What is it with the trend towards designing MMOs with consoles in mind?
A bigger market + lower possibility for bots/exploits = massive profits.
everyone thinks if they can just combine the rampant success of World of Warcraft and apply that to the larger console market, they'll be crapping gold bricks for years to come...
I think the Halo developers had a similar idea of combining the rampant success of PC FPSes with the larger console market, and last I looked, Halo shits gold bricks. Whoever makes the first good console MMO will utterly rake it in.
Basically such interaction is going to mean being limited to certain numbers of active powers that you load onto buttons of the controller (whether or not it is an actual controller or they are mapped to keyboard keys) at a time (or adding a mortal-combat style combos to activate them), and having chat geared sharply to voice chat. Now, look, while I know voice chat has a big role in things like parties, raids, etc, general chat is not it. The idea of something like a barrens voice chat is just an abomination. You take out the focus of a text chat and it really hinders an important element IMO...
Yeah, everyone says things like that about every genre that ends up being developed on consoles. There are still hardcore PC gamers who say that the FPS will never work on a console due to the controller not being as good as mouse and keyboard. But for some reason the developers can't seem to hear such complaints over the noise of their fleet of Bugattis and Ferraris.
A) _All_ that bots do is kill NPCs in a mindless loop.
You don't think it's a bad thing that NPCs can be killed mindlessly by a simple bot?
So basically you have _one_ aspect of the game which can be botted, the combat system. That's all. For most of us it's even the least interesting part of the game, we're in for the quests and social interaction actually.
What is a quest except organised combat? Get the quest, turn on the bot that walks to the npc area, kills all the npcs, picks up the loot needed for the quest, returns to questgiver and gives him the items. Meanwhile you can have a bath.
Seriously. I dove into Vanguard for a year before I quit. The game had amazing graphics, worked extremely well even on my mid- to low-level graphics card
Really? I played the demo the other week, I got maybe 3fps on default settings, and the graphics were abysmal. No detail whatsoever, the blandest game I've ever seen, and buildings popping up yards in front of me. What exactly was taking up so much processing power to make it so slow, when the game looked no better than Everquest 1?
This is all true, but I think the biggest win for WoW was that they had the world's most popular gaming franchise (Warcraft/Starcraft)
Really? I'd never heard of Warcraft before WoW. Was it an MMO or an RPG? I'd have thought the most popular gaming franchises would be Mario, the Sims, Halo etc.
Other than the market expanding even further, I can't see how.
If a game is made that differs from WoW in any way, the WoW players won't play it, as it doesn't have the exact same set of features and gameplay mechanics they demand. If the game is exactly like WoW, they still won't play it, as they already have WoW and don't need another game that's exactly the same.
Seriously, there are players who won't touch another MMO if the quest-givers don't have question marks over their heads. You will never convert people that picky.
America has much, much stricter alcohol regulations than the UK which has UHC. These are just two data, but I think it makes the point. In the UK I don't need to present a driving licence to buy alcohol, I can buy it from a supermarket 24/7 rather than from a state monopoly liquor store, I can drink legally from the age of 5 rather than 21. We only have one 'dry country' in the entire country, and that's basically a throwback.
The US also led the UK in banning smoking in bars.
If government wants to run a nanny state, they will do so. UHC is just a convenient excuse.
On the other hand, Utah is much more ethnically homogeneous than its neighbours. It also has a low population density. These two factors usually correlate with low crime.
Civilized societies have long moved towards executions that are as respectful of life as possible, as opposed to some societies which still publicly rape and stone to death.
Actually, civilised societies have moved away from the death penalty altogether.
Sorry, having to sit there for half an hour downloading and installing updates because I want a ten minute game of Fifa is not acceptable. It's bad enough I've bought the most expensive console on the market, was bait-and-switched with PS2 backward compatibility, have the worse controller of all three systems, as well as a shitty library of games, now I have a series of obligatory, interminable updates.
Sadly, the current economic climate isn't having the same effect in the UK. NIMBYism is still rife, and our governments in so much debt I can't see renewables getting any meaningful investment.
