Now I know somebody's gonna' say "EVE is nothing like WOW or LOTRO!". True, is caters to the Sci-Fi fan and not the fantasy fan, it is an incredibly beautiful game, requires a lot of patience, has the biggest virtual universe of any other MMO and the average player-age is 27. Not 15.
Ah, so the folks who play EVE Online are relatively young? The people I play World of Warcraft with probably average about 35 or so. You do occasionally run into someone who has to go afk to do homework or clean their room, but that's the exception, not the rule.
Would a track wheel work as well as physically turning the pages? Would I occasionally hit the track wheel while reading and lose my place? Would the track wheel know to jump to the well thumbed places? I've been hearing about ebooks for about 20 years, and I think they haven't caugh on because there are a LOT of advantages to old fashioned paper.
I can't have real friends, with real social interaction online? Interesting, since I have known people online, people whom I consider very close.. for upwards to 12 years now. Well all talk regularly, we all know each other by name, we all care about one another.. Hell, you can even have a face-to-face interaction if you want with a webcam, or throw in a mic if you want to bitch about text being impersonal. (It really isn't, unless you type like a wild howler monkey or something, and none of us do.)
My online friends have counted for quite a bit, and likewise they feel the same on the issue. Why anyone thinks a computer removes some of (or all) the humanity out of a person on the other end of communication is beyond me..
Well, mostly because online friendships tend to be shallower than real world ones. Perhaps if you are talking with a mic and webcam it's a close approximation to what you get in the real world, but so much of our communication comes thru the inflection of voice, posture, even just timing of replies. Typing messages back and forth just isn't as deep communication as being face to face with another human being.
This doesn't mean that having online friends is wrong or terrible... but if that's all you have, you are missing out on part of the human experience.
Give me an e-reader that can do what a book can - full color, allows me to keep my purchases in as secure a manner as possible, won't break if I drop it or is trivially replaceable (not at $400, sorry), and I think I'd wobble over towards the e-reader zone, as it were.
I'm in same camp... and the one other book feature that I'd miss in an e-reader is the ability to riffle the pages quickly and browse to the section that I'm looking for.
The one use I could see for ebooks is a delivery mechanism for magazines and newspapers, particularly if it let you pick out a particular article and save/archive it when you discard the rest. It would still need a very well designed browsing interface but that would be something I'd be interested in.
Boy, that's a convenient way to make yourself feel better... "when a company tries to do right and I steal from them, it's not my fault, it's those darned record companies again".
The cost of an OEM Windows license is a large portion of the cost of a new machine, compared to any time in the past. For the cost of Windows and Office, you can buy 2 or 3 computers with no OS, and install linux. the problem is, the consumer is not given a choice, so we don't know how many would take the opportunity.
But it's pretty easy to make an educated guess. Just what percentage of computer users now are sophisticated enough to reload the Windows O/S that they are comfortable with, w/o making a call to tech support? My guess is that we're talking will not install their own O/S. Period. End of discussion.
What I'd like to understand, is that if this has been observed once, and they don't know what it is, how can astronomers estimate that hundreds of similar events occur each day???
Here's a thought - you want someone to "give back" to you when they use your software? Well, you could require them to pay you for the software and not allow them to redistribute it. In other words, you could follow the closed source model.
What amazes me is the hypocrisy of people who scream about "closed source" and "proprietary" and then bitch about companies that use open source software in compliance with the license. If you want "open source" live with the results.
When someone walks thru an airport wearing something that looks like a bomb, you probably want to do a little checking as to whether the person is doing a dry run or perhaps has a few screws loose. Certainly this person is at least slightly out of touch with today's reality.
Yep. This is the dumbest example of Slashdot FUD I think I've ever seen... and that covers a lot of territory. If you actually bother to read the articles, they're providing an easy way to download Windows Live. Whoop de do.
Given that this happened the same day nukes got flown on cruise missles across the USA, I think maybe people are just a little bit too focused on the evils of Microsoft.
You must be using a different Linux than I have... I don't like the structure of the Windows UI or the fact that MS seems to move stuff around at random, but it is WAY easier to configure Windows via the gui than to try to find the appropriate file(s) and then the appropriate settings within those files and then what to restart to make those settings take effect in Linux.
I was a level 67 + a lot of AAs enchanter in EQ. Somehow I felt like I was using some skill when we overpulled and the only way we survived was my skill and speed at mezzing, tashing the mezzed mobs, and keeping them mezzed. And the stuff I did in EQ was easy compared to the endgame in WoW. WoW instances and endgame requires a LOT of smarts and skills. Idiots who just run in and aggro wipe w/o taking down any mobs.
