The article title at Tom's Hardware is a little misleading. This is certainly *not* the first graphics card with two chips on it- back in the days of the ATI Rage chips, ATI had a Rage Fury MAXX that used two chips to render alternate frames.
The problem with the counter-strike analogy is the question of *loss*. In counter-strike, all character improvement is related to player skill, ignoring the short term benefits of acruing money via kills, etc. In an MMORPG character improvement is often very much related to time spent in the game- you put time in, you get a more powerful character out. Adding in "permanent" death" and this no longer occurs- you put time in and can end up with nothing out. Sure, you might have had fun during the time you were playing the character- and hopefully did! - but nonetheless there's a very non-fun sense of loss associated with the permanent death and the requirement to start over. That sense of loss simply doesn't happen with counter-strike, as you just wait for the next map and all is good. If you make MMORPGs like counter-strike by removing the reward for time invested, then you cease to have the essence of a roleplaying game- a slowly improving character, improving in ways not necessarily related to the player's actual skills.
Like I'd said, player generated content is a wonderful thing. However, rarely does it fulfil the full needs of the game. Player quests are fine... except that quests simply are not all of the content of the game. Exploration, monster slaying, raiding, and generally making your character as powerful as possible are equally big- and for a lot of people, much bigger. These are areas that player content simply is not suited for.
Also, as you mentioned, there will definitely be some lemon content. In my view, "some" is a little weak... there will be a lot of lemon content, and a lot of content "moderation" that needs to go on. Unless this content moderation is also player driven, the developers may well spend as much effort managing player content as they would were they to simply create new content on their own.
Basically- player driven content is often very nice, and often complements developer provided content beautifuly. But it will never supplant developer driven content in a world where player power constantly expands, because I don't see any way for player driven content to expand the limits of that power in an intelligent, unified fashion.
Unfortunately, your response suffers from similar problems as the original article. Fewer, but nontheless.
1) Your argument assumes that player improvement is constant and content increase is not. This is not, in fact, required to be the case. Now, in current MMORPGs the rate of expansion is significantly less than the rate of player improvement, and this is dictated by economics to some degree. However, as long as we're talking about theoreticals, here...
Consider how MMORPGs actually work. You start off at the beginning of the game, and you're working your way toward a mythical high point where you've done it all- except that, of course, that's not actually a place you want to stay. At the same time, a return to where you've been before is also hardly what you're interested in. What players want is a permanent existance in the "in-the-process-of-winning" state that they played in between levels 1 and MAX_LEVEL. Permadeath is a "hack" to achieve this- if you keep resetting to 1, of course you can't hit MAX_LEVEL.
Permadeath doesn't actually *solve* problems, though. All it does is reduce the number of people willing to take a risk-free path long enough to reach and stay at the top. Unfortunately, most players don't find the risk-free path particularly interesting. There needs to be risk, as always... but if the risk is too big, and for most players permadeath is almost always too big a risk, then people will avoid the risk if there's anyway around it. And since quitting is always an option...
2) Instancing. Your leap from quests to quests causing instancing to quests are bad is, quite frankly, fully of a few too many holes. The cause of instancing is, quite specifically, having too many players for a given amount of content. Take content A, which can support at most Y players, and must have at least X players to be "interesting" in a game that's intended to be group oriented. If the number of players is below X, well, there's not much anyone can do about that except find ways to draw more people there (possibly causing the same problem elsewhere, but that's another issue). However, if the number of players is above Y, we have two options, at least we have two that have been used thus far: instance content, or add new content. Designers of course attempt to go for new content when possible, as it improves player retention (and makes for a better game, who would argue that?). The problem is, again, one of economics: instancing is much better "bang for the buck". Assuming sufficient content to keep players *interested*, if there are still more players than the content will support, instancing assists in that regard. Especially given the knowledge that player population fluctuates during the course of the MMORPG lifecycle as the average level increases and lower zones become less crowded, instancing can help alleviate the problem of having too few players for a set of content by merely reducing the number of instances of that content.
As for quests being bad... I don't think you know what you're arguing for there. What you want constantly dynamic content and quests, which is a great idea- except for infeasibility and player annoyance at not having a chance at content, as I posted about elsewhere. Quests only give the game linearity if you force them to, doing one quest, then another, then another, in a perfectly linear sequence ad infinitum. That's hardly the only way to play a game, thouogh, and personally I find that the occasional quest adds some spice to the game. If you'd like to read every spoiler site out there so that you know every quest backward and forward, then sure, everything becomes robotic. Spoiler sites are hardly required reading, however.