Interestingly, a wind farm has been built a few miles from where I live in the UK. They're very large and very visible on top of the hills, and there was quite a lot of objection to them. Now they're built no-one really gives a shit, they look better than electric pylons at any rate.
If there's one thing holding back renewables in the UK it's the inefficiency and cost, not the Nimbyism. If the government will demolish entire villages to build a third runway for a shitty airport against massive public objection, they won't think twice about putting windmills on some hills.
Nadal and Federer? Those are the last two I'd expect to be in the final. With tennis becoming this exciting and unpredictable, I might start watching it!
Audit the companies collecting sales tax; don't worry about Grandma and her hobby of making & selling doll clothes. Most business goes through retail channels. Don't sell goods to anybody without charging sales tax unless they have a business ID and are therefore subject to audit. In some ways you could go with VAT like in Europe, but I'm convinced there are better ways.
You're very naive there.
Auditing a company doesn't work when everything's done by cash. When you pay a plumber or electrician in cash, what makes you think he actually declares that income? When you buy some goods off market stall, do you think they write it all down and pay taxes? Do they fuck.
Think about all that imported duty-free tobacco, now imagine that applied to all easily-traded goods. More will be sold under the counter than over it!
But then lending money is pretty pointless if you're not obligating them to benefit the people with it. Like bailing out the banks so they can keep lending, then watching healthy businesses with full order-books going under because they can't get the credit to fulfil their orders, as the banks would rather pocket the cash.
Instead, I'd concentrate on fixing our tax structure so people aren't spending $50/year to figure out their taxes.
Then introduce pay as you earn, where taxes are taken out of your paycheque before you get it. Take out all the deductions, rebates etc. This will make tax evasion harder to revenues will increase without taxes actually going up.
Or go whole hog and get rid of income taxes in favor of sales taxes.
Great, but before you do that, let me know so I can invest my entire net worth in companies that make safes. I can see a sudden mysterious upsurge in the use of cash.
I see government AS the problem, mostly because it's a monopoly, and I am anti-monopoly (pro-choice).
Yeah, the free market usually knows best. That's why American health care is so cheap and provides so much coverage, as opposed to those socialist countries where health care costs twice as much and leaves millions with no coverage. We should apply that system to all other public services.
Education for example, instead of funding it publicly, let everyone buy education insurance. Then if they get pregnant, the insurance company pays the school fees, as long as nothing in the small print lets them wriggle out of it. Of course if you have a kid at school and you lose your job, your can't get new education insurance as the child is a pre-existing condition. I can't think of any downsides to huge sections of the population having no access to education at all, none whatsoever...
How great would it be if everyone's earnings were suddenly doubled?
Great, until five seconds later when the prices for everything double. Then you have to find money for education, a private protection racket to protect you, private fire insurance, and so on and so forth.
Of course all this assumes you have a job at all, as the cuts in public transport spending mean the roads are grid-locked with cars so no-one can actually get anywhere. Even if you do get to work, your job will be have been taken by cheap immigrants as there's no-one to keep them out. Your garbage won't be collected, you most and likely wouldn't have very reliable or cheap electricity, plumbing or gas.
And of course the resultant anarchy that comes from millions of people on welfare suddenly realising they have a choice between stealing or starving to death means crime will go through the roof, and your insurance premiums will sky-rocket. You could send all the criminals to jail, except all the jails have shut down through lack of funding, and there's no-one to catch them anyway.
But at least the lower taxes mean you have more money to repair your house when it's looted and burnt to the ground.
Even when they have the best of intentions you can't rely on government to do the right thing - look at both of the trillion dollar bailout packages: pure pork and waste.
Even when they have the best of intentions you can't rely on people to do the right thing. Give them the money and they'd just spend it on Chinese-made crap, further increasing the trade deficit.
Of course cancelling public education will mean that only the rich are educated and capable of getting a job in the first place, everyone else will just live on the streets or in sweatshops earning $2 a week making goods for the rich. Eventually there'll either be a violent revolution by the oppressed to overthrow the government, or some smart guy might say 'hey, why don't we use taxes to eradicate our crippling poverty and inequality' and given another fifty years or so we might be back where we are today.
