The following bits of insight were copied by me from "Commandant's Ultimate Warrior Guide" (an excellent warrior/general gameplay guide for warriors in the game GemStone III... which was in turn copied from a post by GameMaster Gorlash on the game's official message board on in December '98... though the content of the list was originally created by Ralph Koster, the lead designer of Ultima Online, with insight from other friends who have worked on online games, such as Meridian59's Mike Sellers. I think it's all very interesting, and should be required reading for anybody creating a MUD, or online game of any type or scale.
I am copying this word for word, but am fooling with formatting a little so it's a little more presentable. It's pretty long, so brace yourself. Without further delay, here we have it:
Any general law about virtual worlds should be read as a challenge rather than as a guideline. You'll learn more from attacking it than from accepting it.
Persistence means it never goes away. Once you open your online world, expect to keep your team on it indefinitely. Some of these games will never close. And closing one prematurely may result in losing the faith of your customers, damaging the prospects for other games in the same genre.
Macroing, botting, and automation: No matter what you do, someone is going to automate the process of playing your world.
Game systems: No matter what you do, players will decode every formula, statistic, and algorithm in your world via experimentation.
It is always more rewarding to kill other players than to kill whatever the game sets up as a target. A given player of level x can slay multiple creatures of level y. Therefore, killing a player of level x yields ny reward in purely in-game reward terms. Players will therefore always be more rewarding in game terms than monsters of comparable difficulty. However, there is also the fact that players will be more challenging and exciting to fight than monsters no matter what you do.
Never trust the client: Never put anything on the client. The client is in the hands of the enemy. Never ever forget this.
"Do it Everywhere" law: If you do it one place, you have to do it everywhere. Players like clever things and will search them out. Once they find a clever thing they will search for other similar or related
clever things that seem to be implied by what they found and will get pissed off if they don't find them.
"Do it Everywhere" Corollary: The more detailed you make the world, the more players will want to break away from the classical molds.
Stamp Collecting Dilemma: Lots of people might like stamp collecting in your virtual world. But those who do will never play with those who like other features. Should you have stamp collecting in your world?"
We know that there are a wide range of features that people find enjoyable in online worlds. We also know that some of these features are in conflict with one another. Given the above, we don't yet know if it is possible to have a successful world that incorporates all the features, or whether the design must choose to exclude some of them in order to keep the players happy.
The quality of roleplaying is inversely proportional to the number of people playing.
The higher the fee, the better the role-players. (And of course, the smaller the playerbase.)
Enforcing roleplaying: A role-play-mandated world is essentially going to have to be a fascist state. Whether or not this accords with your goals in making such a world is a decision you yourself will have to make.
Storytelling versus simulation: If you write a static story (or indeed include any static element) in your game, everyone in the world will know how it ends in a matter of days. Mathematically, it is not possible for a design team to create stories fast enough to supply everyone playing. This is the traditional approach to this sort of game nonetheless. You can try a sim-style game which doesn't supply stories but instead supplies freedom to make them. This is a lot harder and arguably has never been done successfully.
Players have higher expectations of the virtual world: The expectations are higher than of similar actions in the real world. For example: players will expect all labor to result in profit; they will expect life to be fair; they will expect to be protected from aggression before the fact, and not just to seek redress after the fact; they will expect problems to be resolved quickly; they will expect that their integrity will be assumed to be beyond reproach; in other words, they will expect too much, and you will not be able to supply it all. The trick is to manage the expectations.
Online game economies are hard: A faucet/drain economy is one where you spawn new stuff, let it pool in the "sink" that is the game, and then have a concomitant drain. Players will hate having this drain, but if you do not enforce ongoing expenditures, you will have Monty Haul syndrome, infinite accumulation of wealth, overall rise in the "standard of living" and capabilities of the average player, and thus unbalance in the game design and poor game longevity.
Ownership is key: You have to give players a sense of ownership in the game. This is what will make them stay--it is a "barrier to departure." Social bonds are not enough, because good social bonds extend outside
the game. Instead, it is context. If they can build their own buildings, build a character, own possessions, hold down a job, feel a sense of responsibility to something that cannot be removed from the game--then you have ownership. If your game is narrow, it will fail. Your game design must be expansive. Even the coolest game mechanic becomes tiresome after a time. You have to supply alternate ways of playing, or alternate ways of experiencing the world. Otherwise, the players will go to another world where they can have new experiences. This means new additions, or better yet, completely different subgames embedded in the actual game.
As a virtual world's "realism" increases, the pool of possible character actions increase. The opportunities for exploitation and subversion are directly proportional to the pool size of possible character actions.
