Well, if you trade "in game" gold for real live cash, that ought to be taxed. What's the difference between doing that and EBay'ing any other item?
If you never cash in your virtual gold, it shouldn't have any impact, the same as if you play any game for fun but don't realize any money. I have trouble believing that it's ever going to come down to having to file a virtual income tax statement ("income: 25,000 gold; expenses: flying mount, 5,000 gold, helm of the uber avatar, 1,500 gold,...)
Right, and that's why, despite the security measures, planes are just raining out of the sky as every lunatic, fruitcake, and religious extremist puts bombs, machines guns and poison gas on planes.
Yeah, it does sound familiar, which is why it isn't going to happen. Because immediately after you gut the flight attendent, 200 people who don't want to be flown into a big building are going to jump you. Basically, any kind of "smuggle a knife on and seize the plane from all the cowering people" isn't going to work anymore, because people would rather take a chance on getting knifed, than be killed for sure in plane crash.
The death penalty in EQ is way overdramatized, given that you pretty much always are grouped with someone who has a 90% or better rez. The main problem with EQ when I played was that most of the time you sat in spot and killed the same stuff over and over and over again. It wasn't hard, it wasn't "hardcore", it was just monotonous.
I wouldn't describe WoW as "casual". Yes, you can get into it, play for half an hour, and get out (in EQ you'd have been yelling for a group for at least that long) but if you get serious and run instances and do raiding, you're going to be at least as hardcore as EQ.
So it sounds like they are getting rid of what I liked about the original game... you can't hide in the shadows (which I guess makes the programming easier), you can't invest training in a particular weapon and get better at it... it sounds like it's just going to be another run and gun shooter.
That a computer can play the game better than a human is a good sign of a bad game.
Please RTFA. Where does it say that the computer plays better than a human? In fact, I can guarantee you that it doesn't.
I doubt anyone goes from 1 to 70 using this. What it can be used by is gold farmers who want to gather cash by repetitively trying to gather resources at a spot, regardless of whether there is actually a resource there.
As to who will do the next moonwalk: before you get too impressed with the Chinese spacewalk, you might want to compare the 30 or so minute walk they did with the upcoming mission to the Hubble telescope: 5 days of two astronauts working 7 hour days outside the shuttle. The Chinese spacewalk is a great achievement. I'm not belittling it in the least. But there is a HUGE gap between what they've accomplished, and what the US and Russia have learned about living and working in space.
To say who is going to be next to the moon is impossible at this point. How many spacecraft have the Chinese soft-landed on another world? How will their country hold up on the stresses of dealing with enormous growth, with pollution, with reconciling new economic prosperity and an oppressive government regime? I'm skeptical because we've already been thru the whole "planned society will outperform weak-minded free market capitalists" a few times. Khrushchev certainly thought so. We all know how that turned out.
I would't ask "how" you know something. I'd just say "ok, on your resume it says you did blah, explain to me how it works, or what you fixed". And I understand that sometimes someone has to think a minute or talk thru it... I'm not always articulate and sometimes I have to start explaining something, then start over because I suddenly remembered some critical point. But the thing is, if the interviewer probes some, or says "gee, that isn't clear, what about X" I can then say "oh yeah, that was done this way because we tried Y and Y had these issues". The critical thing is to explain the thought process, because if you can't, it's a pretty good indication that you didn't really understand what you were doing.
Giving a "job talk" is fine. When I've interviewed people that's usually what I've focused on... what did you do in your last job, and how did you do it? How well can you explain it? If you can't explain to me how your project worked, or it sounds like BS, that's a pretty clear danger sign. Just because you know the details of some programming language or can write a loop in Perl that doesn't mean you can get the job done.
And personally, I have to deal with so many languages in one day that I'm lousy at remembering syntax, or the differences between java io library and C# io library, I have to use cheat sheets that I've built up. Doesn't mean I'm a crappy programmer.
What difference does it make how something was created? The post I replied to said that the creator of a game, who may have spent years and risked a fair bit creating a game, has ZERO ownership of the game. If the creator of an object has no rights on that object, then surely no one can acquire rights by trading bits of green paper for something. The stuff in your house is just as much mine as it is yours.
Good idea. Let's extend it a little. Why should you have any claim on the stuff in your house? Just because it happens to be there?? In any sane society, I should be able to walk into your house and liberate the stuff I need, leaving any payment that I feel is appropriate.