Yes, MMOs can be easy, repetitive, boring grinds that can be automated. Some people play them that way. The boredom can actually be vaguely relaxing. But they don't *have* to be that way. If *you* think they have to be that way, then I don't think I want to play an MMO that you design.
Go vs. video games: yes, Go is the more difficult, more strategic game. Although I don't play Go, my understanding is that Go vs. just about anything, Go is the deeper, more strategic game.
What is exactly wrong with him paying someone else to do this for him? To gain gold for him? To level a character for him?
If the guy is playing solitaire and he wants to pay someone else to play it for him until it's clear that it's a win, and then he comes in and lays down the last few cards, well, that's his business. However, in MMOs gold farmers have a direct (and negative) impact on the other players. In particular, gold farmers who are running bots can monopolize resources by continually pounding on spawn points, making it impossible for other players to get those resources in game.
That's the direct impact. The indirect impact is that you end up with "ebay'ed" players who are high level but incompetent to play their class. They may know how to push the attack button, but they don't have 60 or 70 levels of experience in what to do when an odd situation pops up. Such people are a pain to play with.
What it comes down to is that if you really don't enjoy playing a game (or part of a game) don't play it. If you don't like grinding, don't grind. I've got a 70 priest and a 63 hunter in WoW and I have *never* sat in area grinding. And believe me, as an ex-Everquest player, I know grinding.
don't play MMORPG's, but I presume that this is because playing a low-level RPG character in these games is boring
Not really... the low levels can be just as much fun as the high levels. What seems to drive people to buy gear and high level chars is not that they aren't having fun, but that they think they have to "win" by getting to a high level quickly.
Ok, if you really think that MMOs don't require skill and that the stuff you do in MMOs is boring, then clearly you aren't an MMO player, so it doesn't seem like you are the right one to be deciding how to design an MMO.
That lasted a whole 9 months after release, and then I was bored out of my skull with the poor endgame that WoW had.
My how the times have changed... WoW has an incredibly rich and entertaining endgame now. I suspect you left right before the first endgame additions came out. Even the older endgame like ZG is a ton of fun, and with the BC and the new free Black Temple expansion there is plenty of fun for everyone.
Imagine someone reading a discussion about SOE coming out with a new MMO. Imagine that someone being so dumb that they can't connect the dots when they read about how SOE trashed a different MMO.
In addition to what everyone else said about gutting the character classes, they did it *right after* selling an expansion. And by right after, it was something like within a week of an expansion going on sale, they did the revamp and blew away most of the character classes. Needless to say, the folks who actually like the game they had been playing, and who had bothered to buy the expansion, were not amused.
Well, my experience is the complete opposite of your experience. My last company had a large Bangalore dev office. Projects that would have had one or two experienced US developers had 4-5 Indian devs, with an Indian manager. And the results were horrendous. Even the Indian devs who had been around a while and theoretically were trained and experienced produced terrible code, larded with huge chunks of copy and paste junk. I did work with one or two people in the Bangalore office who seemed to be good, but the overall impression was that the Indian programmers wanted to look like they were producing stuff very quickly, no matter how shoddy the results were. And unfortunately I think it paid off for them, at least in the short term. Long term I don't think they can get away with it, but who knows?
Just because you're not spending your time on the Internet that hardly means that your life is set in concrete. I have a couple of friends who are well informed, caring, intelligent people... people who have traveled the world, done a variety of work, know how to use the Internet thru their jobs. And yet, they just don't want to spend their free time sitting behind a computer at home. Classifying them as cavemen is absurd. I actually think that the folks who just can't live w/o their Internet connection are more in the "keep life predictable" category... come home, read slashdot, reply to people, read the latest GNU license controversy, etc. Same old, same old.
And there's a direct line from from earlier MUDs and MMOs to EQ. I'm not dismissing EQ... I played it for more years than I want to think about. It was a great achievement for its time. Just as WoW is a great achievement for its time.
You give EQ1 WAY too much credit. I suspect that "core ticks" go back to any multiplayer game (e.g. rpgs). Zoning is something that is core to EQ1, and completely foreign to WoW. Yes, EQ1 eventually implemented instances, but from the player base reaction I don't believe they were original from EQ1.
I'm not saying that WoW was the originator of lots of concepts, but I don't think EQ1 was the originator either. EQ1 introduced some concepts, synthesized some others. WoW did the same... but did a MUCH better job of synthesizing. As far as the "seamless" concept, you have to give WoW credit there. I'm sure there are games before WoW that didn't have zoning as clunky as EQ1, but WoW really makes the "you are in the world, you just travel around, no zoning" concept work, and work REALLY well, in an MMO.