A bored player is a potential and willing subversive.
Players will eventually find the shortest path to the cheese.
Featuritis: No matter how many new features you have or add, the players will always want more.
Pleasing your Players: Despite your best intentions, any change will be looked upon as a bad change to a large percentage of your players. Even those who forgot they asked for it to begin with.
Loophole Law: If something can be abused, it will be.
Murphy's Law: Servers only crash and don't restart when you go out of town.
Attention is the currency of the future.
The basic medium of multiplayer games is communication.
Virtual social bonds evolve from the fictional towards real social bonds. If you have good community ties, they will be out-of-character ties, not in-character ties. In other words, friendships will migrate right out of your world into email, real-life gatherings, etc.
"The more persistence a game tries to have; the longer it is set up to last; the greater number (and broader variety) of people it tries to attract; and in general the more immersive a game/world it set out to be--then the more breadth and depth of human experience it needs to support to be successful for more than say, 12-24 months. If you try to create a deeply immersive, broadly appealing, long-lasting world that does not adequately provide for human tendencies such as violence, acquisition, justice, family, community, exploration, etc (and I would contend we are nowhere close to doing this), you will see two results: first, individuals in the population will begin to display a wide range of fairly predictable socially pathological behaviors (including general malaise, complaining, excessive bullying or killing, harassment, territoriality, inappropriate aggression, and open rebellion against those who run the game); and second, people will eventually vote with their feet--but only after having passionately cast 'a pox on both your houses.' In essence, if you set people up for an experience they deeply crave (and mostly cannot find in real life) and then don't deliver, they will become like spurned lovers-some become sullen and aggressive or neurotic, and eventually almost all leave."
Violence is inevitable: You're going to have violence done to people no matter what the facilities for it in the game are. It may be combat system, stealing, blocking entrances, trapping monsters, stealing kills to get experience, pestering, harassment, verbal violence, or just rudeness.
Is it a game? It's a SERVICE. Not a game. It's a WORLD. Not a game. It's a COMMUNITY. Not a game. Anyone who says, "it's just a game" is missing the point.
Identity: You will NEVER have a solid unique identity for your problematic players. They essentially have complete anonymity because of the Internet. Even addresses, credit cards, and so on can be faked--and will be.
Jeff Kesselman's Theorem: An online universe is all about psychology. After all, there IS no physicality. It's all psych and group dynamics.
Psychological disinhibition: People act like jerks more easily online, because anonymity is intoxicating. It is easier to objectify other people and therefore to treat them badly. The only way to combat this is to get them to empathize more with other players.
Mass market facts: Disturbing for those used to smaller environments, but administrative problems increase EXPONENTIALLY instead of linearly, as your playerbase digs deeper into the mass market. Traditional approaches tend to start to fail. Your playerbase probably isn't ready or willing to police itself.
Anonymity and in-game staff: The in-game staff member faces a bizarre problem. He is exercising power that the ordinary virtual citizen cannot. And he is looked to in many ways to provide a certain atmosphere and level of civility in the environment. Yet the fact remains that no matter how scrupulously honest he is, no matter how just he shows himself to be, no matter how committed to the welfare of the virtual space he may prove himself, people will hate his guts. They will mistrust him precisely because he has power, and they can never know him. There will be false accusations galore, many insinuations of nefarious motives, and former friends will turn against him. It may be that the old saying about power and absolute power is just too ingrained in the psyche of most people; whatever the reasons, there has never been an online game whose admins could say with a straight face that all their players really trusted them (and by the way, it gets worse once you take money!).
Community size: Ideal community size is no larger than 250. Past that, you really get subcommunities.
Law of Player/Admin Relations: The amount of whining players do is positively proportional to how much you pamper them. Many players whine if they see any kind of bonus in it for them. It will simply be another way for them to achieve their goals. As an admin you hold the key to many of the goals that they have concerning the virtual environment you control. If you do not pamper the players and let them know that whining will not help them, the whining will subside.
In every aggregation of people online, there is an irreducible proportion of jerks.
Rewarding players: It is not possible to run a scenario or award player actions without other players crying favoritism.
Rewards: The longer your game runs, the less often you get kudos for your efforts.
Utopias: Don't strive for perfection, strive for expressive fertility. You can't create utopia, and if you did nobody would want to live there.
That's it.
