Is it me or are scientists assuming that there are no particles smaller then quarks now? For all we know the effect could be the result of really tiny widgets making ultra-tiny (even for widgets) ropes. Tossing them out and pulling!
When games were played by geeks, terms like "end-game" and "grind" didn't exist. The reason is when geeks play games, the joy is playing the game. When games went mainstream and sucked in the "jock" crowd the idea of "winning" came into the picture. What many jock-like archtypes don't understand with MMO style games is you don't "Win" you play. They try to "win" at something that was never intended to have a "Victory Condition" and to the fans of sports they have trouble grasping that idea. It's not about getting to max level and twinked gear and having X,Y, and Z.
Those complaints that arise out of expansions is an attack to their concept of "winning" WoW. You cannot win or beat the game because there are no terms of victory. When they raise the level to 80 they complain that they are at 70, they "won" the level grind and now you are taking away that perceived victory. When you add new dungeons and new gear you take away that gearing up "victory" away from them.
And the people that complain, and cancel, and leave are those types of people. A form of MMO natural selection really. We gave em the arena tournaments to play in with very good arena gear. All my gear is from the BGs, I don't grind for gear, I enjoy grinding up enemy players:)
I played the old muds and the new MMOs and I can tell you this: "Once you give up trying to win a game that has no end you can start 'playing' the game and having a good time."
If you want to help alleviate some of those complaints from the "Winners" group give them weekly stat break downs by server and guild and let people form "Leagues" and give them digests of the following:
Most Exp This Week Most Honorable kills the week Most Mobs killed this week (those that give exp) Most Money made Most money spent Most Damage Done etc...
Also I strongly reccomend guild housing in contested zones with defense\raiding along the lines of DAOC's frontier system (where as DAOC has predefined keeps and towers, have guilds build and maintain fortifications) and award honor to guild members weighted by level based on how long they can hold on to the keep.
If you want to retain the "Winner" crowd you are better off having a large number of small victory conditions then try to placate larger ambitions of victory. That may reduce the complaining.
The truth in Wikipedia is in the process, not necessarily the final product. An encyclopedia may indicate the contriversial nature of a topic but by viewing the revision history and the day-to-day, month-to-month changes in an article you can actually SEE the controversey and that is the strength of Wikipedia. It's "Truth" is in the process not the content.
The pursuit of truth requires multiple sources of information. In reality no one source can be considered truth anymore then one can accurately navigate 3 dimensonal Space with only a single point. You need at least 3 (4 counting the passage of time if you are moving...) and as a former teacher I would require no less then 10 sources, even for a single page paper. Yes they can be redundant to a degree but I would expect 1/4 to 1/2 to be dissenting sources.
Apologies for poor spelling, still working on the first cup of coffee...
It amazes me the overall left leaning Bush-Hate that has crept into this. I have news people Bush, Clinton, Carter, Nixon, the list goes on. The global state of affairs is the result of a lot more then just Bush's term. The problem we face now started long before we were a country, and will be around long after our country is gone. Get some historic perspective and let go of your hate. The blame can not be levied at on person, group, or country. World affairs is complex at best.
As far as the political commentary it is the death of the American spirit where Cap. was the ideal of what America was and his death more then likely was born out of America realizing that we, as a nation are not perfect and with the movement of globalization the idea of America is lost. His character was too ideallic for writers to deal with in a much more cynically audience. With power inflation gripping this generation of comic characters a near-perfect human doesn't fit well with many of the other... say... tier 2 and tier 3 super heroes.
Here are some issues I see with Cap.
1: He's an artifact of the cold war. There are no Nazi's and the Soviets are no more 2: He is tier 1, he's not chucking cars at people and had to think more and with 30 second attention spans comics can't provide it. I have comics from 1960s to present and present comics, on the average are 1/2 as short. Even slicing up a story across 50 issues still requires enough pages for get a needed portion of story told. 3: Using the current backdrop of politics it fails. From a broad "the corruption of government" it grabed only a little. You would still need to toss in corrupted activist judges, smarmy lawyers, an apethetic, lazy, citizen class who refuses to accept their own guilt for putting the corrupt into power, and a law enforcement system that is more concerned about capacities then safety.
Stark should have been finding low cost ways to house the dissidents and release many of the most dangerous into house arrest programs.
I think people are projecting too much of their own politica idealogy into this, trying to make it fit what they believe. It's much more simple and broad.
--- "Those that hate rebublicans, democrats, liberals, conservatives, NRA, PETA, SPCA, GLBTAU have failed history. The world is a lot more complex and far from black and white and hiding in a narrow understanding of why things are only result in more anger, more hate, more rage, and more evil. Stop, Think, Study, Re-Thinking, Understand, THEN talk."
