a grade, ensuring conformity to their ideas.
Don't these professors themselves rail against a system in which they are accountable to college administrators in precisely the same (hypocritical) way?
I had an international relations professor that didn't want to teach about wars because that would (her words near as I can remember) "enstantiate that conflict was an inherent part of the international system." Anyone with a one-watt IQ can see that's balderdash.
Sarcasm aside, I suspect that if/when we build a REAL space station - or even a Beanstalk - having otherwise-useless surplus mass floating around for the taking (not to mention easy-to-reprocess chunks of steel, aluminium, titanium, etc.) *might* actually be handy.
Not to totally flame you, but maybe you're just elitist?
For a hardcore, 6-hour-a-day player, yeah, maybe WoW is too "easymode". But you don't think they got to 5.5 million players because of the hardcore population, do you? I'd guess that something like 80%+ of the players are CASUAL, an-hour-or-two after work players, for whom the game is evidently fun and challenging (but not too challenging).
The problem with games designed for the l33t is that only the l33t will play them, and it IS a business after all. They will continue to appeal to their core $$ source - ie not you.
FWIW personally, I'd *love* to see a ironman server: 1) resurrection is either impossible or nasty like an hour delay for the first death that day, 2hrs for the second, 4 for the 3rd, etc.. 2) no ID tags, for anyone, ever (ok maybe for party members). 3) everyone's PVP is on, all the time 4) kill an enemy player, you get xp and drops (whether it's from them or world drops based on their level doesn't matter to me), so there's a more-than-simply-moral value for 60's to 'watch over' the newb areas and smoke gankers. 5) you have a home inn. Your mail goes there, not to 'wherever you are'. You change your inn, it takes a day for mail to get to you. 6) no horde+alliance characters on the same account, on that server (like current PVP server rules) 7) physical size = + modifier for hp, - modifier for stealth. Using humans as a baseline, HP modifiers might be (stealth modifiers inverted): Tauren 130% Orc 120% Troll 110% Undead: not sure if they are dessicated (80%) or zombietough (120%) Night Elves: same as humans or maybe 95%? Dwarves: 120% (innately tough) Gnomes: 66% 8) because of the world-lethality, I'd make everyone permanently on 2x xp status 9) rep gains also 2x 10) no chat channels. Your discussions are either/s (say) or/y (yell). All comments put a word bubble over your head.
Gnomes, for example, would be really frikking hard to spot, easy to hide, so they would probably focus on magic-using classes. The horde, being physically larger generally than the Alliance races, should have perhaps fewer spellcasting options or something to offset the otherwise lopsided advantage in hp...maybe the stealth thing does that already, dunno.
My god, I can't even imagine what those first few instance runs would be like if the people who died are GONE...
Why does no one see the irony in an administration that spouts off about, "A culture of respect for life in every stage", which then pushes for the death penalty for a wide range of crimes.
Right. Because the innocent pre-born infant deserves the same treatment and "respect" that is due a felon convicted of a violent crime. Nice universalist moral structure there, not sure how it works in real life. Since apparently everyone deserves the same treatment in your world, can I have the keys to your house?
I love when folks try to make fetuses and people who willlfully commit violent crimes against their fellow human somehow morally equivalent.
Someone who commits pre-meditated murder has the moral stature of an incurably rabid dog; less actually, since I'd feel bad for the dog. Either way, their personal choices illustrate that they are incapable of conforming to the most basic codes of human society, and thus a sane society will remove them. And since I don't believe that we should be willing to waste $36,000 per year on their permanent incarceration, it's merely a matter of economic logic that they be disposed of. Personally, I'd harvest anything I could from them (organs, tissue, etc.) and give the proceeds to the victim's family but that's just me.
she could never find a Chinese speaking UBRS party
The point being, she COULD probably find a lot of Chinese-speaking UBRS groups IF SHE PLAYED ON A CHINESE SERVER.
Look, I understand the implied/overt racism at work here but the DotCGF (Defenders of the Chinese Gold Farmers) crowd has to understand: if I went to play on a GERMAN server, and tried to adventure using my crappy, clumsy BAD German, I would accept that people would get occasionally mad at me and tell me to go play elsewhere.
If I was there coincidentally with hundreds and thousands of other Americans who were camping spawns/veins, ninja-looting drops, and generally being obnoxious, I guess I wouldn't bitch and whine about how unfair it is that they assume I'm one of them. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and stereotypes don't come out of nowhere.
But ultimately it's an open game. Players can rage about it all they like, but WoW *does* have a tool built into the game to prevent instance ninjas: master looter. I refuse to party with any PUG that doesn't leave it on master loot. The slight delay and inconvenience of it far exceeds the aggravation of spending 2 hours of my life running UBRS only to see the uberlewt ninja'd at the end because the leader forgot to put it on master at the end.