Also, quests hardly cause the game to have an end. Player improvement outrunning content addition causes the game to have an end. Quests really have nothing to do with it except that they are part of that content.
A note on emergent gameplay. There's a limit to how much of this will occur, and developers know this.
And he does absolutely nothing to back up said assertion, which is what I'm complaining about. At least with my points regarding permanent death and instancing I can point to current games and say, look, success has been had with instancing. Success has been had with a lack of permanent death. He offers no metric whatsoever for showing that his own assertions have any merit whatsoever.
He can claim whatever he'd like, and I understand that he's not claiming to be going for the "successful" guideline (though his "wishful thinking" at the end indicates that he hopes to be proven right in the end). But he offers no other way for us to measure the accuracy of his statements, and therefore we must fall back on the guidelines that *are* available to us.
The problem with this is the fact that this alienates the people who don't get to consume content previously taken by others. If Guild 01 is the first to get to content A because they play more than I do, and them getting content A prevents me from getting content A, I'm going to feel a little miffed- I'm paying the same money they are, I need to have access to exactly the same content that they have, even if it takes me longer to get to it. Sure, dynamic, ever-changing content is great for the people who are the first everywhere, the people for whom content becomes stale quickly. But for those people who have yet to consume content for the first time, suddenly changing it is likely to be quite irksome.
The solution that games have tried to use thus far is expansions- adding new content for those who have consumed older content, while not removing options for those who are still lagging a bit behind. This has obviously not proven to be a perfect solution, but at least it alienates fewer customers.
The author is guilty of exactly the same things that he blames the newbies for, and his arguments are anything but airtight.
1) Permanent Death. Okay, the author is convinced that permanent death is better. I'd like to see an example of a permanent-death game that did better than one that didn't have it? He can theorize all he likes that it's better for game design, but the simple fact is that nothing has yet shown that it in fact is.
2) Instancing. Again, the author is convinced that instancing is evil. A lot of people might agree. However, "instancing" is a very, very big concept. One can argue that the separate servers in mmorpgs are all "Instances", but that's hardly something most people would call particularly harmful. There's a whole range of instancing from one-person-per-instance to hundreds-per-instance.
The author never manages to show that he's doing anything more than what he accuses newbies of, since while he claims that there are things that are long-term-bad that he likes, he doesn't actually back up such assertions. Then, as above, his examples are ridiculously under-supported.
Having just looked at this on my ipod, the filenames are still quite readable. They're in weird folders (F##, where ## is a two-digit number starting at 00), but the filenames are not mangled.
1) Plug in the iPod and make sure it mounts as a disk. Note the name of the disk (it will be whatever you named your iPod, likely John Doe's iPod). 2) Open a new finder window and press cmd-shift-G. In the sheet that opens up, type the following: "/Volumes/John Doe's iPod/iPod_Control/Music" 3) Your finder window will go the the music folder. It will look empty, but it's not. In the folder *above* the music folder, the music folder itself will appear as a greyed out folder. Drag this icon to wherever you'd like to put it. The copy will begin. 4) Once the copy completes, enjoy the music.
Safari *is* affected at 1.2.3 v125.9. Look at the status bar as you mouse-over the link before clicking; that's there the exploit is. This is not the same as previous exploits that showed a fake URL in the actual URL bar.
The link says www.microsoft.com, mousing over it pops up www.microsoft.com in the status bar in the lower left corner of the window. Clicking the link results in a page at google (with google url in the URL bar).
Say this again when you can create a compiler that can, at compile time, actually determine if memory will be leaked in all cases in a modern application. If all you're doing is allocating memory and then promptly free()'ing it at the end of a function, great. But in a multithreaded environment with the tossing of objects all over the place to exchange data, the compiler simply isn't going to be able to do that sort of job, at least not anytime soon.
The problem with your "solution" is that as soon as one of these edge cases- where the programmer *is* correct and the compiler is not- occurs, the programmer will find the way to turn off all of these warnings/errors, thereby removing any gain that might have happened.
I've been using 2.4.x for some time now, without any issues. The trick? Give the new kernel a few days before using it. Not only will it give people a chance to find these errors, but you'll avoid trashing the kernel mirror sites, too.
FWIW, 2.4.14 still seems to be running quite fine for me..:)
> So, you believe that your ISP can freely, and clandestinely block anything from you without your permission?
and then, further down...
> And since they ar enot _Just_an_ISP_,
You seem to need to listen more to yourself. Above.net does not have an obligation to the end user, and therefore they are not violating any obligation when they blackhole a site. Rather, they have an obligation to the ISPs that connect to their backbone. To determine their right to do this, you have to look at *those* service contracts, not your vague notions of whether or not they have some moral right to do this to you.
