Claiming they'd even consider intentionally understocking the console can be seen as an attack, since it's suggesting they're wanting to leave some people without a console that they really want to buy.
Any theoretical benefit to understocking is surely not as big a benefit as trying to make sure as many people as possible who want 360s will be able to get them. The more sold, the more games and accessories sold, the quicker the installed base increases, and the better the head start over the PS3.
Not only is there not going to be intentional understocking, there is going to be an almost constant resupply to the retail channels. Meaning that someone who doesn't get one at launch might be able to find one a couple weeks later, instead of a Sony-style couple months between each shipment.
I wouldn't buy the intentional understock story even if I didn't personally know people on the Xbox team. But I especially do not buy them because of that.
Yes, online play for games is going to be restricted to Gold accounts only, though there will likely be trial weekends for everyone to play.
Games with subscriptions, such as any MMORPGs, will not require a Gold account - Silver will be sufficient. So you can only pay the game's subscription, and don't have to pay for Xbox Live too in the process.
Bitching about the memory of the 360 when the PS3 and Revolution look to come with LESS?
Complaining about the lact of backcompat when anyone who has paid attention knows the 360 WILL be backcompat through emulation?
Talking about jaggies and looking like Xbox 1 games when anyone who's seen footage of Kameo or PGR3 knows that neither of those comments are anywhere even close to true?
Oh, yeah, this is Slashdot. It's insightful because it's anti-MS, where facts don't matter when it's a means to bash Microsoft.
I still wonder if he was meaning to compare games from the first Xbox, which were all single threaded, to the Xbox 360 games. Read the article again with this in mind, and it looks like that may have been what was intended.
Sorry to post anonymously, but you probably would too in my position.
Considering your company can't even FOLLOW THE DAMN DOCUMENTED PROTOCOLS when dealing with Xbox Live, I'd be embarassed to admit working for such a company too. And yes, I know this to be the case, after bitching to someone about Burnout Revenge not being able to show my friends list on Live properly after the recent upgrade.
This story is false as a couple posters have already pointed out.
Look, Slashdot, I know that if some idiot posted on a website how the 360 was made with tin cans and string and that everyone who buys one is going to mysteriously disappear from the face of the Earth while Microsoft's zombie army grows and grows. That doesn't mean you actually have to believe it.
I don't think anyone's even been able to determine what "event" this clearly-false statement was made at.
(next thing you know, they'll be posting articles here about how the Xbox 360 is powered by DEAD KITTENS...)
Never mind the fact that the story was factually incorrect in several manners, mistakes that were quickly pointed out. That couldn't have been the case, since anything printed on TEH INTARNET is always 110% true.
(At least two different people here inside MS with the knowledge pointed out glaring mistakes in that Anandtech gibberish within 15 minutes of that story being published. Essentially, the guy was talking out of his ass.)
Well, at least one MS employee reports that they played on a 360 Kiosk that clearly was set up wrong, and as a result it was full of artifacts and pixelization.
The Kameo demo I played at the company meeting sure didn't show any signs of looking bad in any way. So I'd be surprised if the kiosks weren't running the exact same thing I played on.
Re:I saw what "the fix" was at my local wal-mart!
on
MS On 360 Wireless Issues
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I wonder if the kiosk you played on was set correctly or not. Apparently there's a significant problem with Wal-Mart know-it-all employees tampering with the 360 kiosks and screwing up the video modes. I guess there are a number of kiosks that have been played around with resulting in the 360 outputting a 480i signal to the 720p native displays - resulting in blocky and stretched video signals that look HORRIBLE.
What's so irrelevant about albums in ID3 tags? I still listen to a lot of my music an album at a time, and some of the albums I have flow into each other - not tracking the album would force me to manually create playlists for each of those albums.
I understand the skepticism. I felt the same way back when I first heard about them - I figured they were just pretty faces to sucker in male gamers. That was before I joined PMS and found out more about the FD in the process.
And in the meantime, I'm rooting for a friend of mine to be chosen to fill the open spot on the Frag Dolls.:) I figure the fact that she already knows them all and plays with them regularly (and often can beat them) might help her get in, too.:)
People don't go around flaunting their straightness
Bull-fucking-shit.
