First, yes, copyright infringement is theft. If I am selling a product, and someone takes it without paying for it, it is theft. Period. If you sneak into a movie, it doesn't cost the movie operator any more to show the movie, but you've still stolen the cost of the movie ticket.
Second, when you try to analyze compensation you start getting into a very tricky area. Just how much is a person's time worth? Why should I be paid more then you? Why am I paid more than the guy who cleans the toilets in my building? You can argue and hand wave about scarcity and skills and so forth, but it gets pretty tricky.
Let's say an author spends 5 years producing a book, and it sells fairly well. Right now, each person who decides to read the work has made a decision that the book is worthwhile, and contributes to the author. It sounds like you are proposing that there be some arbitrary standard that decides what is "fair" compensation for the author, or decides that authors will only be compensated for the first X copies, and the rest will be free. Presumably the same standard would apply to other lines of work... the government would decide how much I need, and allocate it to me? Sounds like I'd be giving up a bit of freedom.
The Longest Journey was a really wonderful adventure. Outside of the occasional bad word, the overall theme might be a bit disturbing... as I recall, she ends up having to control her memory of her father abusing her (or at least that was a pretty obvious way of looking at it). But for sure it's a great point and click adventure with a lot of fun characters.
I suffered with Thunderbird for a couple of years and then when I built a new computer just gave up on it and switched to whatever replaced Outlook Express (Windows Live Mail or something like that). Yes, I know, evil empire and all that, but it just worked, instead of having to try to outguess whatever the Thunderbird auto-configure was trying to do.
This thread really sums up the two approaches to the game... either "you are looking for a relaxed social environment to have fun in" or "you are looking for a strong team to progress thru the content".
I'm in the "relaxed" category. I go along with the idea that I already have a daytime job, I don't need to interview for a WoW job as well. This crystallized for me when I was in a guild raid a while back and the raid leader commented that we were "behind schedule". Screw it, this is a GAME. At work I can be on the clock and have a scheduled date for deliverables. When I'm playing a game, if things don't go so well or we don't have the DPS or I miss healing someone, that's ok, it's just a game. The guild I'm in now has exactly that approach... we'd all like to progress, we'd all like to do better, but the main criteria for being in the guild is being a decent human being, treating others well, and being able to enjoy each other's company. If someone wants advice, people are happy to give it, but no one is looked down upon for not having the gear or the WoW skills. We aren't going to go as fast as the uber raiding guild, but as far as I'm concerned, we're going to have more fun.
I agree that I don't enjoy Cata as much as WotLK, but I don't think it has to do with money grubbing. If Blizzard can get someone to pay to buy a companion or t-shirt, it has zero impact on my play experience, other than Blizzard having more money to put into the game.
For me the problem with questing is that when you combine all the helpers they have (arrows, map dots, etc) and the ability to fly anywhere, questing becomes "fly to the exclamation mark, accept it, bring up map, fly to spot, hover over mobs to figure out which ones to kill, fly back and turn in". It just makes the questing way too mechanical. And the ability to fly anywhere lets you skip the detail on the ground, so you lose a lot of immersion in the game.
Yeah, Blizzard just knows how to do things right. It was the same for me. The other thing that killed EQ for me was that I had an SOE Station Account, and I wanted to downgrade to just EQ, and customer service said that I couldn't downgrade, but I should just cancel my account, use up the rest of the month, and resubscribe next month. That was a big mistake on SOE's part.. telling your customers to go away is never a good idea.
It's going to burst at some point simply because many of the people who joined the genre with WoW never play anything else. When they get bored with WoW (and given how badly Cataclysm is doing in North America, they ARE getting bored with WoW)
I was surprised because I had the impression Cata sold quite well. I did a bit of googling and found this:
The new expansion sold more than 3.3 million copies worldwide as of its first 24 hours of release, including digital pre-sales, eclipsing the previous first day record of 2.8 million sold for Wrath of the Lich King, released in 2008.
