We're really just arguing semantics at this point. The relevant definitions of strategy according to the dictionary are:
1. the science and art of military command exercised to meet the enemy in combat under advantageous conditions 2. the art of devising or employing plans or stratagems toward a goal
According to your posts, your definition of real time strategy games are "a game in which you can beat your opponent by strategy alone with no other factors." Unfortunately for your argument, any game that progresses in real time are going involve factors outside of strategy. By your definition, real-time strategy is almost an oxymoron, because in any real time game involving military action, the quickness at which you act will be a factor.
At this point, if you still believe that games need such a requirement in order to be classified as an RTS, then I well rest my case. However, the rest of the gaming community will continue to classify games like Starcraft as a RTS because after all, it does involve planning towards a goal, and provides opportunities for players to give themselves advantageous conditions.
Just because someone can beat a better "strategic" player by out clicking them doesn't make the game non-strategic. By your logic, real life war is not strategic because whoever has the most money to fund the war usually wins. I know that this isn't always case (i.e. Vietnam). But it isn't always the case with Starcraft either. Sometimes players can change the tides of the battle with a reaver/siege tank drop on resource gatherers. Strategy comes in even more of a factor for team-based games. Do you scout early and gang up to attack? Do you hole yourself in and make them waste resources on failed attacks? No amount of actions per minute will save you from a full on rush from the other team if your teammates don't help you. But if you position your defenses correctly and use the right units, then you might be able to hold them off long enough to get your retarded teammates to come help you.
Here is a good example of why Starcraft is at least somewhat strategic. If you play and island map and make 80 zealots (no dropships) and your opponent makes 1 battlecruiser, guess who will win?
The only "unlimited resource" map that Blizzard made was Big Game Hunters, IIRC, and they only released "due to popular demand." All the other unlimited resource maps were user made.
Gee whiz, fighting Protoss yet again on a map that completely negates their weakness ($$). How fun.
Even if you were playing BGH, you still had to expand in order to get resources faster. Protoss was IMO the hardest race to expand due the cost of the nexus (more expensive than a hatchery) and the Terran's siege tank. From my experience, I didn't see any race that had a significant advantage, at least at my level of play.
If you were playing one of those truly "infinite" resource maps, I have to ask. Why did you play maps that encouraged such boring gameplay?
E.g. - Bowazon vs. the boss Duriel. Small enclosed area with a very fast charge attack. Impossible when starting out because you are only level 8(?) (in the later two difficulties you better equipped/skilled/faster to handle him purely with a bow). You needed to put one point into Jab (the javalin tree) and wack away at him like that. You never use Jab again in the game. That should have been caught in playtesting.
That's ridiculous. You don't ever have to put a point in any skill in the game that you will never use again. Just fill up on pots, get a well equipped merc. At worse it may take a while, or a few deaths if you're not careful. Methinks it's been awhile since you played because you could barely handle Act2 and level 8, much less Duriel. I am assuming you're talking about single player because this isn't even an issue in multiplayer.
I'm guessing you're trying to say that Burizon's were overpowered? Buriza is hardly even used by bowazon's any more with the addition of rune words. I agree that Guided arrow is somewhat of a cheap skill in PvP. But as a lightning sorc I can just teleport around until they get bored of shooting and then one-shot them with lightning. I think there are some balance issues with some of the classes (there always are) but for the most part I believe they are pretty minor. Once the monsters got buffed the bowazon became much less effective.
You don't need this outage to be disappointed. I did the trial membership. It takes about 3-4 business days to receive a disc (if it is not in high demand) and 3-4 business days to be registered as returned. Half of the discs I received were scratched so as to be unplayable (tested on several different players). At that rate (3-4 useful rentals per month) it is not worth the $17 per month.
Excellent concept, poorly implemented.
Each to their own. It has been taking one business day (excluding this hiccup they're having) for me to receive a disc, and one business day for them to get my returned discs. I've almost gone through the entire five seasons of The Wire before they sent me the wrong disc once. None were scratched. Not bad for less than 10 bucks a month if you ask me. Netflix has given me probably the most amount of entertainment per dollar out of all the services I pay for.