People do it ALL THE TIME. Just that unless you're specifically looking for it and thinking about it, you don't even see it, it's so normal and accepted.
The couple walking down the street holding hands. The girl showing off her engagement ring. The teenage boy with the "bikini inspector" shirt. The photograph of the wife and kids on some guy's desk at work. And countless other things.
Relationships are a BIG part of life. You can't do much to get away from them in some manner, and it's all constant displays of people being straight. Now it's not flaunting like someone standing in the mall yelling, "look at me everyone, I'm straight", but it sure as hell is making peoples' sexualities clear.
Yet if I do any of the same things as a gay woman, I risk people complaining about me flaunting my sexuality. And I've realized anyone that does so and claims they're fine with people being gay, well, they're lying.
Now, as far as why girl gamers deserve "special attention"? Right now, I think a little extra attention is good for gamers in general. It will educate some of the guys a bit to realize we're out there, and that the one they run across isn't a fluke. More importantly, it might help more gaming girls to be a bit more open about their choice of entertainment, that there are others, and that they don't need to be embarassed that they play games. And this really does happen - there have been girls that have come to the clan forums and told us how shocked they were to find out about us, and how they look forward to having other girls to play with.
And anyone that has issues with me having "girl" in my gamertag has issues with girl gamers. The ones that say it's because "it shouldn't matter" are just the ones that are being dishonest with themselves/others about it. The ones that don't care and don't bother to tell everyone in the world they don't care are the ones that are really fine about it.
The Frag Dolls are also paid representatives of UbiSoft - they are about making appearances and being gaming "personalities". I don't find it surprising that they'd have some level of expectation about appearance, as would many jobs that require regular media exposure/public appearances.
However, just because Ubi decided to consider appearance, doesn't mean that's ALL they considered. If you dig up old blog entries on the Frag Dolls site, you'll see some descriptions of the process they went through. Demonstrating that they were skilled gamers was a big part of the process. A much bigger part than deciding if they were attractive enough - I'm sure there were some very pretty faces that were dumped during the application process cause they couldn't play well enough to keep up.
So remember, while PMS is a real clan, the Frag Dolls are actually employees of Ubisoft in a manner. Enough that when one of them took a job at another gaming company, she had to leave the Dolls. And if I didn't work at MS, I'd apply for the open spot - a couple of the dolls encouraged me to do so at PAX before I told them...
If you don't care, then congrats! You're not one of the people we're targetting by being obvious about being female gamers.
But then again, I have to wonder - if you really don't care, they why do you care if we're making it a point to let people know we're female?
For example, I'm also gay - and I've seen enough of the "I don't care if you're gay, just do it in private" attitude to realize that what's being said doesn't fit the person's actual attitude. If someone didn't care if I was gay, they also wouldn't care if I held my partner's hand in public. The fact that it bothers such people means that they AREN'T ok with it, since they don't make the big deal about straight people doing the same thing.
So I wonder if there's some of that here - people pretending they're not sexist and saying it's ok to be a gaming girl, just as long as we aren't visible about it.
Don't quite know about that, but I know of a couple women in my clan that are mothers, and make sure their kids go to bed on time so that they can hop on and play Halo.:)
I'm suspecting that when I get to that point, the kids won't be playing games until the homework is finished - because I'll be playing instead.
Nobody's going to notice your all-male clan... why? Because there are already a ton of them out there. Perhaps that wasn't the out-and-out goal when they were made, but there they are.
But were there a ton of people still playing Enter the Matrix a year later?
There are still hundreds of thousands of people that play Halo 2 over live every week, and it's been nearly a year. While that doesn't make it the best game ever, it does suggest that it's definitely a really good game.
What I want is to join a game and not be immediately singled out for negative treatment. Comments like "Are you really a girl?", "That's gotta be a guy cause girls don't play games", and "Get back in the kitchen, b$#(!" are not unusual, nor is being teamkilled just because of being female. I realize some of these come from guys who normally pull that crap on other guys, so that I am recieving equal treatment from the antisocial fuckhead camp. But I get guys who are fine with other guys that start that crap too, and that's what pisses many of us girls off.