GemStone III and DragonRealms are good games (well, actually, I don't know much about Dragonrealms, I only played it for a few days before deciding to stick with GS3)... they have remarkable depth. They are hack-and-slash-and-loot games, undeniably, but there is also plenty of room and oppurtunity for roleplaying if that's your thing. The game creates a terrific atmosphere... nearly everything is very well written, and the way things "happen" is wonderfully immersive and natural most of the time. Usually, its other players, not stupid game mechanics that hurt the immersiveness of that game. It's very easy to suspend disbelief. And the games are constantly expanding. GemStone III is very well balanced, as you say, although the system really starts to break around level 100+ (and actually sooner) when, unfortunately, combat is a pretty much hit-or-miss affair. Often you either die in an eyeblink due to a poor roll, bad timing, or just plain bad luck... or you win a fight in one move, by virtue of either good timing, a good roll, or good luck. And forming a group to hunt in GS3 is usually not particularly fruitful. Most classes actually do best when they are alone. I think its great that all the classes can solo, but it be better if it were more enticing to group up.
Those are minor points though. GS3 is simply magic for a new player, and the flaws are minor enough that most veteren players don't seem very bothered by them.
That said, I quit playing GS3... a lot of my other friends stopped playing, and a large part of the game is the social dynamic. I could've made new friends, but I wanted to try another online game (EverQuest.)
EverQuest... heh. For a while, it was great fun, but now it is a complete bore... the only thing keeping me in that game are the friendships I've formed there. Verant, despite the fact that it is running a game that is about 1000 times more popular than anything Simutronics has created, seems to be only a tenth as professional and capable as Simutronics. EverQuest is littered with examples of poor grammer and spelling. It feels like I'm playing some college student's MUD, but with nice graphics on top, and a huge playerbase. EQ is balanced so poorly it's absurd. Certain classes and races suffer huge experience penalties that slow their advancement (by as much as 40% or more in some cases) but get nothing to compensate for this. The class that is generally considered to be one of the "weakest" in the game (rangers) are one of the classes that suffer this penalty. Ridiculous. And on top of that, EQ is still a rather buggy game. And Verant is fond of implementing sloppy "workarounds" as opposed to true bug fixes. For example, there was a bug on the PvP servers that would make it so a caster, who is disguised by an illusion, could cast a stun spell on another player, and the target player might end up permanently stunned. A fairly serious problem, but one that most people were unaware of, and it wasn't a bug that was being abused. Verant's solution was to implement a workaround: they made it so that whenever you cast a spell on another player, any illusion that you are under the effects of goes away. Talk about using a chainsaw rather than a scapel. This change had VERY serious game balance ramifications, and prompted several enchanters (whose powers include a wide range of illusionary spells) to quit their characters. These weren't people who were abusing the illusion-stun-bug, they were people who were using their illusions to hide their identity among other player characters... which they now cannot do, because if they cast on another player, their identify is revealed. A bug fix should not effect collateral game balance issues in such a major way... that is such a simple design principle, but one that Verant apparently can't grasp, or decided to ignore. This is just one example of Verant's clumbsy approach to "fixing" issues--it is by no means the only example one could give. Still, EQ is an undeniably awesome achievement... with such a big project, I guess problems are inevitable.
On the other hand, Simutronics has impressed me a lot. I don't think any company has ever done a better job creating and maintaing a multiplayer online game. Most of their games don't have a huge number of players or subscribers (well... their numbers are respectable, but they aren't 'massive' like EQ's) but I still think that the boys at Simu know a lot more about game design principle than a lot of the people making and running most online games today.
Simutronics apparently has been developing a game called Hero's Journey, what is to be a graphical MMORPG... if it ever becomes a reality. Their developers were posting left and right on discussion forums throughout the Internet a while back, and things were looking promising, but there there was a drought... now we seem to be hearing from Simu a bit more, which is a great sign, but I'm skeptical about if HJ will become a reality. IGN has information about it at The Hero's Journey Vault.
We don't need the government to protect consumers
on
Perverts and Consumers
·
· Score: 1
It's funny how when an article about a pen as an input device comes up, the first thing that leaps to peoples' minds is that it'll replace the mouse (or that it won't replace the mouse.)
What it could also manage to replace is the keyboard. Afterall, keyboards are used mainly for inputting text, which is what pens are also for in the analog world.
I mean, to me, if you're going to replace the mouse, with a pen, you should replace the keyboard with it too. I don't know about you guys, but my mouse is posistioned to the right of my keyboard. It would be very awkward if I had to reach to the right and angle my wrist whenever I wanted to point. Of course, if you get rid of the keyboard, you have a lot of free space in front of you.
My guess is, however, that none of these newfangled input devices will take off, at least not for PCs, and not for a long time. We're getting to the point where the average person can probably type faster than they can write, and I've never heard anybody complain about mice being too hard to use.
