It would seem that someone has gotten the DATA.PSP files from the various update EBOOT.PBP files decrypted.
If you can dump the original, encrypted file to your computer AND you have the decrypted contents, it becomes a very simple cryptanalysis task to find out the key, no?
It's kind of like making a play about Jedi and Gunguns and Midichlorians and then charging the public to go see it without permission from George Lucas. If I did that I'd also be expecting a letter from his lawyers pretty soon.
This is not a great analogy either, as you probably haven't payed(sp?) George Lucas & co. anything, whereas the GM already has spent at least dozens of dollars buying the books, thus paying for the right to use the material. Could it be argued (in a court even), that the GM has already paid for the right?
IANAL so I don't know, and I'm not touching the whole copyright / IP issue either, but from my point of view the GM should have a explicit right to use the material any way he likes, as long as he's not distributing it to others.
And speaking as a GM (V:tM amongst other settings and systems) I can assert that the preparation for a session is not a small feat. Done right it could take dozens of hours. Saying that the GM can't charge a little bit for this work is just ridiculous and pure greed. Besides, the audience for a gaming session is typically a dozen people at most, in any case a lot less than for a play or a movie.
Now, having said all that, there is nothing stopping you from just making up your own rules on how to pretend to be a vampire.
What White Wolf are saying is that if people run and use White Wolf games at conventions and charge people money to play for a *profit*, then they need to obtain a license to make said profit using White Wolf's material as the key engine for doing so.
I disagree. It's like if a guy buys a moviemaker's guidebook, proceeds to make a great movie based on the advice on the guidebook, and then the writers demand royalties from the movie.
WW already got their money when the storyteller bought several books needed to run their game (together costing $100+ probably). What's more important the storyteller probably invested a lot of their time to prepare the game for the players.
It's sad but true that most games nowadays are packaged like you describe. However, not all of them. I'm a happy owner of the World of Warcraft Collector's Edition. It comes with a ton of extra stuff besides the game (too lazy to list them all, see for yourself), and yes, it includes a cloth map:)
The absolutely amazing hard-cover art book was alone well worth the price difference.
Nice idea, but it's against the basic principle of any business - money goes in, money doesn't go out. Someone has to pay the pizzeria, and unless it's not SOE, you will not be seeing such a feature.
User: "Hey tech support, some dick cracked the key that's on the firmware on my player's model, and also my player stopped working!"
It isn't feasible to supply each manufactured player with it's own, unique key. When one gets cracked and then invalidated, it means all players containing that key will stop playing new disks.
CoH is exactly the MMO I want to play.
There is no crafting. There is only the barest notion of "treasure" (bad guys sometimes drop enhancements to your powers). There is no notion of "camping" as I understand the EQ definition.
It is very easy to just load up CoH and PLAY, without worrying about the secondary and tertiary activities that seem to overwhelm the actual game in UO or Everquest or SWG.
My sentiments exactly. Since I have job and a spouse I can't play any game 24/7 like I used to do with MUDs 10 years ago. This means a MMO needs to be playable casually, and this is where City of Heroes excels. Only have 30 minutes? Fine, load up the game and go do a mission, or just arrest villains that plague the streets. No need to sit in PoK or whatever looking for a group first. On the other hand, if you like teaming up, CoH has it down pat, too. The team seek functionality is the best I've seen in any game, and the concepts of sidekicking/exemplaring mean that it is possible to team up with absolutely anyone else, no matter what level they are.
I am an European player. However, most likely I will not be joining the new EU servers. There are two reasons; first, my server (Justice) works without any noticeable lag, so there are no performance issues solved by switching. Second, Cryptic/NCSoft have announced that they will not be offering a chance to transfer characters to the new servers. Money is no issue for me.
I can understand this policy (it prevents ebaying), but I've put 4 months worth of my precious free time into my few characters. None of them are even level 40, but I've grown very fond of them. The idea of doing the lower levels again with them just is horrible. As I said, I'm not a powergamer per se, and don't have the option nor the motivation to quickly pump hundreds of playhours into the game just to get back where I am now. I play the game to have a fun, and the minute it turns into a chore, I'll quit.
If you follow the money to the top of the reganomics pyramid and they get a measly 50 thousand players, they get around 10 million dollars a year. There's no way it costs that much money to run the infrastructure needed for this game.
The price is wrong.
