Face it, this idea everything would be done on a server and you would only need a "thin client" or such has been nothing much more than a pipe-dream.
One major reason is cost, the end clients have become more powerful and the price has dropped. The difference in cost between having a low powered end client versus a standard one isn't enough to justify anyone moving to a different model.
Then toss in the adversion most people have to "not owning it" and it becomes clear why this has never taken off. Look at the adversion people here on slashdot have to subscription music! Do you think any of these people will want to subsribe to software? Sure there will be some people who put up a server at home and work that way but that isn't a killer-app.
Notebooks and even phones for that matter will continue to get more powerful. There will be markets for low cost phones, but those same markets are not of any interest to the central server market advocates as these markets most likely won't have the money or inclination to use the service.
If you want your central server model you have to look no further than the green screen systems that are in use in many industries doing real work. Its really hard to sell someone something when the solution already exists.
It seems quite obvious to me that they are aiming after iTunes users by offering them two different methods of obtaining music. iTunes doesn't have a subscription service, which I bet many would jump at the chance to use if it did.
The all you can eat till you stop paying system has many benefits, namely you don't have to backup your "purchased" music. If you lose your songs you bought from iTunes they will not necessarily allow you to download them again.
Nothing your asking of Microsoft is beyond asking of Apple either, just Apple is given a pass by many people for doing the same crap Microsoft does. DRM'd to hell music that you cannot play on any other player, oh but I know, we can convert it and thats okay even though its as simple as converting a WMA.
Microsoft is doing what they do best, letting someone else show there is a market then moving in. Apple is going to put themselves in the bind if they keep trying to fly solo, they did it with PCs and look where they ended up. Granted with iTunes and iPods they have a substantial lead but they are one company against many as this just isn't Microsoft.
Apple needs to become more open, just like you and others complain Microsoft must. I want to be able to use ANY service to obtain my music and play it. By far iTunes it the easiest but you get locked into iPods to play it. They may be the better hardware now but for how long? (and I'm on my second iPod as the first died from HDD failure, if I do a third and stick with Apple it will have to be a RAM based offering)
After seeing what this guy did I think permanently banning the account is in order. While some violations may not deserve banning this one is too extreme not to deserve it.
Most games already have alternatives to outright banning, from warnings to account suspensions. It is the fear of banning is what keeps most people in line who would otherwise be trouble makers. Unfortunately people use the anonyminity of game worlds to act out their aggressions. Just as we cannot accept this behaviour in the real world we cannot accept it in a virtual one either. Both are societies and both can suffer from the actions of just one person.
as many changes are directly because of whining by the PvP crowd of WOW which isn't the majority no matter how much they or even Blizzard would pretend otherwise.
Depending on how you count them this is the third nerfing of Paladins and probably the most effective. The new fear is that someone will find a way for his Paladin to dual wield shields:) Paladins are probably the worst implemented class in WoW. Simply put they should probably never have been put in WoW as player conceptions based on past Blizzard products and those of competitors portray an idea that is far from what was implemented in WoW. In WoW Paladins are the hardest things to kill for those with little skill in PvP and probably the easiest character to play badly.
Before commencing on the changes to the class Blizzard asked the community through multiple threads what they thought was wrong with each of the Paladins talents and abilities and why. They got an earful, some were inane comments while others delved into the numbers to explain their position. Come the first preview patch on the Test Realm and it was evident to many that the developers chose to ignore all the responses they received. The primary evidence was a talent named Blessing of Kings. One of the major issues with Paladin players was having this 5 minute Blessing as the top tier of one of the talent trees. Two revisions of the new Talent tree and it finally moved. There were other obvious indicators of developers not acknowledging the issues but this was the most glaring.
Come patch time and Paladins will find a major change. The one and formost speciality of Paladins was their ability to heal under stress. This was because of a talent called Spiritual Focus, when bought fully provided a 70% chance to heal while being wailed upon. This was one of the first talents many Paladins obtained and found in many builds. Now a new Paladin will find previously class defining talent further down the holy tree and the complimentary talents even further down. In other words, what was once the defining ability of a class will not be for only a few of the class.
The second defining ability of Paladins were their shields which gave them short time immunity from about anything, upwards of a dozen seconds. Paladins had two of these and could use them back to back on themselves is necessary. Multiple Paladins could use them on allies for protection from somone important who pulled to much aggro. After incessant whining by PvP players who could not play a FPS without cheat codes this ability now cannot be used on the same target more than once per minute.
Many classes have gone through revisions that greatly enhanced the playability of those classes or fixed glaring issues with one of the three talent trees each class enjoys. Beastmaster Hunters became more viable in 1.7 and Feral Druids became truly viable in 1.9. Druids of other talent trees also enjoyed improvement. Not so with Paladins, in fact many priest players, whose class gets reviewed in 1.10, are now afraid of being "Paladinized".
