But audiences can be educated to enjoy more sophisticated forms of art.
People don't want to pay to be educated in MMOs. Really. You should jump on a MMO trial account some time and see. Sad to say, it really is as bad as the GP says. The vast majority of players just want to be fed the absolute minimum knowledge required to grind as fast as possible.
Give them the option of doing quests that actually make them think and explore on their own, and most of them won't touch them, so you just wasted all that expensive development effort. Give them nothing but those quests, and you're out of business.
Anyone writing Massive servers in Java (or C#) should be billed the full ongoing costs of the extra iron that they require. Quite apart from the inherent overheads of VMs, those languages automagically spawn threads for network activity, rather than allowing you to perform non-blocking access from a smaller thread pool. They simply don't scale up well. A few dozen players, fine, hundreds, OK, but you hit the thousands and you're spending a significant amount of your cycles just thrashing between threads.
Java and C# people will likely deny it, but then they were always pretty big on cognitive dissonance.
Never mind bugs; most online games are broken by design. To improve interactivity, they trust clients to send state changes rather than just requests. And thus are speed hacks born, and the arms race begins. Even Blizzard are fighting a rearguard on that, and they have nobody to blame but themselves.
I fully agree on the reaction issue. I've yet to see an online game where exploits are treated the correct way. Instead of shrieking "burn the witch" and wielding the banstick, they should just be silently fixed (not that they should have been designed in, but I digress). In fact, even calling them exploits engenders the wrong attitude. The right attitude is to say that anything that the game lets you do is OK, and that it is the developers' sole responsibility to alter the game's behaviour, and never, ever the players' responsibility to refrain from any action that the game (by which I really mean the servers) actually allows.
The amount of energy, time and money that companies waste on railing their paying players for acting like real humans rather than obedient serfs would be funny if it weren't so pathetic and self defeating.
Pah, engineers. My kids will be middle management. There will always be on-site middle management: who else will suck up and lie to the senior managers?
For future reference, the giveaway wasn't the obvious free time that you have, it's that you didn't use the workload as an excuse to get the hell out of the house for another day. Kids are so rewarding, in very. Short. Doses.
That takes me back. I used to scam my parents all the time too, and it won't be long until my kids are old enough to look me in the eye with a straight face and lie through their teeth. They grow up so fast.:(
The bad news for Omni Mega Hypercorp is that people like you with great work ethics don't have kids. I on the other hand am shiftless but fruitful, and my lazy offspring are going to micromanage you all the way to your grave.
Damn skippy. I don't even think about work when I'm in the office. Fuck them, they'll smartsize my headcount in a heartbeat the moment that they think it'll add ten cents to next quarter's bottom line, so I'm getting my retaliation in preemptively. Curiously, the more I slack off, the more they over-value my skills. Making this post probably put another $100 on next year's salary.
Urgh, now that I've actually looked through them, I'd prefer a -1, Skankathon. I know there's a recession on, but damn it, you don't cut your Booth Babe budget, ever.
And trademarks are "defend them or lose them", so they pretty much have to quash projects like this, for certain evil corporate foot-shooting scum sucking values of "have to".
The capitalist idea of letting the free market determine price based on supply and demand does not mean a capitalist thinks the supply of anything is endless
Correct. A capitalist hopes that it isn't endless, because selling the last unicorn burger buys you beachfront in Maui.
That's a great idea, but since pilots won't work for bus driver money, that means the rest of us will have to cycle to work. Sure, you get a really quick commute to the airport, but you'll lose that time in cleaning the blood, mangled spokes and scraps of spandex off of your car.
Hey, why is there such a shortage of resources? Can't capitalism solve that? Is it that the damn Earth doesn't get this whole supply/demand thing? Aargh, we're living on a commie planet!
"Yeah, I remember some of the commercial stuff was OK, but the 'free' shit that those Goddamn stoners kept churning out on their bongos and sitars at festivals was beyond excrable."
Define "modern". From experience the CVT on a 2000 HR-V with a 1.6 petrol engine was absolutely awful in practical use. I'm sure that under the right test conditions it would produce good results, but I'd be very hesitant to touch another one because of the dreadful throttle response, making town driving a nightmare. Put your foot down, even gently, and the CVT would first quickly change ratios to allow the engine to rev (without changing speed at all), and then slowly, oh so slowly, change ratio back to increase speed. That may have been a foible of Honda's revvy (rather than torquey) engines, but it made the thing a pig to drive, and inefficient to boot.
Not quite all. It's important to remember that SpinCorp pays about 15% less than ParentCorp, and that any length of service benefits don't transfer. Rinse and repeat whenever your peons get uppity.
I agree about the crash safety - you're probably less protected than a motorcylist.
Great, then you should start some form of Retard Club together. For fuck's sake, how can you be less protected than nothing? Wasn't "thrown free in the event of an impact" debunked half a century ago?
(From experience, in a Honda HR-V) CVT gives you really shitty mileage (and performance) though, even worse than a torque converted auto box. Still, it's one fewer thing to concentrate on, and given the target market, that's a really good idea.
Slashdot Mirror
People don't want to pay to be educated in MMOs. Really. You should jump on a MMO trial account some time and see. Sad to say, it really is as bad as the GP says. The vast majority of players just want to be fed the absolute minimum knowledge required to grind as fast as possible.