Plus, mice work fine as they are. The new MS mouse works on any surface. I'm using a fairly cheap Genius NetMouse without any special surface (using my wooden desk, no mousepad) and it works fine. I don't use it for gaming, but for ordinary navigation, it's great.
I don't really see why people are going through all the effort. I think I remember seeing something on TV that lets you navigate with your eyes... just silly stuff. The mouse does its job well. If that isn't cool enough for you, voice recognition is rapidly becoming more viable. I'll still be sticking with a classic keyboard/mouse combo.
Sorry, that was moronic of me. I was made a moderator for the first time, and used your post to scroll through the list of desciptive terms that can be used, and carelessly left it on "redundant" when I scrolled down, found a post I liked (it was the last post on my list at the time) and hit the "moderate" button.
I sincerely apologize. This is what happens whenever somebody gives me too much power.:)
It'll be obsolete in a year.
on
New ATi 3D Chip
·
· Score: 3
Ever since the TNT, nothing has excited me about video cards. I expect for them to leapfrog each other in speed at regular intervals.
Of course, larger textures, more polygons and features like full-screen antialiasing and enviornmental bump mapping and true color are great, but it is hard to get worked up over any particular video card when each of them only has bits and pieces of the really cool features, and when it comes down to it, all they really do is allow some minor improvements in image quality and allow you to up your screen resolution and get more frames. Great for the obsessed gamer, but game developers still have to make games with the low end in mind, so the games themselves aren't tremendously more impressive from a graphical perspective.
For those reasons I'm a lot more excited about the Dolphin and PSX2 than I could ever be about a mere video card, or even a new class of video cards (like those with on-board T&L, which is meeting with mixed enthusiasm from developers btw.)
But all these incremental advances and all the competition is great. It means that maybe in 3 or 4 years, there'll be PC games where the game developers aren't limited by hardware anymore, but rather the "developmer's bottleneck" will be the designer's creativity, effort and resources. That would be cool.:)
Maybe I am ignorant about the details of this whole affair, but what was stopping the people of that newsgroup from setting up killfiles to ignore this guy? What is the point in bothering the courts with this sort of nonsense?
And it just seems like such a petty thing to ignore the first amendment over.
Also, what is to stop this guy from continuing his mischief through anonymous posting? Or stop somebody else doing the same thing again? I wouldn't be suprised if a legion of trolls descended upon rsa because that group will now appear more sensitive to flames than all the others. This could just open up a whole new can of worms, with nobody really benefitting.
I hope somebody challenges this somehow, because this is not a precedent I am very happy with.
Well, I don't see any reason to assume that just because an inefficient government endorses Linux that Linux will suddenly become inefficient for everybody. Besides, look who is software king of the capitalist hill, no inefficiencies there, huh?:)
It doesn't matter that the ignorant will make lame Linux=China=Oppression associations. If you're ignorant you probably are not going to be very open to Linux anyway (unless you're an ignorant Linux user, of course.) Yes, it will be irking to hear morons scream even louder about Linux being a "communist OS," but few people with an open mind and a gram of sense will pay much attention to them anyway.
It has pretty much been observed here that there will always be people (in this age, and in those to come) who will work out of necessity and survival... we're nowhere close to a utopian sort of "entertainment society" that Linus envisions for us in 150 years or so. There are still plenty of problems in the world for us to deal with... overpopulation, pollution, war, hate, ect. Marx's ideal of "ultimate communism" was for every individual in the society to do whatever work they wanted, almost spontaneously. So a person could one week be a painter, and the next a journalist, and then after that be a plumber, and pursue whatever whims, fancies, or passions that they may have at the time. Linus seems to think, that somehow, we will achieve something like this state of society, where we will do what we do in pursuit of 'entertainment'... where we will do things because of the challenge, or the fun, and that the other needs of society will somehow be fulfilled with a minimal percentage of the population toiling with jobs and lives they are not really happy with. After all, there are plenty of jobs that I can think of where it is difficult for me imagine many people thinking of them as highly fulfilling, challenging, and fun. Maybe technology will get rid of all these unpopular occupations, but I sincerely doubt it... at least for a good long while (longer perhaps than the human race will be able to sustain itself without destroying itself.)
Also, as has been pretty much observed, many people do not need to enjoy or have a real passion for their jobs. People are willing to do something they do not particularly enjoy for a living, in exchange for the net result of having more freedom intellectually, finanically, or in deciding in how to spend one's time.