That's also one of the big changes they are putting in to Diablo 3. When you're in a multiplayer game, each item drops for a specific player, and only that player can see that item until they pick it up (and drop it). So no you don't have to loot furiously or out ninja-click your teammates to get shinyz any more.
And even then, whatever comes out of any candidates mouth during a campaign is just pie in the sky.
Screw their stance on terrorism or gay marriage. If a candidate can promise pie in the sky, I would vote for him or her. Especially if it's strawberry-rhubarb! Yum!
So what we found was a bunch of stuff that was kept secret but could be COMPLETELY INNOCENT (minus planes/missile engines), but could also possibly be used to bring up a WMD program full-scale in a month or so (i.e.: Very fast). Depending on the logic you apply, we found nothing or everything. Both sides have an argument.
Except the Bush administration simply stated (and reiterated hundreds of times over) that there were WMD's in Iraq. Not "there might be" or "there could be resources that bring up a full-scale WMD program within a month."
When this discussion comes up, I think a lot of people are just upset that they were lied to. The Bush administration definitely tried their best to make it seem like Saddam had stockpiles of nuclear weapons. Excluding the "Oops, we made an honest mistake" (easiest excuse to use when you get caught lying) argument, I really don't think both sides have an argument on this topic.
You could apply this opinion to pretty much any type of military technology that has ever been created. Of course people can use this technology to do bad things, and they probably will. However, if there is a demand for such technology, and it's scientifically possible to create such technology, then someone or some organization will eventually create it. I'd rather we come up with this technology first before some other country where it might be more likely to end up in the hands of terrorists. Also, the sooner we develop this cloaking technology the sooner we can develop technologies to counter it and to detect it.
I think it's funny that you say this cloaking technology would make it hard to protect world leaders, when I think this technology would be perfect protection for them.
The more disconnected we are, the more arrogant we become, the poorer our judgement becomes, and the worse it gets. It's not because the UAV pilots are evil, it's because their whole mission is fundamentally selfish and flawed.
I don't know if I should really speak to this because I've never been involved in combat. I can only imagine.
First of all, I'm not totally convinced that the amount of "connection" we have to battle has any effect on our moral judgement. There are plenty of examples of massacres that have happened in our past where the people involved were all there at the scene. People are smart enough to realize they are killing, even though they are seeing it on a screen instead of viewing it with their own eyes.
With that being said, when you're playing a game in which the losers get killed, maimed, tortured, and imprisoned, would you just have our military remove such technologies at the possible cost of losing the game? Would you just give our soldiers some M-1 Garands and just drop them in the middle of a war zone with a couple of walkie talkies (sending them to certain death) just to limit civilian casualties?
Don't get me wrong, I think collateral damage should be avoided at all costs, and I think the US military and all military force can do a better job of doing so. It's just that I would hesitate on solely blaming new technology for our problems with collateral damage. In terms of the US, I think the problem with us creating new enemies is mainly because we are sending our military to places where it doesn't belong. When there are already dozens of videos circulating the internet, showing our soldiers throwing puppies of cliffs, terrorizing civilians, and shooting defenseless animals, can you see why we don't need military technology to create enemies?
The military pays good money to research better methods for delivering their weapons in order to reduce civilian casualties. I guess my point is that technologies disconnecting ourselves from war isn't as much of a problem as peoples lack of morality. I rather be on the side that has the remote control killing machines, then the one that doesn't, but that doesn't mean that I'd rather be on the side that kills defenseless civilians.
I'm not a physicist or whatever engineer that deals with sharp edges of materials, but doesn't the material have to be hard (or have some other property) in order to pose a risk for cutting. For example when a piece of latex, the edges of broken part would be "sharp" (very thin) but since the material is flimsy it would bend before causing damage to other materials. I guess my point is there is a different between thin and sharp.
That's awesome to see websites catering to people's disabilities. Now if they only had a device that output song lyrics in braille, blind people will be able to listen to songs for the first time!