I'm not sure I agree with the article, I mean, yes, *some* gaming ads are directed at hormonally-charged adolescent males, but then again, aren't adolescents the most likely to be persuaded by a flashy ad ANYWAY?
Personally I don't believe games or marketing is exclusively aimed (any more) at young men. Sure, there are some T&A ads in print, but even those are getting rarer (and generally ridiculed - I remember that John Romero wanted to make me his "bitch" but I'm still waiting, John...).
In fact, I can't think of a single TV ad for any video game, ever. I'm not saying there aren't any, but if there are, they certainly didn't grab my attention.
No, I'd like to think that the 30+-somethings that are playing already have a fairly clear view of what they want from a game, the sense to read multiple reviews before buying, and generally act like informed consumers - a demographic that advertising is rarely aimed at.
You mention when your power 'glitches'...brownout or blackout or spike? We are a light industrial building in a heavy industrial park, and I swear the power goes glitchy 2-3 times per year.
We'll get brownout and blackouts, and when the power comes back it SEEMS like it's on, but only 2 of the 3 phases of the A/C actually comes up, meaning (depending on how it's wired at the *circuit box*) some circuits are dead, some are full, and some are semi-brownout (our flourescent ballasts LOVE that half-state.....not).
That third phase sometimes doesn't come back up for hours.
I have no idea if this is of any help, that electrical stuff is arcana to me, I'm just reporting what we've discovered.
"The growth was largely driven through an expanding market for handheld systems."
Maybe it's just sloppy language, but I think this is mistaking a result for a cause. The (revenue) growth may have been MAINLY in the handheld categories, but it was driven by: - Hollywood failing to generate a single new idea for the past 3(?) years. Despite the lack of ideas, movie tickets are now somewhere just south of $10 each, making a "movie night" for a family of 4, plus dinner at a moderate restaurant, popcorn, pop = roughly a hundred-dollar evening. Normal families can't really afford this as a 'routine' entertainment anymore. - Each of the major-league sports is riven with controversy, usually because the thuggish behavior of it's whinging prima-donna multigajillionaire stars. Simultaneously, despite ever-increasing salaries, performance (san steroids) in major league sports has never been more disappointing. Likewise free-agency and insanely high ticket prices have utterly destroyed any sort of hometown team loyalty any fans ever felt. - In my region, the increasing prevalence of "outdoor" diseases such as "bird flu" and Lyme Disease means that kids are spending ever more time indoors when possible. - Finally, 2-income households and parents working 50, 60, even 70 hours per week just to make ends meet means that children are more and more left on their own. Better to buy them a video game system and KNOW that they are being amused relatively safely, than to leave them to their own devices and god-only-knows what they'll get up to.
They don't even need to escape. The RIAA hasn't even figured out how to formulate the bars yet. They've got some shadowy concept-ideas but none of them have ever been legally tested (and I'd guess most people believe they're pretty flimsy anyway).
Example: As I understand it, the music industry insists that "owning" a cd doesn't mean I actually own the music and can do what I want with it. "Ownership" of a cd merely gives me the license to listen to it. The media itself is functionally irrelevent, it's the IP that's at stake. By corollary then, does that mean that everyone who has ALREADY PAID FOR THAT LICENSE in one medium is then really ENTITLED to the legal right to listen to that music, regardless of medium? But I don't hear anyone telling people with ancient record collections that they can download everything they've already paid for? I bought 500 crappy unlistenable tapes of music I like from a garage sale...thus I own the tapes by previous rulings of 'fair use'. So then I go and download to get digitally perfect versions of all the music, have i broken the law? What if I re-record them ONTO the crappy tapes? Does that make them retroactively legal?
No, the whole IP **AA boondoggle is the transient bending of the copyright system to protect the profiteering middlemen in the industry, which simply can't stand. It isn't even standing now, it's a joke.
While I understand that the hardware is functionally different, my main concern with ATI is their written drivers.
I have 2 'gaming' computers in my home LAN - one with a pretty good ATI card, the other with a slightly older Nvidia card. IMO ATI and Nvidia have been relatively neck and neck technologically for years now. ATI advances half generation with this new product, Nvidia leapfrogs that 6 months later, ATI leapfrogs Nvidia 6 months further on, etc.
Where there is a HUGE difference is the drivers. Nvidia drivers seem to be to simple to install, very stable, and really outstanding. ATIs on the other hand are buggy, kludgy, and inconsistent until MANY generations after first release. I frankly use the Omegadrivers in preference to whatever comes directly from ATI. In performance, I read the specs and my Nvidia card should be slightly worse than the ATI, but the ATI doesn't appreciably outperform the Nvidia.
So you put ATI hardware into a box that CAN'T be upgraded, can't easily be patched by the user? From my experience with ATI drivers, that would make me nervous.