More power to them. It is a complete MYTH that farmers cause inflation. Talk to any graduate economics student and let them run the numbers (I had my work's accounts crush numbers because they found the idea of virtual economies fascinating.) and they came back with a simple summary for us non-economics majors (my bg is in theology and history).
Ready?
"Because there is no real scaricity in a vitual economy the laws of supply and demand and basic inflation do not function as they do in the real world."
There are an unlimited number of item X given the amount of time Y. Gold and Item farmers do not sell items or gold in a virtual economy, they sell time. 99% of items sold for costs > 100gp are from instances (base on the logs I gave them). Farmers most likely would spend most, if not all, of their time in instances (don't ask how long it took to explain instances to non-gamers, it was bad) as the time\value ratio is higher then world-drop items you would sell. This assumes that the whole group is farmers (more likely then a mixed crowd and more efficent use of time) and used some rather relaxed pacing for time to clear an instance. There was one interesting fact that came from the logs (auctioneer's data was a big help along with a modded loot link,cosmo,thott cruncher) that the most profitable trade skill, via AH was in fact, skinning. I would have figured enchanting but seems skinning has best margin (99% profit) and best volume via the AH. Based on figures btw, skinning trails instance whoring by less then 20% for time\gold ratio. Not bad for grinding on furries. They gave me a shit load of weird Macro\Micro Encono gibberish but I couldn't make it out.
Their best guess is game-inflation has more to do with the bulk of a server's players hitting the END-GAME (or as we called it the PE (Player\Endgame ratio) and higher level players twinking out their lower level players (inflation as a result of convienence.) They were pretty confident that inflation was most likely tied into the level dynamics rather then any form of gold\item farming.
I firmly belive this is more a perception issue then a reality. Based on world drops in zones (using Thott's drop rate data) and excluding BOP (bind on pickup) compared to instance drops (again excluding BOP) no farmer would farm outside of an instance, it simply is not efficent use of time to farm outside of an instance. (Mathmatically that is.) For Solo farming your typical farmer is skinning, skinning, and skinning and probably disenchanting damn near everything else for parts.
I support gold farmers as they sell time, something many don't have a lot of. I used to be a hard core gamer but adult married life doesn't afford me 12 hours a day to farm MC or Blackwing. Main reason I left EQ was spending 6 hours as a warrior to kill 1 epic mob only to find out the loot got ninja'd by a toon named Warner. The reality and most people don't have that kind of time and Gold Farmers filled the void. I think what we need is Blizzard, Mythic, M$, and Sony, as an industry sit down with some economists and draft as standard model for virtual economies. Until I see hard evidence that gold farmers ipact the economy the complaints about them seem more like the echos of angy miners pissed at cheap asian laundry workers.
Throw people into Chaos, run around and yell "You Make Big Bread, You Sell Gold?!"
To Quote A Conservative: "If you want it fixed vote for the green party. In the mean time enjoy having a job, low cost utilities, and the highest standard of living on Earth."
To Quote A Hippie: "IF you don't eat sand you're killing mother earth!! Because eating animals is bad because they feel pain, and eating plants deprives mother earth of important C02 gobbling plants, and you certainly can't eat rocks as they are the very skin of our dear mother! Err. wait.... NO SAND NO SAND!"
To Quote A Scientist: "We need money, we'll say whatever they (being the people that are funding them) want us to say."
The Universe: "I don't give a shit if your planet blows up. I can always use another kupier belt there!"
Change is the only constant. Change is amoral. Mar's doesn't care if there is nuclear waste all over it, neither does the moon, neither does Earth. Only the arrogance of man would allow a population to complain about climate change. We are an oddity, not the norm. Find me one other planet that even remotly resembles earth. Quite frankly perhaps we are setting the climate to what it is supposed to be, rather then what we THINK it should be. Perhaps something between Venus' and Mars' atmosphere.
We are just as much a part of nature as any other animal and all things we do ARE NATURAL. Quite frankly I think it's man's nature to coat the planet in plastic and cement and I for one have no qualms in assisting in that endevor if that in fact is our purpose in life. Humans appear to be the only creatures that question their own actions, perhaps we should question what our definition of a proper planet should look like. So far my theory is pretty sound as we have yet to find a planet like ours....
Yet Sony still has not explained how developers will get around the weakness of cell processing on the PS3 when it comes to AI development, one of the biggest concerns that several developers I work with have been researching. The very architecture of the cell process could make decent AI problematic.
Release the source code\ server code under a restricted license (non-commerical use) and allow people to take up the falg of using the old dated-engine to create new worlds or preserve the old world. Anything on the Internet can live forever, so long as there is space and people with time on their hands. It would be great to see those of us that still to this day use DIKU and ROM and SMUAG etc.. to run smaller, more imtimate worlds have tools to do the same but with graphics.
