It might also be helpful to point out that the guy made a slashdot account and is actively responding to questions of his points on here.
I personally think it is rather commendable, and while I think the short term will be rough for him, hopefully it can bring to light other issues that the coast guard has been glossing over. My dad was in the navy and road an icebreaker on a trip up near the North Pole. If equipment was not rated to survive in the cold weather, they were basically useless to the crew.
Keep it up, you have media attention now, and thanks to midterm elections, something might actually be done about it.
There are a ton of movies floating around. I really like this one of us busting an alliance's safe spot, killing a bunch of battleships. (It's shot from the perspective of a covert ops who found them and remained cloaked nearby.) http://www.battleclinic.com/cue/fraps/SS_Bust_14_5 _06.avi
You can also check out http://www.eve-files.com/, which has a ton more pictures and some movies and such.
The entire reason I started playing Eve was because the lack of shards. During my time on WoW, I would run into friends IRL who would say they would be playing WoW, but unless I wanted to do the entire level grind again, I would never be able to hang out with them in game. So, if any of my friends started playing Eve, I could hook up with them and fly. It was good times. The economy, though spread across so many regions, really makes it interesting to trade.
My corp currently holds an outpost, and it's really interesting to see the idea of player run stations, where it's not any different than a normal station that people dock at. I am really looking forward to the Kali upgrades which should really expand the world.
For those who havn't tried it, remember you can try it for 14 days free, though it will only get you hooked. heh A couple people I know are now playing for 'free' by trading in game isk for time cards, which buys you time in the game.
Anyway, it's a fun game, I'm glad to see it getting the attention it deserves on slashdot. Even though I've only been playing 7ish months, I've already got the two accounts going, and I suspect i'm going to keep them going. And even though I'm head down in work currently, my characters are still leveling skills in game, so when I get done with this project, I'll finally be able to fly that hauler that can fit everything. heh
haha those kind of problems were so common, it wasn't even funny. Those 41's would happen when ANYTHING broke on the network, with no real details on why. So you'd be talking to someone, they'd be 'Oh yeah, we were getting 41s for the past couple days, but didn't really think anything about it.' Then you'd find out that someone had unplugged the server. or the switch. Or just removed that nic because it made ifconfig look messy. `8r/
My favorite netbackup horror story was when a coworker took out "the" DNS server with an accidental rm -rf / . And then we couldn't get a restore to happen. Because it used DNS to resolve names. And an anal retentive sysadmin refused to allow a hosts file entry because it was against "corporate standards". So we had to do a new bind instance with two entries for the server we were restoring to and the netbackup master. Which then got overridden in the middle of the restore process. Which bind didn't notice, but then the admin (enforcing "corporate standards") did notice. So he rebooted the machine. And we had to restart the process again. Which failed because bind was broken because not all of it had been restored. So we recreated bind again, with a few more entries this time. And restored. And this time it 'took'. My coworker was very sorry (and learned why everyone uses sudo that day), but the "corporate standards" sysadmin blamed netbackup for the length of time of the restore.
Damn that netbackup, why doesn't it function when you chop the network out at it's knees!!
I do love netbackup though. But only because it paid the bills because noone wanted to learn it.
Re:Still have flashbacks ...
on
Quake is 10
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, totally worth a semester of incomplete classes. Six months of Quake was good times. I'm sure my parents don't agree.
Ironically, the combination of quake and linux is the real reason for my early jobs doing Unix admin. Doing work at PlanetQuake, then onto GameSpy, and then into the 'real world'... wow what a strange road.
I think this is yet another huge misstep by the Xbox team. Non-technical people don't traditionally do well with different but very similar products. I'm sure they'll get all games to work on both models, but I have a feeling some will recommend running on the faster one only.
These types of updates are a slamdunk on the old xbox platform. Make upgrade boards, or stuff like that, and you could have extended the life of the xbox by another five years. (Assuming they hadn't short changed the memory, hard drive, and HD capabilities in the first place though.) However, with the xbox 360, propietary everything, the people with first rev 360's might feel frozen out, and might feel forced into buying a new version. You don't want to alienate your customers, especially when you have competion in the future.
But I'm guessing they're doing this so they can bottom out the price just in time for the PS3 ramp up.
Ne-Yo's CD In My Own Words sold 301,000 copies using this method. Chris Brown's Run It, that was in the itunes store, sold 154,000 copies in its first week. Ne-Yo's So Sick was downloaded approximately 3.4 million times on the peer to peer networks during the week of his album release while the album Run It! was downloaded approximately 5.3 million times in the same release period.