Well, considering that probably many of these games are bought by the "responsible adults" in people's lives (aunts, uncles, moms, dads, etc), it's one thing to buy DOA4 for your teen male which is OSTENSIBLY a fighting game, and another thing entirely to buy "DOA5:Orgy Jigglefest".
One is tittilating (pun intended), the other is pr0n.
I'm sure some sophisticated Euro is going to come in and draw conclusions about the double-standard this portrays as regards the views of sex vs. violence in the US. Bleh.
In other news, students report using an ancient technology called "books" to discover facts. "It's amazing," one student reported, "it's like, so STATIC. I mean, I was reading about something that wasn't constantly being updated, and actually had REFERENCES and a BIBLIOGRAPHY, which led me to other books." She paused, amazed. "I wonder just how far these links go? I mean, there could be like an endless chain of information out there that none of us would have ever checked? Well, until Google digitized them of course."
It sounded very interesting from the promo text, but I dug a little further, and found some other comments from various Beta testers as well as above: The World : The hub style of MMO really bums me out, for many reasons. Every aspect of the gameplay exists within private instances. Groups are found in the town areas, ala Guild Wars. Due to this, all open-ended gameplay disappears and is replaced by simple, directed instancing. Your mileage may vary, but I prefer plundering vast open plains and mountains. Worlds are fun. Boxes less so.
I agree. While CoH handled zone transitions cleverly, they were still there. Personally, I *like* just exploring, seeing new things, even if there isn't a 'game value' to the exploration. I know many people that pretty much mainly jsut do that. Having everything be intanced is, well, so artifical and constantly reminds you of that.
Don't get this game expecting to solo. A lot of folks have pissed and moaned about that, but they are trying to be pretty true to the Pen and Paper (PnP) rules and designs. You almost never see a DM spend all this time to create a world, dungeons, and the like, and then have them sit down at a table with a lone player with a lone character. Get over your wish to solo. It's a MMO. You are supposed to be grouping! Uh oh. Frankly, I'm NOT a gigantic fan of grouping. I play MMOs for the unpredictability, the variety of content, NOT to make new friends and gain social interaction. Frankly, most of the groups I've been in sucked, WW2OL being the great exception. I *really* like the idea that they have an integrated voicecomm system - that genuinely may make all the difference.
Finally, I'm simply not convinced that the D&D mechanics really work. I mean, I think I've seen a fair share of RPGs in my time, and *every* one of them had rationalizations, shortcuts, and RubeGoldberg(tm) tables to minimize number crunching and speed play and get back to the interactions. With computers, it's ENTIRELY the opposite - you can have them auto-calculate the ballistic path of an arrow, but they can't make a bartender that will give you a decent conversation. Does such a system scale to realtime? Doesn't it make more sense to get, say, a Steve Perrin or Robin Laws to design the rules around the capabilities of the venue, rather than shoehorning the rules to work in contexts where they really don't? Problems: (and if you've read more than me, and found the answers to these already addressed - I'd love the links) - Woohoo - I'm a wizard, I get 2 spells and then I might as well logoff for the day? How does that work in a realtime world? - Deaths: in MMOs, deaths are frequent and annoying but in PnP D&D, if you died below level what, 6-7-8 it was rarely worth the trouble to rez you. Even healing in true DnD was a matter of DAYS. I guess for me a lot of the mechanical questions revolve around the ability of a PnP game to compress time freely, which is absolutely verboten in an MMO.
This game is going to be very rewarding for a group of 6 people that want to play DDO as a cohesive group 2-3 times a week for a few hours each time, with maybe a Saturday session that lasts 4+ hours for those longer missions. Then why not just get together and play, if one has the schedule time for this?
I don't see any crafting at all - that's a HUGE loss of potential customer base, right there. I've realized that, since playing CoH, this is sort of a subgame that drives a lot of activity, and (for me) is quite fun.
One plus: no "inter mission travel", thus no areas strangely devoid of trees, thus no sleeping on the ground in the middle of nowhere, thus no being eaten by a passing bonesnapper when the DMs pissed at you for something or other.
You know, I had a lot more 'sympathy' for the underdog when he was a revolutionary fighting an oppressive government.
But since the 1960s and 70s, terrorists have found that murderous brutality against women, children, and civilians in general gets them so much more publicity, they've gone that route.
I may have disagreed with the mid-20th Century IRA, or the comoros, or other earlier insurgencies, but back when they attacked only soldiers and policemen it at least had a legitimate claim that its efforts were productive (from their point of view). I oppose them politically, but I could agree that they were fighting an asymmetric conflict as COMBATANTS, not simply terrorists.
Now, terrorists are just psychotic murderers, organized under a banner, and supplied by those with a political motivation and utterly no sense of morality. So yes, goodbye to all of the indiscriminate murderers, and I cheerfully hope that they rot/burn in whatever hell their particular god has waiting for them.