The price you pay does not correllate with the cost of making the product available to you. So what? That's how capitalism works. You invest in making a product and hope that it gives you, the investor, a maximal amount of return. The market will decide how much the potential customers are willing to pay for the product, ie. how good the investment was.
Forcing them to scale the price to the costs would be market regulation at best, communism at worst. How would you like it if you wrote a kick-ass piece of software, and the government/someone said that since it's so good and it'll sell like crazy, you can't ask more than ten cents per copy, because otherwise the "price would be wrong"?
Yep, a common lament. Another fine way to ruin your day is to inadvertedly press the enter key just as you're trying to hit tilde.
These days I delete the backup files by first writing
rm -f ~
and then move the cursor in front of the tilde, and adding an asterisk or the filename. Call me paranoid, but one time was enough, and I always double-check these kinds of commands before pressing enter.
Also City of Heroes can be bought as a pure download. You register on the web page, pay the fee (I used Visa) and get the reg key you can use when installing the download.
I guess paying for the game itself isn't just covering the packaging and S&H, it's just what the market is prepared to do to get playing. A business without competition (I mean nobody else can sell CoH) will try to charge the customer exactly as much they're willing to pay.
It'll be interesting to see how well Guild Wars (another NCSoft MMOG) is going to do, as it's going to the opposite direction. No monthly fees at all, you pay only for the initial game package and periodical expansion packs. The theory is that the expansion packs are purely optional, but I'm very sceptic about this. I started my MMOG habit about six months ago with Everquest, and mostly because the numerous expansion packs the gap between a starting character and high-end one was huge. One of the reasons I went to CoH was that there was no expansions yet. Guild Wars has to be very careful about this, lest to make the game very daunting for starting players after a few expansions.
Ignoring the fact that TFA is just some fubar made-up crap that's designed to get the page linked to tha main page, your post had something that I just have to reply to...
You need wallpaper set up before you can be productive?
Yes. I just recently had to reinstall my laptop (HD crashed and burned), and from the moment I got it back up there was a persistent and annoying feeling bugging me. Took me a while to figure the cause, and it was the unfamiliar wallpaper. Reinstating the old wallpaper (backups, baby!) made the feeling go away immediately, allowing me to concentrate fully on working.
The nagging feeling with the wrong wallpaper really spooked me, it was so strong.
What wall paper was it that has so strong effect, you might ask? It was one of the masterpieces by Greg Martin, Celestia to be exact.
Maybe everyone has lost sight of the fact that all the analysis that is done is supposed to serve the consumer, the interested reader and to help them make informed decisions.
Well. Call me a cynic, but I doubt the marketing departments driving the rushed review circus has those motivations. Rather, the idea is to drive up the hype and snow the consumer from making throughly informed decisions. But then, that's just basic implications of the free market for you.
Not that I have anything against a free market, quite the opposite, but the consumer does well to take the marketing messages with a grain of salt, even if they're presented by a third party.
A common lament. In fact, judging from the female heroes' outfits it seems that the cloth company ran out of material after delivering the male hero clothing.
Seriously, there are tons of female heroes who have designed their costumes to reveal as much as possible. Forum threads on the topic suggests most of those are played by guys, though.
So you want something like this? It's been announced etc. already, just no ETA yet.
Should take care of the n+1 punks whining at the lack of PvP. Also, should make the PvE side cleaner, as I've noticed that many of the inconsiderate and immature people I've met in the game seem to be waiting for CoV. It doesn't interest me much as my playstyle is very casual, but it'll be nice to get rid of the most obnoxious individuals who only make the game worse for the others.
I really do believe we can stuff enough algorithms in a movie that only the dedicated hackers can spend the time and effort to try to plumb through those 1,000 algorithms to try to find a way to beat it.
Yes, clearly the man is an expert on the tech side of the issue and we all should listen to what he has to say about the tech.
Seriously, nobody should be surprised of the fuss caused by this guy. I mean, who'd be surprised that a truck driver (or a businessman for that matter) would screw up a surgery? Jack would be better off listening more carefully to the suggestions of his tech savvy advisors.
There are tons of problems with existing content, and people got pissed of off the fact that Sony would rather release more pay-to-get content instead of putting resources into fixing the existing content.
Also, people weren't too happy to hear they announced the new expansion before they even had finalized its features. This GU comic summarizes the hassle nicely.
I'm not a quantum physicist, but I think I have a idea what this is about; the light waves just interfere differently with four slits. Since this Deutsch guy draws wildly different conclusions about the result, I guess he's either much stupider or much smarter than me. And since he's the university physicist and not me, I feel bad for him if it's the former.