The hardest part of designing a game is creating moods. We use sound and visuals and story to place players into moods that help make the game enjoyable.
Excellent examples of moods are:
NES: Legend of Zela, alone and exploring an unknown world PS: Persona, Mysterious and spooky
None of the DQ series really ever gave a mood that I could relate to. Ultima on the other hand, Garriot had an knack for moods in those games, largely after Exodus using the Virtues as a moral backdrop to drive the moods. Sadly JPRG's (Japanese RPG) largely are lost in translation and the ability for players to relate to the content. Where did all the North American RPG developers go?
(I am in a bad mood today at work, therefore I shall rant....)
Dear John Smedly:
After you and Sony fucked over EQ, fucked over EQ2, fucked over Planetside, and fucked over SWG, and while you have pride in fucking up each product as you go along, remember that quality actually counts for something. I've played em all (EQ,DAOC,AC,WOW,COH,etc.) and you still cannot beat your own orginal product in the form of innovation, quality, and... well I know you and the team at Sony don't quite understand this concept (Blizzard seems to have mastered it) games have to be well.... FUN.
You see John nobody wants an "Experience." You've been hanging around MS too much. I don't come home from work or school and log into an online game for an EXPERIENCE. I want to have some FUN. Not all EXPERIENCES are FUN. Somewhere in those maggot sized brains you greed fucks there at Sony (and EA for that matter) forgot the definitions of FUN and EXPERIENCE. Yeah I guess if we were all low self-esteem, socially devoid people you see in movies and TV,that despartly need an alternate life to feel fullfilled we would run to an EXPERIENCE. But sadly, most of us are normal, well adjusted, people that can't speel wehn posting on Slashdot. Life has plently of EXPERIENCES we deal with in our normal day-to-day lives. We play games to have FUN. I am sorry that reality doesn't quite fit you vision of the typical game player, but that is reality.
You gonna kick's who's ass? Why would you fucking care sherlock? You should worry about making a great game, the hell with the market rules. Instead of being a follower try being a leader for once you sac of shit and shut the fuck up. If you spent 1/2 the energy you expend making excuses for your short commings and directed that into make FUN GAMES rather then products and EXPERIENCES you'd be in a much better position in life and the industry.
Gaming (playing, living, and making) is far more an art form then an manufacturing process.
Your world John: Cute+Furry+Female Lead+Platform Scroller+30 hours game play+R&B Track = Successful Product with an estimated launch of 10 million in sales.
Gamer's World: Mario Bros + Pokemon + Repetative Game Play = Suck-My-Ass.
Take a good hard look John, WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU WANT TO EMULATE THE MOVIE INDUSTRY?! How often do people get tired of the same shit, crappy shit, at the theaters AND YOUR TAKING ADVICE FROM THIS INDUSTRY?? LAST I CHECKED THEY WERE IN THE DECLINE DUE TO WHAT?? YEAH POOR QUALITY!
Video Games != Movies != Books != Imagination != Life != Small Furry Aliens that like to eat Cats!
No you aren't worried about lyign, the core of the problem with Wikipedia is what qualifies someone to be an authority in the context of an encyclopedia. An encyclopedia, rather then a technical proof or instructional device, is usually a broader, historical reference item. The problem I see with Wikipedia is it can't make up it's mind on being a dictionary, rather then an encyclopedia. History can be very subjective and the current model seems to work well for an encyclopedia, but Wikipedia, to validate you point, appears to be more of a dictionary or technical reference, rather then an encyclopedia. A community driven encyclopedia help mitigate the old adage, "History is written by the winners" where contradicting views can be sorted out over time. Perhaps part of Wikipedia is an overload of information. Part of the problem with Wikipedia appears to be grounded in the scope of what an encyclopedia should\n't be. Formulas and proofs normally don't end up in an encyclopedia (going back to the earlier peer review comments). As someone posted earlier, Wikipedia was born as a stop-gap measure to fill a vaccum between the old way and new way of managing content. Perhaps Wikipedia's quality could be improved by better defining the scope what content and how specific the content should get. Dunno... Oh well good chat, great thread, time to go home for the day.
Wikipedia is the prefect format for any type of information on the Internet. Sadly The Register has failed to observe one significant point; Unlike the Register itself Wikipedia is subject to a thousand year old form of analysis: Peer Review. If peer review is good enough for the scientific community (they put a man on the moon, the register has yet to accomplish that) and the medical community (they have done heart transplants, the Register has not) and the Linux Kernel, as any open source project, is subject to peer review (they have a very good perating system, the Register has yet to boot a machine) why would we not subject our historical data to such a process? Why not subject our media to such processes. Sadly it seems that the Register has the disease many younger Internet-generation kids have, a lack of patience. Peer review is slower, but as history moves on, faster. I personally think that colleges could help improve the content by assigning classmates, in the study of their respective fields to contribute to Wikipedia's need for editors. The broad variety of instructors, and college cultures could accelerate Wiki's accuracy and improve credibility. It would also be an excellent place for students and colleges to like student thesis and papers as additional linked sites. I.e.