Well, I don't know about you, but I ahve a high-def monitor, and with the crappy "HD" digital cable content, I'd actually like to see HD movies coming over my component video cable.
I think there are actually a lot of people out there who are like me, have a HD monitor and hunger for real HD content.
Slashdot Mirror
Pickens was further quoted as remarking: "We've already gotten our application for the Darwin Award all filled out, we're just not sure if we should wait until after the experiment to submit it."
I played City of Heroes for a year, and I can certainly see your point.
However, I'd argue this is the "Alpha Centauri" effect.
One of the most successful games of all time was Civ, right?
Alpha Centauri, as the sequel to Civ II, should have been a huge hit. It was successful, but what was one of the main complaints? Expectations. See, in Civ, people understood (roughly) what happened when you invented Coinage or Religion. Certainly there were specific game effects/numbers, but in any case you knew "Coinage" probably wasn't going to make your armies tougher, and "religion" wasn't going to do much to protect from earthquakes, for example.
In AC, however, people were developing techs like "anti-physics probulator" or "neutronium psionic pleasure ray" and while you COULD drill down into the game and get the numbers, players were on a very basic level unhappy because they didn't instinctively KNOW what things did.
I'd argue the same for CoH. Is "stupendous blast" more or less damaging than "megaboom punch"?
The more I think about it, a game lacking in numbers can't really just be the same-old, same-old dressed in different clothing. It's got to progress differently, and present the information at LEAST as informatively as real life would.
So for example, Joe Warrior learns the basics of using a sword. He's killing rats left and right, and starting to fight tougher things. The next time he's in town, he's checking with the weapons master who surprises him by saying "you know, I think you're ready to learn some of the more advanced moves. Which would you like to focus on:
- powerful, smashing attacks
- nimble attacks at vital areas
- fighting more than one target at a time
But again, like real life, these aren't exclusive - if you're finding that the powerful, smashing attacks aren't working well against your opponents, go back and learn the others at a cost of time and $$. You'd only LOSE the power attacks skills as they atrophy if you don't use them regularly.
Think about grouping - instead of a metagamey "Let's go do the Instance of Death!" "OK, let's group" "Well, we're all 20th lvl, you're only 10th you'd get slaughtered, so you can't come." it might be more like "Let's do the Instance of Death!" "Think we're ready?" "Sure! Bill and I just killed a minotaur yesterday, and Glenda's fireballs have really been kicking butt." "Can I come? Yesterday I killed some bandits, and didn't have much trouble." "Much trouble?" "Yeah well I died once, but I got them all." "You mean the bandits north of town?" "Yep." "Look, if you had trouble with them, you probably shouldn't. I fought them a couple of weeks ago and they weren't much challenge for me, I think the Instance of Death is going to be quite a bit more difficult."
Which sounds more REAL?
I think it could be done, it would just take more careful planning and effort than most producers would be interested in putting in, when they could just go the well-worn "levels" route and not worry about that part of the game at all.
I'd love to see a game where the numbers simply aren't available to the players.
Something whose mechanics are derived from Runequest, for example, where every time you try something, you MIGHT succeed and if you do (or even sometimes if you don't) you get better. There's no fixed/limited list of 'talents' available to anyone, although there are some special skills that you can't learn until you reach a certain level of expertise.
You know you're ready to move out of the newbie zone when the creatures you're fighting no longer pose a challenge and the rewards are uninteresting, not because all their names turn green or something.
You know you are a good wall-climber because you've scaled a number of dangerous precipices and survived, not because you're a level 12 rogue and you have the "climb walls" ability.
You know your "inflict agony" spell lasts about 15 seconds because that's what it's done the last five times you've cast it. There was that one creature on whom it only lasted 6 seconds, however....
You know that new sword you got is a sweet one either because you paid to have someone magically investigate it, or more frequently because you killed the last 5 nasties in a single swing, not because the "pluses" are better.
Where is a Darklands MMO?
* truth in commenting note: I don't think this would EVER exist commercially, because not enough people want something that hard. I do think it might be conceivable however to get a CURRENT class-based game to run a mod version where the numbers/details like this are not shown...even that alone would be interesting.
From TFA:
The main reason they all acted as if they enjoyed their work was presumably the upper-middle class convention that you're supposed to. It would not merely be bad for your career to say that you despised your job, but a social faux-pas.
Why is it conventional to pretend to like what you do? The first sentence of this essay explains that. If you have to like something to do it well, then the most successful people will all like what they do.
Begged question.
I pretend that I like what I do for a couple of reasons, neither of which he lists.
1) rationalization. Maybe it's psychotic, but at a certain point there's a value to pretending you like taking out the stinky, dirty trash because, well, you have to do it anyway, you might as well at least TRY to find ways to enjoy it "oh, look, I'm outside in the fresh air"
2) courtesy. If all I ever did was talk about how much I dislike what I do, I wouldn't have any friends and I wouldn't blame them. Speaking about something that they can fix/change is constructive; speaking about something that they can have no impact on is pointless bitching, aka whining.