Don't forget that after more than 4 years have past since the last game, the AI still has binocular x-ray vision, perfect aim and has trouble navigating.
I think they should be "innovating" less and studying more. It seems like every new game repeats past problems and ignores solutions.
Strange how every article about MMOs is quickly filled with EVE fans telling everyone how great and unique it is, even though no-one cares because EVE is boring as hell.
The alternative, to a casual fantasy-loving gamer, would be to keep up with the steady stream of console RPGs that keeps coming out. If you don't care about getting the infinity plus one sword or reaching 101% completion (which you don't, because remember that you're a casual gamer), then it takes roughly 50 hours to beat any new game of the Dragon Fantasy variety. Last I checked, these games cost around $50 each, giving you about 1 hour for every $1 you spend on it.
Who the hell measures their level of entertainment in 'hours'? And who the hell counts ten hours a week as casual? I could bang my head against the wall for an hour, it'd be free but not very entertaining.
Even if you are counting other hours, you could play a subscription-less game for the cost of the game alone, saving you hundreds of dollars.
Slashdot Mirror
You'd be surprised how rapidly your baggage ends up 5,000 miles away from your destination.
A bigger market + lower possibility for bots/exploits = massive profits.
I think the Halo developers had a similar idea of combining the rampant success of PC FPSes with the larger console market, and last I looked, Halo shits gold bricks. Whoever makes the first good console MMO will utterly rake it in.
Yeah, everyone says things like that about every genre that ends up being developed on consoles. There are still hardcore PC gamers who say that the FPS will never work on a console due to the controller not being as good as mouse and keyboard. But for some reason the developers can't seem to hear such complaints over the noise of their fleet of Bugattis and Ferraris.
I think the main difference is in how simple it is to automate an MMO, and how difficult it is to automate chess.
You don't think it's a bad thing that NPCs can be killed mindlessly by a simple bot?
What is a quest except organised combat? Get the quest, turn on the bot that walks to the npc area, kills all the npcs, picks up the loot needed for the quest, returns to questgiver and gives him the items. Meanwhile you can have a bath.
Really? I played the demo the other week, I got maybe 3fps on default settings, and the graphics were abysmal. No detail whatsoever, the blandest game I've ever seen, and buildings popping up yards in front of me. What exactly was taking up so much processing power to make it so slow, when the game looked no better than Everquest 1?
Really? I'd never heard of Warcraft before WoW. Was it an MMO or an RPG? I'd have thought the most popular gaming franchises would be Mario, the Sims, Halo etc.
Other than the market expanding even further, I can't see how.
If a game is made that differs from WoW in any way, the WoW players won't play it, as it doesn't have the exact same set of features and gameplay mechanics they demand. If the game is exactly like WoW, they still won't play it, as they already have WoW and don't need another game that's exactly the same.
Seriously, there are players who won't touch another MMO if the quest-givers don't have question marks over their heads. You will never convert people that picky.
America has much, much stricter alcohol regulations than the UK which has UHC. These are just two data, but I think it makes the point. In the UK I don't need to present a driving licence to buy alcohol, I can buy it from a supermarket 24/7 rather than from a state monopoly liquor store, I can drink legally from the age of 5 rather than 21. We only have one 'dry country' in the entire country, and that's basically a throwback.
The US also led the UK in banning smoking in bars.
If government wants to run a nanny state, they will do so. UHC is just a convenient excuse.
On the other hand, Utah is much more ethnically homogeneous than its neighbours. It also has a low population density. These two factors usually correlate with low crime.
Actually, civilised societies have moved away from the death penalty altogether.
Except fucking with the natural world has a nasty tendency to come back and fuck us over later on.
I'm sure the people of Easter Island thought that having wood to burn was more important than the wildlife.
Sorry, having to sit there for half an hour downloading and installing updates because I want a ten minute game of Fifa is not acceptable. It's bad enough I've bought the most expensive console on the market, was bait-and-switched with PS2 backward compatibility, have the worse controller of all three systems, as well as a shitty library of games, now I have a series of obligatory, interminable updates.