The American Revolution Student Works
Browse Purdue's Student Archives
Browse Stanfords' Student Archives
and so forth.
If peer review is good enough for science, medicine, and open source it is certainly good enough for history as well.
Salary surveys are one of the worst examples of statistics. First off you have to be EMPLOYED. The average salary for a football player is say 4 million. Now out of the millions of people that try to get into professional football how many? Telling me people in the game industry are earning $60k a year means nothing if you can't get a job in te industry. Further more the cost of education, hours worked, and benefits compensation are left out largely. In addition salary surverys are biased as they ignore laid off, unemployed, and displaced employees in the industry.
Salary Survey question example:
How much do you make an hour? --- $30 and hour.
As far as the survery is concerned I make $60,000 a year. But if I get laid off for 6 months do they adjust that? Nope. It's too irrelivant to use salary figures. IF wonk A get 60k a year and wonk B gets 70k who makes more? Well Wonka A pays nothing for health insurance and Wonk B pays 12k a year for health insurance. What about deductables and 401k\b performance. Stock options. I know plenty of Eron employees that could talk about the real wage of a staffer just as EA employees could rant a bit on it.
Done: --- SNIP -- I am a reader of an online news aggregate and commentary sight Slashdot, and a recent article about Jack Thompson and a web sight has brought to my attention Mr. Thompsons behavior. After spending the day investigating the facts as far as I can see I am compelled, per my civic duty, to bring my concern to the Bar that there is some validity to many claims of unethical behavior on Mr. Thompsons conduct. I am however, not a lawyer, nor familiar with the Bar's standards for conduct. But I know what I've seen, and I find it unsettling. I would not readily dismiss the claims coming from people, especially those more familiar with the Bar's conduct rules, but I do feel his conduct is questionable and worth investigating. I would however remind the Bar that a through investigation would be in order and to treat any comments from a news aggregate sight as suspect, we are all innocent until proven guilty after all.
I would argue that competition may be core but entertainment is core to the definition. If there is competition but no "entertainment or relaxation" then I would classify it as a sport rather then a game.
How, in constrast to how Masters of Orion 3, will the Civ team be addressing macro and micro management aspects of the game? RTS games are forced to place heavy consideration into managing in real time units and control and the scope of an RTS prevents a snowball effect. Turned based games become burdened by logistical considerations as a result of not having that same focus on micromanagment. Managing 55 workers in Civ3 along with 35 cities becomes a logistical nightmare when governor AI doesn't learn from your play style. Directing 22 to build 13 fortresses across a continent while running rail lines to each with production queues rallied to those location but only to a max of 25 units per fortress ares and having to manually intercept an invading force resultsed in a single turn while playing Civ3 that took 2 weeks to process (thats 2 weeks of play time. It actually took about 2 months to move to the next turn.) Additionally having a stack of 75 units attack a city is a rather dull event, even worse when the computer attacks.
Ken's Rule of Gaming: Complexity in feature should be inversly proportional to the amount of player control.
The more complex a process is in real life, the less direct control a person has, this is what MOO3 tried to resolve.
MOO3 was a real shock to many players but once you learned to let go of micromanagment the game becomes rather plesant and suprising. A good contrast is what Sim City is To Civilization as Civilization is to M003.
What happened and who were the original voice actors for the game? Without them I highly doubt they'll be able to capture the charm. The animated series, sans the original actors, was dissapointing.
Slashdot Mirror
As I taught my students:
Please Do Not Tip Strippers Poorly Again
With the added point of: Know when to be right, and when to shut the hell up and let your boss dig his own hole.
Actually they would be silver if we're going by the book.
Is it me or are scientists assuming that there are no particles smaller then quarks now? For all we know the effect could be the result of really tiny widgets making ultra-tiny (even for widgets) ropes. Tossing them out and pulling!
When games were played by geeks, terms like "end-game" and "grind" didn't exist. The reason is when geeks play games, the joy is playing the game. When games went mainstream and sucked in the "jock" crowd the idea of "winning" came into the picture. What many jock-like archtypes don't understand with MMO style games is you don't "Win" you play. They try to "win" at something that was never intended to have a "Victory Condition" and to the fans of sports they have trouble grasping that idea. It's not about getting to max level and twinked gear and having X,Y, and Z.