3) my dependants. For those who depend on my daily income to live, how would it make them feel if I were to carp about how much I hate my work? Something parallel to "you know, I could be off having fun doing what I want except I have feed your damn face every day!"
4) my boss. If you had a choice of hiring someone who convincingly says they love this work, and someone who says that they don't, which would you hire? I already despise the type-As that spend 80 hours a week at work and expect everyone else to as well (not-so-coincidentally, these guys/gals generally have no family, and no non-work life). Suggesting to them that I might not enjoy what I'm doing is a good way to make sure I'm on that "to be replaced when possible" list no matter how competently I do my job.
I read the article, and just got this overwhelming sense that the author is disconnected with the reality of most people's daily lives. Sure, it would be great to do what you love. In my experience, it's only a vanishingly small % of people that get to do that, because its rare that a person's passion intersects with the connections, the pay, the job, and the circumstances to make it all their occupation. Would I like to do something I love? Sure. But the people I love are more important than my own happiness.
As a side note, let's also recognize that as a male American, I've been brought up to understand THAT'S MY NECESSARY SACRIFICE for my family. Women go through childbirth and generally end up doing the most work for a family. But they get to spend more time with the children too. Perhaps I wasn't there to see the kids' first steps, or hear their first word. But they are clothed, fed, and sheltered - I have to take pride in that, no matter the cost to my own well-being.
And I call bullshit right back.
Example:
I had a course from a professor Nye at the University of MN.
He was a deeply leftist Professor Emeritus, who felt that his early work on the atom bomb project therefore allowed him full rein to espouse his (anti-Reagan) politics.
My girlfriend (now wife) and I were in Astronomy 1001. This was an INCREDIBLY simple course, clearly meant to be for the athletes who didn't really want to be there. One of the assignments was to write a 2 page paper on "anything space" - could be science fiction, about rocketships, could be astronomy, whatever. Anything was acceptable. The professor and his 2 TAs would review it, each giving it a score of 1-10, for a total of 3-30. Not terribly tough.
My g/f hated writing papers, and I was good at churning them out. So I wrote hers. (Freely acknowledge that what I did was wrong.) For hers, I wrote some shallow pap about the possibility of colonizing Mars. Real optimistic pro-space-exploration stuff. For my paper I decided to tweak his politics, and discuss the implementation of the SDI space-based antimissile system. Particularly, I touched on the hypocrisy of scientists who were happy to spend $millions$ in gov't grants on mating African Violets, but objected to the spending of these dollars on OTHER projects.
Two papers, written the same night by the same person.
Hers? 26 (9+9+8). Comments like "Great!" and "Really well explained!" lots of very nice things.
Mine? 7 (2+2+1) Comments like "Haven't you ever heard of PEACE!!?!?!?!?!?!?" in giant red letters across the paper. I seem to recall, but can't be sure, the word 'fascist' was used.
Anyway when I waved them in front of the student ombudsman, he said it was obvious to him too but it wasn't worth pursuing since I still got an A by the end of the class (the final test was a little more fact-based).
No, no bias there. I still laugh that I got an F on a paper in an ASTRONOMY class because of politics.
And that's NOTHING compared to the leftists in the PolyScit and International Relations departments. OMFG.
No, it's called democracy.
When fringe elements are in a position of relatively unassailable authority (who invented tenure anyway?) the ONLY way that they can be brought to conform to the social norm is through pressure of the group and social / occupational ostracism.
And yes, I do mean brought back to the norm. IMO college-level education SHOULD be about exposure to different and interesting and even disagreeable ideas, not necessarily the indoctrination into those ideas. Too many professors use their classes as agitprop sessions, in which they can spout all sorts of crap without fear of contradiction, because their audience is beholden to them for a grade, ensuring conformity to their ideas.
Don't these professors themselves rail against a system in which they are accountable to college administrators in precisely the same (hypocritical) way?
I had an international relations professor that didn't want to teach about wars because that would (her words near as I can remember) "enstantiate that conflict was an inherent part of the international system." Anyone with a one-watt IQ can see that's balderdash.
Sarcasm aside, I suspect that if/when we build a REAL space station - or even a Beanstalk - having otherwise-useless surplus mass floating around for the taking (not to mention easy-to-reprocess chunks of steel, aluminium, titanium, etc.) *might* actually be handy.
Maybe I'm just to oldschool...
/s (say) or /y (yell). All comments put a word bubble over your head.
Not to totally flame you, but maybe you're just elitist?
For a hardcore, 6-hour-a-day player, yeah, maybe WoW is too "easymode".
But you don't think they got to 5.5 million players because of the hardcore population, do you?