It may be that Cata sales haven't continued as well as WotLK, but I suspect Cata outsold most of the new free MMO's put together.
So the big $15 a month makes it immoral? In other words, the same cost as going to a movie once a month and buying coke & popcorn? If that's what gets you going, what are you going to do when your credit card company hits you for 20% interest because you were a day late paying? Or your company's CEO gets a $10 million dollar golden parachute as your company tanks and you lose your job? On the grand scale of things, whether you pay $15 for perhaps 100 hours of entertainment is pretty tiny. You could mow one more lawn and pay for WoW for a couple of months.
Well, in the case of WoW, quality is correlated with success. I went from Everquest, and then briefly Everquest 2, to WoW. The difference was night and day. EQ was so riddled with bugs that you just got used to the idea that the boats didn't work, that you fell thru the world, that professions were bugged, etc. And you also got used to the idea that "playing" meant yelling for an hour to get a group, then once you finally found a decent group, finding a "camp" to sit in, then sitting there as long as your sanity held out killing the same mobs over and over and over and....
WoW changed all that. The game just worked, the game was fun, you could do stuff on your own or with other people... it was an eye opener. It's worth remembering that WoW was NOT automatically crowned as "the king of MMOs". It came out about the same time as EQ 2, and you would have had to say that EQ 2 had the inside track, as it was the follow on to the 800 pound gorilla of the MMO world. WoW was successful because Blizzard, as it always does, supplied a very high quality game.
As far as community, yes, Internet games, like the Internet in general, has a lot of jerks. I've met a ton of friendly, mature people who are more interested in having fun than in yelling about their uber gear. I'm sure it's basically the same in all MMOs. Just depends on who you run into.
I'm guessing you didn't bother to read the article, which points out that there are certain ideas for interfaces (such as keeping them consistent) that make them easy to use, regardless of whether it's mouse & keyboard or touch.
I've programmed in both Java &.Net languages (C# & VB.Net). I'd say that advantage is that the.Net languages benefited from having Java go first. You might think of them as "Java with the rough edges taken off".
If Bin Laden had obviously surrendered, they would have loaded him on the chopper and left, but "obviously surrendering" would involved him immediately kneeling, putting his hands in the air, and then somehow verifying that he isn't wearing a suicide vest. He didn't do that, and he's dead.
Sure, for some people, managing ANY computer system is not what they know about or are interested in. What I'm responding to is the statement that managing Windows is somehow magically much harder than managing Ubuntu or a Mac. I'm also not sure, even on a browser based setup, how you are going to avoid some sort of hierarchical folder / file structure for organizing your mail / bookmarks / photos / videos / documents / whatever. If people are confused by files & folders in Windows, they are still going to be confused by that in Chrome.
I've been running various Windows computers for 20 to 25 years, don't recall ever having to wipe the partition and reinstall. I don't do a whole lot of management either. I'm baffled by the whole "Windows is so hard for the average user to manage" argument. Maybe if you are managing a server farm you are way better off with Linux, but for the average desktop user it's just not a big deal.
Process is fine, as long as it's always aimed at producing better software. When the goal becomes the process itself, that's when you have a problem.
If you are having lots of trouble with changes introducing bugs, it's time to extend test coverage, because that will help the goal of producing reliable software on time. If the goal is just "90% test coverage" without any relationship to how that improves the software product, you've got a process problem.
I've been in situations where everything is going fine, we are producing good code sprint to sprint, but the scrum master gets focused on getting a smooth burn down chart. The burn down chart is NOT the product. If the product is being produced successfully & on time, focusing on the burn down chart is a distraction that is hurting, not helping.
I thought the emphasis on the stresses of being locked in a ship with no end in sight was pretty well done. Yeah, some people are going to blow their brains out under those circumstances. Some people are going to argue. Some people are going to hole up. Some people are going to try to fix everyone. SGU did a great job of showing that. It was nice that it wasn't all laser space battles that we've seen a gazillion times before.