:)
Those complaints that arise out of expansions is an attack to their concept of "winning" WoW. You cannot win or beat the game because there are no terms of victory. When they raise the level to 80 they complain that they are at 70, they "won" the level grind and now you are taking away that perceived victory. When you add new dungeons and new gear you take away that gearing up "victory" away from them.
And the people that complain, and cancel, and leave are those types of people. A form of MMO natural selection really. We gave em the arena tournaments to play in with very good arena gear. All my gear is from the BGs, I don't grind for gear, I enjoy grinding up enemy players
I played the old muds and the new MMOs and I can tell you this: "Once you give up trying to win a game that has no end you can start 'playing' the game and having a good time."
If you want to help alleviate some of those complaints from the "Winners" group give them weekly stat break downs by server and guild and let people form "Leagues" and give them digests of the following:
Most Exp This Week
Most Honorable kills the week
Most Mobs killed this week (those that give exp)
Most Money made
Most money spent
Most Damage Done
etc...
Also I strongly reccomend guild housing in contested zones with defense\raiding along the lines of DAOC's frontier system (where as DAOC has predefined keeps and towers, have guilds build and maintain fortifications) and award honor to guild members weighted by level based on how long they can hold on to the keep.
If you want to retain the "Winner" crowd you are better off having a large number of small victory conditions then try to placate larger ambitions of victory. That may reduce the complaining.
The truth in Wikipedia is in the process, not necessarily the final product. An encyclopedia may indicate the contriversial nature of a topic but by viewing the revision history and the day-to-day, month-to-month changes in an article you can actually SEE the controversey and that is the strength of Wikipedia. It's "Truth" is in the process not the content.
The pursuit of truth requires multiple sources of information. In reality no one source can be considered truth anymore then one can accurately navigate 3 dimensonal Space with only a single point. You need at least 3 (4 counting the passage of time if you are moving...) and as a former teacher I would require no less then 10 sources, even for a single page paper. Yes they can be redundant to a degree but I would expect 1/4 to 1/2 to be dissenting sources.
Apologies for poor spelling, still working on the first cup of coffee...
It amazes me the overall left leaning Bush-Hate that has crept into this. I have news people Bush, Clinton, Carter, Nixon, the list goes on. The global state of affairs is the result of a lot more then just Bush's term. The problem we face now started long before we were a country, and will be around long after our country is gone. Get some historic perspective and let go of your hate. The blame can not be levied at on person, group, or country. World affairs is complex at best.
... say... tier 2 and tier 3 super heroes.
As far as the political commentary it is the death of the American spirit where Cap. was the ideal of what America was and his death more then likely was born out of America realizing that we, as a nation are not perfect and with the movement of globalization the idea of America is lost. His character was too ideallic for writers to deal with in a much more cynically audience. With power inflation gripping this generation of comic characters a near-perfect human doesn't fit well with many of the other
Here are some issues I see with Cap.
1: He's an artifact of the cold war. There are no Nazi's and the Soviets are no more
2: He is tier 1, he's not chucking cars at people and had to think more and with 30 second attention spans comics can't provide it. I have comics from 1960s to present and present comics, on the average are 1/2 as short. Even slicing up a story across 50 issues still requires enough pages for get a needed portion of story told.
3: Using the current backdrop of politics it fails. From a broad "the corruption of government" it grabed only a little. You would still need to toss in corrupted activist judges, smarmy lawyers, an apethetic, lazy, citizen class who refuses to accept their own guilt for putting the corrupt into power, and a law enforcement system that is more concerned about capacities then safety.
Stark should have been finding low cost ways to house the dissidents and release many of the most dangerous into house arrest programs.
I think people are projecting too much of their own politica idealogy into this, trying to make it fit what they believe. It's much more simple and broad.
---
"Those that hate rebublicans, democrats, liberals, conservatives, NRA, PETA, SPCA, GLBTAU have failed history. The world is a lot more complex and far from black and white and hiding in a narrow understanding of why things are only result in more anger, more hate, more rage, and more evil. Stop, Think, Study, Re-Thinking, Understand, THEN talk."
I refuse to justify this absurd behavior with an actual response beyond, "Get a fucking life you sue-happy son of a bitch."
More power to them. It is a complete MYTH that farmers cause inflation. Talk to any graduate economics student and let them run the numbers (I had my work's accounts crush numbers because they found the idea of virtual economies fascinating.) and they came back with a simple summary for us non-economics majors (my bg is in theology and history).
Ready?
"Because there is no real scaricity in a vitual economy the laws of supply and demand and basic inflation do not function as they do in the real world."