WoW has done something similar when opening up some new of the new content, e.g. Sunwell Isle. You start off by joining an invasion force that controls a small portion of the island. Each day you can do quests (kill x, gather x, etc) that advance the conquest of the island. After players have completed a certain number of quests, a permanent change happens where more of the island is under control of the invasion force.
World of Warcraft has that. Both "in the world" Player vs. Player objectives (capture this city, etc), and instanced PvP battlegrounds. The "in the world" objectives do have consequences, e.g. the city of Halaa changes sides depending on who has captured it, or you receive a buff in a zone if your side controls a particular objective in that zone.
No, the UI is NOT reducing the fun of the game. The UI already is open... people can mod it to create virtually any interface you can imagine. The game does NOT require "repeating pointless activities". Some people choose to play WoW the way you play other MMOs, by repeating one activity over and over. That is their choice, NOT a requirement of the game.
WoW has way less grinding than any other MMO I'm familiar with. In fact, there really isn't any need to grind at all. You can move from quest to quest, area to area, dungeon to dungeon, without any particular amount of repetition. I've been playing for a couple of years and I can only remember one or two times where I sat in one spot for more than an hour or so doing the same thing. Finding resources like herbs is not a huge grind. I spend perhaps 20 minutes in the morning before I go to work, and it's actually a pretty relaxing start to the day.
I wish the people whining about "WoW grind" had experienced Everquest hell levels back before they smoothed out the experience curve. Weeks of sitting in the same spot killing the same mobs over and over till you knew every hair on their bodies, just to get a couple of pixels of experience. THAT was a grind. In fact, people who play other MMOs tend to be annoyed that you DON'T have to grind in WoW. I'm not sure why they considering grinding a necessary part of gameplay, but different strokes for different folks.
If you choose to grind in WoW, well, that's up to you, but don't whine about how horrible the grind is. You choose your playstyle... grind away at the same thing for hour after hour, or change it up and have fun as you play. It's up to you.
Actually, Blizzard has also embraced the 3rd party development community. The UI is written in LUA and XML, and that's completely open. Some operations are restricted to avoid completely automating gameplay, but WoW is far more open than most other games. I just run fairly minor enhancements but some people run UIs that are completely different, such that you wouldn't recognize the game as being the same.
why does it matter whether or not a player puts in that time, or a bot does?
Well, let's do the analogy thing. What difference does it make if you take some GPL software and tuck it into closed source? Really, what's the harm? You could have used it anyway, the source is still out there, anyone who wants to use it can. The impact on anyone else is ZERO. Yes, you're breaking the license, but obviously you don't care about that.
I'm sure there will be a "open source software is serious stuff, this is just a game" answer, but really, it comes down to the same thing. You are using software against the license agreement. People throughout this topic are talking about "slippery slope" and MS banning software they don't like. Well, if you buy that it's ok to violate this license, then it's ok to violate every license.
The difference is that a bot can pound on a location where something spawns 24x7, making it absolutely impossible for humans to access that resource. If Blizzard wasn't working hard to prevent botting, I can guarantee you that many resources that players rely on would simply be monopolized by people running bots, making the game unplayable.
The other, more subtle consequence of botting is that you end up with level 70 players who are utterly clueless about how to play. Playing well in WoW and handling the more difficult challenges requires a great deal of skill and practice. Someone can have all the great gear in the world and still end up causing a group or raid to wipe repeatedly because they don't know what to do when.
And then there are other problems, such as bots being used to gold farm, which screws up the economy by raising item prices (e.g. people pay real world dollars for in game gold and can then afford to outbid the players who come by their gold honestly).
Probably a host of other impacts as well, but these should be enough for you.
You might want to actually RTFA. The government regulated alcohol consumption, something it's been doing pretty much forever. Regulating alcohol consumption != censorship.
For God's sake this is NOT government censorship!!! No laws were passed, no black helicopters showed up. People sent letters to the company until it backed off. For it to be government censorship, there has to be... well... government involved.
Modern puzzles are all based around explicit known uses. If you fire a blue portal in Portal, you know that it will open a connection from the red portal. If you move a puzzle piece in Tomb Raider, you will know it will move a platform in an expected way. If, on the other hand, you attempt to use the crow on something in The Longest Journey, there is a 90% chance that you will have no idea what it does, and the attempted action will have no consequences.
The Longest Journey was one of the best puzzle games ever made. The puzzles were actually logical, rather than the "do stuff at random and hope a door opens up" variety. If you thought about what you were trying to do, you could usually figure them out. And they were really well integrated into the excellent storyline.