For me the difference between SG1, SGA, and SGU was the characters. I really loved the characters and the interaction on SG1 (not to mention the great story arcs) On SGU, I thought they did a great job with Rush... he had to have a lot of power, because he & Eli were the only real experts on Ancient technology, but you couldn't trust him. Or to put it another way, you had to trust him with your life... but you also had to watch your back. It was an interesting dynamic.
SGA, OTOH, I just never cared about any of the characters, and I hated whoever the woman was who was in charge. She looked like she was thinking "Ok, now I need to look resolute". I just couldn't care less whether those people lived or died.
I think SGU was doomed because it had the same basic problem as star trek voyager: when you flying thru space faster than everyone else, in a super high tech ship built by people who were almost gods, how to have any continuing interaction with anyone outside the ship? They fudged it but it really never made any sense once they tried to develop ongoing enemies to deal with.
Anyway, despite that, sad to see SGU go... certainly not going to watch guys with flashlights under their chins going "oh... there's definitely something there!"
You might want to give Stargate another try. They did a great job of building believable characters, fantastic story arcs, and great chemistry. The last couple of seasons after they defeated the Goauld weren't as good, but overall it was a great show.
I don't care either way, when it comes then very nice, but could we hold off on these sort of posts until, say, a few months before it comes out in 2014? Call me troll i don't care, i'm just sick of hyping up the hype that leads to endless post-pones that have been the norm in recent years.
I agree, and that's even accepting that Blizzard product delays are typically because they want to make the product as high quality as possible, not because they're a shit developer who needs the extra time to make their product barely salable. Or to chase a never-ending stream of complete revamps like a certain notable example.
"It's done when it's done" is a great mantra, but we already knew that. So "no official release date" is as non-newsworthy as possible.
If only ALL developers were such shit developers.
In other news, yes, you are a troll. Try harder next time.
Slashdot Mirror
Excuse me, but who is going to pay authors by the hour?
First, yes, copyright infringement is theft. If I am selling a product, and someone takes it without paying for it, it is theft. Period. If you sneak into a movie, it doesn't cost the movie operator any more to show the movie, but you've still stolen the cost of the movie ticket.
Second, when you try to analyze compensation you start getting into a very tricky area. Just how much is a person's time worth? Why should I be paid more then you? Why am I paid more than the guy who cleans the toilets in my building? You can argue and hand wave about scarcity and skills and so forth, but it gets pretty tricky.
Let's say an author spends 5 years producing a book, and it sells fairly well. Right now, each person who decides to read the work has made a decision that the book is worthwhile, and contributes to the author. It sounds like you are proposing that there be some arbitrary standard that decides what is "fair" compensation for the author, or decides that authors will only be compensated for the first X copies, and the rest will be free. Presumably the same standard would apply to other lines of work... the government would decide how much I need, and allocate it to me? Sounds like I'd be giving up a bit of freedom.
The Longest Journey was a really wonderful adventure. Outside of the occasional bad word, the overall theme might be a bit disturbing... as I recall, she ends up having to control her memory of her father abusing her (or at least that was a pretty obvious way of looking at it). But for sure it's a great point and click adventure with a lot of fun characters.
God yes!!!
I suffered with Thunderbird for a couple of years and then when I built a new computer just gave up on it and switched to whatever replaced Outlook Express (Windows Live Mail or something like that). Yes, I know, evil empire and all that, but it just worked, instead of having to try to outguess whatever the Thunderbird auto-configure was trying to do.
This thread really sums up the two approaches to the game... either "you are looking for a relaxed social environment to have fun in" or "you are looking for a strong team to progress thru the content".