There are an unlimited number of item X given the amount of time Y. Gold and Item farmers do not sell items or gold in a virtual economy, they sell time. 99% of items sold for costs > 100gp are from instances (base on the logs I gave them). Farmers most likely would spend most, if not all, of their time in instances (don't ask how long it took to explain instances to non-gamers, it was bad) as the time\value ratio is higher then world-drop items you would sell. This assumes that the whole group is farmers (more likely then a mixed crowd and more efficent use of time) and used some rather relaxed pacing for time to clear an instance. There was one interesting fact that came from the logs (auctioneer's data was a big help along with a modded loot link,cosmo,thott cruncher) that the most profitable trade skill, via AH was in fact, skinning. I would have figured enchanting but seems skinning has best margin (99% profit) and best volume via the AH. Based on figures btw, skinning trails instance whoring by less then 20% for time\gold ratio. Not bad for grinding on furries. They gave me a shit load of weird Macro\Micro Encono gibberish but I couldn't make it out.
Their best guess is game-inflation has more to do with the bulk of a server's players hitting the END-GAME (or as we called it the PE (Player\Endgame ratio) and higher level players twinking out their lower level players (inflation as a result of convienence.) They were pretty confident that inflation was most likely tied into the level dynamics rather then any form of gold\item farming.
I firmly belive this is more a perception issue then a reality. Based on world drops in zones (using Thott's drop rate data) and excluding BOP (bind on pickup) compared to instance drops (again excluding BOP) no farmer would farm outside of an instance, it simply is not efficent use of time to farm outside of an instance. (Mathmatically that is.) For Solo farming your typical farmer is skinning, skinning, and skinning and probably disenchanting damn near everything else for parts.
I support gold farmers as they sell time, something many don't have a lot of. I used to be a hard core gamer but adult married life doesn't afford me 12 hours a day to farm MC or Blackwing. Main reason I left EQ was spending 6 hours as a warrior to kill 1 epic mob only to find out the loot got ninja'd by a toon named Warner. The reality and most people don't have that kind of time and Gold Farmers filled the void. I think what we need is Blizzard, Mythic, M$, and Sony, as an industry sit down with some economists and draft as standard model for virtual economies. Until I see hard evidence that gold farmers ipact the economy the complaints about them seem more like the echos of angy miners pissed at cheap asian laundry workers.
Throw people into Chaos, run around and yell "You Make Big Bread, You Sell Gold?!"
my 2 cents
From the US:
To Quote A Liberal: "It's Bush's Fault."
To Quote A Conservative: "If you want it fixed vote for the green party. In the mean time enjoy having a job, low cost utilities, and the highest standard of living on Earth."
To Quote A Hippie: "IF you don't eat sand you're killing mother earth!! Because eating animals is bad because they feel pain, and eating plants deprives mother earth of important C02 gobbling plants, and you certainly can't eat rocks as they are the very skin of our dear mother! Err. wait.... NO SAND NO SAND!"
To Quote A Scientist: "We need money, we'll say whatever they (being the people that are funding them) want us to say."
The Universe: "I don't give a shit if your planet blows up. I can always use another kupier belt there!"
Change is the only constant. Change is amoral. Mar's doesn't care if there is nuclear waste all over it, neither does the moon, neither does Earth. Only the arrogance of man would allow a population to complain about climate change. We are an oddity, not the norm. Find me one other planet that even remotly resembles earth. Quite frankly perhaps we are setting the climate to what it is supposed to be, rather then what we THINK it should be. Perhaps something between Venus' and Mars' atmosphere.
We are just as much a part of nature as any other animal and all things we do ARE NATURAL. Quite frankly I think it's man's nature to coat the planet in plastic and cement and I for one have no qualms in assisting in that endevor if that in fact is our purpose in life. Humans appear to be the only creatures that question their own actions, perhaps we should question what our definition of a proper planet should look like. So far my theory is pretty sound as we have yet to find a planet like ours....
Yet Sony still has not explained how developers will get around the weakness of cell processing on the PS3 when it comes to AI development, one of the biggest concerns that several developers I work with have been researching. The very architecture of the cell process could make decent AI problematic.
"... invite a new generation of developers to contribute, building on the long tradition of the X Window System..."
Stability, Innefficent memory usage, bloated number of system calls, yeah... Perhaps some traditions should be left in the past...
Release the source code\ server code under a restricted license (non-commerical use) and allow people to take up the falg of using the old dated-engine to create new worlds or preserve the old world. Anything on the Internet can live forever, so long as there is space and people with time on their hands. It would be great to see those of us that still to this day use DIKU and ROM and SMUAG etc.. to run smaller, more imtimate worlds have tools to do the same but with graphics.
Free the code and AC will live forever.
The hardest part of designing a game is creating moods. We use sound and visuals and story to place players into moods that help make the game enjoyable.