If that's what you mean by "one of the guys", then I appreciate the sentiment. The phrasing leaves something to be desired though, because of the inherent sexism prevalent from people thinking of online gaming as a guy's world.
(and before someone goes off on me for being "one of those women" who complain about sexism inherent in everything, I've long rolled my eyes at such women and am totally aware of the irony in me making the statements I have...)
I never referred to you as a brain-dead idiot... Just that there are a lot of them out there that we have to deal with. So chill out when assuming that everything said is about you personally.
And considering the amount of people that I've played with after joining PMS, large numbers of people with overall positive attitudes and good personalities, I'd say we're hardly alienating ourselves from gaming culture. Just the opposite - we're a definite part of it, just a part that excludes the "gaming is guys' territory" crowd.
As Mistletoe said, there is overlap between PMS and the Frag Dolls.
And I've been gaming since I was like 6, I have about a dozen consoles at home, and am playing something just about every single day. And the Dolls and some of the PMS girls make me look like a casual gamer in comparison. It's almost scary how hardcore they are.
If these women so obsessed with being treated equally, why do they so deliberately differentiate themselves from the pack, and still expect to be treated just like one of the guys?
Mistake #1 - we don't WANT to be "one of the guys". To suggest that implies that gaming is your territory, and that we need your "permission" to be allowed to play. And that's total bullshit.
I want to make it clear I'm a girl so that guys can be aware that we do play. Some guys are fine with it, and it quickly becomes just my gamertag, and they don't even see it as an issue. And the ones that make a big deal about it, well, I'm happy to know they'll remember they were beaten by a girl, cause surely their ego needs such a beating.
Is this a case of women wanting to be more than equal?
Let's wait until we're at least equal before wondering about things like this, please.
Slashdot Mirror
Claiming they'd even consider intentionally understocking the console can be seen as an attack, since it's suggesting they're wanting to leave some people without a console that they really want to buy.
Any theoretical benefit to understocking is surely not as big a benefit as trying to make sure as many people as possible who want 360s will be able to get them. The more sold, the more games and accessories sold, the quicker the installed base increases, and the better the head start over the PS3.
Not only is there not going to be intentional understocking, there is going to be an almost constant resupply to the retail channels. Meaning that someone who doesn't get one at launch might be able to find one a couple weeks later, instead of a Sony-style couple months between each shipment.
I wouldn't buy the intentional understock story even if I didn't personally know people on the Xbox team. But I especially do not buy them because of that.
The 360 won't be overstocked, it will be intentionally understocked.
You honestly believe that line? "Hmmm, there seems to be all this demand for our system, so LET'S SHIP FEWER OF THEM TO SELL!"
People sure are reaching to find ways to attack Microsoft.
Yes, online play for games is going to be restricted to Gold accounts only, though there will likely be trial weekends for everyone to play.
Games with subscriptions, such as any MMORPGs, will not require a Gold account - Silver will be sufficient. So you can only pay the game's subscription, and don't have to pay for Xbox Live too in the process.
This was INSIGHTFUL?
Bitching about the memory of the 360 when the PS3 and Revolution look to come with LESS?
Complaining about the lact of backcompat when anyone who has paid attention knows the 360 WILL be backcompat through emulation?
Talking about jaggies and looking like Xbox 1 games when anyone who's seen footage of Kameo or PGR3 knows that neither of those comments are anywhere even close to true?
Oh, yeah, this is Slashdot. It's insightful because it's anti-MS, where facts don't matter when it's a means to bash Microsoft.
I still wonder if he was meaning to compare games from the first Xbox, which were all single threaded, to the Xbox 360 games. Read the article again with this in mind, and it looks like that may have been what was intended.
Sorry to post anonymously, but you probably would too in my position.
Considering your company can't even FOLLOW THE DAMN DOCUMENTED PROTOCOLS when dealing with Xbox Live, I'd be embarassed to admit working for such a company too. And yes, I know this to be the case, after bitching to someone about Burnout Revenge not being able to show my friends list on Live properly after the recent upgrade.
EA = Entirely Adequate.