I'm in the "relaxed" category. I go along with the idea that I already have a daytime job, I don't need to interview for a WoW job as well. This crystallized for me when I was in a guild raid a while back and the raid leader commented that we were "behind schedule". Screw it, this is a GAME. At work I can be on the clock and have a scheduled date for deliverables. When I'm playing a game, if things don't go so well or we don't have the DPS or I miss healing someone, that's ok, it's just a game. The guild I'm in now has exactly that approach... we'd all like to progress, we'd all like to do better, but the main criteria for being in the guild is being a decent human being, treating others well, and being able to enjoy each other's company. If someone wants advice, people are happy to give it, but no one is looked down upon for not having the gear or the WoW skills. We aren't going to go as fast as the uber raiding guild, but as far as I'm concerned, we're going to have more fun.
I agree that I don't enjoy Cata as much as WotLK, but I don't think it has to do with money grubbing. If Blizzard can get someone to pay to buy a companion or t-shirt, it has zero impact on my play experience, other than Blizzard having more money to put into the game.
For me the problem with questing is that when you combine all the helpers they have (arrows, map dots, etc) and the ability to fly anywhere, questing becomes "fly to the exclamation mark, accept it, bring up map, fly to spot, hover over mobs to figure out which ones to kill, fly back and turn in". It just makes the questing way too mechanical. And the ability to fly anywhere lets you skip the detail on the ground, so you lose a lot of immersion in the game.
Yeah, Blizzard just knows how to do things right. It was the same for me. The other thing that killed EQ for me was that I had an SOE Station Account, and I wanted to downgrade to just EQ, and customer service said that I couldn't downgrade, but I should just cancel my account, use up the rest of the month, and resubscribe next month. That was a big mistake on SOE's part.. telling your customers to go away is never a good idea.
Well... obviously the free MMOs aren't "sold"... what I mean is that more people have played Cata than the new free MMOs put together.
It's going to burst at some point simply because many of the people who joined the genre with WoW never play anything else. When they get bored with WoW (and given how badly Cataclysm is doing in North America, they ARE getting bored with WoW)
I was surprised because I had the impression Cata sold quite well. I did a bit of googling and found this:
The new expansion sold more than 3.3 million copies worldwide as of its first 24 hours of release, including digital pre-sales, eclipsing the previous first day record of 2.8 million sold for Wrath of the Lich King, released in 2008.
It may be that Cata sales haven't continued as well as WotLK, but I suspect Cata outsold most of the new free MMO's put together.
So the big $15 a month makes it immoral? In other words, the same cost as going to a movie once a month and buying coke & popcorn? If that's what gets you going, what are you going to do when your credit card company hits you for 20% interest because you were a day late paying? Or your company's CEO gets a $10 million dollar golden parachute as your company tanks and you lose your job? On the grand scale of things, whether you pay $15 for perhaps 100 hours of entertainment is pretty tiny. You could mow one more lawn and pay for WoW for a couple of months.
Well, in the case of WoW, quality is correlated with success. I went from Everquest, and then briefly Everquest 2, to WoW. The difference was night and day. EQ was so riddled with bugs that you just got used to the idea that the boats didn't work, that you fell thru the world, that professions were bugged, etc. And you also got used to the idea that "playing" meant yelling for an hour to get a group, then once you finally found a decent group, finding a "camp" to sit in, then sitting there as long as your sanity held out killing the same mobs over and over and over and ....
WoW changed all that. The game just worked, the game was fun, you could do stuff on your own or with other people... it was an eye opener. It's worth remembering that WoW was NOT automatically crowned as "the king of MMOs". It came out about the same time as EQ 2, and you would have had to say that EQ 2 had the inside track, as it was the follow on to the 800 pound gorilla of the MMO world. WoW was successful because Blizzard, as it always does, supplied a very high quality game.
As far as community, yes, Internet games, like the Internet in general, has a lot of jerks. I've met a ton of friendly, mature people who are more interested in having fun than in yelling about their uber gear. I'm sure it's basically the same in all MMOs. Just depends on who you run into.
Being 56 myself and a guild leader in WoW I also hope I'm not too old to play. That would be sad :(
I'm guessing you didn't bother to read the article, which points out that there are certain ideas for interfaces (such as keeping them consistent) that make them easy to use, regardless of whether it's mouse & keyboard or touch.