Paladins can rejoice in knowing they are not the only class to suffer in 1.9. As PvP ruins most PvE play in games it is found in Hunters will enjoy considerable changes in 1.9 No longer will pets have unique abilities because of who they were before training. Players sought out special pets, sometimes at great time expenditure, to give themselve something fairly unique and an advantage. This has been lost as pets are now differentiated only by type and skin texture. Type being wolf,cat, and etc. Skin texture as the only difference between any two wolves will be the texture, same for cats and so on. Used to be you could find pets with fast pursuit speeds, odd attack types, or even slower speeds. No more. Beastmastery specialist top tier power, Bestial Wrath, got the nerf stick as too many cloth wearing PvPers complained it wasn't fair that a pet could kill them. Even food was apparently causing too much benefit to players so that
Farmers exist in WoW and other games because the designers don't work out the ramifications of their decisions. Then, once faced with those issues they instead go after the farmers instead of fixing the system which created the need for the farmers.
WoW is the perfect example. Early mounts, level 40 requirement, are only 100 gold. This is fairly simple to obtain. Level 60 mounts can be upwards of 1000 gold. This isn't easy, unless you want to spend hours collecting gold instead of playing the game. Hence for 6 to 7 dollars per 100 gold you can just go buy it. When compared to how much some gamers put into their machines this money is nothing. Add another example, rare patterns that are placed on the auction house for obscene amounts. How can sellers do this? Easy, the cost to place the auction is based on what the vendor would pay for the item, usually a pittance, and not what the person selling it put it up for. As a result they can create artificially high prices because there isn't a penalty for doing so.
Yet Blizzard will continue to go after the farmers and blame them for their own game design faults. Blizzard knows the fixes but they won't make them either out of lazinessor stubborness.
This issue has been around since the earliest days of large MMORPGs. It isn't going away until designers actually sit down and either accept it will happen or design away the need for it to happen.
I do not want a harddrive in my phone. My phone gets more abuse than any other gadget I have. Granted its cheaper than using flash but hell I would rather pay for something that isn't going to possibly be toast when it bounces once off the pavement.
Summary, we didn't have a design document and as such we could not deliver.
Any medium to large development is going to fail unless their is an underlying document which sets forth the goals. Any such project will be further compromised if those in charge are not competent to know this. Of course if they are paranoid someone will steal their ideas if they are ever written down that should be a red flag as well.
For what its worth, quite a few games get to market only to meander and fail because there is no post-launch plan or worse there are conflicting goals among the people running the show. A good game design document should lay out what happens before, during, and after. Just as with any other project if you don't know what should happen when it probably never will.
and they will then come up with a regulation which does put a value on your free software.
A government agency isn't going to allow someone to sidestep its authority when it comes to getting its hands on money. They will create an unlimited amount of BS to justify their theft.
What some may see as a boon to open source could become a pox upon it as well.
Damn, isn't there anything he doesn't screw up? All I remember from early SWG was how many of the annoyances were UO early days like. It was like the ultimate expression of feature creep.
So basically NGE is admission the original system was unsustainable from both a monetary and coding basis. They overcomplexed themselves into a ditch. Changing the game isn't a bad idea. Actively deceiving your player base is. SOE should be required to pay back the subscription fees for every player ever since the first line of code of NGE was laid down. They knew what they were doing, knew what the reaction would be, and then purposely made sure not to let anyone know as to maintain their income until the moment they changed.
Hell, I don't know who is more dishonest, SOE or Turbine; Turbine is the company who owns AC2 which recently closed, annoucning it was going to close less than a quarter after releasing an expansion!
They really should have released it as a new game and allowed the current player base to play the game they had paid for. Obviously this is another case of the developers wanting the players to play a game their way regardless of the desires of those actually paying for it.
if his personal views come across in it then so be it. Yeah some of his views are not exactly politically correct and some grate against the self-perceived intellectuals of society but why isn't his view allowed to be known?
do we want a world where everyone acts like a politician? Telling you one thing and believing the opposite, or worse getting into office and doing the opposite?
if bigotry or racism, neither I will attribute to Card, are hidden then how are they ever dealt with?
finally just because he doesn't fit your view doesn't mean his is invalid.
Honestly? Because no matter what he does, even if it is the next best thing since sliced bread, the majority of/. posters aren't going to be satisfied as it still is Microsoft.
Let some other company do it and it will be lauded. Let some other company screw it up and it probably won't get posted or if it does a million bad examples superficially similar to something wrong Microsoft did will be used to excuse it.
Microsoft may be lead by certain people but most of their products do have that design by committee look. The one thing that makes OSS great can also make it aggravating and that is that a lot of it is created by individuals. Individuals don't always feel a need to compromise and that can lead to true innovation. Fortunately their screw ups are rarely noticed until they have gained name recognition. Multinational corporations don't have that ability anymore.
Look at this way, at least they are hiring people that are known quantities. From that we can at least deduce what they are trying to do or hope to do.
AC2 should have never been released. At least never under the AC name.