Excellent examples of moods are:
NES: Legend of Zela, alone and exploring an unknown world
PS: Persona, Mysterious and spooky
None of the DQ series really ever gave a mood that I could relate to. Ultima on the other hand, Garriot had an knack for moods in those games, largely after Exodus using the Virtues as a moral backdrop to drive the moods. Sadly JPRG's (Japanese RPG) largely are lost in translation and the ability for players to relate to the content. Where did all the North American RPG developers go?
(I am in a bad mood today at work, therefore I shall rant....)
... well I know you and the team at Sony don't quite understand this concept (Blizzard seems to have mastered it) games have to be well.... FUN.
,that despartly need an alternate life to feel fullfilled we would run to an EXPERIENCE. But sadly, most of us are normal, well adjusted, people that can't speel wehn posting on Slashdot. Life has plently of EXPERIENCES we deal with in our normal day-to-day lives. We play games to have FUN. I am sorry that reality doesn't quite fit you vision of the typical game player, but that is reality.
Dear John Smedly:
After you and Sony fucked over EQ, fucked over EQ2, fucked over Planetside, and fucked over SWG, and while you have pride in fucking up each product as you go along, remember that quality actually counts for something. I've played em all (EQ,DAOC,AC,WOW,COH,etc.) and you still cannot beat your own orginal product in the form of innovation, quality, and
You see John nobody wants an "Experience." You've been hanging around MS too much. I don't come home from work or school and log into an online game for an EXPERIENCE. I want to have some FUN. Not all EXPERIENCES are FUN. Somewhere in those maggot sized brains you greed fucks there at Sony (and EA for that matter) forgot the definitions of FUN and EXPERIENCE. Yeah I guess if we were all low self-esteem, socially devoid people you see in movies and TV
You gonna kick's who's ass? Why would you fucking care sherlock? You should worry about making a great game, the hell with the market rules. Instead of being a follower try being a leader for once you sac of shit and shut the fuck up. If you spent 1/2 the energy you expend making excuses for your short commings and directed that into make FUN GAMES rather then products and EXPERIENCES you'd be in a much better position in life and the industry.
Gaming (playing, living, and making) is far more an art form then an manufacturing process.
Your world John:
Cute+Furry+Female Lead+Platform Scroller+30 hours game play+R&B Track = Successful Product with an estimated launch of 10 million in sales.
Gamer's World:
Mario Bros + Pokemon + Repetative Game Play = Suck-My-Ass.
Take a good hard look John, WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU WANT TO EMULATE THE MOVIE INDUSTRY?! How often do people get tired of the same shit, crappy shit, at the theaters AND YOUR TAKING ADVICE FROM THIS INDUSTRY?? LAST I CHECKED THEY WERE IN THE DECLINE DUE TO WHAT?? YEAH POOR QUALITY!
Video Games != Movies != Books != Imagination != Life != Small Furry Aliens that like to eat Cats!
STFU John, we do't care what you think anymore.
No you aren't worried about lyign, the core of the problem with Wikipedia is what qualifies someone to be an authority in the context of an encyclopedia. An encyclopedia, rather then a technical proof or instructional device, is usually a broader, historical reference item. The problem I see with Wikipedia is it can't make up it's mind on being a dictionary, rather then an encyclopedia. History can be very subjective and the current model seems to work well for an encyclopedia, but Wikipedia, to validate you point, appears to be more of a dictionary or technical reference, rather then an encyclopedia. A community driven encyclopedia help mitigate the old adage, "History is written by the winners" where contradicting views can be sorted out over time. Perhaps part of Wikipedia is an overload of information. Part of the problem with Wikipedia appears to be grounded in the scope of what an encyclopedia should\n't be. Formulas and proofs normally don't end up in an encyclopedia (going back to the earlier peer review comments). As someone posted earlier, Wikipedia was born as a stop-gap measure to fill a vaccum between the old way and new way of managing content. Perhaps Wikipedia's quality could be improved by better defining the scope what content and how specific the content should get. Dunno... Oh well good chat, great thread, time to go home for the day.
The more eyes that look, the more eyes that will see
the more eyes that see, the hard it is to lie.
More often then you would think it's the "untrained" that find the flaws that the "trained" gloss over and ignore.
ack apologies for the bad typos, was talking on the phone. That should be LINK not LIKE for the student papers section. My bad.
Wikipedia is the prefect format for any type of information on the Internet. Sadly The Register has failed to observe one significant point; Unlike the Register itself Wikipedia is subject to a thousand year old form of analysis: Peer Review. If peer review is good enough for the scientific community (they put a man on the moon, the register has yet to accomplish that) and the medical community (they have done heart transplants, the Register has not) and the Linux Kernel, as any open source project, is subject to peer review (they have a very good perating system, the Register has yet to boot a machine) why would we not subject our historical data to such a process? Why not subject our media to such processes. Sadly it seems that the Register has the disease many younger Internet-generation kids have, a lack of patience. Peer review is slower, but as history moves on, faster. I personally think that colleges could help improve the content by assigning classmates, in the study of their respective fields to contribute to Wikipedia's need for editors. The broad variety of instructors, and college cultures could accelerate Wiki's accuracy and improve credibility. It would also be an excellent place for students and colleges to like student thesis and papers as additional linked sites. I.e.
