With no graphics card upgrade, the big question on my mind is what the gaming benchmarks were like for the previous macbook pro. It is likely that this macbook pro will be GPU bound,
I've done the requisite googling and found nothing satisfying. Does anyone have any links to gaming benchmarks for the macbook pro? Under boot camp is fine using windows for gaming is tollerable, but OS X World of Warcraft would be great too.
The idea that by playing an MMO you are learning valuable skills you will apply to your real life job is a novel one but it's somewhat of an exercise in self justification. You'd probably learn better skills working in McDonalds as a manager and you'd make more money too!
It looks like this HD drive is for movies not for games. Even if it is possible to have games that use the HD-DVD player, no game will be made for HD-DVD because there won't be a sufficient install base to market such a game. A good reference point is the PS2 hard drive, there really wasn't much use of it except by Square who bundled it.
Why would anyone buy the HD-DVD drive? Because a $99 add on HD drive to your 360 will be cheaper than a $199 or $299 standalone HDDVD player. The math is pretty simple. From Microsoft's perspective it extends the capabilities of the 360 as a media player. I expect we'll see more such accessories, in fact while it may not be announced today there is no reason why a Blu-ray drive couldn't be added to the 360.
It would have been nice if the 360 shipped with an HD-DVD drive so games could use the extra disc storage space, but that opportunity has passed. Given the choice to stick with DVD technology, this addition of an HD-DVD unit is a smart move on the part of Microsoft.
This thread is pretty long so I'm only reading +5 comments, but I'm surprised to see nothing about international policy.
As a Canadian skilled tech worker the major negative thing I see about living/working in the U.S. is foreign policy, including IRAQ. Some people prefer to live in a country that doesn't interfere as much with the affairs of others.
So did everyone who mentioned IRAQ or Afghanistan get modded down as a troll?
In all seriousness here is the answer to your question.
Casual MMO players are actually more expensive than more serious ones.
The major expense in operating an MMO is customer service. Casual players on average require more customer service than regular ones. This is coming from a friend of mine who works at Blizzard.
Obivously not all casual mmo players really cost more but as long as that is true on average, it wouldn't make economic sense to charge less to casual players.
I'm a girl and I've been playing games online for six years. I've never had any problems with people "not believing" I'm a girl who plays video games. Perhaps it's because I don't spend any time worrying about whether or not anyone I meet online thinks I'm a girl or not, I just am who I am.
I don't believe the author faces any serious questioning of her gender online.
Am I the only one who finds it ironic that there is a prominently feature picture of a girl on the first page of the article, when so much of it revolves around people demanding a pic? Am I to believe that she's worried we won't even believe she's a girl after reading the article without such a pic?
Problem #1: Players are negatively impacted when their character names are changed. Since the name is the major way in which individuals in MMOs identify one another, and differentiate themselves, this impact is real. This is in itself a problem, in the real world if you change your name everyone recognizes you, in an MMO they don't.
Problem #2: These games require naming policies of some kind that are non trivial to automate. Since they are non-trivial to automate, there will always be people who slip through. Even if you have a human monitoring each new name (Everquest used to do this), Borisyeltsin may slip through because the human monitoring name approval that day happened to not known who Boris Yeltsin is.
In this specific case the core issue wasn't that CmdrTaco was not a valid name, or even that it was changed, it's that it was changed at level 45, after 100s of hours were invested in the character. This makes the impact of #1 very real.
In WOW name petitioning is basically a form of griefing. There is no review process for names. I've seen people who have petitioned and spoken with GMs (who obviously saw their names) and then weeks later their names were changed because someone petitioned them, their name was reviewed, and then changed. All name petitions come from players essentially. Why did the other 10,000 people who saw Taco before not petition? Probably because they weren't jackasses, and the guy who petitioned was.