AC2 had a horrid open beta and terrible end of beta event that lead of a ho-hum release. They//Turbine// were warned off the bugs and exploits remaining yet released anyway. The most famous of exploits was to use terrain versus tyrants (their dragons). Get them stuck and missle them to death and voila, you could level to max in a month or two. Took them a while to fix and that was only the tip of the exploit iceburg. The Turbine motto assigned by fans is , "Exploit Early, Exploit Often". It is a well deserved motto they earned in AC1 and carried into AC2 with abandon.
The whole dev team was just inept. They could not get pathing right so they allowed mobs to move through trees and rocks. To make matters worse one day we found nearly all mobs had ranged attacks! Yippee! They made a half-hearted attempt at RvR like DAOC. Half-hearted might be too strong, they put 3 kingdoms down, 3 plateaus, and forgot about it. Basically they had no idea other than what they saw someone else did but after copying the concept they could not figure out how to implement. Improvements sometimes were worse than what was before. To spice the lands up group mobs were put in. Trouble was there were too many and they aggro'd when you attacked nearby of the same. Old bugs would resurface from patch to patch, exploits were left in for whole patches.
The game was a mess. They put together a world without NPCs but didn't provide the players a means to compensate. They had huge wrecked cities that supposedly would repair if the players spent time in them and used their crafting facilities. Trouble was the cities were huge and dead, monuments to the egos of developers. They only improved through downtime! They even launched with a wrecked chat system. Half the time you could not use world or allegiance channels! Hilarious fun.
Worst feature, their "vaults". Quest dungeons where you get a story at the end. While beautiful in looks they showed the flaw of the game. Turbine wrote the game the developers wanted to play, not what their players were clamouring for. They then attempted to ram that idea down player's throats. Play it the way we intend or forget it. Well you could always exploit it...
Attemps were made to fix crafting and they came close, but the promised change to make crafting work took over 1 and 1/2 years beyond when promised. Which about summarizes the game, promises made and rarely delivered and if delivered so late it mattered not. A visually beautiful game with no real point. A game so diametrically opposed to its predecessor that it alienated those fans of the franchise.
To top off all the insults to their player base they released an expansion in late summer only to announce a few months later they were closing. Before then they chopped monthly updates to push their expansion for their older game AC1 because that expansion was so far behind as to be near vaporware.
Turbine is a gaming company without management or programming discipline. They take overly long to deliver on promises, they leave exploits in their games, they even condoned "Attended Combat macroing", and their updates had some bugs that smacked of last minute developer sneak ins (cowboy programming).
Fans of D&D and Middle Earth can only hope the franchise owners keep a tight leash on Turbine else these games will be travesties. Already both games have been pushed back beyond relevance, with MEO having even gone through a name change to boot! D&D looks and plays like NWN in FPS style but without player ability to customize the world (promised for "later") and a monthly fee! MEO, well, hell, with their previous history everyone will have a copy of the "one ring" before the first quarter is out.
Turbine is proof the Dilbert principle works in the business world, fail badly and your noticed, being assigned even something bigger:)
and it is because of this very issue I know a few people who run without AV protection. Norton is the king of annoyances but some free solutions can be just as bad.
The biggest annoyance is that these types of programs love to pop up windows and take focus from whatever application is in use regardless if that application was in full screen (usually games). Now if it was some notication of a hack/virus/etc it could be understood, but no, Norton and many AV programs will do this for simple updates! Hell even JAVA from Sun pops up a little floater above the task bar.
Developers need to realize that many of us prefer to have the comfort of protection but without the annoyance factor. We do not need to know your updating. We do need to know if you cannot update. We don't need pop-ups that tell us updates are available, a simple tray icon is sufficient. Lastly never ever interrupt any full screen application unless the world is ending.
Works especially well when want to look informed. Some believe it adds an aura of authority to their writings. It is also very easy to use against people as they will nod their head and whatnot so as not to look ignorant.
A very good example, the housing market (stateside). Dropping terms/names like "granite", "stainless steel", and "Berbur" implies much more than what it means. By constant promotion of such people assume that it must be quality. Works well for organizations. First, have an important and official sounding name and then follow it with little excerpts from places people who think like you are inclined to favor.
I am sure there are much clearer explanations but so many people post here who drop a name as if that ends any discussion. Very common method employed by the Intelligentsia. (a bunch of self declared "smarter than you" people)
and by a little prodding, namely press releases and such, Microsoft keeps them from exceeding what Microsoft wants people to pay for them. What is unusual in the game console business is how the units are priced. With many products you rarely ever see the manufacturer set the price and hold the retailers to it, there are actually laws that prevent some of this from occuring.
So whats a retailer to do? Simple, bundle it. Many did this and it irked many consumers but many still bought into it. Microsoft's angle is that raising the price only defeats the end purpose which is to sell the catridges and accessories where the real money is made. That and the fact if you keep it around $300 more will go for it. Combine also with many stores offering finance deals starting for totals of $299 and up...
Well it all adds up. Microsoft never intended to profit directly from the console itself. They are doing old adage of buying into a market. Get people to associate microsoft with the living room, television, and entertainment. Impressionable youngsters may look to them in the future with either concious or subconcious favor all based on this early exposure to the brand.