Finally I'd like to add that Linux is not fun for everybody. Linus seems to be saying that Linux is fun for programmers, which I wouldn't personally disagree with, but for the average person, I think it needs to be understood, playing around with a complex OS (as great as the OS may be) is not their idea of fun.;) It has nothing to do with not being intelligent, or even with not being interested in the technical functioning of computers. I've been using PCs since the age of 9, and have a fairly respectable degree of experience using/troubleshooting/maintaining them (probably not nearly as much as the average slashdot reader, but probably more than the average C|Net reader) and I have to say that my experiences with Linux have been anything but fun. I've had a great deal of difficultly getting all the elements of a what I'd call a 'functional' computer working under Linux on my PC, and for some reason (which I'm sure is my fault,) Linux is able 10 times more unstable for me than Windows 95 is (lockups nearly every session.) Right now I just have been unable to muster the discipline to make a great effort to understand Linux. I defintely need to buy another Linux book (lost the one I had) and make friends with a Linux guru or two before I move on... and even then, I'm not optimistic (as I once was) that learning Linux will be a bright and fun experience. Meanwhile, using Windows, for me, is a pretty entertaining experience.
BTW, sorry for the length of this post. I'm not very good at being concise, which is one reason (of a few) reasons I'm very shy about posting here.:)
Slashdot Mirror
I am copying this word for word, but am fooling with formatting a little so it's a little more presentable. It's pretty long, so brace yourself. Without further delay, here we have it:
Any general law about virtual worlds should be read as a challenge rather than as a guideline. You'll learn more from attacking it than from accepting it.
Persistence means it never goes away. Once you open your online world, expect to keep your team on it indefinitely. Some of these games will never close. And closing one prematurely may result in losing the faith of your customers, damaging the prospects for other games in the same genre.
Macroing, botting, and automation: No matter what you do, someone is going to automate the process of playing your world.
Game systems: No matter what you do, players will decode every formula, statistic, and algorithm in your world via experimentation.
It is always more rewarding to kill other players than to kill whatever the game sets up as a target. A given player of level x can slay multiple creatures of level y. Therefore, killing a player of level x yields ny reward in purely in-game reward terms. Players will therefore always be more rewarding in game terms than monsters of comparable difficulty. However, there is also the fact that players will be more challenging and exciting to fight than monsters no matter what you do.
Never trust the client: Never put anything on the client. The client is in the hands of the enemy. Never ever forget this.
"Do it Everywhere" law: If you do it one place, you have to do it everywhere. Players like clever things and will search them out. Once they find a clever thing they will search for other similar or related clever things that seem to be implied by what they found and will get pissed off if they don't find them.
"Do it Everywhere" Corollary: The more detailed you make the world, the more players will want to break away from the classical molds.
Stamp Collecting Dilemma: Lots of people might like stamp collecting in your virtual world. But those who do will never play with those who like other features. Should you have stamp collecting in your world?"
We know that there are a wide range of features that people find enjoyable in online worlds. We also know that some of these features are in conflict with one another. Given the above, we don't yet know if it is possible to have a successful world that incorporates all the features, or whether the design must choose to exclude some of them in order to keep the players happy.
The quality of roleplaying is inversely proportional to the number of people playing. The higher the fee, the better the role-players. (And of course, the smaller the playerbase.)
Enforcing roleplaying: A role-play-mandated world is essentially going to have to be a fascist state. Whether or not this accords with your goals in making such a world is a decision you yourself will have to make.
Storytelling versus simulation: If you write a static story (or indeed include any static element) in your game, everyone in the world will know how it ends in a matter of days. Mathematically, it is not possible for a design team to create stories fast enough to supply everyone playing. This is the traditional approach to this sort of game nonetheless. You can try a sim-style game which doesn't supply stories but instead supplies freedom to make them. This is a lot harder and arguably has never been done successfully.
Players have higher expectations of the virtual world: The expectations are higher than of similar actions in the real world. For example: players will expect all labor to result in profit; they will expect life to be fair; they will expect to be protected from aggression before the fact, and not just to seek redress after the fact; they will expect problems to be resolved quickly; they will expect that their integrity will be assumed to be beyond reproach; in other words, they will expect too much, and you will not be able to supply it all. The trick is to manage the expectations.
Online game economies are hard: A faucet/drain economy is one where you spawn new stuff, let it pool in the "sink" that is the game, and then have a concomitant drain. Players will hate having this drain, but if you do not enforce ongoing expenditures, you will have Monty Haul syndrome, infinite accumulation of wealth, overall rise in the "standard of living" and capabilities of the average player, and thus unbalance in the game design and poor game longevity.