Let's take that arguement for a second. Ne-Yo now has around 3.7 million people with an interest in his music, while Chris Brown has around 5.4 million people interested in his music. Because artists don't make much money off cd sales, they make it on people showing up to concerts and other options they have. So who is in a more actionable position? And how much money does the artist get from an itunes album sale versus a physical sale?
I can see why the RIAA is getting upset though. The artists might actually make a buck and not need a monopoly pushing their product.
I rarely hide my real identity, even putting my regular name alongside my characters in game. I think it helps establish some level of trust with the people i'm playing with, though most rarely return the thought. It also helps that goninzo is unique to me, I'm the only one who (currently) uses it, and that's very rare on the internet these days.
What scares me is not people's anonymity, but usually two other things associated with it. The first is lack of anonymity, which can ruin a perfectly good game or discussion or quite a few other things. If people want to be assholes in a game or such, and they're sometimes allowed within the game's structure, then they can use in game mechanics to get back at them. But as soon as someone personalizes an experience, and takes it out on the person's real life, then it's not quite so much fun anymore. The PA comic below is a great example of that, tracking down the person's work and telling them that the person traffics in child pornography... not so fun. Or when a company uses it to track your online usage habits, tracking it back to you, and then direct marketing to you. Good times. heh
The other is the astroturfing. The assuming of multiple identities within a community for the expressed purpose of saying how great something is. Once this becomes common, it will become harder to decide what's getting good word of mouth and what someone is just spending money to make it seem like word of mouth. After all, with software, as soon as you bought it, you have very little recourse if it turns out to be the next Diakatana.
I don't expect much from the AI from an MMO, but you'd think it'd be easy in this case. Take down the cleric, and the party dies. They didn't seem to have any threat system that involved healing. I could cast as much as I wanted, and nothing would ever decide to take me down. Casting was even worse because it was almost random who it would cast at, with random spells as well. The darkness spell that kobold shaman could cast was a rare occurance really, and even then, it was unpredictable. Luckily, everything else was really predictable, except when it came to pathing. heh
In a PnP game, the DM could modify the monster's play style to fit the adventurers, in here it's very algorthym based. I just expect a bit more from my AI now, I guess. Like GW has a pretty interesting method of picking who to attack, and it is actually pretty effective sometimes at picking off adventurers.
Anyway, I think the best sign of bad AI was the time someone cast stinking cloud, and we got the monsters to run through it like 3 times in a row. You know, good times.
This is such a fluff piece that I'm surprised it didn't float away. The writer obviously didn't even try to find a review of the game before going to press. The game is almost the opposite of a real PnP (Pen and paper) adventure.
In the PnP, you have wide flexibility in what you can do, limited only by your GM. In the MMO, you have a limited number of 'dungeons' that you can run, which only seem to involve going into someplace and killing monsters to get stuff. If you ran any of these dungeons, you know they reduce into 'warning, trap, kill that guy, this way' said over and over and over again, but that's about it.
In the PnP, role playing is encouraged, you interact with people, you are forced to come up with solutions to social situations. (which is very hard for the usual anti social RPGer!) In the MMO, you click the first answer over and over again until it stops prompting you. There is very little varability and because you end up having to do missions multiple times, it's very 'non' RPG. Even when you enter an inn and are talking with strangers, it's usually 'Level 2 Cleric, LFG'.
In the PnP, you can get by without a cleric and a theif. Your GM usually modifies things so it's doable, or adds and NPC to come along and help out. In the MMO, you *MUST* have one or the other, or you will have a rather short run due to accident or lack of healing. If they had just added NPC helpers, this problem would have been mitigated.
The only thing the MMO does have is the rule set, in painful detail, which is quite good in reality. However, everything else about it is bad for an MMO. The interface is horrible, the monsters have little AI, there is limited content in place, you run the same things over and over... Players are instanced to death, and even then it's laggy with just a few people in one place. Were this released in the days of EQ or AO or UO, it would have done pretty well. But in the days of ever-present World of Warcraft, or the beautiful Guild Wars, or the player-driven Eve Online, I just don't see how it can compete.
The only thing it has going for it is nostalgia, and people already know the rules way too well.
You train skills offline in Eve Online. The longer you are in the game, the more likely you'll have more experience. So, you can have one person who plays 16 hours a day for a month, versus one person who plays 30 minutes a day for a month, in the end of the time, they could have the exact same skills. (though the 16 hour a day player might have more money.)