They are insistent in getting their hands on my checking account. They will not allow me to be verified any other way. My bank stated that in no shape or form would they reimburse me should I get defrauded this way.
I tried to work a solution with Paypal to no avail. My suggestion was, to allow them to verify the existance of the checking account and then to immediate forget it exists. No go, they want access. They claim I'm protected yet completely ignored a fraud report I had against another of their customers. Their claim was since I did not pay their "optional" insurance they were not responsible for any losses.
I don't think anyone is entitled to anything. Certainly not success in a game.
The key difference in my view and others is I do not think it is wrong to prevent people from buying their way through an online game by trading their money for the time they do not have. This has nothing to do with entitlement. Games are recreational. By default many recreational activities cost money. Some cost a large amount. Spending money on a game does not need to stop at the box or monthly subscription. It should totally up to the player what they choose to invest, their time, their money, or both.
I still believe that most games are poorly designed. I stated my reason but I will repeat it. If a developer makes a system where time is the only true investment that pays off and makes the means for the payoff to be trade amongst players they encourage the behaviour they claim they don't want. In other words, they are trying to tell people to play the game one way when they designed it a whole different way.
As for your peeve over new loot every 4 levels. Sounds like you need to stay out of these games. The new loot syndrom may actually be governed more by ruleset than want. In a number of games even a few levels can mean lots of difference. Some games are more exaggerated than others. However in any game where you can only upgrade every X levels your power falls off as you approach the next breakpoint. This is as good as a guarantee that the player will have to upgrade to stay competitive or see progression.
Cyberspace is ours, let the Army, Navy, and Marines sit and spin.
Justifcation of one's budget usually means jumping the gun and laying ownership claims quickly. Expressing it in your mission statement is one good way of doing it. Now the other branches will have to figure out how to keep the Air Force from getting the sole control of that arena.
In other words, we want money and here is our justification, after all Cyberspace is so big and scary!
because no government operates under any true constraint except those which ends its dominance. If anything the Bush people are just to blunt. Perhaps its the nature of Texans, but subterfuge isn't always the best method either.
when I needed a 16:9 the only ones available at the time were sold as HD monitors, in other words needing a converter. EDTV sets, which are at most what a DVD needs, are a recent attempt to sell more plasma sets as the price of the HDTV version was putting too many people off. I did buy with the intention of using it for HDTV broadcasts but like many others I will not pay $200+ for a receiver capable of it.
Get the receivers down under $100, preferably under $75 and then I'll look. As it stands now, other than sports and maybe discovery hd, what is there that really benefits from the better signal?
I guess if Porn was in HDTV (and the actors were really really good looking) there would be more popularity. Sitcoms don't need PvP, reality shows don't need it, and most certainly game shows aren't going to be enhanced by it. Hell my SO doesn't truly watch her soaps as much as listen to them!
Use the extra resolution to add more content to the screen might be one direction to go. Hell I could even see a market for live scene broadcasts in HDTV from certain places in the world. Imagine a real fish screensaver (well ok, use one of the big national aquariums). Give people a reason to have it in the background and more use will come along for regular viewing.
I had no other concern in my purchase. It is 16:9 and it has the ability to support HDTV provided I buy the receiver. I've talked with others who have one for the same purpose. The last part is one of the major reasons people don't use HD. Who wants to buy a special receiver?
Once all sets come with it built in then perhaps people will use it.
If you can retrieve the password how can you tell a user their information is secure?
The first rule of password security for me is that there is no way to retrieve the password from the system. If that cannot be done then you have no security at all.
Let them farm gold, let those who want to buy gold do so. Farmers don't ruin games. Games are ruined by poor design and implementation.
Face it, the one commodity these developers refuse to code around is time. Those who can invest a large amount of time come out of ahead. The problem in these environments is the way things are implemented in most MMORPGs money is a driving force in the game. It only stands to reason that if you have more time to invest in the game the more money you can have. As such the ability of some people to play the game for long hours tips the balance of the game. Since the developers love to create money sinks and tweak them to keep the supply and demand where they want them they will invariably harm those with the least means. The in game economy is wrecked far before any farmer sets foot in the game. The farmer exists because people are trying to exist in this artificial economy and they don't have the one resource needed for it, time.
Gold Farmers merely point out the flaw of the game. If it so damn important that someone can make real world cash off of it the developers should instead find methods to reduce the importance instead of wasting time trying stop the actual sale. My analogy, stopping gold sales by going after the farmers is like closing plants to reduce the number of cars you build so you don't get stuck with too many unsold. The gold farmers exist because you failed to create a system where people with inordinate amounts of game time cannot dictate the economy. The cars remain unsold on the lot not because you make to many but because your goal wasn't to make them more popular and thereby sell more. Both ignore the hard issues. The gold farmer can be defeated by finding ways to remove the exaggerated affect "lifers" have on game economies and you can sell cars once you realize that that is the real goal.
Slashdot Mirror
Face it, this idea everything would be done on a server and you would only need a "thin client" or such has been nothing much more than a pipe-dream.