Ownership is key: You have to give players a sense of ownership in the game. This is what will make them stay--it is a "barrier to departure." Social bonds are not enough, because good social bonds extend outside the game. Instead, it is context. If they can build their own buildings, build a character, own possessions, hold down a job, feel a sense of responsibility to something that cannot be removed from the game--then you have ownership. If your game is narrow, it will fail. Your game design must be expansive. Even the coolest game mechanic becomes tiresome after a time. You have to supply alternate ways of playing, or alternate ways of experiencing the world. Otherwise, the players will go to another world where they can have new experiences. This means new additions, or better yet, completely different subgames embedded in the actual game.
As a virtual world's "realism" increases, the pool of possible character actions increase. The opportunities for exploitation and subversion are directly proportional to the pool size of possible character actions.
A bored player is a potential and willing subversive.
Players will eventually find the shortest path to the cheese.
Featuritis: No matter how many new features you have or add, the players will always want more. Pleasing your Players: Despite your best intentions, any change will be looked upon as a bad change to a large percentage of your players. Even those who forgot they asked for it to begin with.
Loophole Law: If something can be abused, it will be.
Murphy's Law: Servers only crash and don't restart when you go out of town.
Attention is the currency of the future. The basic medium of multiplayer games is communication.
Virtual social bonds evolve from the fictional towards real social bonds. If you have good community ties, they will be out-of-character ties, not in-character ties. In other words, friendships will migrate right out of your world into email, real-life gatherings, etc.
"The more persistence a game tries to have; the longer it is set up to last; the greater number (and broader variety) of people it tries to attract; and in general the more immersive a game/world it set out to be--then the more breadth and depth of human experience it needs to support to be successful for more than say, 12-24 months. If you try to create a deeply immersive, broadly appealing, long-lasting world that does not adequately provide for human tendencies such as violence, acquisition, justice, family, community, exploration, etc (and I would contend we are nowhere close to doing this), you will see two results: first, individuals in the population will begin to display a wide range of fairly predictable socially pathological behaviors (including general malaise, complaining, excessive bullying or killing, harassment, territoriality, inappropriate aggression, and open rebellion against those who run the game); and second, people will eventually vote with their feet--but only after having passionately cast 'a pox on both your houses.' In essence, if you set people up for an experience they deeply crave (and mostly cannot find in real life) and then don't deliver, they will become like spurned lovers-some become sullen and aggressive or neurotic, and eventually almost all leave." Violence is inevitable: You're going to have violence done to people no matter what the facilities for it in the game are. It may be combat system, stealing, blocking entrances, trapping monsters, stealing kills to get experience, pestering, harassment, verbal violence, or just rudeness.
Is it a game? It's a SERVICE. Not a game. It's a WORLD. Not a game. It's a COMMUNITY. Not a game. Anyone who says, "it's just a game" is missing the point.
Identity: You will NEVER have a solid unique identity for your problematic players. They essentially have complete anonymity because of the Internet. Even addresses, credit cards, and so on can be faked--and will be.
Jeff Kesselman's Theorem: An online universe is all about psychology. After all, there IS no physicality. It's all psych and group dynamics. Psychological disinhibition: People act like jerks more easily online, because anonymity is intoxicating. It is easier to objectify other people and therefore to treat them badly. The only way to combat this is to get them to empathize more with other players.
Mass market facts: Disturbing for those used to smaller environments, but administrative problems increase EXPONENTIALLY instead of linearly, as your playerbase digs deeper into the mass market. Traditional approaches tend to start to fail. Your playerbase probably isn't ready or willing to police itself.
Anonymity and in-game staff: The in-game staff member faces a bizarre problem. He is exercising power that the ordinary virtual citizen cannot. And he is looked to in many ways to provide a certain atmosphere and level of civility in the environment. Yet the fact remains that no matter how scrupulously honest he is, no matter how just he shows himself to be, no matter how committed to the welfare of the virtual space he may prove himself, people will hate his guts. They will mistrust him precisely because he has power, and they can never know him. There will be false accusations galore, many insinuations of nefarious motives, and former friends will turn against him. It may be that the old saying about power and absolute power is just too ingrained in the psyche of most people; whatever the reasons, there has never been an online game whose admins could say with a straight face that all their players really trusted them (and by the way, it gets worse once you take money!).
Community size: Ideal community size is no larger than 250. Past that, you really get subcommunities.
Law of Player/Admin Relations: The amount of whining players do is positively proportional to how much you pamper them. Many players whine if they see any kind of bonus in it for them. It will simply be another way for them to achieve their goals. As an admin you hold the key to many of the goals that they have concerning the virtual environment you control. If you do not pamper the players and let them know that whining will not help them, the whining will subside. In every aggregation of people online, there is an irreducible proportion of jerks.