According to the list, the letters 'a', 'c' and 'q', and the numbers 0, 1, 2, 5 and 7 should never be used as passwords. This means I'm safe as all my passwords are the letter 'Z'. Capitalized no less, that'll confound them!
I sure hope you can somehow hook two units together to multiplay. Anyone remember Wizard of Wor? It was actually the first computer game I ever played, in 1983. Damn those were some good times, back then... I still play it with Vice sometimes, though you want to play it co-op multiplayer for maximal fun.
If you would like to get stuff for Vice, check out Arnold. It seems they have every C64 title I've ever heard of.
Slashdot Mirror
If you can dump the original, encrypted file to your computer AND you have the decrypted contents, it becomes a very simple cryptanalysis task to find out the key, no?
I disagree. It's like if a guy buys a moviemaker's guidebook, proceeds to make a great movie based on the advice on the guidebook, and then the writers demand royalties from the movie.
WW already got their money when the storyteller bought several books needed to run their game (together costing $100+ probably). What's more important the storyteller probably invested a lot of their time to prepare the game for the players.
No, White Wolf is acting on pure greed here.
That must be it.
It's sad but true that most games nowadays are packaged like you describe. However, not all of them. I'm a happy owner of the World of Warcraft Collector's Edition. It comes with a ton of extra stuff besides the game (too lazy to list them all, see for yourself), and yes, it includes a cloth map :)
The absolutely amazing hard-cover art book was alone well worth the price difference.
There is also translucent concrete which works by having optical fibers mixed in.
Yes, it's just you.
Nice idea, but it's against the basic principle of any business - money goes in, money doesn't go out. Someone has to pay the pizzeria, and unless it's not SOE, you will not be seeing such a feature.
No, more like this.
User: "Hey tech support, some dick cracked the key that's on the firmware on my player's model, and also my player stopped working!"
It isn't feasible to supply each manufactured player with it's own, unique key. When one gets cracked and then invalidated, it means all players containing that key will stop playing new disks.
And a comic is more valuable than a thousand jokes.
My sentiments exactly. Since I have job and a spouse I can't play any game 24/7 like I used to do with MUDs 10 years ago. This means a MMO needs to be playable casually, and this is where City of Heroes excels. Only have 30 minutes? Fine, load up the game and go do a mission, or just arrest villains that plague the streets. No need to sit in PoK or whatever looking for a group first. On the other hand, if you like teaming up, CoH has it down pat, too. The team seek functionality is the best I've seen in any game, and the concepts of sidekicking/exemplaring mean that it is possible to team up with absolutely anyone else, no matter what level they are.
I am an European player. However, most likely I will not be joining the new EU servers. There are two reasons; first, my server (Justice) works without any noticeable lag, so there are no performance issues solved by switching. Second, Cryptic/NCSoft have announced that they will not be offering a chance to transfer characters to the new servers. Money is no issue for me.
I can understand this policy (it prevents ebaying), but I've put 4 months worth of my precious free time into my few characters. None of them are even level 40, but I've grown very fond of them. The idea of doing the lower levels again with them just is horrible. As I said, I'm not a powergamer per se, and don't have the option nor the motivation to quickly pump hundreds of playhours into the game just to get back where I am now. I play the game to have a fun, and the minute it turns into a chore, I'll quit.
www.mudconnector.com
Most, if not all, are completely free. And quite addictive, too.
If you follow the money to the top of the reganomics pyramid and they get a measly 50 thousand players, they get around 10 million dollars a year. There's no way it costs that much money to run the infrastructure needed for this game.
The price is wrong.
The price you pay does not correllate with the cost of making the product available to you. So what? That's how capitalism works. You invest in making a product and hope that it gives you, the investor, a maximal amount of return. The market will decide how much the potential customers are willing to pay for the product, ie. how good the investment was.
Forcing them to scale the price to the costs would be market regulation at best, communism at worst. How would you like it if you wrote a kick-ass piece of software, and the government/someone said that since it's so good and it'll sell like crazy, you can't ask more than ten cents per copy, because otherwise the "price would be wrong"?
These days I delete the backup files by first writing and then move the cursor in front of the tilde, and adding an asterisk or the filename. Call me paranoid, but one time was enough, and I always double-check these kinds of commands before pressing enter.
Also City of Heroes can be bought as a pure download. You register on the web page, pay the fee (I used Visa) and get the reg key you can use when installing the download.