The American Revolution
Student Works
Browse Purdue's Student Archives
Browse Stanfords' Student Archives
and so forth.
If peer review is good enough for science, medicine, and open source it is certainly good enough for history as well.
My 2cents
Salary surveys are one of the worst examples of statistics. First off you have to be EMPLOYED. The average salary for a football player is say 4 million. Now out of the millions of people that try to get into professional football how many? Telling me people in the game industry are earning $60k a year means nothing if you can't get a job in te industry. Further more the cost of education, hours worked, and benefits compensation are left out largely. In addition salary surverys are biased as they ignore laid off, unemployed, and displaced employees in the industry.
Salary Survey question example:
How much do you make an hour? --- $30 and hour.
As far as the survery is concerned I make $60,000 a year. But if I get laid off for 6 months do they adjust that? Nope. It's too irrelivant to use salary figures. IF wonk A get 60k a year and wonk B gets 70k who makes more? Well Wonka A pays nothing for health insurance and Wonk B pays 12k a year for health insurance. What about deductables and 401k\b performance. Stock options. I know plenty of Eron employees that could talk about the real wage of a staffer just as EA employees could rant a bit on it.
Tired of surverys that mean nothing....
my 2
Done:
--- SNIP --
I am a reader of an online news aggregate and commentary sight Slashdot, and a recent article about Jack Thompson and a web sight has brought to my attention Mr. Thompsons behavior. After spending the day investigating the facts as far as I can see I am compelled, per my civic duty, to bring my concern to the Bar that there is some validity to many claims of unethical behavior on Mr. Thompsons conduct. I am however, not a lawyer, nor familiar with the Bar's standards for conduct. But I know what I've seen, and I find it unsettling. I would not readily dismiss the claims coming from people, especially those more familiar with the Bar's conduct rules, but I do feel his conduct is questionable and worth investigating. I would however remind the Bar that a through investigation would be in order and to treat any comments from a news aggregate sight as suspect, we are all innocent until proven guilty after all.
Thank You
-- SNIP --
I would argue that competition may be core but entertainment is core to the definition. If there is competition but no "entertainment or relaxation" then I would classify it as a sport rather then a game.
a game is a recreational activity that alleviates the player from stress and provides and escape from reality for a period of time.
Does EQ, DOAC, WoW, AC, or any other MMO out there really fit that definition?
How, in constrast to how Masters of Orion 3, will the Civ team be addressing macro and micro management aspects of the game? RTS games are forced to place heavy consideration into managing in real time units and control and the scope of an RTS prevents a snowball effect. Turned based games become burdened by logistical considerations as a result of not having that same focus on micromanagment. Managing 55 workers in Civ3 along with 35 cities becomes a logistical nightmare when governor AI doesn't learn from your play style. Directing 22 to build 13 fortresses across a continent while running rail lines to each with production queues rallied to those location but only to a max of 25 units per fortress ares and having to manually intercept an invading force resultsed in a single turn while playing Civ3 that took 2 weeks to process (thats 2 weeks of play time. It actually took about 2 months to move to the next turn.) Additionally having a stack of 75 units attack a city is a rather dull event, even worse when the computer attacks.
Ken's Rule of Gaming: Complexity in feature should be inversly proportional to the amount of player control.
The more complex a process is in real life, the less direct control a person has, this is what MOO3 tried to resolve.
MOO3 was a real shock to many players but once you learned to let go of micromanagment the game becomes rather plesant and suprising. A good contrast is what Sim City is To Civilization as Civilization is to M003.
Which Direction is Civ4 taking?
I paint my chair red and it looks brand new
But the years roll on and it's not so new
So I get a new chair and it feels so sweet.
But my chair grown old so I decide to paint it one day.
I paint my chair red and it looks brand new
But the years roll on and it's not so new
So I get a new chair and it feels so sweet.
But my chair grown old so I decide to paint it one day.
I paint my chair red and it looks brand new
But no matter how many chairs I get, and how many times I paint them, be it red, or black, or blue, it's still is a chair and I have grown old
Prehaps bed is what I think I need. I've tried of chairs and want some sleep. But Perhaps I 'll get red sheets
What happened and who were the original voice actors for the game? Without them I highly doubt they'll be able to capture the charm. The animated series, sans the original actors, was dissapointing.