I'd guess that something like 80%+ of the players are CASUAL, an-hour-or-two after work players, for whom the game is evidently fun and challenging (but not too challenging).
The problem with games designed for the l33t is that only the l33t will play them, and it IS a business after all. They will continue to appeal to their core $$ source - ie not you.
FWIW personally, I'd *love* to see a ironman server:
1) resurrection is either impossible or nasty like an hour delay for the first death that day, 2hrs for the second, 4 for the 3rd, etc..
2) no ID tags, for anyone, ever (ok maybe for party members).
3) everyone's PVP is on, all the time
4) kill an enemy player, you get xp and drops (whether it's from them or world drops based on their level doesn't matter to me), so there's a more-than-simply-moral value for 60's to 'watch over' the newb areas and smoke gankers.
5) you have a home inn. Your mail goes there, not to 'wherever you are'. You change your inn, it takes a day for mail to get to you.
6) no horde+alliance characters on the same account, on that server (like current PVP server rules)
7) physical size = + modifier for hp, - modifier for stealth. Using humans as a baseline, HP modifiers might be (stealth modifiers inverted):
Tauren 130%
Orc 120%
Troll 110%
Undead: not sure if they are dessicated (80%) or zombietough (120%)
Night Elves: same as humans or maybe 95%?
Dwarves: 120% (innately tough)
Gnomes: 66%
8) because of the world-lethality, I'd make everyone permanently on 2x xp status
9) rep gains also 2x
10) no chat channels. Your discussions are either
Gnomes, for example, would be really frikking hard to spot, easy to hide, so they would probably focus on magic-using classes. The horde, being physically larger generally than the Alliance races, should have perhaps fewer spellcasting options or something to offset the otherwise lopsided advantage in hp...maybe the stealth thing does that already, dunno.
My god, I can't even imagine what those first few instance runs would be like if the people who died are GONE...
Why does no one see the irony in an administration that spouts off about, "A culture of respect for life in every stage", which then pushes for the death penalty for a wide range of crimes.
Right. Because the innocent pre-born infant deserves the same treatment and "respect" that is due a felon convicted of a violent crime. Nice universalist moral structure there, not sure how it works in real life. Since apparently everyone deserves the same treatment in your world, can I have the keys to your house?
I love when folks try to make fetuses and people who willlfully commit violent crimes against their fellow human somehow morally equivalent.
Someone who commits pre-meditated murder has the moral stature of an incurably rabid dog; less actually, since I'd feel bad for the dog. Either way, their personal choices illustrate that they are incapable of conforming to the most basic codes of human society, and thus a sane society will remove them. And since I don't believe that we should be willing to waste $36,000 per year on their permanent incarceration, it's merely a matter of economic logic that they be disposed of. Personally, I'd harvest anything I could from them (organs, tissue, etc.) and give the proceeds to the victim's family but that's just me.
she could never find a Chinese speaking UBRS party
The point being, she COULD probably find a lot of Chinese-speaking UBRS groups IF SHE PLAYED ON A CHINESE SERVER.
Look, I understand the implied/overt racism at work here but the DotCGF (Defenders of the Chinese Gold Farmers) crowd has to understand: if I went to play on a GERMAN server, and tried to adventure using my crappy, clumsy BAD German, I would accept that people would get occasionally mad at me and tell me to go play elsewhere.
If I was there coincidentally with hundreds and thousands of other Americans who were camping spawns/veins, ninja-looting drops, and generally being obnoxious, I guess I wouldn't bitch and whine about how unfair it is that they assume I'm one of them. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and stereotypes don't come out of nowhere.
But ultimately it's an open game. Players can rage about it all they like, but WoW *does* have a tool built into the game to prevent instance ninjas: master looter. I refuse to party with any PUG that doesn't leave it on master loot. The slight delay and inconvenience of it far exceeds the aggravation of spending 2 hours of my life running UBRS only to see the uberlewt ninja'd at the end because the leader forgot to put it on master at the end.
I'm not sure I agree with the article, I mean, yes, *some* gaming ads are directed at hormonally-charged adolescent males, but then again, aren't adolescents the most likely to be persuaded by a flashy ad ANYWAY?
Personally I don't believe games or marketing is exclusively aimed (any more) at young men. Sure, there are some T&A ads in print, but even those are getting rarer (and generally ridiculed - I remember that John Romero wanted to make me his "bitch" but I'm still waiting, John...).
In fact, I can't think of a single TV ad for any video game, ever. I'm not saying there aren't any, but if there are, they certainly didn't grab my attention.
No, I'd like to think that the 30+-somethings that are playing already have a fairly clear view of what they want from a game, the sense to read multiple reviews before buying, and generally act like informed consumers - a demographic that advertising is rarely aimed at.
You mention when your power 'glitches'...brownout or blackout or spike?
We are a light industrial building in a heavy industrial park, and I swear the power goes glitchy 2-3 times per year.