Above.net offers a service in a competetive market. There are other providers available, and if the subscribers of an ISP dislike the backbone that the ISP is connected to, the ISP can switch backbones.
> how would you feel if the postals ervice, or FedEx, or whomever is in your area, decides to just stop delivering the mail you sent out?
This *is* breach of contract, as I have paid money (stamps) to acquire a certain service. Again, in the case of Above.net, the end user has *not* paid above.net and therefore only the ISPs have the right (possibly) to claim breach of contract. If their contract allows above.net to blackhole at will, however, then no one really has any right to say that they were in the wrong.
I've never understand what people disliked so much about eva's original ending. It lacked the giant-mecha-fight-scenes that the earlier portion of the series had, but eva's only superficially a mecha show. The entire story revolves around character, and the entire original ending is devoted tying up loose ends in *character*. It does this remarkably well.
End of Eva, on the other hand, was fan-pacification attempt. People who watched eva solely for the giant mecha were disappointed with the psychological ending, and so GAINAX gave them what they wanted. All in all, the original ending is really more true to the series; End of Eva is just a bit more fun.
Of course they do... but we didn't detect them until recently, which is, I believe, the intent of the original poster. The discovery of fullerenes got someone (three people, actually) a nobel prize, so I'd call it a relatively amazing discovery, wouldn't you?
Vote for Harry Browne (Libertarian), then. He qualified for over a million dollars in federal funding for his campaign, and turned down every cent of it because he, too, is against federal funding of the campaigns. For once, a candidate whose action really do match his words.
Can't help but agree with you- especially if you've ever seen Apple's old At Ease software (or, to a lesser degree,the Panels view used with Mutiple Users under OS9) The icons look as if they've been lifted straight out of old apple products, and the softer colors look more and more like Apple's "Platinum" look every day. Looks nicer, but it'd be nice if they could do *something*, anything, on their own...
Nope, sorry... Mars is actually *larger* than Earth, it's just much less dense. Lower gravity despite the larger size, which only serves to spread out an already thin layer of atmosphere.
Slashdot Mirror
google.com queries at the top are separated from the news.google.com queries (next section down), and the results for the two are different.
The article title at Tom's Hardware is a little misleading. This is certainly *not* the first graphics card with two chips on it- back in the days of the ATI Rage chips, ATI had a Rage Fury MAXX that used two chips to render alternate frames.
The problem with the counter-strike analogy is the question of *loss*. In counter-strike, all character improvement is related to player skill, ignoring the short term benefits of acruing money via kills, etc. In an MMORPG character improvement is often very much related to time spent in the game- you put time in, you get a more powerful character out. Adding in "permanent" death" and this no longer occurs- you put time in and can end up with nothing out. Sure, you might have had fun during the time you were playing the character- and hopefully did! - but nonetheless there's a very non-fun sense of loss associated with the permanent death and the requirement to start over. That sense of loss simply doesn't happen with counter-strike, as you just wait for the next map and all is good. If you make MMORPGs like counter-strike by removing the reward for time invested, then you cease to have the essence of a roleplaying game- a slowly improving character, improving in ways not necessarily related to the player's actual skills.
Like I'd said, player generated content is a wonderful thing. However, rarely does it fulfil the full needs of the game. Player quests are fine... except that quests simply are not all of the content of the game. Exploration, monster slaying, raiding, and generally making your character as powerful as possible are equally big- and for a lot of people, much bigger. These are areas that player content simply is not suited for.
Also, as you mentioned, there will definitely be some lemon content. In my view, "some" is a little weak... there will be a lot of lemon content, and a lot of content "moderation" that needs to go on. Unless this content moderation is also player driven, the developers may well spend as much effort managing player content as they would were they to simply create new content on their own.
Basically- player driven content is often very nice, and often complements developer provided content beautifuly. But it will never supplant developer driven content in a world where player power constantly expands, because I don't see any way for player driven content to expand the limits of that power in an intelligent, unified fashion.
Unfortunately, your response suffers from similar problems as the original article. Fewer, but nontheless.
1) Your argument assumes that player improvement is constant and content increase is not. This is not, in fact, required to be the case. Now, in current MMORPGs the rate of expansion is significantly less than the rate of player improvement, and this is dictated by economics to some degree. However, as long as we're talking about theoreticals, here...