Go to any bit torrent website and look how many people are leaching/seeding Blizzard's games. God can only imagine how much people were leaching when bnetd was still in full force. That being said, Blizzard has the capital to market and put their games on store shelves, the online game component alone isn't what made their game sell. They are popular enough that they don't have to infect their games with nasty DRM in order to make a profit. Indy developers aren't necessarily so blessed. Not any developer can sit down and pull battlenet out of their ass, and on top of that, afford the resources required to maintain such a service.
Who in their right mind would think that making a game suck without an online component would be a good idea?
Please, read my post more carefully. I said you were forced to do one of the other, not that either approach is good. Which is why the OP's solution is a bad idea.
You add MORE to the game, not take stuff away.
Again, I never said to take stuff away. But you assume that simply adding stuff to a game will make people want to buy it. This is easier said the done. Especially if you're limited to the OP's solution of merely adding on-line components to the game. You can do basically what most companies do: create a demo of the game which is fun but little content, and then release the full game with DRM. Either way, you're now back to square one. The point the guy made in the article is a very good one: People bitch and moan about DRM, but there really isn't a more effective way to stop them from illegally obtaining your game.
Tried EvE. It just got old after awhile because I had to use it more and more just to get high. Also, since their product was more complicated to use, EvE-fiends were pretty elitist and thought they were special and more intelligent than WoW-whores. I just had to quit.
So yeah, maybe it's good to hook a friend up with EvE. They are more likely to get out of the MMO scene before their addiction destroys their lives.
No, the solution would be to have a game with on-line components (even as simple as a score league and competitions with small prizes) that people must be registered users to access. So long as the online componants add value, your users will register and pay.
Your solution is seriously flawed. What you suggest is really just DRM that isn't necessarily "forced" on users. With this solution, you can only take your game in two directions:
1. Make your game suck enough without the online components so it forces people to register the game. However, why would they register if all they know is that your game sucks?
2. Make your game good without the online components and hope people will register it because it's fun. If the game is already fun, why would people with tight budgets pay more for the game?
You are also not taking into consideration that there are people who like to play games for themselves and don't really care about competing against others. You are also not taking into consideration that games may be single player by nature and making it mutliplayer or pseudo multiplayer would only damage the feel or the theme of the game. You also assume that the game developer has the resources (programmers with net coding experience) to create online components. Not necessarily a fair assumption.
You could describe the gameplay of any game that involves monsters and loot that way if you're vague enough. The part makes up the meat and potatoes of the gameplay is how you kill the monsters, what kind of items you can get, and how the monsters fight back. Diablo 2 has some very unique player classes that let you dispatch monsters in fun, different, unique methods, the different types of items you can get are almost endless (I really love the rune system), and there are hundreds of unique monsters with different abilities that can be quite a challenge.
That graph would be funnier if the creator understood graphs (or at least labeled them correctly). Eve online is notorious for being harsh towards newbies. So if anything, the gaming skill would rise slowly over time. Unless, of course, the creator meant "gaming skill required" , then that line graph would make much more sense.
You can be a PvP or PvE tank, healer or DPS, but you don't FEEL as much like you're a knight in shining armor, or a warlock in control of wicked dark arts as much as you FEEL and like you're a pirate in a game like EVE.
You're comparing apples to oranges. Pirate isn't really a player class in Eve. It's more of an occupation if anything. As a pirate in EVE you choose to ruin other people's evenings by destroying their hard earned ships and taking their equipment. You can achieve the same thing in a WoW PVP, by going around and ganking noobs of the other faction while they try to finish quests. It might not be quite at the same level of assholness, but it's the same idea. In WoW, you can also be a market profiteer, a crafter, a guild backstabber, and oooh even a fisherman (beat that EVE)!
You can't really talk up EVE's immersion too much because when you run the exact same mission 18 times you should begin to think: "Didn't I already destroy this NPC pirate stronghold?"
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We're really just arguing semantics at this point. The relevant definitions of strategy according to the dictionary are:
1. the science and art of military command exercised to meet the enemy in combat under advantageous conditions
2. the art of devising or employing plans or stratagems toward a goal
According to your posts, your definition of real time strategy games are "a game in which you can beat your opponent by strategy alone with no other factors." Unfortunately for your argument, any game that progresses in real time are going involve factors outside of strategy. By your definition, real-time strategy is almost an oxymoron, because in any real time game involving military action, the quickness at which you act will be a factor.