With EXTREMELY few exceptions, absolutely everything in WoW was pioneered with EverQuest.
Kinda... in the sense that the core elements (NPCs, walking around in a virtual world, having persistent characters, etc) are common to all MMOs that I'm aware of. Of course, WoW not only introduced new elements, but managed to get the old ones right.
When you can walk away from your machine and have your character hammer on a gold outcrop, mining that resource and preventing any other character from getting it, for days on end, that's cheating. Period. No fine line, no fancy footwork. Nothing hard to understand, no matter how hard you try to turn it into a moral grey area. If you want to promote this kind of behaviour, don't screw around, just announce that you are a selfish pig and go for it. And then let millions of players applaud as Blizzard bans you.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, so the folks who play EVE Online are relatively young? The people I play World of Warcraft with probably average about 35 or so. You do occasionally run into someone who has to go afk to do homework or clean their room, but that's the exception, not the rule.
Would a track wheel work as well as physically turning the pages? Would I occasionally hit the track wheel while reading and lose my place? Would the track wheel know to jump to the well thumbed places? I've been hearing about ebooks for about 20 years, and I think they haven't caugh on because there are a LOT of advantages to old fashioned paper.
Well, mostly because online friendships tend to be shallower than real world ones. Perhaps if you are talking with a mic and webcam it's a close approximation to what you get in the real world, but so much of our communication comes thru the inflection of voice, posture, even just timing of replies. Typing messages back and forth just isn't as deep communication as being face to face with another human being.
This doesn't mean that having online friends is wrong or terrible... but if that's all you have, you are missing out on part of the human experience.
I'm in same camp... and the one other book feature that I'd miss in an e-reader is the ability to riffle the pages quickly and browse to the section that I'm looking for.
The one use I could see for ebooks is a delivery mechanism for magazines and newspapers, particularly if it let you pick out a particular article and save/archive it when you discard the rest. It would still need a very well designed browsing interface but that would be something I'd be interested in.
Boy, that's a convenient way to make yourself feel better... "when a company tries to do right and I steal from them, it's not my fault, it's those darned record companies again".
But it's pretty easy to make an educated guess. Just what percentage of computer users now are sophisticated enough to reload the Windows O/S that they are comfortable with, w/o making a call to tech support? My guess is that we're talking will not install their own O/S. Period. End of discussion.
Having occasionally read the at -1, I'd have to say thank God for the mod system.
What I'd like to understand, is that if this has been observed once, and they don't know what it is, how can astronomers estimate that hundreds of similar events occur each day???
Here's a thought - you want someone to "give back" to you when they use your software? Well, you could require them to pay you for the software and not allow them to redistribute it. In other words, you could follow the closed source model.
What amazes me is the hypocrisy of people who scream about "closed source" and "proprietary" and then bitch about companies that use open source software in compliance with the license. If you want "open source" live with the results.
When someone walks thru an airport wearing something that looks like a bomb, you probably want to do a little checking as to whether the person is doing a dry run or perhaps has a few screws loose. Certainly this person is at least slightly out of touch with today's reality.
Yep. This is the dumbest example of Slashdot FUD I think I've ever seen... and that covers a lot of territory. If you actually bother to read the articles, they're providing an easy way to download Windows Live. Whoop de do.
Given that this happened the same day nukes got flown on cruise missles across the USA, I think maybe people are just a little bit too focused on the evils of Microsoft.
You must be using a different Linux than I have... I don't like the structure of the Windows UI or the fact that MS seems to move stuff around at random, but it is WAY easier to configure Windows via the gui than to try to find the appropriate file(s) and then the appropriate settings within those files and then what to restart to make those settings take effect in Linux.
I was a level 67 + a lot of AAs enchanter in EQ. Somehow I felt like I was using some skill when we overpulled and the only way we survived was my skill and speed at mezzing, tashing the mezzed mobs, and keeping them mezzed. And the stuff I did in EQ was easy compared to the endgame in WoW. WoW instances and endgame requires a LOT of smarts and skills. Idiots who just run in and aggro wipe w/o taking down any mobs.
Yes, MMOs can be easy, repetitive, boring grinds that can be automated. Some people play them that way. The boredom can actually be vaguely relaxing. But they don't *have* to be that way. If *you* think they have to be that way, then I don't think I want to play an MMO that you design.
Go vs. video games: yes, Go is the more difficult, more strategic game. Although I don't play Go, my understanding is that Go vs. just about anything, Go is the deeper, more strategic game.