I don't have a perfect solution but it seems like the best one is a combination solution:
Developers should try and improve heuristics for flagging potential "problem" names
All names should go though a reviewed-by-a-human process within several days of being created. This is a pretty serious proposition, we're talking about spending $0.25 - $0.50 of human time on reviewing each name + followup cost
There need to be two versions of the policy:
The strict initial policy
The more lax grandfather-clause plicy
The grandfather-clause policy would apply to a player's name after some period of time (say 48 hours of play time and one week of real time have passed). It would basically say, by this point a number of humans have seen you and have not complained about your name. Your name was reviewed by customer service. At this point while we can still change your name, we recognize the social impact, and as thus will be more lax in applying the policy.
While I too find this somewhat ironic, he does bring up a good point. In a virtual world where the only truly identifying characteristic is a character's name, how does a name change (forced or voluntary) impact relations with others in the game? A follow up question would be: how could developers, if they so chose, account for this to minimize any negative impact?
This is a good point. For example my good friend AssFinger played World of Warcraft for 11 days reaching level 21 before his name was changed to something random by the GMs. Why can't Blizzard evaluate all names on creation time so that innocents, like AssFinger, will not form deep meaningful social relationships with people just to have their very identity stripped away. They could at least add a "display former name" option to the interface, so people who wanted to could choose to see "Pewpie, formerly known as AssFinger" to better recognize my friend. SHAME Blizzard SHAME.
Flash with actionscript 2.0 is actually a really great development platform for web based end user apps/games. I'm a C++ developer but I'd love to program more in flash / actionscript 2.0:)
Flash has a bit of a reputation as being for art projects and not for serious coding. Actionscript 1.0 was a piece of trash. It's going to take a while for flash to loose it's reputation.
There was extensive discussion of this on the International Game Developer's Association women in the games industry mailing list. The overall conclusions of this discussion were:
Microsoft is not trying to appeal to Mom gamers, they are trying to provide information to help you convince mom (your wife, your actual mom) that purchasing an X-box 360 is a justifiable expense. Women are often the financial gatekeepers in a household. Unless you're quite wealthy, spending $300-400 on a new console system is going to involve "running it by mom". If you can tell Mom, "it's a DVD player" and "we can view our photos on it" and "we can listen to music on it" it makes it sound like more than just a game machine, it makes it sounds like a home entertainment device. This might be slightly easier to sell Mom on than "it's the next big console!"
Furthermore these same arguments can help people who are their own financial gatekeepers reach the same conclusion. Living alone? Got a job but not a tonne of money to burn? Research has shown that when purchasing an expensive item, consumers often need to come up with some kind of justification for why the purchase in question is worth it. This is in part why high-end items often have extra arguably useless features. These extra features help you build a case in your head that spending the extra money "is worth it".
Microsoft doesn't have delusions of halo playing housewives, this is all part of convincing families and individuals that the 360 is more than just a gaming machine so they'll be willing to purchase it.
This is all about price points. Mom goes to Walmart around Christmas and sees "XBox 360 $299". She's much more likely to buy it than she is to buy it at $399. That's all that matters. Mom will buy it.
So now little Jimmy has it and he's slapping down $60/game every now and then, whenever he can afford one himself, or can nag his parents into buying one.
Jimmy eventually gets Halo 3, and yes there are map packs, and yes his friends are playing them and he can't because he can only download one map onto his memory card at a time and it's just a huge pain. So he whines and it's been a year and his mom is like "god he spends a lot of time on that x-box I wish I hadn't bought it" and she forks over $99 for the hard drive upgrade.
People are more willing to spend $800 over two years than they are to spend $600 all at once. It's just human consumer nature.
Microsoft wants you to buy the stripped down version, then they will entice you to buy the upgrade. They get more users from the stripped down version, they get more money from the upgrades. It's win win for them.
It makes perfect business sense and I don't blame them for avoiding taking an extra $100 loss on every system they sell so it has a hard drive.
But does it suck for the developers? Of course. Does it mean games won't be *as good*, certainly. Is it better for Microsoft, probably yes. Personally I'm just going to suck it up and buy the premium system with the hard drive and the wireless dohicky etc. It's the price of early adoption, wait a year and premium will be $100 less, and regular will be $50 less, and more and more games will come out that just require the hard drive.
wow you're just flat at wrong, most x-box games did in fact make use of the hard drive. Perhaps just for faster save/load, perhaps just for caching, but those things resulted in significant performance increases and reduced load times.