At this point, if you still believe that games need such a requirement in order to be classified as an RTS, then I well rest my case. However, the rest of the gaming community will continue to classify games like Starcraft as a RTS because after all, it does involve planning towards a goal, and provides opportunities for players to give themselves advantageous conditions.
Just because someone can beat a better "strategic" player by out clicking them doesn't make the game non-strategic. By your logic, real life war is not strategic because whoever has the most money to fund the war usually wins. I know that this isn't always case (i.e. Vietnam). But it isn't always the case with Starcraft either. Sometimes players can change the tides of the battle with a reaver/siege tank drop on resource gatherers. Strategy comes in even more of a factor for team-based games. Do you scout early and gang up to attack? Do you hole yourself in and make them waste resources on failed attacks? No amount of actions per minute will save you from a full on rush from the other team if your teammates don't help you. But if you position your defenses correctly and use the right units, then you might be able to hold them off long enough to get your retarded teammates to come help you.
Here is a good example of why Starcraft is at least somewhat strategic. If you play and island map and make 80 zealots (no dropships) and your opponent makes 1 battlecruiser, guess who will win?
The only "unlimited resource" map that Blizzard made was Big Game Hunters, IIRC, and they only released "due to popular demand." All the other unlimited resource maps were user made.
Gee whiz, fighting Protoss yet again on a map that completely negates their weakness ($$). How fun.
Even if you were playing BGH, you still had to expand in order to get resources faster. Protoss was IMO the hardest race to expand due the cost of the nexus (more expensive than a hatchery) and the Terran's siege tank. From my experience, I didn't see any race that had a significant advantage, at least at my level of play.
If you were playing one of those truly "infinite" resource maps, I have to ask. Why did you play maps that encouraged such boring gameplay?
*WOOOSH!* #1
It's almost as stupid as naming your product "Wii." No one would ever pay for something with such a stupid name...
E.g. - Bowazon vs. the boss Duriel. Small enclosed area with a very fast charge attack. Impossible when starting out because you are only level 8(?) (in the later two difficulties you better equipped/skilled/faster to handle him purely with a bow). You needed to put one point into Jab (the javalin tree) and wack away at him like that. You never use Jab again in the game. That should have been caught in playtesting.
That's ridiculous. You don't ever have to put a point in any skill in the game that you will never use again. Just fill up on pots, get a well equipped merc. At worse it may take a while, or a few deaths if you're not careful. Methinks it's been awhile since you played because you could barely handle Act2 and level 8, much less Duriel. I am assuming you're talking about single player because this isn't even an issue in multiplayer.
I'm guessing you're trying to say that Burizon's were overpowered? Buriza is hardly even used by bowazon's any more with the addition of rune words. I agree that Guided arrow is somewhat of a cheap skill in PvP. But as a lightning sorc I can just teleport around until they get bored of shooting and then one-shot them with lightning. I think there are some balance issues with some of the classes (there always are) but for the most part I believe they are pretty minor. Once the monsters got buffed the bowazon became much less effective.
You don't need this outage to be disappointed.
I did the trial membership. It takes about 3-4 business days to receive a disc (if it is not in high demand) and 3-4 business days to be registered as returned. Half of the discs I received were scratched so as to be unplayable (tested on several different players). At that rate (3-4 useful rentals per month) it is not worth the $17 per month.
Excellent concept, poorly implemented.
Each to their own. It has been taking one business day (excluding this hiccup they're having) for me to receive a disc, and one business day for them to get my returned discs. I've almost gone through the entire five seasons of The Wire before they sent me the wrong disc once. None were scratched. Not bad for less than 10 bucks a month if you ask me. Netflix has given me probably the most amount of entertainment per dollar out of all the services I pay for.