Give them the option of doing quests that actually make them think and explore on their own, and most of them won't touch them, so you just wasted all that expensive development effort. Give them nothing but those quests, and you're out of business.
Anyone writing Massive servers in Java (or C#) should be billed the full ongoing costs of the extra iron that they require. Quite apart from the inherent overheads of VMs, those languages automagically spawn threads for network activity, rather than allowing you to perform non-blocking access from a smaller thread pool. They simply don't scale up well. A few dozen players, fine, hundreds, OK, but you hit the thousands and you're spending a significant amount of your cycles just thrashing between threads.
Java and C# people will likely deny it, but then they were always pretty big on cognitive dissonance.
Never mind bugs; most online games are broken by design. To improve interactivity, they trust clients to send state changes rather than just requests. And thus are speed hacks born, and the arms race begins. Even Blizzard are fighting a rearguard on that, and they have nobody to blame but themselves.
I fully agree on the reaction issue. I've yet to see an online game where exploits are treated the correct way. Instead of shrieking "burn the witch" and wielding the banstick, they should just be silently fixed (not that they should have been designed in, but I digress). In fact, even calling them exploits engenders the wrong attitude. The right attitude is to say that anything that the game lets you do is OK, and that it is the developers' sole responsibility to alter the game's behaviour, and never, ever the players' responsibility to refrain from any action that the game (by which I really mean the servers) actually allows.
The amount of energy, time and money that companies waste on railing their paying players for acting like real humans rather than obedient serfs would be funny if it weren't so pathetic and self defeating.
Pah, engineers. My kids will be middle management. There will always be on-site middle management: who else will suck up and lie to the senior managers?
For future reference, the giveaway wasn't the obvious free time that you have, it's that you didn't use the workload as an excuse to get the hell out of the house for another day. Kids are so rewarding, in very. Short. Doses.
That takes me back. I used to scam my parents all the time too, and it won't be long until my kids are old enough to look me in the eye with a straight face and lie through their teeth. They grow up so fast. :(
The bad news for Omni Mega Hypercorp is that people like you with great work ethics don't have kids. I on the other hand am shiftless but fruitful, and my lazy offspring are going to micromanage you all the way to your grave.
You don't work with contractors a lot, do you?
First they commit their code, then you pay them.
Damn skippy. I don't even think about work when I'm in the office. Fuck them, they'll smartsize my headcount in a heartbeat the moment that they think it'll add ten cents to next quarter's bottom line, so I'm getting my retaliation in preemptively. Curiously, the more I slack off, the more they over-value my skills. Making this post probably put another $100 on next year's salary.
There's a lot of fugly ladyboys in there, for sure. However, I am starting to overrate Sharp for some reason.
Urgh, now that I've actually looked through them, I'd prefer a -1, Skankathon. I know there's a recession on, but damn it, you don't cut your Booth Babe budget, ever.
Talking of photographs - never mind these sleazy hucksters, here's the CES 2008 Booth Babes. +1 Insightful, thanks.
They could move all their IT over to SCO Unix.
And trademarks are "defend them or lose them", so they pretty much have to quash projects like this, for certain evil corporate foot-shooting scum sucking values of "have to".
Correct. A capitalist hopes that it isn't endless, because selling the last unicorn burger buys you beachfront in Maui.
Batteries Not Included.
Click here to add a Mr Fusion to your order.
That's a great idea, but since pilots won't work for bus driver money, that means the rest of us will have to cycle to work. Sure, you get a really quick commute to the airport, but you'll lose that time in cleaning the blood, mangled spokes and scraps of spandex off of your car.
Hey, why is there such a shortage of resources? Can't capitalism solve that? Is it that the damn Earth doesn't get this whole supply/demand thing? Aargh, we're living on a commie planet!
How much fuel is required to lift helium down from orbit?
"Yeah, I remember some of the commercial stuff was OK, but the 'free' shit that those Goddamn stoners kept churning out on their bongos and sitars at festivals was beyond excrable."
Define "modern". From experience the CVT on a 2000 HR-V with a 1.6 petrol engine was absolutely awful in practical use. I'm sure that under the right test conditions it would produce good results, but I'd be very hesitant to touch another one because of the dreadful throttle response, making town driving a nightmare. Put your foot down, even gently, and the CVT would first quickly change ratios to allow the engine to rev (without changing speed at all), and then slowly, oh so slowly, change ratio back to increase speed. That may have been a foible of Honda's revvy (rather than torquey) engines, but it made the thing a pig to drive, and inefficient to boot.
Not quite all. It's important to remember that SpinCorp pays about 15% less than ParentCorp, and that any length of service benefits don't transfer. Rinse and repeat whenever your peons get uppity.
Nicely reasoned, but please allow me to synopsise it a bit further.
We can get it elsewhere more reliably, efficiently and for less money, because people in the cloud are:
It may not be phrased in quite that manner in the boardroom.
Great, then you should start some form of Retard Club together. For fuck's sake, how can you be less protected than nothing? Wasn't "thrown free in the event of an impact" debunked half a century ago?
(From experience, in a Honda HR-V) CVT gives you really shitty mileage (and performance) though, even worse than a torque converted auto box. Still, it's one fewer thing to concentrate on, and given the target market, that's a really good idea.