I've programmed in both Java & .Net languages (C# & VB.Net). I'd say that advantage is that the .Net languages benefited from having Java go first. You might think of them as "Java with the rough edges taken off".
If Bin Laden had obviously surrendered, they would have loaded him on the chopper and left, but "obviously surrendering" would involved him immediately kneeling, putting his hands in the air, and then somehow verifying that he isn't wearing a suicide vest. He didn't do that, and he's dead.
Sure, for some people, managing ANY computer system is not what they know about or are interested in. What I'm responding to is the statement that managing Windows is somehow magically much harder than managing Ubuntu or a Mac. I'm also not sure, even on a browser based setup, how you are going to avoid some sort of hierarchical folder / file structure for organizing your mail / bookmarks / photos / videos / documents / whatever. If people are confused by files & folders in Windows, they are still going to be confused by that in Chrome.
Just what "caring attention" does Windows require?
I've been running various Windows computers for 20 to 25 years, don't recall ever having to wipe the partition and reinstall. I don't do a whole lot of management either. I'm baffled by the whole "Windows is so hard for the average user to manage" argument. Maybe if you are managing a server farm you are way better off with Linux, but for the average desktop user it's just not a big deal.
Just watched the final episode... very well done. I was wondering how they would wind it up and they did a great job.
Process is fine, as long as it's always aimed at producing better software. When the goal becomes the process itself, that's when you have a problem.
If you are having lots of trouble with changes introducing bugs, it's time to extend test coverage, because that will help the goal of producing reliable software on time. If the goal is just "90% test coverage" without any relationship to how that improves the software product, you've got a process problem.
I've been in situations where everything is going fine, we are producing good code sprint to sprint, but the scrum master gets focused on getting a smooth burn down chart. The burn down chart is NOT the product. If the product is being produced successfully & on time, focusing on the burn down chart is a distraction that is hurting, not helping.
I thought the emphasis on the stresses of being locked in a ship with no end in sight was pretty well done. Yeah, some people are going to blow their brains out under those circumstances. Some people are going to argue. Some people are going to hole up. Some people are going to try to fix everyone. SGU did a great job of showing that. It was nice that it wasn't all laser space battles that we've seen a gazillion times before.
For me the difference between SG1, SGA, and SGU was the characters. I really loved the characters and the interaction on SG1 (not to mention the great story arcs) On SGU, I thought they did a great job with Rush... he had to have a lot of power, because he & Eli were the only real experts on Ancient technology, but you couldn't trust him. Or to put it another way, you had to trust him with your life... but you also had to watch your back. It was an interesting dynamic.
SGA, OTOH, I just never cared about any of the characters, and I hated whoever the woman was who was in charge. She looked like she was thinking "Ok, now I need to look resolute". I just couldn't care less whether those people lived or died.
I think SGU was doomed because it had the same basic problem as star trek voyager: when you flying thru space faster than everyone else, in a super high tech ship built by people who were almost gods, how to have any continuing interaction with anyone outside the ship? They fudged it but it really never made any sense once they tried to develop ongoing enemies to deal with.
Anyway, despite that, sad to see SGU go... certainly not going to watch guys with flashlights under their chins going "oh... there's definitely something there!"
You might want to give Stargate another try. They did a great job of building believable characters, fantastic story arcs, and great chemistry. The last couple of seasons after they defeated the Goauld weren't as good, but overall it was a great show.
I loved Troi's mom and kept hoping Weasley would have a tragic transporter accident.
I agree, and that's even accepting that Blizzard product delays are typically because they want to make the product as high quality as possible, not because they're a shit developer who needs the extra time to make their product barely salable. Or to chase a never-ending stream of complete revamps like a certain notable example.
"It's done when it's done" is a great mantra, but we already knew that. So "no official release date" is as non-newsworthy as possible.
If only ALL developers were such shit developers.
In other news, yes, you are a troll. Try harder next time.