Today Bioware announced a new science fiction action-rpg that is already in development, Mass Effect. It will only be released for the Xbox 360 with no PC port planned and it's promising photo-realistic graphics, squad based gameplay, and continuous character development.
Actually it's no PC port announced. Announced and planned are two entirely different things. A PC port can be planned but not announced, as part of the terms with the publisher.
This original article doesn't really detail the two major reasons why battlegrounds have queues.
Reason #1: Faction Imbalance
You require basically the same number of alliance and horde players to play in a battlegrounds. On many servers the ratio of alliance to horde is 2:1 or 3:1. This means the horde can get into battlegrounds easily, while the alliance need to wait a long time (can be hours). Furthermore this disparity leads to unethical behavior, like horde exiting a battleground to find an easier team to fight.
Reason #2: Localized Battlegrounds
When you go into a battlegrounds you always play with people from your server. The positive of this is that you can form better relationships with those people. The negative is that you have a much smaller pool of players to pick from.
Lets say for example you have a 100 servers on which there are 5 characters level 21-30 who are queued for battlegrounds on the alliance side. How many games do you get? Zero! Five is not enough to start a battlegrounds.
Solutions:
Make battlegrounds cross server, including allowing pvp and non pvp characters to interract (since the BGs are purely pvp anyway). This would require a few modifications:
- transfer of characters to bg servers, and back from bg servers
- disable trade window while in a battlegrounds (to prevent transfer of items)
- allow a localized name space, do not allow collisions (simplest solution) so there is only one "bob" in any battlegrounds, but there could be 10 bobs in different battlegrounds
The cross faction issue should be lessened by the above, but if it's a big issue long term it may be worthwhile to look at other solutions, like potentially allowing alliance vs alliance in the battlegrounds. This opens other issues -- like the need to prevent cross-team communication.
Battlegrounds are great, queues are terrible! Blizzard really needs to implement ways of getting people into games faster so they can enjoy Warcraft.
First of all you say you're working with 10 teams, but whose team are you on? You can't be on 10 teams, you can't report to 10 managers. I'm going to guess you are on one team and have one direct supervisor.
If the teams are trying to make you work within your team structure that's a separate issue to task management. You need to inform them of the task management structure your department uses, and have them submit requests for work under that structure. If your deliverables are project deliverables, they can be tracked, but they need to be tracked as external deliverables, and most importantly you don't need to track them according to the process that team uses to track deliverables. If you do have to act as a member of many teams dear god you and your organization need some serious intervention.
Anyway, so your problem is really "I have many many many tasks, how do I track them?" As someone else mentioned Getting Things Done is a technologistic agnostic task management sytem that is very popular with geeks, for managing many many tasks at once. You can also google to find links and articles like this one to let you try-before-you-buy.
This article contains a statement of a position and no supporting arguments or evidence.
I'm very disappointed that this made it to slashdot games. Where is the logical analysis to back up the arguments?
Also as a side comment to people claiming horde is more powerful than alliance -- they should be. The WOW player ecology depends on a blanace in the number of horde and alliance players. Giving advantages to the horde is a sensible way to try and counteract the fact that more people play alliance.
I play alliance (level 60 gnome warrior). I do PvP. I am aware of the fact that other races make much better warriors than gnomes (alliance or horde). Honestly it doesn't make that big a difference. Taurens with their hit points and war stomps have an advantage over me, but skill, gear, and teamwork are much bigger factors. I happily grants horde players their tiny tiny racial abilities advantage. Meanwhile the horde as a whole faces a very large disadvantage in their lower populations, meaning the alliance are able to constantly zerg them in pvp (except for ctf), and are much better able to mobilize in PVE to gain powerful items that more than make up for these tiny racial abilities.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.transgaming.com/products_linux.php
Working with Cadega probably makes more sense for most game developers.
Yes you restrict your product to Cadega users, but most of the hassle is handled by Cadega.
Found these gaming benchmarks for the macbook pro core duo (not the new core 2 duo) but uses the same graphics card:
http://www.barefeats.com/mbcd3.html
In comparision my boyfriend's dell xps laptop with a 7900 GTX GO gets 60fps consistently anywhere in WOW compared to the 38 reported here.