If the guy is playing solitaire and he wants to pay someone else to play it for him until it's clear that it's a win, and then he comes in and lays down the last few cards, well, that's his business. However, in MMOs gold farmers have a direct (and negative) impact on the other players. In particular, gold farmers who are running bots can monopolize resources by continually pounding on spawn points, making it impossible for other players to get those resources in game.
That's the direct impact. The indirect impact is that you end up with "ebay'ed" players who are high level but incompetent to play their class. They may know how to push the attack button, but they don't have 60 or 70 levels of experience in what to do when an odd situation pops up. Such people are a pain to play with.
What it comes down to is that if you really don't enjoy playing a game (or part of a game) don't play it. If you don't like grinding, don't grind. I've got a 70 priest and a 63 hunter in WoW and I have *never* sat in area grinding. And believe me, as an ex-Everquest player, I know grinding.
Not really... the low levels can be just as much fun as the high levels. What seems to drive people to buy gear and high level chars is not that they aren't having fun, but that they think they have to "win" by getting to a high level quickly.
Ok, if you really think that MMOs don't require skill and that the stuff you do in MMOs is boring, then clearly you aren't an MMO player, so it doesn't seem like you are the right one to be deciding how to design an MMO.
My how the times have changed... WoW has an incredibly rich and entertaining endgame now. I suspect you left right before the first endgame additions came out. Even the older endgame like ZG is a ton of fun, and with the BC and the new free Black Temple expansion there is plenty of fun for everyone.
Imagine someone reading a discussion about SOE coming out with a new MMO. Imagine that someone being so dumb that they can't connect the dots when they read about how SOE trashed a different MMO.
In addition to what everyone else said about gutting the character classes, they did it *right after* selling an expansion. And by right after, it was something like within a week of an expansion going on sale, they did the revamp and blew away most of the character classes. Needless to say, the folks who actually like the game they had been playing, and who had bothered to buy the expansion, were not amused.
Well, my experience is the complete opposite of your experience. My last company had a large Bangalore dev office. Projects that would have had one or two experienced US developers had 4-5 Indian devs, with an Indian manager. And the results were horrendous. Even the Indian devs who had been around a while and theoretically were trained and experienced produced terrible code, larded with huge chunks of copy and paste junk. I did work with one or two people in the Bangalore office who seemed to be good, but the overall impression was that the Indian programmers wanted to look like they were producing stuff very quickly, no matter how shoddy the results were. And unfortunately I think it paid off for them, at least in the short term. Long term I don't think they can get away with it, but who knows?
Just because you're not spending your time on the Internet that hardly means that your life is set in concrete. I have a couple of friends who are well informed, caring, intelligent people... people who have traveled the world, done a variety of work, know how to use the Internet thru their jobs. And yet, they just don't want to spend their free time sitting behind a computer at home. Classifying them as cavemen is absurd. I actually think that the folks who just can't live w/o their Internet connection are more in the "keep life predictable" category... come home, read slashdot, reply to people, read the latest GNU license controversy, etc. Same old, same old.
And there's a direct line from from earlier MUDs and MMOs to EQ. I'm not dismissing EQ... I played it for more years than I want to think about. It was a great achievement for its time. Just as WoW is a great achievement for its time.
You give EQ1 WAY too much credit. I suspect that "core ticks" go back to any multiplayer game (e.g. rpgs). Zoning is something that is core to EQ1, and completely foreign to WoW. Yes, EQ1 eventually implemented instances, but from the player base reaction I don't believe they were original from EQ1.
I'm not saying that WoW was the originator of lots of concepts, but I don't think EQ1 was the originator either. EQ1 introduced some concepts, synthesized some others. WoW did the same... but did a MUCH better job of synthesizing. As far as the "seamless" concept, you have to give WoW credit there. I'm sure there are games before WoW that didn't have zoning as clunky as EQ1, but WoW really makes the "you are in the world, you just travel around, no zoning" concept work, and work REALLY well, in an MMO.
Kinda... in the sense that the core elements (NPCs, walking around in a virtual world, having persistent characters, etc) are common to all MMOs that I'm aware of. Of course, WoW not only introduced new elements, but managed to get the old ones right.
When you can walk away from your machine and have your character hammer on a gold outcrop, mining that resource and preventing any other character from getting it, for days on end, that's cheating. Period. No fine line, no fancy footwork. Nothing hard to understand, no matter how hard you try to turn it into a moral grey area. If you want to promote this kind of behaviour, don't screw around, just announce that you are a selfish pig and go for it. And then let millions of players applaud as Blizzard bans you.