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Well, if you trade "in game" gold for real live cash, that ought to be taxed. What's the difference between doing that and EBay'ing any other item?
If you never cash in your virtual gold, it shouldn't have any impact, the same as if you play any game for fun but don't realize any money. I have trouble believing that it's ever going to come down to having to file a virtual income tax statement ("income: 25,000 gold; expenses: flying mount, 5,000 gold, helm of the uber avatar, 1,500 gold, ...)
So your answer is "do nothing" and hope that when the bomb goes off, someone else gets it? Nice.
Right, and that's why, despite the security measures, planes are just raining out of the sky as every lunatic, fruitcake, and religious extremist puts bombs, machines guns and poison gas on planes.
Yeah, it does sound familiar, which is why it isn't going to happen. Because immediately after you gut the flight attendent, 200 people who don't want to be flown into a big building are going to jump you. Basically, any kind of "smuggle a knife on and seize the plane from all the cowering people" isn't going to work anymore, because people would rather take a chance on getting knifed, than be killed for sure in plane crash.
The death penalty in EQ is way overdramatized, given that you pretty much always are grouped with someone who has a 90% or better rez. The main problem with EQ when I played was that most of the time you sat in spot and killed the same stuff over and over and over again. It wasn't hard, it wasn't "hardcore", it was just monotonous.
I wouldn't describe WoW as "casual". Yes, you can get into it, play for half an hour, and get out (in EQ you'd have been yelling for a group for at least that long) but if you get serious and run instances and do raiding, you're going to be at least as hardcore as EQ.
So it sounds like they are getting rid of what I liked about the original game... you can't hide in the shadows (which I guess makes the programming easier), you can't invest training in a particular weapon and get better at it... it sounds like it's just going to be another run and gun shooter.
Yeah, I'm sure WoW players are really annoyed that Blizzard is preventing people from cheating.
Try again.
That a computer can play the game better than a human is a good sign of a bad game.
Please RTFA. Where does it say that the computer plays better than a human? In fact, I can guarantee you that it doesn't.
I doubt anyone goes from 1 to 70 using this. What it can be used by is gold farmers who want to gather cash by repetitively trying to gather resources at a spot, regardless of whether there is actually a resource there.
I'm sure the Chinese Central Committee will be fascinated by your theories.
As to who will do the next moonwalk: before you get too impressed with the Chinese spacewalk, you might want to compare the 30 or so minute walk they did with the upcoming mission to the Hubble telescope: 5 days of two astronauts working 7 hour days outside the shuttle. The Chinese spacewalk is a great achievement. I'm not belittling it in the least. But there is a HUGE gap between what they've accomplished, and what the US and Russia have learned about living and working in space.
To say who is going to be next to the moon is impossible at this point. How many spacecraft have the Chinese soft-landed on another world? How will their country hold up on the stresses of dealing with enormous growth, with pollution, with reconciling new economic prosperity and an oppressive government regime? I'm skeptical because we've already been thru the whole "planned society will outperform weak-minded free market capitalists" a few times. Khrushchev certainly thought so. We all know how that turned out.
I would't ask "how" you know something. I'd just say "ok, on your resume it says you did blah, explain to me how it works, or what you fixed". And I understand that sometimes someone has to think a minute or talk thru it... I'm not always articulate and sometimes I have to start explaining something, then start over because I suddenly remembered some critical point. But the thing is, if the interviewer probes some, or says "gee, that isn't clear, what about X" I can then say "oh yeah, that was done this way because we tried Y and Y had these issues". The critical thing is to explain the thought process, because if you can't, it's a pretty good indication that you didn't really understand what you were doing.
Giving a "job talk" is fine. When I've interviewed people that's usually what I've focused on... what did you do in your last job, and how did you do it? How well can you explain it? If you can't explain to me how your project worked, or it sounds like BS, that's a pretty clear danger sign. Just because you know the details of some programming language or can write a loop in Perl that doesn't mean you can get the job done.
And personally, I have to deal with so many languages in one day that I'm lousy at remembering syntax, or the differences between java io library and C# io library, I have to use cheat sheets that I've built up. Doesn't mean I'm a crappy programmer.
What difference does it make how something was created? The post I replied to said that the creator of a game, who may have spent years and risked a fair bit creating a game, has ZERO ownership of the game. If the creator of an object has no rights on that object, then surely no one can acquire rights by trading bits of green paper for something. The stuff in your house is just as much mine as it is yours.