Consider how MMORPGs actually work. You start off at the beginning of the game, and you're working your way toward a mythical high point where you've done it all- except that, of course, that's not actually a place you want to stay. At the same time, a return to where you've been before is also hardly what you're interested in. What players want is a permanent existance in the "in-the-process-of-winning" state that they played in between levels 1 and MAX_LEVEL. Permadeath is a "hack" to achieve this- if you keep resetting to 1, of course you can't hit MAX_LEVEL.
Permadeath doesn't actually *solve* problems, though. All it does is reduce the number of people willing to take a risk-free path long enough to reach and stay at the top. Unfortunately, most players don't find the risk-free path particularly interesting. There needs to be risk, as always... but if the risk is too big, and for most players permadeath is almost always too big a risk, then people will avoid the risk if there's anyway around it. And since quitting is always an option...
2) Instancing. Your leap from quests to quests causing instancing to quests are bad is, quite frankly, fully of a few too many holes. The cause of instancing is, quite specifically, having too many players for a given amount of content. Take content A, which can support at most Y players, and must have at least X players to be "interesting" in a game that's intended to be group oriented. If the number of players is below X, well, there's not much anyone can do about that except find ways to draw more people there (possibly causing the same problem elsewhere, but that's another issue). However, if the number of players is above Y, we have two options, at least we have two that have been used thus far: instance content, or add new content. Designers of course attempt to go for new content when possible, as it improves player retention (and makes for a better game, who would argue that?). The problem is, again, one of economics: instancing is much better "bang for the buck". Assuming sufficient content to keep players *interested*, if there are still more players than the content will support, instancing assists in that regard. Especially given the knowledge that player population fluctuates during the course of the MMORPG lifecycle as the average level increases and lower zones become less crowded, instancing can help alleviate the problem of having too few players for a set of content by merely reducing the number of instances of that content.
As for quests being bad... I don't think you know what you're arguing for there. What you want constantly dynamic content and quests, which is a great idea- except for infeasibility and player annoyance at not having a chance at content, as I posted about elsewhere. Quests only give the game linearity if you force them to, doing one quest, then another, then another, in a perfectly linear sequence ad infinitum. That's hardly the only way to play a game, thouogh, and personally I find that the occasional quest adds some spice to the game. If you'd like to read every spoiler site out there so that you know every quest backward and forward, then sure, everything becomes robotic. Spoiler sites are hardly required reading, however.
Also, quests hardly cause the game to have an end. Player improvement outrunning content addition causes the game to have an end. Quests really have nothing to do with it except that they are part of that content.
A note on emergent gameplay. There's a limit to how much of this will occur, and developers know this.
And he does absolutely nothing to back up said assertion, which is what I'm complaining about. At least with my points regarding permanent death and instancing I can point to current games and say, look, success has been had with instancing. Success has been had with a lack of permanent death. He offers no metric whatsoever for showing that his own assertions have any merit whatsoever.
He can claim whatever he'd like, and I understand that he's not claiming to be going for the "successful" guideline (though his "wishful thinking" at the end indicates that he hopes to be proven right in the end). But he offers no other way for us to measure the accuracy of his statements, and therefore we must fall back on the guidelines that *are* available to us.
The problem with this is the fact that this alienates the people who don't get to consume content previously taken by others. If Guild 01 is the first to get to content A because they play more than I do, and them getting content A prevents me from getting content A, I'm going to feel a little miffed- I'm paying the same money they are, I need to have access to exactly the same content that they have, even if it takes me longer to get to it. Sure, dynamic, ever-changing content is great for the people who are the first everywhere, the people for whom content becomes stale quickly. But for those people who have yet to consume content for the first time, suddenly changing it is likely to be quite irksome.
The solution that games have tried to use thus far is expansions- adding new content for those who have consumed older content, while not removing options for those who are still lagging a bit behind. This has obviously not proven to be a perfect solution, but at least it alienates fewer customers.
The author is guilty of exactly the same things that he blames the newbies for, and his arguments are anything but airtight.
1) Permanent Death. Okay, the author is convinced that permanent death is better. I'd like to see an example of a permanent-death game that did better than one that didn't have it? He can theorize all he likes that it's better for game design, but the simple fact is that nothing has yet shown that it in fact is.
2) Instancing. Again, the author is convinced that instancing is evil. A lot of people might agree. However, "instancing" is a very, very big concept. One can argue that the separate servers in mmorpgs are all "Instances", but that's hardly something most people would call particularly harmful. There's a whole range of instancing from one-person-per-instance to hundreds-per-instance.
The author never manages to show that he's doing anything more than what he accuses newbies of, since while he claims that there are things that are long-term-bad that he likes, he doesn't actually back up such assertions. Then, as above, his examples are ridiculously under-supported.