With no graphics card upgrade, the big question on my mind is what the gaming benchmarks were like for the previous macbook pro. It is likely that this macbook pro will be GPU bound,
I've done the requisite googling and found nothing satisfying. Does anyone have any links to gaming benchmarks for the macbook pro? Under boot camp is fine using windows for gaming is tollerable, but OS X World of Warcraft would be great too.
The idea that by playing an MMO you are learning valuable skills you will apply to your real life job is a novel one but it's somewhat of an exercise in self justification. You'd probably learn better skills working in McDonalds as a manager and you'd make more money too!
But they will anyway
I played through Jade Empire without pausing!
Simple economics shows you are not correct. World of Warcraft earns orders of magnitude more money than Second Life.
It's great to argue that player created content would be awesome for a leading mmo, but it's clearly not required.
It looks like this HD drive is for movies not for games. Even if it is possible to have games that use the HD-DVD player, no game will be made for HD-DVD because there won't be a sufficient install base to market such a game. A good reference point is the PS2 hard drive, there really wasn't much use of it except by Square who bundled it.
Why would anyone buy the HD-DVD drive? Because a $99 add on HD drive to your 360 will be cheaper than a $199 or $299 standalone HDDVD player. The math is pretty simple. From Microsoft's perspective it extends the capabilities of the 360 as a media player. I expect we'll see more such accessories, in fact while it may not be announced today there is no reason why a Blu-ray drive couldn't be added to the 360.
It would have been nice if the 360 shipped with an HD-DVD drive so games could use the extra disc storage space, but that opportunity has passed. Given the choice to stick with DVD technology, this addition of an HD-DVD unit is a smart move on the part of Microsoft.
This thread is pretty long so I'm only reading +5 comments, but I'm surprised to see nothing about international policy.
As a Canadian skilled tech worker the major negative thing I see about living/working in the U.S. is foreign policy, including IRAQ. Some people prefer to live in a country that doesn't interfere as much with the affairs of others.
So did everyone who mentioned IRAQ or Afghanistan get modded down as a troll?
In all seriousness here is the answer to your question.
Casual MMO players are actually more expensive than more serious ones.
The major expense in operating an MMO is customer service. Casual players on average require more customer service than regular ones. This is coming from a friend of mine who works at Blizzard.
Obivously not all casual mmo players really cost more but as long as that is true on average, it wouldn't make economic sense to charge less to casual players.
Knights of the Old Republic
Chronicles of Riddick
Two great movie license games.
Savvy gamers will buy games based on quality of the game, unsavvy gamers won't be reading slashdot anyway so they'll keep buying movie license games.
I'm a girl and I've been playing games online for six years. I've never had any problems with people "not believing" I'm a girl who plays video games. Perhaps it's because I don't spend any time worrying about whether or not anyone I meet online thinks I'm a girl or not, I just am who I am.
I don't believe the author faces any serious questioning of her gender online.
Am I the only one who finds it ironic that there is a prominently feature picture of a girl on the first page of the article, when so much of it revolves around people demanding a pic? Am I to believe that she's worried we won't even believe she's a girl after reading the article without such a pic?
She probably sucks at video games too.
Problem #2: These games require naming policies of some kind that are non trivial to automate. Since they are non-trivial to automate, there will always be people who slip through. Even if you have a human monitoring each new name (Everquest used to do this), Borisyeltsin may slip through because the human monitoring name approval that day happened to not known who Boris Yeltsin is.
In this specific case the core issue wasn't that CmdrTaco was not a valid name, or even that it was changed, it's that it was changed at level 45, after 100s of hours were invested in the character. This makes the impact of #1 very real.
In WOW name petitioning is basically a form of griefing. There is no review process for names. I've seen people who have petitioned and spoken with GMs (who obviously saw their names) and then weeks later their names were changed because someone petitioned them, their name was reviewed, and then changed. All name petitions come from players essentially. Why did the other 10,000 people who saw Taco before not petition? Probably because they weren't jackasses, and the guy who petitioned was.