One major reason is cost, the end clients have become more powerful and the price has dropped. The difference in cost between having a low powered end client versus a standard one isn't enough to justify anyone moving to a different model.
Then toss in the adversion most people have to "not owning it" and it becomes clear why this has never taken off. Look at the adversion people here on slashdot have to subscription music! Do you think any of these people will want to subsribe to software? Sure there will be some people who put up a server at home and work that way but that isn't a killer-app.
Notebooks and even phones for that matter will continue to get more powerful. There will be markets for low cost phones, but those same markets are not of any interest to the central server market advocates as these markets most likely won't have the money or inclination to use the service.
If you want your central server model you have to look no further than the green screen systems that are in use in many industries doing real work. Its really hard to sell someone something when the solution already exists.
It seems quite obvious to me that they are aiming after iTunes users by offering them two different methods of obtaining music. iTunes doesn't have a subscription service, which I bet many would jump at the chance to use if it did.
The all you can eat till you stop paying system has many benefits, namely you don't have to backup your "purchased" music. If you lose your songs you bought from iTunes they will not necessarily allow you to download them again.
Nothing your asking of Microsoft is beyond asking of Apple either, just Apple is given a pass by many people for doing the same crap Microsoft does. DRM'd to hell music that you cannot play on any other player, oh but I know, we can convert it and thats okay even though its as simple as converting a WMA.
Microsoft is doing what they do best, letting someone else show there is a market then moving in. Apple is going to put themselves in the bind if they keep trying to fly solo, they did it with PCs and look where they ended up. Granted with iTunes and iPods they have a substantial lead but they are one company against many as this just isn't Microsoft.
Apple needs to become more open, just like you and others complain Microsoft must. I want to be able to use ANY service to obtain my music and play it. By far iTunes it the easiest but you get locked into iPods to play it. They may be the better hardware now but for how long? (and I'm on my second iPod as the first died from HDD failure, if I do a third and stick with Apple it will have to be a RAM based offering)
After seeing what this guy did I think permanently banning the account is in order. While some violations may not deserve banning this one is too extreme not to deserve it.
Most games already have alternatives to outright banning, from warnings to account suspensions. It is the fear of banning is what keeps most people in line who would otherwise be trouble makers. Unfortunately people use the anonyminity of game worlds to act out their aggressions. Just as we cannot accept this behaviour in the real world we cannot accept it in a virtual one either. Both are societies and both can suffer from the actions of just one person.
the released an expansion last year only to follow it with an annoucement a few months later they were closing down the game.
AC2 was dead from launch. It was a game for developers, lauding themselves, and ignoring the players. It deserved to die and it did.
as many changes are directly because of whining by the PvP crowd of WOW which isn't the majority no matter how much they or even Blizzard would pretend otherwise.
:) Paladins are probably the worst implemented class in WoW. Simply put they should probably never have been put in WoW as player conceptions based on past Blizzard products and those of competitors portray an idea that is far from what was implemented in WoW. In WoW Paladins are the hardest things to kill for those with little skill in PvP and probably the easiest character to play badly.
Depending on how you count them this is the third nerfing of Paladins and probably the most effective. The new fear is that someone will find a way for his Paladin to dual wield shields
Before commencing on the changes to the class Blizzard asked the community through multiple threads what they thought was wrong with each of the Paladins talents and abilities and why. They got an earful, some were inane comments while others delved into the numbers to explain their position. Come the first preview patch on the Test Realm and it was evident to many that the developers chose to ignore all the responses they received. The primary evidence was a talent named Blessing of Kings. One of the major issues with Paladin players was having this 5 minute Blessing as the top tier of one of the talent trees. Two revisions of the new Talent tree and it finally moved. There were other obvious indicators of developers not acknowledging the issues but this was the most glaring.
Come patch time and Paladins will find a major change. The one and formost speciality of Paladins was their ability to heal under stress. This was because of a talent called Spiritual Focus, when bought fully provided a 70% chance to heal while being wailed upon. This was one of the first talents many Paladins obtained and found in many builds. Now a new Paladin will find previously class defining talent further down the holy tree and the complimentary talents even further down. In other words, what was once the defining ability of a class will not be for only a few of the class.
The second defining ability of Paladins were their shields which gave them short time immunity from about anything, upwards of a dozen seconds. Paladins had two of these and could use them back to back on themselves is necessary. Multiple Paladins could use them on allies for protection from somone important who pulled to much aggro. After incessant whining by PvP players who could not play a FPS without cheat codes this ability now cannot be used on the same target more than once per minute.
Many classes have gone through revisions that greatly enhanced the playability of those classes or fixed glaring issues with one of the three talent trees each class enjoys. Beastmaster Hunters became more viable in 1.7 and Feral Druids became truly viable in 1.9. Druids of other talent trees also enjoyed improvement. Not so with Paladins, in fact many priest players, whose class gets reviewed in 1.10, are now afraid of being "Paladinized".