In conclusion: fuck Sony.
Interestingly, a wind farm has been built a few miles from where I live in the UK. They're very large and very visible on top of the hills, and there was quite a lot of objection to them. Now they're built no-one really gives a shit, they look better than electric pylons at any rate.
If there's one thing holding back renewables in the UK it's the inefficiency and cost, not the Nimbyism. If the government will demolish entire villages to build a third runway for a shitty airport against massive public objection, they won't think twice about putting windmills on some hills.
Nadal and Federer? Those are the last two I'd expect to be in the final. With tennis becoming this exciting and unpredictable, I might start watching it!
They may be low in fat, but they still have a shit-load of calories in them, especially with the shells.
You mean like the US funding the Taleban and the IRA?
Obviously not, otherwise the bandwidth would already be here.
You're very naive there.
Auditing a company doesn't work when everything's done by cash. When you pay a plumber or electrician in cash, what makes you think he actually declares that income? When you buy some goods off market stall, do you think they write it all down and pay taxes? Do they fuck.
Think about all that imported duty-free tobacco, now imagine that applied to all easily-traded goods. More will be sold under the counter than over it!
But then lending money is pretty pointless if you're not obligating them to benefit the people with it. Like bailing out the banks so they can keep lending, then watching healthy businesses with full order-books going under because they can't get the credit to fulfil their orders, as the banks would rather pocket the cash.
Then introduce pay as you earn, where taxes are taken out of your paycheque before you get it. Take out all the deductions, rebates etc. This will make tax evasion harder to revenues will increase without taxes actually going up.
Great, but before you do that, let me know so I can invest my entire net worth in companies that make safes. I can see a sudden mysterious upsurge in the use of cash.
Yeah, the free market usually knows best. That's why American health care is so cheap and provides so much coverage, as opposed to those socialist countries where health care costs twice as much and leaves millions with no coverage. We should apply that system to all other public services.
Education for example, instead of funding it publicly, let everyone buy education insurance. Then if they get pregnant, the insurance company pays the school fees, as long as nothing in the small print lets them wriggle out of it. Of course if you have a kid at school and you lose your job, your can't get new education insurance as the child is a pre-existing condition. I can't think of any downsides to huge sections of the population having no access to education at all, none whatsoever...
Great, until five seconds later when the prices for everything double. Then you have to find money for education, a private protection racket to protect you, private fire insurance, and so on and so forth.
Of course all this assumes you have a job at all, as the cuts in public transport spending mean the roads are grid-locked with cars so no-one can actually get anywhere. Even if you do get to work, your job will be have been taken by cheap immigrants as there's no-one to keep them out. Your garbage won't be collected, you most and likely wouldn't have very reliable or cheap electricity, plumbing or gas.
And of course the resultant anarchy that comes from millions of people on welfare suddenly realising they have a choice between stealing or starving to death means crime will go through the roof, and your insurance premiums will sky-rocket. You could send all the criminals to jail, except all the jails have shut down through lack of funding, and there's no-one to catch them anyway.
But at least the lower taxes mean you have more money to repair your house when it's looted and burnt to the ground.
Even when they have the best of intentions you can't rely on people to do the right thing. Give them the money and they'd just spend it on Chinese-made crap, further increasing the trade deficit.
Of course cancelling public education will mean that only the rich are educated and capable of getting a job in the first place, everyone else will just live on the streets or in sweatshops earning $2 a week making goods for the rich. Eventually there'll either be a violent revolution by the oppressed to overthrow the government, or some smart guy might say 'hey, why don't we use taxes to eradicate our crippling poverty and inequality' and given another fifty years or so we might be back where we are today.
But look at the realistic grass!
Strange how every article about MMOs is quickly filled with EVE fans telling everyone how great and unique it is, even though no-one cares because EVE is boring as hell.
Who the hell measures their level of entertainment in 'hours'? And who the hell counts ten hours a week as casual? I could bang my head against the wall for an hour, it'd be free but not very entertaining.
Even if you are counting other hours, you could play a subscription-less game for the cost of the game alone, saving you hundreds of dollars.