I don't have a perfect solution but it seems like the best one is a combination solution:
The grandfather-clause policy would apply to a player's name after some period of time (say 48 hours of play time and one week of real time have passed). It would basically say, by this point a number of humans have seen you and have not complained about your name. Your name was reviewed by customer service. At this point while we can still change your name, we recognize the social impact, and as thus will be more lax in applying the policy.
While I too find this somewhat ironic, he does bring up a good point. In a virtual world where the only truly identifying characteristic is a character's name, how does a name change (forced or voluntary) impact relations with others in the game? A follow up question would be: how could developers, if they so chose, account for this to minimize any negative impact?
This is a good point. For example my good friend AssFinger played World of Warcraft for 11 days reaching level 21 before his name was changed to something random by the GMs. Why can't Blizzard evaluate all names on creation time so that innocents, like AssFinger, will not form deep meaningful social relationships with people just to have their very identity stripped away. They could at least add a "display former name" option to the interface, so people who wanted to could choose to see "Pewpie, formerly known as AssFinger" to better recognize my friend. SHAME Blizzard SHAME.
Flash with actionscript 2.0 is actually a really great development platform for web based end user apps/games. I'm a C++ developer but I'd love to program more in flash / actionscript 2.0 :)
Flash has a bit of a reputation as being for art projects and not for serious coding. Actionscript 1.0 was a piece of trash. It's going to take a while for flash to loose it's reputation.
There was extensive discussion of this on the International Game Developer's Association women in the games industry mailing list. The overall conclusions of this discussion were:
Microsoft is not trying to appeal to Mom gamers, they are trying to provide information to help you convince mom (your wife, your actual mom) that purchasing an X-box 360 is a justifiable expense. Women are often the financial gatekeepers in a household. Unless you're quite wealthy, spending $300-400 on a new console system is going to involve "running it by mom". If you can tell Mom, "it's a DVD player" and "we can view our photos on it" and "we can listen to music on it" it makes it sound like more than just a game machine, it makes it sounds like a home entertainment device. This might be slightly easier to sell Mom on than "it's the next big console!"
Furthermore these same arguments can help people who are their own financial gatekeepers reach the same conclusion. Living alone? Got a job but not a tonne of money to burn? Research has shown that when purchasing an expensive item, consumers often need to come up with some kind of justification for why the purchase in question is worth it. This is in part why high-end items often have extra arguably useless features. These extra features help you build a case in your head that spending the extra money "is worth it".
Microsoft doesn't have delusions of halo playing housewives, this is all part of convincing families and individuals that the 360 is more than just a gaming machine so they'll be willing to purchase it.
This is all about price points. Mom goes to Walmart around Christmas and sees "XBox 360 $299". She's much more likely to buy it than she is to buy it at $399. That's all that matters. Mom will buy it.
So now little Jimmy has it and he's slapping down $60/game every now and then, whenever he can afford one himself, or can nag his parents into buying one.
Jimmy eventually gets Halo 3, and yes there are map packs, and yes his friends are playing them and he can't because he can only download one map onto his memory card at a time and it's just a huge pain. So he whines and it's been a year and his mom is like "god he spends a lot of time on that x-box I wish I hadn't bought it" and she forks over $99 for the hard drive upgrade.
People are more willing to spend $800 over two years than they are to spend $600 all at once. It's just human consumer nature.
Microsoft wants you to buy the stripped down version, then they will entice you to buy the upgrade. They get more users from the stripped down version, they get more money from the upgrades. It's win win for them.
It makes perfect business sense and I don't blame them for avoiding taking an extra $100 loss on every system they sell so it has a hard drive.
But does it suck for the developers? Of course. Does it mean games won't be *as good*, certainly. Is it better for Microsoft, probably yes. Personally I'm just going to suck it up and buy the premium system with the hard drive and the wireless dohicky etc. It's the price of early adoption, wait a year and premium will be $100 less, and regular will be $50 less, and more and more games will come out that just require the hard drive.
wow you're just flat at wrong, most x-box games did in fact make use of the hard drive. Perhaps just for faster save/load, perhaps just for caching, but those things resulted in significant performance increases and reduced load times.