Paladins can rejoice in knowing they are not the only class to suffer in 1.9. As PvP ruins most PvE play in games it is found in Hunters will enjoy considerable changes in 1.9 No longer will pets have unique abilities because of who they were before training. Players sought out special pets, sometimes at great time expenditure, to give themselve something fairly unique and an advantage. This has been lost as pets are now differentiated only by type and skin texture. Type being wolf,cat, and etc. Skin texture as the only difference between any two wolves will be the texture, same for cats and so on. Used to be you could find pets with fast pursuit speeds, odd attack types, or even slower speeds. No more. Beastmastery specialist top tier power, Bestial Wrath, got the nerf stick as too many cloth wearing PvPers complained it wasn't fair that a pet could kill them. Even food was apparently causing too much benefit to players so that
Farmers exist in WoW and other games because the designers don't work out the ramifications of their decisions. Then, once faced with those issues they instead go after the farmers instead of fixing the system which created the need for the farmers.
WoW is the perfect example. Early mounts, level 40 requirement, are only 100 gold. This is fairly simple to obtain. Level 60 mounts can be upwards of 1000 gold. This isn't easy, unless you want to spend hours collecting gold instead of playing the game. Hence for 6 to 7 dollars per 100 gold you can just go buy it. When compared to how much some gamers put into their machines this money is nothing. Add another example, rare patterns that are placed on the auction house for obscene amounts. How can sellers do this? Easy, the cost to place the auction is based on what the vendor would pay for the item, usually a pittance, and not what the person selling it put it up for. As a result they can create artificially high prices because there isn't a penalty for doing so.
Yet Blizzard will continue to go after the farmers and blame them for their own game design faults. Blizzard knows the fixes but they won't make them either out of lazinessor stubborness.
This issue has been around since the earliest days of large MMORPGs. It isn't going away until designers actually sit down and either accept it will happen or design away the need for it to happen.
I do not want a harddrive in my phone. My phone gets more abuse than any other gadget I have. Granted its cheaper than using flash but hell I would rather pay for something that isn't going to possibly be toast when it bounces once off the pavement.
Summary, we didn't have a design document and as such we could not deliver.
Any medium to large development is going to fail unless their is an underlying document which sets forth the goals. Any such project will be further compromised if those in charge are not competent to know this. Of course if they are paranoid someone will steal their ideas if they are ever written down that should be a red flag as well.
For what its worth, quite a few games get to market only to meander and fail because there is no post-launch plan or worse there are conflicting goals among the people running the show. A good game design document should lay out what happens before, during, and after. Just as with any other project if you don't know what should happen when it probably never will.
and they will then come up with a regulation which does put a value on your free software.
A government agency isn't going to allow someone to sidestep its authority when it comes to getting its hands on money. They will create an unlimited amount of BS to justify their theft.
What some may see as a boon to open source could become a pox upon it as well.
Who died and made Raph Koster god?
Damn, isn't there anything he doesn't screw up? All I remember from early SWG was how many of the annoyances were UO early days like. It was like the ultimate expression of feature creep.
So basically NGE is admission the original system was unsustainable from both a monetary and coding basis. They overcomplexed themselves into a ditch. Changing the game isn't a bad idea. Actively deceiving your player base is. SOE should be required to pay back the subscription fees for every player ever since the first line of code of NGE was laid down. They knew what they were doing, knew what the reaction would be, and then purposely made sure not to let anyone know as to maintain their income until the moment they changed.
Hell, I don't know who is more dishonest, SOE or Turbine; Turbine is the company who owns AC2 which recently closed, annoucning it was going to close less than a quarter after releasing an expansion!
They really should have released it as a new game and allowed the current player base to play the game they had paid for. Obviously this is another case of the developers wanting the players to play a game their way regardless of the desires of those actually paying for it.
if his personal views come across in it then so be it. Yeah some of his views are not exactly politically correct and some grate against the self-perceived intellectuals of society but why isn't his view allowed to be known?
do we want a world where everyone acts like a politician? Telling you one thing and believing the opposite, or worse getting into office and doing the opposite?
if bigotry or racism, neither I will attribute to Card, are hidden then how are they ever dealt with?
finally just because he doesn't fit your view doesn't mean his is invalid.
Honestly? Because no matter what he does, even if it is the next best thing since sliced bread, the majority of /. posters aren't going to be satisfied as it still is Microsoft.
Let some other company do it and it will be lauded. Let some other company screw it up and it probably won't get posted or if it does a million bad examples superficially similar to something wrong Microsoft did will be used to excuse it.
Microsoft may be lead by certain people but most of their products do have that design by committee look. The one thing that makes OSS great can also make it aggravating and that is that a lot of it is created by individuals. Individuals don't always feel a need to compromise and that can lead to true innovation. Fortunately their screw ups are rarely noticed until they have gained name recognition. Multinational corporations don't have that ability anymore.
Look at this way, at least they are hiring people that are known quantities. From that we can at least deduce what they are trying to do or hope to do.
AC2 should have never been released. At least never under the AC name.
//Turbine// were warned off the bugs and exploits remaining yet released anyway. The most famous of exploits was to use terrain versus tyrants (their dragons). Get them stuck and missle them to death and voila, you could level to max in a month or two. Took them a while to fix and that was only the tip of the exploit iceburg. The Turbine motto assigned by fans is , "Exploit Early, Exploit Often". It is a well deserved motto they earned in AC1 and carried into AC2 with abandon.