Having just looked at this on my ipod, the filenames are still quite readable. They're in weird folders (F##, where ## is a two-digit number starting at 00), but the filenames are not mangled.
On a Mac, this is fairly simple.
1) Plug in the iPod and make sure it mounts as a disk. Note the name of the disk (it will be whatever you named your iPod, likely John Doe's iPod).
2) Open a new finder window and press cmd-shift-G. In the sheet that opens up, type the following: "/Volumes/John Doe's iPod/iPod_Control/Music"
3) Your finder window will go the the music folder. It will look empty, but it's not. In the folder *above* the music folder, the music folder itself will appear as a greyed out folder. Drag this icon to wherever you'd like to put it. The copy will begin.
4) Once the copy completes, enjoy the music.
Safari *is* affected at 1.2.3 v125.9. Look at the status bar as you mouse-over the link before clicking; that's there the exploit is. This is not the same as previous exploits that showed a fake URL in the actual URL bar.
The link says www.microsoft.com, mousing over it pops up www.microsoft.com in the status bar in the lower left corner of the window. Clicking the link results in a page at google (with google url in the URL bar).
The default install of MacOS X allows editing over an FTP connection quite well, actually. I use it regularly.
Say this again when you can create a compiler that can, at compile time, actually determine if memory will be leaked in all cases in a modern application. If all you're doing is allocating memory and then promptly free()'ing it at the end of a function, great. But in a multithreaded environment with the tossing of objects all over the place to exchange data, the compiler simply isn't going to be able to do that sort of job, at least not anytime soon.
The problem with your "solution" is that as soon as one of these edge cases- where the programmer *is* correct and the compiler is not- occurs, the programmer will find the way to turn off all of these warnings/errors, thereby removing any gain that might have happened.
I've been using 2.4.x for some time now, without any issues. The trick? Give the new kernel a few days before using it. Not only will it give people a chance to find these errors, but you'll avoid trashing the kernel mirror sites, too.
:)
FWIW, 2.4.14 still seems to be running quite fine for me..
> So, you believe that your ISP can freely, and clandestinely block anything from you without your permission?
and then, further down...
> And since they ar enot _Just_an_ISP_,
You seem to need to listen more to yourself. Above.net does not have an obligation to the end user, and therefore they are not violating any obligation when they blackhole a site. Rather, they have an obligation to the ISPs that connect to their backbone. To determine their right to do this, you have to look at *those* service contracts, not your vague notions of whether or not they have some moral right to do this to you.
Above.net offers a service in a competetive market. There are other providers available, and if the subscribers of an ISP dislike the backbone that the ISP is connected to, the ISP can switch backbones.
> how would you feel if the postals ervice, or FedEx, or whomever is in your area, decides to just stop delivering the mail you sent out?
This *is* breach of contract, as I have paid money (stamps) to acquire a certain service. Again, in the case of Above.net, the end user has *not* paid above.net and therefore only the ISPs have the right (possibly) to claim breach of contract. If their contract allows above.net to blackhole at will, however, then no one really has any right to say that they were in the wrong.
I've never understand what people disliked so much about eva's original ending. It lacked the giant-mecha-fight-scenes that the earlier portion of the series had, but eva's only superficially a mecha show. The entire story revolves around character, and the entire original ending is devoted tying up loose ends in *character*. It does this remarkably well.
End of Eva, on the other hand, was fan-pacification attempt. People who watched eva solely for the giant mecha were disappointed with the psychological ending, and so GAINAX gave them what they wanted. All in all, the original ending is really more true to the series; End of Eva is just a bit more fun.
Of course they do... but we didn't detect them until recently, which is, I believe, the intent of the original poster. The discovery of fullerenes got someone (three people, actually) a nobel prize, so I'd call it a relatively amazing discovery, wouldn't you?
Vote for Harry Browne (Libertarian), then. He qualified for over a million dollars in federal funding for his campaign, and turned down every cent of it because he, too, is against federal funding of the campaigns. For once, a candidate whose action really do match his words.
"to me it really looks more and more like a mac."
Can't help but agree with you- especially if you've ever seen Apple's old At Ease software (or, to a lesser degree,the Panels view used with Mutiple Users under OS9) The icons look as if they've been lifted straight out of old apple products, and the softer colors look more and more like Apple's "Platinum" look every day. Looks nicer, but it'd be nice if they could do *something*, anything, on their own...
Nope, sorry... Mars is actually *larger* than Earth, it's just much less dense. Lower gravity despite the larger size, which only serves to spread out an already thin layer of atmosphere.