Today Bioware announced a new science fiction action-rpg that is already in development, Mass Effect. It will only be released for the Xbox 360 with no PC port planned and it's promising photo-realistic graphics, squad based gameplay, and continuous character development.
Actually it's no PC port announced. Announced and planned are two entirely different things. A PC port can be planned but not announced, as part of the terms with the publisher.
A simple google news search for X05 reveals it has started
G =Search+News
http://news.google.ca/news?hl=en&ned=ca&q=x05&btn
Or maybe this was supposed to be funny?
This original article doesn't really detail the two major reasons why battlegrounds have queues.
Reason #1: Faction Imbalance
You require basically the same number of alliance and horde players to play in a battlegrounds. On many servers the ratio of alliance to horde is 2:1 or 3:1. This means the horde can get into battlegrounds easily, while the alliance need to wait a long time (can be hours). Furthermore this disparity leads to unethical behavior, like horde exiting a battleground to find an easier team to fight.
Reason #2: Localized Battlegrounds
When you go into a battlegrounds you always play with people from your server. The positive of this is that you can form better relationships with those people. The negative is that you have a much smaller pool of players to pick from.
Lets say for example you have a 100 servers on which there are 5 characters level 21-30 who are queued for battlegrounds on the alliance side. How many games do you get? Zero! Five is not enough to start a battlegrounds.
Solutions:
Make battlegrounds cross server, including allowing pvp and non pvp characters to interract (since the BGs are purely pvp anyway). This would require a few modifications:
- transfer of characters to bg servers, and back from bg servers
- disable trade window while in a battlegrounds (to prevent transfer of items)
- allow a localized name space, do not allow collisions (simplest solution) so there is only one "bob" in any battlegrounds, but there could be 10 bobs in different battlegrounds
The cross faction issue should be lessened by the above, but if it's a big issue long term it may be worthwhile to look at other solutions, like potentially allowing alliance vs alliance in the battlegrounds. This opens other issues -- like the need to prevent cross-team communication.
Battlegrounds are great, queues are terrible! Blizzard really needs to implement ways of getting people into games faster so they can enjoy Warcraft.
First of all you say you're working with 10 teams, but whose team are you on? You can't be on 10 teams, you can't report to 10 managers. I'm going to guess you are on one team and have one direct supervisor.
If the teams are trying to make you work within your team structure that's a separate issue to task management. You need to inform them of the task management structure your department uses, and have them submit requests for work under that structure. If your deliverables are project deliverables, they can be tracked, but they need to be tracked as external deliverables, and most importantly you don't need to track them according to the process that team uses to track deliverables. If you do have to act as a member of many teams dear god you and your organization need some serious intervention.
Anyway, so your problem is really "I have many many many tasks, how do I track them?" As someone else mentioned Getting Things Done is a technologistic agnostic task management sytem that is very popular with geeks, for managing many many tasks at once. You can also google to find links and articles like this one to let you try-before-you-buy.
It's not difficult it's just bad design
You can't just scale up hp or damage or anything to make encounters scale. Seriously. It's just not that easy.
This article contains a statement of a position and no supporting arguments or evidence.
I'm very disappointed that this made it to slashdot games. Where is the logical analysis to back up the arguments?
Also as a side comment to people claiming horde is more powerful than alliance -- they should be. The WOW player ecology depends on a blanace in the number of horde and alliance players. Giving advantages to the horde is a sensible way to try and counteract the fact that more people play alliance.
I play alliance (level 60 gnome warrior). I do PvP. I am aware of the fact that other races make much better warriors than gnomes (alliance or horde). Honestly it doesn't make that big a difference. Taurens with their hit points and war stomps have an advantage over me, but skill, gear, and teamwork are much bigger factors. I happily grants horde players their tiny tiny racial abilities advantage. Meanwhile the horde as a whole faces a very large disadvantage in their lower populations, meaning the alliance are able to constantly zerg them in pvp (except for ctf), and are much better able to mobilize in PVE to gain powerful items that more than make up for these tiny racial abilities.
Where can I read these essays?
Please email links to my gmail account
Which begins with "truffle@"