:)
AC2 had a horrid open beta and terrible end of beta event that lead of a ho-hum release. They
The whole dev team was just inept. They could not get pathing right so they allowed mobs to move through trees and rocks. To make matters worse one day we found nearly all mobs had ranged attacks! Yippee! They made a half-hearted attempt at RvR like DAOC. Half-hearted might be too strong, they put 3 kingdoms down, 3 plateaus, and forgot about it. Basically they had no idea other than what they saw someone else did but after copying the concept they could not figure out how to implement. Improvements sometimes were worse than what was before. To spice the lands up group mobs were put in. Trouble was there were too many and they aggro'd when you attacked nearby of the same. Old bugs would resurface from patch to patch, exploits were left in for whole patches.
The game was a mess. They put together a world without NPCs but didn't provide the players a means to compensate. They had huge wrecked cities that supposedly would repair if the players spent time in them and used their crafting facilities. Trouble was the cities were huge and dead, monuments to the egos of developers. They only improved through downtime! They even launched with a wrecked chat system. Half the time you could not use world or allegiance channels! Hilarious fun.
Worst feature, their "vaults". Quest dungeons where you get a story at the end. While beautiful in looks they showed the flaw of the game. Turbine wrote the game the developers wanted to play, not what their players were clamouring for. They then attempted to ram that idea down player's throats. Play it the way we intend or forget it. Well you could always exploit it...
Attemps were made to fix crafting and they came close, but the promised change to make crafting work took over 1 and 1/2 years beyond when promised. Which about summarizes the game, promises made and rarely delivered and if delivered so late it mattered not. A visually beautiful game with no real point. A game so diametrically opposed to its predecessor that it alienated those fans of the franchise.
To top off all the insults to their player base they released an expansion in late summer only to announce a few months later they were closing. Before then they chopped monthly updates to push their expansion for their older game AC1 because that expansion was so far behind as to be near vaporware.
Turbine is a gaming company without management or programming discipline. They take overly long to deliver on promises, they leave exploits in their games, they even condoned "Attended Combat macroing", and their updates had some bugs that smacked of last minute developer sneak ins (cowboy programming).
Fans of D&D and Middle Earth can only hope the franchise owners keep a tight leash on Turbine else these games will be travesties. Already both games have been pushed back beyond relevance, with MEO having even gone through a name change to boot! D&D looks and plays like NWN in FPS style but without player ability to customize the world (promised for "later") and a monthly fee! MEO, well, hell, with their previous history everyone will have a copy of the "one ring" before the first quarter is out.
Turbine is proof the Dilbert principle works in the business world, fail badly and your noticed, being assigned even something bigger
and it is because of this very issue I know a few people who run without AV protection. Norton is the king of annoyances but some free solutions can be just as bad.
The biggest annoyance is that these types of programs love to pop up windows and take focus from whatever application is in use regardless if that application was in full screen (usually games). Now if it was some notication of a hack/virus/etc it could be understood, but no, Norton and many AV programs will do this for simple updates! Hell even JAVA from Sun pops up a little floater above the task bar.
Developers need to realize that many of us prefer to have the comfort of protection but without the annoyance factor. We do not need to know your updating. We do need to know if you cannot update. We don't need pop-ups that tell us updates are available, a simple tray icon is sufficient. Lastly never ever interrupt any full screen application unless the world is ending.
Works especially well when want to look informed. Some believe it adds an aura of authority to their writings. It is also very easy to use against people as they will nod their head and whatnot so as not to look ignorant.
A very good example, the housing market (stateside). Dropping terms/names like "granite", "stainless steel", and "Berbur" implies much more than what it means. By constant promotion of such people assume that it must be quality. Works well for organizations. First, have an important and official sounding name and then follow it with little excerpts from places people who think like you are inclined to favor.
I am sure there are much clearer explanations but so many people post here who drop a name as if that ends any discussion. Very common method employed by the Intelligentsia. (a bunch of self declared "smarter than you" people)
and by a little prodding, namely press releases and such, Microsoft keeps them from exceeding what Microsoft wants people to pay for them. What is unusual in the game console business is how the units are priced. With many products you rarely ever see the manufacturer set the price and hold the retailers to it, there are actually laws that prevent some of this from occuring.
So whats a retailer to do? Simple, bundle it. Many did this and it irked many consumers but many still bought into it. Microsoft's angle is that raising the price only defeats the end purpose which is to sell the catridges and accessories where the real money is made. That and the fact if you keep it around $300 more will go for it. Combine also with many stores offering finance deals starting for totals of $299 and up...
Well it all adds up. Microsoft never intended to profit directly from the console itself. They are doing old adage of buying into a market. Get people to associate microsoft with the living room, television, and entertainment. Impressionable youngsters may look to them in the future with either concious or subconcious favor all based on this early exposure to the brand.
Go figure that E-Bay owns them.