We'll get brownout and blackouts, and when the power comes back it SEEMS like it's on, but only 2 of the 3 phases of the A/C actually comes up, meaning (depending on how it's wired at the *circuit box*) some circuits are dead, some are full, and some are semi-brownout (our flourescent ballasts LOVE that half-state.....not).
That third phase sometimes doesn't come back up for hours.
I have no idea if this is of any help, that electrical stuff is arcana to me, I'm just reporting what we've discovered.
3x3 rubrics cube
/pedant
It's not even a material OBJECT, just some 3x3 grid of 'rules'.
Ben, we never told you: we all hated it. :)
-S
"The growth was largely driven through an expanding market for handheld systems."
Maybe it's just sloppy language, but I think this is mistaking a result for a cause. The (revenue) growth may have been MAINLY in the handheld categories, but it was driven by:
- Hollywood failing to generate a single new idea for the past 3(?) years. Despite the lack of ideas, movie tickets are now somewhere just south of $10 each, making a "movie night" for a family of 4, plus dinner at a moderate restaurant, popcorn, pop = roughly a hundred-dollar evening. Normal families can't really afford this as a 'routine' entertainment anymore.
- Each of the major-league sports is riven with controversy, usually because the thuggish behavior of it's whinging prima-donna multigajillionaire stars. Simultaneously, despite ever-increasing salaries, performance (san steroids) in major league sports has never been more disappointing. Likewise free-agency and insanely high ticket prices have utterly destroyed any sort of hometown team loyalty any fans ever felt.
- In my region, the increasing prevalence of "outdoor" diseases such as "bird flu" and Lyme Disease means that kids are spending ever more time indoors when possible.
- Finally, 2-income households and parents working 50, 60, even 70 hours per week just to make ends meet means that children are more and more left on their own. Better to buy them a video game system and KNOW that they are being amused relatively safely, than to leave them to their own devices and god-only-knows what they'll get up to.
Seems a relatively logical trend, to me.
Why start now?
They don't even need to escape. The RIAA hasn't even figured out how to formulate the bars yet. They've got some shadowy concept-ideas but none of them have ever been legally tested (and I'd guess most people believe they're pretty flimsy anyway).
Example: As I understand it, the music industry insists that "owning" a cd doesn't mean I actually own the music and can do what I want with it. "Ownership" of a cd merely gives me the license to listen to it. The media itself is functionally irrelevent, it's the IP that's at stake.
By corollary then, does that mean that everyone who has ALREADY PAID FOR THAT LICENSE in one medium is then really ENTITLED to the legal right to listen to that music, regardless of medium?
But I don't hear anyone telling people with ancient record collections that they can download everything they've already paid for? I bought 500 crappy unlistenable tapes of music I like from a garage sale...thus I own the tapes by previous rulings of 'fair use'. So then I go and download to get digitally perfect versions of all the music, have i broken the law? What if I re-record them ONTO the crappy tapes? Does that make them retroactively legal?
No, the whole IP **AA boondoggle is the transient bending of the copyright system to protect the profiteering middlemen in the industry, which simply can't stand. It isn't even standing now, it's a joke.
While I understand that the hardware is functionally different, my main concern with ATI is their written drivers.
I have 2 'gaming' computers in my home LAN - one with a pretty good ATI card, the other with a slightly older Nvidia card. IMO ATI and Nvidia have been relatively neck and neck technologically for years now. ATI advances half generation with this new product, Nvidia leapfrogs that 6 months later, ATI leapfrogs Nvidia 6 months further on, etc.
Where there is a HUGE difference is the drivers. Nvidia drivers seem to be to simple to install, very stable, and really outstanding. ATIs on the other hand are buggy, kludgy, and inconsistent until MANY generations after first release. I frankly use the Omegadrivers in preference to whatever comes directly from ATI. In performance, I read the specs and my Nvidia card should be slightly worse than the ATI, but the ATI doesn't appreciably outperform the Nvidia.
So you put ATI hardware into a box that CAN'T be upgraded, can't easily be patched by the user? From my experience with ATI drivers, that would make me nervous.
Well, considering that probably many of these games are bought by the "responsible adults" in people's lives (aunts, uncles, moms, dads, etc), it's one thing to buy DOA4 for your teen male which is OSTENSIBLY a fighting game, and another thing entirely to buy "DOA5:Orgy Jigglefest".
One is tittilating (pun intended), the other is pr0n.
I'm sure some sophisticated Euro is going to come in and draw conclusions about the double-standard this portrays as regards the views of sex vs. violence in the US. Bleh.
Now can you imagine driving for an extend period of time using your thumb muscles instead of your leg muscles?
Never really played a video game, have you?
Like most statistics, the numbers can mean what you want them to.
For a number of months (?) 2nd life was offering free lifetime memberships. Of course I signed up. It was Free (as in beer)!