This story is false as a couple posters have already pointed out.
Look, Slashdot, I know that if some idiot posted on a website how the 360 was made with tin cans and string and that everyone who buys one is going to mysteriously disappear from the face of the Earth while Microsoft's zombie army grows and grows. That doesn't mean you actually have to believe it.
I don't think anyone's even been able to determine what "event" this clearly-false statement was made at.
(next thing you know, they'll be posting articles here about how the Xbox 360 is powered by DEAD KITTENS...)
Never mind the fact that the story was factually incorrect in several manners, mistakes that were quickly pointed out. That couldn't have been the case, since anything printed on TEH INTARNET is always 110% true.
(At least two different people here inside MS with the knowledge pointed out glaring mistakes in that Anandtech gibberish within 15 minutes of that story being published. Essentially, the guy was talking out of his ass.)
Well, at least one MS employee reports that they played on a 360 Kiosk that clearly was set up wrong, and as a result it was full of artifacts and pixelization.
The Kameo demo I played at the company meeting sure didn't show any signs of looking bad in any way. So I'd be surprised if the kiosks weren't running the exact same thing I played on.
I wonder if the kiosk you played on was set correctly or not. Apparently there's a significant problem with Wal-Mart know-it-all employees tampering with the 360 kiosks and screwing up the video modes. I guess there are a number of kiosks that have been played around with resulting in the 360 outputting a 480i signal to the 720p native displays - resulting in blocky and stretched video signals that look HORRIBLE.
What's so irrelevant about albums in ID3 tags? I still listen to a lot of my music an album at a time, and some of the albums I have flow into each other - not tracking the album would force me to manually create playlists for each of those albums.
I understand the skepticism. I felt the same way back when I first heard about them - I figured they were just pretty faces to sucker in male gamers. That was before I joined PMS and found out more about the FD in the process.
:) I figure the fact that she already knows them all and plays with them regularly (and often can beat them) might help her get in, too. :)
And in the meantime, I'm rooting for a friend of mine to be chosen to fill the open spot on the Frag Dolls.
I was always a fan of "PMS Means Skills", going the recursive route. :)
People don't go around flaunting their straightness
Bull-fucking-shit.
People do it ALL THE TIME. Just that unless you're specifically looking for it and thinking about it, you don't even see it, it's so normal and accepted.
The couple walking down the street holding hands. The girl showing off her engagement ring. The teenage boy with the "bikini inspector" shirt. The photograph of the wife and kids on some guy's desk at work. And countless other things.
Relationships are a BIG part of life. You can't do much to get away from them in some manner, and it's all constant displays of people being straight. Now it's not flaunting like someone standing in the mall yelling, "look at me everyone, I'm straight", but it sure as hell is making peoples' sexualities clear.
Yet if I do any of the same things as a gay woman, I risk people complaining about me flaunting my sexuality. And I've realized anyone that does so and claims they're fine with people being gay, well, they're lying.
Now, as far as why girl gamers deserve "special attention"? Right now, I think a little extra attention is good for gamers in general. It will educate some of the guys a bit to realize we're out there, and that the one they run across isn't a fluke. More importantly, it might help more gaming girls to be a bit more open about their choice of entertainment, that there are others, and that they don't need to be embarassed that they play games. And this really does happen - there have been girls that have come to the clan forums and told us how shocked they were to find out about us, and how they look forward to having other girls to play with.
And anyone that has issues with me having "girl" in my gamertag has issues with girl gamers. The ones that say it's because "it shouldn't matter" are just the ones that are being dishonest with themselves/others about it. The ones that don't care and don't bother to tell everyone in the world they don't care are the ones that are really fine about it.
They decided on "Pandora's Maiden Soldiers"??
Please, tell me you're kidding!
The Frag Dolls are also paid representatives of UbiSoft - they are about making appearances and being gaming "personalities". I don't find it surprising that they'd have some level of expectation about appearance, as would many jobs that require regular media exposure/public appearances.