There are other games that develop these ideas as well, but I don't think it's a serious article. Any article that mentions Progress Quest obviously thinks of MMO's very highly. heh
Everytime WoW gets a patch upgrade, even a minor one, Blizzard get a story. Eve does a content service pack, for free, and CCP gets a small mention during the holiday patches with 6 other games. We just seem to get the shaft in the major media.
No mention of the 22k people on at the same time, concurrently, without different servers. No mention that in Eve PVP you lose basically everything to the other person, giving a real incentive to the other party. Just bothers me that it gets marginalized because everyone was busy playing WoW. heh
You'd think he'd at least reference the recent Dead or Alive 4 save game bug in the review. I love the fact we're getting more games reviewed in here though. `8r)
One thing TFA mentions that the paragraph above points out is the randomization. This feature is long overdue in many different game types. Diablo was a great example of how to do the random levels correctly. And Diablo II had the customization of weapons through gems and such. It seems that this game is taking heavy pointers from this. I think it's great. `8r) Imagine how much better certain blizzard games would be with some randomization. 'Onyxia has a Archon guardian this time, RUUUNN!'
However, the nebulous release date of '2006' seems to be far off for me. Also, he mentioned that single player and multiplayer are two different tracks. I hope they adopt the idea of the Diablo open and secure characters, allowing us to copy over single player characters for 'open' games just between friends. But he seems to imply coop, though in a game such as this, I wonder what happens to the story.
The game itself seems to be pulling from a couple different areas though. There are a couple others that tried this and failed. (*cough*diakatana) And of course, some that succeeded, like System Shock. Going to be interesting to see what they can do with it.
Actually, it's a feature not a bug. If your ass gets kicked so badly at a game, losing some unlockables is great modivation to get better. 'Wow, Tina just knocked my socks off! And Survival mode! Damnit!'
The question I have is if they will be replacing discs for those people without the HD. Because the HD is an option and not manditory, I don't think a patch should be the only fix they implement. And if people can't return the game, then they are stuck having to spend another hundred bucks on a HD. (Not like any real gamer would get a core system but... heh)
While I completely agree with the above poster, I also believe that the other thing hurting all publishers is the high entry cost to the next-generation market. Because of this, they are more likely to go with a known franchise, which will have known sales, even if it has predictable gameplay and a tired plot. If they have an innovative game, such as Katamari Damacy, they are less likely to green light it due to the (larger) cost of creating the game. And until the game is created, it's somewhat uncertain that it will do well in the market.
Sadly, I think the Xbox 360 Marketplace might solve some of these problems, allowing a publisher to put forth a unique but low cost game. If it does well, they have a better case for producing a full blown version. But, on the flip side, they might notice that Millipede is being downloaded more than other games, and revive the IP associated with it to make a new 'and improved' version that has a bunch of bullshit we don't care about.
But given the choice between these two options, I think corporate america would favor the revived branding, relying on people's memories of the old game, rather than having to market a brand new product. And it just creates a sad gaming environment. On the plus side, we get the occational independant hit that quite good and keeps us occupied.
I think the video game industry is just now getting the memo that the movie and music industries have been getting for years (and are ignoring): Stop producing (expensive) crap.
You obviously have not been having to buy expansion packs for MMOs! I mean, look at EQ, it had how many expansion packs, at like 30 a pop? Plus the subscription rate?
I'd almost prefer guild wars, the one time purchase and then unlimited play after that.
Eve Online releases a free content patch called Red Moon Rising, and no mention on slashdot. They release a snowball launcher that launch giant snowballs, and no mention. What do you have to do to get a game noticed around here, maybe send a free subscription to someone? What, a 14 day free trial isn't enough? `8r/
Then again, my submission is still sitting in the queue and hasn't been rejected so... who knows.
Did they compare their data across the different questions? Because if people are saying they want to be all borg captains, they might be into a bit of a surprise.
I also find it sad there wasn't a cowboy neal question for every category that had an answer of Wesley. Cause who wouldn't want to be a traveler. heh
There are some myths out there that cannot be proved without a massive undertaking and amazing funding. Is there any one in particular that you would love to take on if money and time was no object?
Keep up the great work guys, I love your show. My favorite is when you guys were finding the gas-air ratio and had the 'accident'. heh
Slashdot Mirror
I personally think it is rather commendable, and while I think the short term will be rough for him, hopefully it can bring to light other issues that the coast guard has been glossing over. My dad was in the navy and road an icebreaker on a trip up near the North Pole. If equipment was not rated to survive in the cold weather, they were basically useless to the crew.
Keep it up, you have media attention now, and thanks to midterm elections, something might actually be done about it.
But it's basically 'yay i win eve'.
You can also check out http://www.eve-files.com/, which has a ton more pictures and some movies and such.