I guess paying for the game itself isn't just covering the packaging and S&H, it's just what the market is prepared to do to get playing. A business without competition (I mean nobody else can sell CoH) will try to charge the customer exactly as much they're willing to pay.
It'll be interesting to see how well Guild Wars (another NCSoft MMOG) is going to do, as it's going to the opposite direction. No monthly fees at all, you pay only for the initial game package and periodical expansion packs. The theory is that the expansion packs are purely optional, but I'm very sceptic about this. I started my MMOG habit about six months ago with Everquest, and mostly because the numerous expansion packs the gap between a starting character and high-end one was huge. One of the reasons I went to CoH was that there was no expansions yet. Guild Wars has to be very careful about this, lest to make the game very daunting for starting players after a few expansions.
Ignoring the fact that TFA is just some fubar made-up crap that's designed to get the page linked to tha main page, your post had something that I just have to reply to...
You need wallpaper set up before you can be productive?
Yes. I just recently had to reinstall my laptop (HD crashed and burned), and from the moment I got it back up there was a persistent and annoying feeling bugging me. Took me a while to figure the cause, and it was the unfamiliar wallpaper. Reinstating the old wallpaper (backups, baby!) made the feeling go away immediately, allowing me to concentrate fully on working.
The nagging feeling with the wrong wallpaper really spooked me, it was so strong.
What wall paper was it that has so strong effect, you might ask? It was one of the masterpieces by Greg Martin, Celestia to be exact.
Maybe everyone has lost sight of the fact that all the analysis that is done is supposed to serve the consumer, the interested reader and to help them make informed decisions.
Well. Call me a cynic, but I doubt the marketing departments driving the rushed review circus has those motivations. Rather, the idea is to drive up the hype and snow the consumer from making throughly informed decisions. But then, that's just basic implications of the free market for you.
Not that I have anything against a free market, quite the opposite, but the consumer does well to take the marketing messages with a grain of salt, even if they're presented by a third party.
A common lament. In fact, judging from the female heroes' outfits it seems that the cloth company ran out of material after delivering the male hero clothing.
Seriously, there are tons of female heroes who have designed their costumes to reveal as much as possible. Forum threads on the topic suggests most of those are played by guys, though.
So you want something like this? It's been announced etc. already, just no ETA yet.
Should take care of the n+1 punks whining at the lack of PvP. Also, should make the PvE side cleaner, as I've noticed that many of the inconsiderate and immature people I've met in the game seem to be waiting for CoV. It doesn't interest me much as my playstyle is very casual, but it'll be nice to get rid of the most obnoxious individuals who only make the game worse for the others.
I really do believe we can stuff enough algorithms in a movie that only the dedicated hackers can spend the time and effort to try to plumb through those 1,000 algorithms to try to find a way to beat it.
Yes, clearly the man is an expert on the tech side of the issue and we all should listen to what he has to say about the tech.
Seriously, nobody should be surprised of the fuss caused by this guy. I mean, who'd be surprised that a truck driver (or a businessman for that matter) would screw up a surgery? Jack would be better off listening more carefully to the suggestions of his tech savvy advisors.
There are tons of problems with existing content, and people got pissed of off the fact that Sony would rather release more pay-to-get content instead of putting resources into fixing the existing content.
Also, people weren't too happy to hear they announced the new expansion before they even had finalized its features. This GU comic summarizes the hassle nicely.
Yeah, here is a nice summary with pictures.
I'm not a quantum physicist, but I think I have a idea what this is about; the light waves just interfere differently with four slits. Since this Deutsch guy draws wildly different conclusions about the result, I guess he's either much stupider or much smarter than me. And since he's the university physicist and not me, I feel bad for him if it's the former.
But the company says it's not a gimmick! It's right there in the story. Do you mean that everything in the intarweb may not be true?
According to the list, the letters 'a', 'c' and 'q', and the numbers 0, 1, 2, 5 and 7 should never be used as passwords. This means I'm safe as all my passwords are the letter 'Z'. Capitalized no less, that'll confound them!
I sure hope you can somehow hook two units together to multiplay. Anyone remember Wizard of Wor? It was actually the first computer game I ever played, in 1983. Damn those were some good times, back then... I still play it with Vice sometimes, though you want to play it co-op multiplayer for maximal fun.
If you would like to get stuff for Vice, check out Arnold. It seems they have every C64 title I've ever heard of.