Good idea. Let's extend it a little. Why should you have any claim on the stuff in your house? Just because it happens to be there?? In any sane society, I should be able to walk into your house and liberate the stuff I need, leaving any payment that I feel is appropriate.
WoW has done something similar when opening up some new of the new content, e.g. Sunwell Isle. You start off by joining an invasion force that controls a small portion of the island. Each day you can do quests (kill x, gather x, etc) that advance the conquest of the island. After players have completed a certain number of quests, a permanent change happens where more of the island is under control of the invasion force.
World of Warcraft has that. Both "in the world" Player vs. Player objectives (capture this city, etc), and instanced PvP battlegrounds. The "in the world" objectives do have consequences, e.g. the city of Halaa changes sides depending on who has captured it, or you receive a buff in a zone if your side controls a particular objective in that zone.
No, the UI is NOT reducing the fun of the game. The UI already is open... people can mod it to create virtually any interface you can imagine. The game does NOT require "repeating pointless activities". Some people choose to play WoW the way you play other MMOs, by repeating one activity over and over. That is their choice, NOT a requirement of the game.
WoW has way less grinding than any other MMO I'm familiar with. In fact, there really isn't any need to grind at all. You can move from quest to quest, area to area, dungeon to dungeon, without any particular amount of repetition. I've been playing for a couple of years and I can only remember one or two times where I sat in one spot for more than an hour or so doing the same thing. Finding resources like herbs is not a huge grind. I spend perhaps 20 minutes in the morning before I go to work, and it's actually a pretty relaxing start to the day.
I wish the people whining about "WoW grind" had experienced Everquest hell levels back before they smoothed out the experience curve. Weeks of sitting in the same spot killing the same mobs over and over till you knew every hair on their bodies, just to get a couple of pixels of experience. THAT was a grind. In fact, people who play other MMOs tend to be annoyed that you DON'T have to grind in WoW. I'm not sure why they considering grinding a necessary part of gameplay, but different strokes for different folks.
If you choose to grind in WoW, well, that's up to you, but don't whine about how horrible the grind is. You choose your playstyle... grind away at the same thing for hour after hour, or change it up and have fun as you play. It's up to you.
Actually, Blizzard has also embraced the 3rd party development community. The UI is written in LUA and XML, and that's completely open. Some operations are restricted to avoid completely automating gameplay, but WoW is far more open than most other games. I just run fairly minor enhancements but some people run UIs that are completely different, such that you wouldn't recognize the game as being the same.
Well, let's do the analogy thing. What difference does it make if you take some GPL software and tuck it into closed source? Really, what's the harm? You could have used it anyway, the source is still out there, anyone who wants to use it can. The impact on anyone else is ZERO. Yes, you're breaking the license, but obviously you don't care about that.
I'm sure there will be a "open source software is serious stuff, this is just a game" answer, but really, it comes down to the same thing. You are using software against the license agreement. People throughout this topic are talking about "slippery slope" and MS banning software they don't like. Well, if you buy that it's ok to violate this license, then it's ok to violate every license.
The difference is that a bot can pound on a location where something spawns 24x7, making it absolutely impossible for humans to access that resource. If Blizzard wasn't working hard to prevent botting, I can guarantee you that many resources that players rely on would simply be monopolized by people running bots, making the game unplayable.
The other, more subtle consequence of botting is that you end up with level 70 players who are utterly clueless about how to play. Playing well in WoW and handling the more difficult challenges requires a great deal of skill and practice. Someone can have all the great gear in the world and still end up causing a group or raid to wipe repeatedly because they don't know what to do when.
And then there are other problems, such as bots being used to gold farm, which screws up the economy by raising item prices (e.g. people pay real world dollars for in game gold and can then afford to outbid the players who come by their gold honestly).
Probably a host of other impacts as well, but these should be enough for you.
You might want to actually RTFA. The government regulated alcohol consumption, something it's been doing pretty much forever. Regulating alcohol consumption != censorship.
Of course a court can take action based on speech. What do you think happens in a defamation suit?
For God's sake this is NOT government censorship!!! No laws were passed, no black helicopters showed up. People sent letters to the company until it backed off. For it to be government censorship, there has to be... well... government involved.
The Longest Journey was one of the best puzzle games ever made. The puzzles were actually logical, rather than the "do stuff at random and hope a door opens up" variety. If you thought about what you were trying to do, you could usually figure them out. And they were really well integrated into the excellent storyline.