Or, youtube, of course. http://www.youtube.com/results?search=eve+online
The entire reason I started playing Eve was because the lack of shards. During my time on WoW, I would run into friends IRL who would say they would be playing WoW, but unless I wanted to do the entire level grind again, I would never be able to hang out with them in game. So, if any of my friends started playing Eve, I could hook up with them and fly. It was good times. The economy, though spread across so many regions, really makes it interesting to trade.
My corp currently holds an outpost, and it's really interesting to see the idea of player run stations, where it's not any different than a normal station that people dock at. I am really looking forward to the Kali upgrades which should really expand the world.
For those who havn't tried it, remember you can try it for 14 days free, though it will only get you hooked. heh A couple people I know are now playing for 'free' by trading in game isk for time cards, which buys you time in the game.
Anyway, it's a fun game, I'm glad to see it getting the attention it deserves on slashdot. Even though I've only been playing 7ish months, I've already got the two accounts going, and I suspect i'm going to keep them going. And even though I'm head down in work currently, my characters are still leveling skills in game, so when I get done with this project, I'll finally be able to fly that hauler that can fit everything. heh
-Kismeteer in game
haha those kind of problems were so common, it wasn't even funny. Those 41's would happen when ANYTHING broke on the network, with no real details on why. So you'd be talking to someone, they'd be 'Oh yeah, we were getting 41s for the past couple days, but didn't really think anything about it.' Then you'd find out that someone had unplugged the server. or the switch. Or just removed that nic because it made ifconfig look messy. `8r/
My favorite netbackup horror story was when a coworker took out "the" DNS server with an accidental rm -rf / . And then we couldn't get a restore to happen. Because it used DNS to resolve names. And an anal retentive sysadmin refused to allow a hosts file entry because it was against "corporate standards". So we had to do a new bind instance with two entries for the server we were restoring to and the netbackup master. Which then got overridden in the middle of the restore process. Which bind didn't notice, but then the admin (enforcing "corporate standards") did notice. So he rebooted the machine. And we had to restart the process again. Which failed because bind was broken because not all of it had been restored. So we recreated bind again, with a few more entries this time. And restored. And this time it 'took'. My coworker was very sorry (and learned why everyone uses sudo that day), but the "corporate standards" sysadmin blamed netbackup for the length of time of the restore.
Damn that netbackup, why doesn't it function when you chop the network out at it's knees!!
I do love netbackup though. But only because it paid the bills because noone wanted to learn it.
Yeah, totally worth a semester of incomplete classes. Six months of Quake was good times. I'm sure my parents don't agree. Ironically, the combination of quake and linux is the real reason for my early jobs doing Unix admin. Doing work at PlanetQuake, then onto GameSpy, and then into the 'real world'... wow what a strange road.
Yes, we know it's a trick. Get an axe.
These types of updates are a slamdunk on the old xbox platform. Make upgrade boards, or stuff like that, and you could have extended the life of the xbox by another five years. (Assuming they hadn't short changed the memory, hard drive, and HD capabilities in the first place though.) However, with the xbox 360, propietary everything, the people with first rev 360's might feel frozen out, and might feel forced into buying a new version. You don't want to alienate your customers, especially when you have competion in the future.
But I'm guessing they're doing this so they can bottom out the price just in time for the PS3 ramp up.
Let's take that arguement for a second. Ne-Yo now has around 3.7 million people with an interest in his music, while Chris Brown has around 5.4 million people interested in his music. Because artists don't make much money off cd sales, they make it on people showing up to concerts and other options they have. So who is in a more actionable position? And how much money does the artist get from an itunes album sale versus a physical sale?
I can see why the RIAA is getting upset though. The artists might actually make a buck and not need a monopoly pushing their product.
What scares me is not people's anonymity, but usually two other things associated with it. The first is lack of anonymity, which can ruin a perfectly good game or discussion or quite a few other things. If people want to be assholes in a game or such, and they're sometimes allowed within the game's structure, then they can use in game mechanics to get back at them. But as soon as someone personalizes an experience, and takes it out on the person's real life, then it's not quite so much fun anymore. The PA comic below is a great example of that, tracking down the person's work and telling them that the person traffics in child pornography... not so fun. Or when a company uses it to track your online usage habits, tracking it back to you, and then direct marketing to you. Good times. heh
The other is the astroturfing. The assuming of multiple identities within a community for the expressed purpose of saying how great something is. Once this becomes common, it will become harder to decide what's getting good word of mouth and what someone is just spending money to make it seem like word of mouth. After all, with software, as soon as you bought it, you have very little recourse if it turns out to be the next Diakatana.