I haven't logged on for probably a year, does that mean I'm still counted as a 'subscriber'?
Chinese Ban on Wikipedia Prevents Research
In other news, students report using an ancient technology called "books" to discover facts. "It's amazing," one student reported, "it's like, so STATIC. I mean, I was reading about something that wasn't constantly being updated, and actually had REFERENCES and a BIBLIOGRAPHY, which led me to other books."
She paused, amazed. "I wonder just how far these links go? I mean, there could be like an endless chain of information out there that none of us would have ever checked? Well, until Google digitized them of course."
It sounded very interesting from the promo text, but I dug a little further, and found some other comments from various Beta testers as well as above:
The World : The hub style of MMO really bums me out, for many reasons. Every aspect of the gameplay exists within private instances. Groups are found in the town areas, ala Guild Wars. Due to this, all open-ended gameplay disappears and is replaced by simple, directed instancing. Your mileage may vary, but I prefer plundering vast open plains and mountains. Worlds are fun. Boxes less so.
I agree. While CoH handled zone transitions cleverly, they were still there. Personally, I *like* just exploring, seeing new things, even if there isn't a 'game value' to the exploration. I know many people that pretty much mainly jsut do that. Having everything be intanced is, well, so artifical and constantly reminds you of that.
Don't get this game expecting to solo. A lot of folks have pissed and moaned about that, but they are trying to be pretty true to the Pen and Paper (PnP) rules and designs. You almost never see a DM spend all this time to create a world, dungeons, and the like, and then have them sit down at a table with a lone player with a lone character. Get over your wish to solo. It's a MMO. You are supposed to be grouping!
Uh oh. Frankly, I'm NOT a gigantic fan of grouping. I play MMOs for the unpredictability, the variety of content, NOT to make new friends and gain social interaction. Frankly, most of the groups I've been in sucked, WW2OL being the great exception. I *really* like the idea that they have an integrated voicecomm system - that genuinely may make all the difference.
Finally, I'm simply not convinced that the D&D mechanics really work. I mean, I think I've seen a fair share of RPGs in my time, and *every* one of them had rationalizations, shortcuts, and RubeGoldberg(tm) tables to minimize number crunching and speed play and get back to the interactions. With computers, it's ENTIRELY the opposite - you can have them auto-calculate the ballistic path of an arrow, but they can't make a bartender that will give you a decent conversation.
Does such a system scale to realtime? Doesn't it make more sense to get, say, a Steve Perrin or Robin Laws to design the rules around the capabilities of the venue, rather than shoehorning the rules to work in contexts where they really don't?
Problems: (and if you've read more than me, and found the answers to these already addressed - I'd love the links)
- Woohoo - I'm a wizard, I get 2 spells and then I might as well logoff for the day? How does that work in a realtime world?
- Deaths: in MMOs, deaths are frequent and annoying but in PnP D&D, if you died below level what, 6-7-8 it was rarely worth the trouble to rez you. Even healing in true DnD was a matter of DAYS.
I guess for me a lot of the mechanical questions revolve around the ability of a PnP game to compress time freely, which is absolutely verboten in an MMO.
This game is going to be very rewarding for a group of 6 people that want to play DDO as a cohesive group 2-3 times a week for a few hours each time, with maybe a Saturday session that lasts 4+ hours for those longer missions.
Then why not just get together and play, if one has the schedule time for this?
I don't see any crafting at all - that's a HUGE loss of potential customer base, right there. I've realized that, since playing CoH, this is sort of a subgame that drives a lot of activity, and (for me) is quite fun.
One plus: no "inter mission travel", thus no areas strangely devoid of trees, thus no sleeping on the ground in the middle of nowhere, thus no being eaten by a passing bonesnapper when the DMs pissed at you for something or other.
You know, I had a lot more 'sympathy' for the underdog when he was a revolutionary fighting an oppressive government.
But since the 1960s and 70s, terrorists have found that murderous brutality against women, children, and civilians in general gets them so much more publicity, they've gone that route.
I may have disagreed with the mid-20th Century IRA, or the comoros, or other earlier insurgencies, but back when they attacked only soldiers and policemen it at least had a legitimate claim that its efforts were productive (from their point of view). I oppose them politically, but I could agree that they were fighting an asymmetric conflict as COMBATANTS, not simply terrorists.
Now, terrorists are just psychotic murderers, organized under a banner, and supplied by those with a political motivation and utterly no sense of morality. So yes, goodbye to all of the indiscriminate murderers, and I cheerfully hope that they rot/burn in whatever hell their particular god has waiting for them.
Well, I don't know about you, but I ahve a high-def monitor, and with the crappy "HD" digital cable content, I'd actually like to see HD movies coming over my component video cable.
I think there are actually a lot of people out there who are like me, have a HD monitor and hunger for real HD content.