Rewarding players: It is not possible to run a scenario or award player actions without other players crying favoritism.
Rewards: The longer your game runs, the less often you get kudos for your efforts.
Utopias: Don't strive for perfection, strive for expressive fertility. You can't create utopia, and if you did nobody would want to live there. That's it.
Those are minor points though. GS3 is simply magic for a new player, and the flaws are minor enough that most veteren players don't seem very bothered by them.
That said, I quit playing GS3... a lot of my other friends stopped playing, and a large part of the game is the social dynamic. I could've made new friends, but I wanted to try another online game (EverQuest.)
EverQuest... heh. For a while, it was great fun, but now it is a complete bore... the only thing keeping me in that game are the friendships I've formed there. Verant, despite the fact that it is running a game that is about 1000 times more popular than anything Simutronics has created, seems to be only a tenth as professional and capable as Simutronics. EverQuest is littered with examples of poor grammer and spelling. It feels like I'm playing some college student's MUD, but with nice graphics on top, and a huge playerbase. EQ is balanced so poorly it's absurd. Certain classes and races suffer huge experience penalties that slow their advancement (by as much as 40% or more in some cases) but get nothing to compensate for this. The class that is generally considered to be one of the "weakest" in the game (rangers) are one of the classes that suffer this penalty. Ridiculous. And on top of that, EQ is still a rather buggy game. And Verant is fond of implementing sloppy "workarounds" as opposed to true bug fixes. For example, there was a bug on the PvP servers that would make it so a caster, who is disguised by an illusion, could cast a stun spell on another player, and the target player might end up permanently stunned. A fairly serious problem, but one that most people were unaware of, and it wasn't a bug that was being abused. Verant's solution was to implement a workaround: they made it so that whenever you cast a spell on another player, any illusion that you are under the effects of goes away. Talk about using a chainsaw rather than a scapel. This change had VERY serious game balance ramifications, and prompted several enchanters (whose powers include a wide range of illusionary spells) to quit their characters. These weren't people who were abusing the illusion-stun-bug, they were people who were using their illusions to hide their identity among other player characters... which they now cannot do, because if they cast on another player, their identify is revealed. A bug fix should not effect collateral game balance issues in such a major way... that is such a simple design principle, but one that Verant apparently can't grasp, or decided to ignore. This is just one example of Verant's clumbsy approach to "fixing" issues--it is by no means the only example one could give. Still, EQ is an undeniably awesome achievement... with such a big project, I guess problems are inevitable.
On the other hand, Simutronics has impressed me a lot. I don't think any company has ever done a better job creating and maintaing a multiplayer online game. Most of their games don't have a huge number of players or subscribers (well... their numbers are respectable, but they aren't 'massive' like EQ's) but I still think that the boys at Simu know a lot more about game design principle than a lot of the people making and running most online games today.
Simutronics apparently has been developing a game called Hero's Journey, what is to be a graphical MMORPG... if it ever becomes a reality. Their developers were posting left and right on discussion forums throughout the Internet a while back, and things were looking promising, but there there was a drought... now we seem to be hearing from Simu a bit more, which is a great sign, but I'm skeptical about if HJ will become a reality. IGN has information about it at The Hero's Journey Vault.
... 'cause we've got Bizrate.com! Don't congressmen watch TV? :)
What it could also manage to replace is the keyboard. Afterall, keyboards are used mainly for inputting text, which is what pens are also for in the analog world.
I mean, to me, if you're going to replace the mouse, with a pen, you should replace the keyboard with it too. I don't know about you guys, but my mouse is posistioned to the right of my keyboard. It would be very awkward if I had to reach to the right and angle my wrist whenever I wanted to point. Of course, if you get rid of the keyboard, you have a lot of free space in front of you.
My guess is, however, that none of these newfangled input devices will take off, at least not for PCs, and not for a long time. We're getting to the point where the average person can probably type faster than they can write, and I've never heard anybody complain about mice being too hard to use.
Plus, mice work fine as they are. The new MS mouse works on any surface. I'm using a fairly cheap Genius NetMouse without any special surface (using my wooden desk, no mousepad) and it works fine. I don't use it for gaming, but for ordinary navigation, it's great.
I don't really see why people are going through all the effort. I think I remember seeing something on TV that lets you navigate with your eyes... just silly stuff. The mouse does its job well. If that isn't cool enough for you, voice recognition is rapidly becoming more viable. I'll still be sticking with a classic keyboard/mouse combo.