In a PnP game, the DM could modify the monster's play style to fit the adventurers, in here it's very algorthym based. I just expect a bit more from my AI now, I guess. Like GW has a pretty interesting method of picking who to attack, and it is actually pretty effective sometimes at picking off adventurers.
Anyway, I think the best sign of bad AI was the time someone cast stinking cloud, and we got the monsters to run through it like 3 times in a row. You know, good times.
In the PnP, you have wide flexibility in what you can do, limited only by your GM. In the MMO, you have a limited number of 'dungeons' that you can run, which only seem to involve going into someplace and killing monsters to get stuff. If you ran any of these dungeons, you know they reduce into 'warning, trap, kill that guy, this way' said over and over and over again, but that's about it.
In the PnP, role playing is encouraged, you interact with people, you are forced to come up with solutions to social situations. (which is very hard for the usual anti social RPGer!) In the MMO, you click the first answer over and over again until it stops prompting you. There is very little varability and because you end up having to do missions multiple times, it's very 'non' RPG. Even when you enter an inn and are talking with strangers, it's usually 'Level 2 Cleric, LFG'.
In the PnP, you can get by without a cleric and a theif. Your GM usually modifies things so it's doable, or adds and NPC to come along and help out. In the MMO, you *MUST* have one or the other, or you will have a rather short run due to accident or lack of healing. If they had just added NPC helpers, this problem would have been mitigated.
The only thing the MMO does have is the rule set, in painful detail, which is quite good in reality. However, everything else about it is bad for an MMO. The interface is horrible, the monsters have little AI, there is limited content in place, you run the same things over and over... Players are instanced to death, and even then it's laggy with just a few people in one place. Were this released in the days of EQ or AO or UO, it would have done pretty well. But in the days of ever-present World of Warcraft, or the beautiful Guild Wars, or the player-driven Eve Online, I just don't see how it can compete.
The only thing it has going for it is nostalgia, and people already know the rules way too well.
There are other games that develop these ideas as well, but I don't think it's a serious article. Any article that mentions Progress Quest obviously thinks of MMO's very highly. heh
No mention of the 22k people on at the same time, concurrently, without different servers. No mention that in Eve PVP you lose basically everything to the other person, giving a real incentive to the other party. Just bothers me that it gets marginalized because everyone was busy playing WoW. heh
Hopefully, this poll opens some people's eyes.
You'd think he'd at least reference the recent Dead or Alive 4 save game bug in the review. I love the fact we're getting more games reviewed in here though. `8r)
However, the nebulous release date of '2006' seems to be far off for me. Also, he mentioned that single player and multiplayer are two different tracks. I hope they adopt the idea of the Diablo open and secure characters, allowing us to copy over single player characters for 'open' games just between friends. But he seems to imply coop, though in a game such as this, I wonder what happens to the story.
The game itself seems to be pulling from a couple different areas though. There are a couple others that tried this and failed. (*cough*diakatana) And of course, some that succeeded, like System Shock. Going to be interesting to see what they can do with it.
The question I have is if they will be replacing discs for those people without the HD. Because the HD is an option and not manditory, I don't think a patch should be the only fix they implement. And if people can't return the game, then they are stuck having to spend another hundred bucks on a HD. (Not like any real gamer would get a core system but... heh)
Sadly, I think the Xbox 360 Marketplace might solve some of these problems, allowing a publisher to put forth a unique but low cost game. If it does well, they have a better case for producing a full blown version. But, on the flip side, they might notice that Millipede is being downloaded more than other games, and revive the IP associated with it to make a new 'and improved' version that has a bunch of bullshit we don't care about.
But given the choice between these two options, I think corporate america would favor the revived branding, relying on people's memories of the old game, rather than having to market a brand new product. And it just creates a sad gaming environment. On the plus side, we get the occational independant hit that quite good and keeps us occupied.
I think the video game industry is just now getting the memo that the movie and music industries have been getting for years (and are ignoring): Stop producing (expensive) crap.
What you say?!
I'd almost prefer guild wars, the one time purchase and then unlimited play after that.
Then again, my submission is still sitting in the queue and hasn't been rejected so... who knows.
I also find it sad there wasn't a cowboy neal question for every category that had an answer of Wesley. Cause who wouldn't want to be a traveler. heh
Thanks for the run-down, I wish more reviews were this factual.
Keep up the great work guys, I love your show. My favorite is when you guys were finding the gas-air ratio and had the 'accident'. heh
I agree with you on the rest of these points. `8r)