However, just because Ubi decided to consider appearance, doesn't mean that's ALL they considered. If you dig up old blog entries on the Frag Dolls site, you'll see some descriptions of the process they went through. Demonstrating that they were skilled gamers was a big part of the process. A much bigger part than deciding if they were attractive enough - I'm sure there were some very pretty faces that were dumped during the application process cause they couldn't play well enough to keep up.
So remember, while PMS is a real clan, the Frag Dolls are actually employees of Ubisoft in a manner. Enough that when one of them took a job at another gaming company, she had to leave the Dolls. And if I didn't work at MS, I'd apply for the open spot - a couple of the dolls encouraged me to do so at PAX before I told them...
If you don't care, then congrats! You're not one of the people we're targetting by being obvious about being female gamers.
But then again, I have to wonder - if you really don't care, they why do you care if we're making it a point to let people know we're female?
For example, I'm also gay - and I've seen enough of the "I don't care if you're gay, just do it in private" attitude to realize that what's being said doesn't fit the person's actual attitude. If someone didn't care if I was gay, they also wouldn't care if I held my partner's hand in public. The fact that it bothers such people means that they AREN'T ok with it, since they don't make the big deal about straight people doing the same thing.
So I wonder if there's some of that here - people pretending they're not sexist and saying it's ok to be a gaming girl, just as long as we aren't visible about it.
Don't quite know about that, but I know of a couple women in my clan that are mothers, and make sure their kids go to bed on time so that they can hop on and play Halo. :)
I'm suspecting that when I get to that point, the kids won't be playing games until the homework is finished - because I'll be playing instead.
Nobody's going to notice your all-male clan... why? Because there are already a ton of them out there. Perhaps that wasn't the out-and-out goal when they were made, but there they are.
But were there a ton of people still playing Enter the Matrix a year later?
There are still hundreds of thousands of people that play Halo 2 over live every week, and it's been nearly a year. While that doesn't make it the best game ever, it does suggest that it's definitely a really good game.
What I want is to join a game and not be immediately singled out for negative treatment. Comments like "Are you really a girl?", "That's gotta be a guy cause girls don't play games", and "Get back in the kitchen, b$#(!" are not unusual, nor is being teamkilled just because of being female. I realize some of these come from guys who normally pull that crap on other guys, so that I am recieving equal treatment from the antisocial fuckhead camp. But I get guys who are fine with other guys that start that crap too, and that's what pisses many of us girls off.
If that's what you mean by "one of the guys", then I appreciate the sentiment. The phrasing leaves something to be desired though, because of the inherent sexism prevalent from people thinking of online gaming as a guy's world.
(and before someone goes off on me for being "one of those women" who complain about sexism inherent in everything, I've long rolled my eyes at such women and am totally aware of the irony in me making the statements I have...)
I never referred to you as a brain-dead idiot... Just that there are a lot of them out there that we have to deal with. So chill out when assuming that everything said is about you personally.
And considering the amount of people that I've played with after joining PMS, large numbers of people with overall positive attitudes and good personalities, I'd say we're hardly alienating ourselves from gaming culture. Just the opposite - we're a definite part of it, just a part that excludes the "gaming is guys' territory" crowd.
No division at all.
As Mistletoe said, there is overlap between PMS and the Frag Dolls.
And I've been gaming since I was like 6, I have about a dozen consoles at home, and am playing something just about every single day. And the Dolls and some of the PMS girls make me look like a casual gamer in comparison. It's almost scary how hardcore they are.
I know a bunch of girls that game just because they like games.
There's a whole group of us.
We even have a website.
Imagine that.
If these women so obsessed with being treated equally, why do they so deliberately differentiate themselves from the pack, and still expect to be treated just like one of the guys?
Mistake #1 - we don't WANT to be "one of the guys". To suggest that implies that gaming is your territory, and that we need your "permission" to be allowed to play. And that's total bullshit.
I want to make it clear I'm a girl so that guys can be aware that we do play. Some guys are fine with it, and it quickly becomes just my gamertag, and they don't even see it as an issue. And the ones that make a big deal about it, well, I'm happy to know they'll remember they were beaten by a girl, cause surely their ego needs such a beating.
Is this a case of women wanting to be more than equal?
Let's wait until we're at least equal before wondering about things like this, please.