Sorry, that was moronic of me. I was made a moderator for the first time, and used your post to scroll through the list of desciptive terms that can be used, and carelessly left it on "redundant" when I scrolled down, found a post I liked (it was the last post on my list at the time) and hit the "moderate" button.
:)
I sincerely apologize. This is what happens whenever somebody gives me too much power.
Of course, larger textures, more polygons and features like full-screen antialiasing and enviornmental bump mapping and true color are great, but it is hard to get worked up over any particular video card when each of them only has bits and pieces of the really cool features, and when it comes down to it, all they really do is allow some minor improvements in image quality and allow you to up your screen resolution and get more frames. Great for the obsessed gamer, but game developers still have to make games with the low end in mind, so the games themselves aren't tremendously more impressive from a graphical perspective.
For those reasons I'm a lot more excited about the Dolphin and PSX2 than I could ever be about a mere video card, or even a new class of video cards (like those with on-board T&L, which is meeting with mixed enthusiasm from developers btw.)
But all these incremental advances and all the competition is great. It means that maybe in 3 or 4 years, there'll be PC games where the game developers aren't limited by hardware anymore, but rather the "developmer's bottleneck" will be the designer's creativity, effort and resources. That would be cool. :)
A better pun would have probably be: "Redundant or just dumb?"
And it just seems like such a petty thing to ignore the first amendment over.
Also, what is to stop this guy from continuing his mischief through anonymous posting? Or stop somebody else doing the same thing again? I wouldn't be suprised if a legion of trolls descended upon rsa because that group will now appear more sensitive to flames than all the others. This could just open up a whole new can of worms, with nobody really benefitting.
I hope somebody challenges this somehow, because this is not a precedent I am very happy with.
It doesn't matter that the ignorant will make lame Linux=China=Oppression associations. If you're ignorant you probably are not going to be very open to Linux anyway (unless you're an ignorant Linux user, of course.) Yes, it will be irking to hear morons scream even louder about Linux being a "communist OS," but few people with an open mind and a gram of sense will pay much attention to them anyway.
It has pretty much been observed here that there will always be people (in this age, and in those to come) who will work out of necessity and survival... we're nowhere close to a utopian sort of "entertainment society" that Linus envisions for us in 150 years or so. There are still plenty of problems in the world for us to deal with... overpopulation, pollution, war, hate, ect. Marx's ideal of "ultimate communism" was for every individual in the society to do whatever work they wanted, almost spontaneously. So a person could one week be a painter, and the next a journalist, and then after that be a plumber, and pursue whatever whims, fancies, or passions that they may have at the time. Linus seems to think, that somehow, we will achieve something like this state of society, where we will do what we do in pursuit of 'entertainment'... where we will do things because of the challenge, or the fun, and that the other needs of society will somehow be fulfilled with a minimal percentage of the population toiling with jobs and lives they are not really happy with. After all, there are plenty of jobs that I can think of where it is difficult for me imagine many people thinking of them as highly fulfilling, challenging, and fun. Maybe technology will get rid of all these unpopular occupations, but I sincerely doubt it... at least for a good long while (longer perhaps than the human race will be able to sustain itself without destroying itself.)
;) It has nothing to do with not being intelligent, or even with not being interested in the technical functioning of computers. I've been using PCs since the age of 9, and have a fairly respectable degree of experience using/troubleshooting/maintaining them (probably not nearly as much as the average slashdot reader, but probably more than the average C|Net reader) and I have to say that my experiences with Linux have been anything but fun. I've had a great deal of difficultly getting all the elements of a what I'd call a 'functional' computer working under Linux on my PC, and for some reason (which I'm sure is my fault,) Linux is able 10 times more unstable for me than Windows 95 is (lockups nearly every session.) Right now I just have been unable to muster the discipline to make a great effort to understand Linux. I defintely need to buy another Linux book (lost the one I had) and make friends with a Linux guru or two before I move on... and even then, I'm not optimistic (as I once was) that learning Linux will be a bright and fun experience. Meanwhile, using Windows, for me, is a pretty entertaining experience.
:)
Also, as has been pretty much observed, many people do not need to enjoy or have a real passion for their jobs. People are willing to do something they do not particularly enjoy for a living, in exchange for the net result of having more freedom intellectually, finanically, or in deciding in how to spend one's time.
Finally I'd like to add that Linux is not fun for everybody. Linus seems to be saying that Linux is fun for programmers, which I wouldn't personally disagree with, but for the average person, I think it needs to be understood, playing around with a complex OS (as great as the OS may be) is not their idea of fun.
BTW, sorry for the length of this post. I'm not very good at being concise, which is one reason (of a few) reasons I'm very shy about posting here.