That's also one of the big changes they are putting in to Diablo 3. When you're in a multiplayer game, each item drops for a specific player, and only that player can see that item until they pick it up (and drop it). So no you don't have to loot furiously or out ninja-click your teammates to get shinyz any more.
For those who think I'm talking out of my ass:
http://blizzplanet.com/news/2537/
And even then, whatever comes out of any candidates mouth during a campaign is just pie in the sky.
Screw their stance on terrorism or gay marriage. If a candidate can promise pie in the sky, I would vote for him or her. Especially if it's strawberry-rhubarb! Yum!
So what we found was a bunch of stuff that was kept secret but could be COMPLETELY INNOCENT (minus planes/missile engines), but could also possibly be used to bring up a WMD program full-scale in a month or so (i.e.: Very fast). Depending on the logic you apply, we found nothing or everything. Both sides have an argument.
Except the Bush administration simply stated (and reiterated hundreds of times over) that there were WMD's in Iraq. Not "there might be" or "there could be resources that bring up a full-scale WMD program within a month."
When this discussion comes up, I think a lot of people are just upset that they were lied to. The Bush administration definitely tried their best to make it seem like Saddam had stockpiles of nuclear weapons. Excluding the "Oops, we made an honest mistake" (easiest excuse to use when you get caught lying) argument, I really don't think both sides have an argument on this topic.
You could apply this opinion to pretty much any type of military technology that has ever been created. Of course people can use this technology to do bad things, and they probably will. However, if there is a demand for such technology, and it's scientifically possible to create such technology, then someone or some organization will eventually create it. I'd rather we come up with this technology first before some other country where it might be more likely to end up in the hands of terrorists. Also, the sooner we develop this cloaking technology the sooner we can develop technologies to counter it and to detect it.
I think it's funny that you say this cloaking technology would make it hard to protect world leaders, when I think this technology would be perfect protection for them.
The more disconnected we are, the more arrogant we become, the poorer our judgement becomes, and the worse it gets. It's not because the UAV pilots are evil, it's because their whole mission is fundamentally selfish and flawed.
I don't know if I should really speak to this because I've never been involved in combat. I can only imagine.
First of all, I'm not totally convinced that the amount of "connection" we have to battle has any effect on our moral judgement. There are plenty of examples of massacres that have happened in our past where the people involved were all there at the scene. People are smart enough to realize they are killing, even though they are seeing it on a screen instead of viewing it with their own eyes.
With that being said, when you're playing a game in which the losers get killed, maimed, tortured, and imprisoned, would you just have our military remove such technologies at the possible cost of losing the game? Would you just give our soldiers some M-1 Garands and just drop them in the middle of a war zone with a couple of walkie talkies (sending them to certain death) just to limit civilian casualties?
Don't get me wrong, I think collateral damage should be avoided at all costs, and I think the US military and all military force can do a better job of doing so. It's just that I would hesitate on solely blaming new technology for our problems with collateral damage. In terms of the US, I think the problem with us creating new enemies is mainly because we are sending our military to places where it doesn't belong. When there are already dozens of videos circulating the internet, showing our soldiers throwing puppies of cliffs, terrorizing civilians, and shooting defenseless animals, can you see why we don't need military technology to create enemies?
The military pays good money to research better methods for delivering their weapons in order to reduce civilian casualties. I guess my point is that technologies disconnecting ourselves from war isn't as much of a problem as peoples lack of morality. I rather be on the side that has the remote control killing machines, then the one that doesn't, but that doesn't mean that I'd rather be on the side that kills defenseless civilians.
I'm not a physicist or whatever engineer that deals with sharp edges of materials, but doesn't the material have to be hard (or have some other property) in order to pose a risk for cutting. For example when a piece of latex, the edges of broken part would be "sharp" (very thin) but since the material is flimsy it would bend before causing damage to other materials. I guess my point is there is a different between thin and sharp.
That's awesome to see websites catering to people's disabilities. Now if they only had a device that output song lyrics in braille, blind people will be able to listen to songs for the first time!
If anyone has the potential to cause WOW some trouble, it's WAR. They have the IP, the money, and the marketing muscle.
...Kind of like Star Wars Galaxies.