They are insistent in getting their hands on my checking account. They will not allow me to be verified any other way. My bank stated that in no shape or form would they reimburse me should I get defrauded this way.
I tried to work a solution with Paypal to no avail. My suggestion was, to allow them to verify the existance of the checking account and then to immediate forget it exists. No go, they want access. They claim I'm protected yet completely ignored a fraud report I had against another of their customers. Their claim was since I did not pay their "optional" insurance they were not responsible for any losses.
Yet they want into my checking account?
It isn't unintentional errors I am worried about, it is the intentional distortion which is important and which one is more subject to that?
Volley!
I don't think anyone is entitled to anything. Certainly not success in a game.
The key difference in my view and others is I do not think it is wrong to prevent people from buying their way through an online game by trading their money for the time they do not have. This has nothing to do with entitlement. Games are recreational. By default many recreational activities cost money. Some cost a large amount. Spending money on a game does not need to stop at the box or monthly subscription. It should totally up to the player what they choose to invest, their time, their money, or both.
I still believe that most games are poorly designed. I stated my reason but I will repeat it. If a developer makes a system where time is the only true investment that pays off and makes the means for the payoff to be trade amongst players they encourage the behaviour they claim they don't want. In other words, they are trying to tell people to play the game one way when they designed it a whole different way.
As for your peeve over new loot every 4 levels. Sounds like you need to stay out of these games. The new loot syndrom may actually be governed more by ruleset than want. In a number of games even a few levels can mean lots of difference. Some games are more exaggerated than others. However in any game where you can only upgrade every X levels your power falls off as you approach the next breakpoint. This is as good as a guarantee that the player will have to upgrade to stay competitive or see progression.
Cyberspace is ours, let the Army, Navy, and Marines sit and spin.
Justifcation of one's budget usually means jumping the gun and laying ownership claims quickly. Expressing it in your mission statement is one good way of doing it. Now the other branches will have to figure out how to keep the Air Force from getting the sole control of that arena.
In other words, we want money and here is our justification, after all Cyberspace is so big and scary!
because no government operates under any true constraint except those which ends its dominance. If anything the Bush people are just to blunt. Perhaps its the nature of Texans, but subterfuge isn't always the best method either.
when I needed a 16:9 the only ones available at the time were sold as HD monitors, in other words needing a converter. EDTV sets, which are at most what a DVD needs, are a recent attempt to sell more plasma sets as the price of the HDTV version was putting too many people off. I did buy with the intention of using it for HDTV broadcasts but like many others I will not pay $200+ for a receiver capable of it.
Get the receivers down under $100, preferably under $75 and then I'll look. As it stands now, other than sports and maybe discovery hd, what is there that really benefits from the better signal?
I guess if Porn was in HDTV (and the actors were really really good looking) there would be more popularity. Sitcoms don't need PvP, reality shows don't need it, and most certainly game shows aren't going to be enhanced by it. Hell my SO doesn't truly watch her soaps as much as listen to them!
Use the extra resolution to add more content to the screen might be one direction to go. Hell I could even see a market for live scene broadcasts in HDTV from certain places in the world. Imagine a real fish screensaver (well ok, use one of the big national aquariums). Give people a reason to have it in the background and more use will come along for regular viewing.
I had no other concern in my purchase. It is 16:9 and it has the ability to support HDTV provided I buy the receiver. I've talked with others who have one for the same purpose. The last part is one of the major reasons people don't use HD. Who wants to buy a special receiver?
Once all sets come with it built in then perhaps people will use it.
If you can retrieve the password how can you tell a user their information is secure?
The first rule of password security for me is that there is no way to retrieve the password from the system. If that cannot be done then you have no security at all.
Let them farm gold, let those who want to buy gold do so. Farmers don't ruin games. Games are ruined by poor design and implementation.
Face it, the one commodity these developers refuse to code around is time. Those who can invest a large amount of time come out of ahead. The problem in these environments is the way things are implemented in most MMORPGs money is a driving force in the game. It only stands to reason that if you have more time to invest in the game the more money you can have. As such the ability of some people to play the game for long hours tips the balance of the game. Since the developers love to create money sinks and tweak them to keep the supply and demand where they want them they will invariably harm those with the least means. The in game economy is wrecked far before any farmer sets foot in the game. The farmer exists because people are trying to exist in this artificial economy and they don't have the one resource needed for it, time.
Gold Farmers merely point out the flaw of the game. If it so damn important that someone can make real world cash off of it the developers should instead find methods to reduce the importance instead of wasting time trying stop the actual sale. My analogy, stopping gold sales by going after the farmers is like closing plants to reduce the number of cars you build so you don't get stuck with too many unsold. The gold farmers exist because you failed to create a system where people with inordinate amounts of game time cannot dictate the economy. The cars remain unsold on the lot not because you make to many but because your goal wasn't to make them more popular and thereby sell more. Both ignore the hard issues. The gold farmer can be defeated by finding ways to remove the exaggerated affect "lifers" have on game economies and you can sell cars once you realize that that is the real goal.