Go to any bit torrent website and look how many people are leaching/seeding Blizzard's games. God can only imagine how much people were leaching when bnetd was still in full force. That being said, Blizzard has the capital to market and put their games on store shelves, the online game component alone isn't what made their game sell. They are popular enough that they don't have to infect their games with nasty DRM in order to make a profit. Indy developers aren't necessarily so blessed. Not any developer can sit down and pull battlenet out of their ass, and on top of that, afford the resources required to maintain such a service.
I was trying to ween you off your WoW addiction! Can't you see!?
Who in their right mind would think that making a game suck without an online component would be a good idea?
Please, read my post more carefully. I said you were forced to do one of the other, not that either approach is good. Which is why the OP's solution is a bad idea.
You add MORE to the game, not take stuff away.
Again, I never said to take stuff away. But you assume that simply adding stuff to a game will make people want to buy it. This is easier said the done. Especially if you're limited to the OP's solution of merely adding on-line components to the game. You can do basically what most companies do: create a demo of the game which is fun but little content, and then release the full game with DRM. Either way, you're now back to square one. The point the guy made in the article is a very good one: People bitch and moan about DRM, but there really isn't a more effective way to stop them from illegally obtaining your game.
Tried EvE. It just got old after awhile because I had to use it more and more just to get high. Also, since their product was more complicated to use, EvE-fiends were pretty elitist and thought they were special and more intelligent than WoW-whores. I just had to quit.
So yeah, maybe it's good to hook a friend up with EvE. They are more likely to get out of the MMO scene before their addiction destroys their lives.
No, the solution would be to have a game with on-line components (even as simple as a score league and competitions with small prizes) that people must be registered users to access. So long as the online componants add value, your users will register and pay.
Your solution is seriously flawed. What you suggest is really just DRM that isn't necessarily "forced" on users. With this solution, you can only take your game in two directions:
1. Make your game suck enough without the online components so it forces people to register the game. However, why would they register if all they know is that your game sucks?
2. Make your game good without the online components and hope people will register it because it's fun. If the game is already fun, why would people with tight budgets pay more for the game?
You are also not taking into consideration that there are people who like to play games for themselves and don't really care about competing against others. You are also not taking into consideration that games may be single player by nature and making it mutliplayer or pseudo multiplayer would only damage the feel or the theme of the game. You also assume that the game developer has the resources (programmers with net coding experience) to create online components. Not necessarily a fair assumption.
No! Friends don't let friends do WoW.
I think this "WC3" style you are referring to is also known as "3D." Other than that, every game after WC3 has had their own style.
You could describe the gameplay of any game that involves monsters and loot that way if you're vague enough. The part makes up the meat and potatoes of the gameplay is how you kill the monsters, what kind of items you can get, and how the monsters fight back. Diablo 2 has some very unique player classes that let you dispatch monsters in fun, different, unique methods, the different types of items you can get are almost endless (I really love the rune system), and there are hundreds of unique monsters with different abilities that can be quite a challenge.
That graph would be funnier if the creator understood graphs (or at least labeled them correctly). Eve online is notorious for being harsh towards newbies. So if anything, the gaming skill would rise slowly over time. Unless, of course, the creator meant "gaming skill required" , then that line graph would make much more sense.
You can be a PvP or PvE tank, healer or DPS, but you don't FEEL as much like you're a knight in shining armor, or a warlock in control of wicked dark arts as much as you FEEL and like you're a pirate in a game like EVE.
You're comparing apples to oranges. Pirate isn't really a player class in Eve. It's more of an occupation if anything. As a pirate in EVE you choose to ruin other people's evenings by destroying their hard earned ships and taking their equipment. You can achieve the same thing in a WoW PVP, by going around and ganking noobs of the other faction while they try to finish quests. It might not be quite at the same level of assholness, but it's the same idea. In WoW, you can also be a market profiteer, a crafter, a guild backstabber, and oooh even a fisherman (beat that EVE)!
You can't really talk up EVE's immersion too much because when you run the exact same mission 18 times you should begin to think: "Didn't I already destroy this NPC pirate stronghold?"