Bizarrely it was only this morning that I thought, I wish there was a free or cut-down version of Maya available. It would be a huge help for a small, non-commercial game that I'm working on as a hobby. And now my hopes have been answered! Sort of...
The trouble is that it's so cut-down that it can't really be described as "free for personal use". The watermarks prevent you from doing anything useful with what you create, even non-commercially. The lack of SDK and plug-in support prevent it from being used for non-commercial game development. It even uses a different, non-standard file format.
In my opinion, this is nothing more than an advert for the full version. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but please let's not give credit where it isn't due. There's no community spirit here. No generosity for non-commercial game developers who could really benefit from a free version of Maya. This is a 133Mb advert and the download is even set-up in such a way that you can't use a download manager without some tweaking.
I may be in the minority but I consider this bad news.
Up until now the only countries with serious 'access' to space have been the US and Russia and, for all their faults, I don't fear those countries. In some ways I trust them, and in other ways I trust them to fear the other and the rest of the world. Either way, I think they'll behave themselves.
China? I'm not so sure.
This is just my opinion, of course, and I won't even attempt to back it up with any hard evidence because I know next-to-nothing on the subject. I'm simply talking as a citizen of the Earth who has a right to be concerned for the future of the planet and the species.
What I will say, though, is this...
Do you believe that China's interest in space is purely civilian?
Well last week, a spokesman for the Chinese government was quoted as saying: "China has never and will never participate in an arms race of any form in outer space."
Most people would assume that China intends to compete for military control of space, or at least to have a strong military presence. Most people would have accepted that. But if the Chinese government is already lying about its plans for space then I find that to be most worrying.
What EverQuest is not, however, is a mass-market success. J.K. Rowling sold over nine million copies of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix this summer. Michael Jackson sold 25 million copies of 'Thriller.'
By this rationale 99.9% of books and albums are mass-market failures.
Harry Potter and Thriller are extreme examples of successful products. Most books/albums don't sell as many copies.
I'm not going to research this but just for the sake of argument, let's say EverQuest sold half a million copies at $40 per copy. That's $20m. Monthly subscription is $10 approx isn't it? So those 460,000 subscribers are paying $4.6m per month. For one year that's a total of $75.2m.
The majority of movies would be lucky to make that much money from ticket sales, sell-through and TV rights combined. I'd be surprised if any book has ever made that much.
If you want to check my posting history then you'll see that I'm strongly anti-piracy and supportive of pretty much *anything* that copyright holders do to defend their livelihood.
But I disapprove of this technology.
What if it believes a genuine installation of the game is in fact a pirated copy? What if it then sets about slowly punishing the person who has done nothing worse than purchase a game?
This technology, a piece of software and therefore objective by definition, is attempting to make subjective, semi-human judgements. The only way such technology would be acceptable is if it was 100% reliable and fault proof.
Do you want them testing it on your system?
And you just *know* the next step will be punitive file deletions, hard drive formatting, etc.
Unless there is a radical change in the thinking of TV execs, the future of TV is more phone-to-vote 'interactive' shows and more on-screen corporate logos and scrolling messages.
This seems to be their focus nowadays.
Making good programmes that people actually want to watch because of what the program *is* doesn't appear to be very important nowadays. Execs seem satisfied to get ratings by attracting huge armies of teenagers armed with mobile phones and opinions because (a) they'll call the vote lines and (b) they're the target demographic for advertisers.
Based on current trends, anything genuinely pro-viewer has only a limited place in the future of television.
Could a Freenet/P2P type system, with plausible deniability, be developed from the remnants of the JAP program?
I wonder if you considered the inherent dishonesty in this question?
You're saying that you want to create a system to achieve one specific goal, but the design should include a way for you to claim that you never intended it to be used in that way.
Now I realise that you're not talking about piracy, but this is exactly the mentality that has caused a lot of good folk (myself included) to lose sympathy for *any* p2p system that is used for piracy. The dishonesty is insulting. I'd have much more respect for a company/organisation that set up a "pro-piracy" p2p system and then defended its use for piracy. Sure they'd lose, but at least they'd have a shred of dignity in doing so.
Picture some guy in a repressive third-world country, standing outside a police station, lobbing grenades in and spraying the place with machine gun fire. Then when the cops come running out he hides the gun behind his back and shouts "It wasn't me! The guy who did it ran away!". That guy's face ain't going on no t-shirt. But analogically, that's not a million miles away from what p2p companies are doing with da system and eeeevil copyright holders, and some people hold them up as modern heroes.
Hmm, I don't agree, but maybe I rambled a bit before and didn't make myself clear.
This is how it was...
1. Company policy was that people stay behind but aren't paid.
2. The manager's stated policy was that he agreed with company policy and abided by it.
3. But really the manager disagreed with company policy so he paid people half an hour's wage for, ahem, "other work" that they hadn't actually done.
He was a good manager, don't get me wrong. The only "lie" he told was the lie he had to tell to pay people fairly but not get in trouble himself. He knew that company policy was wrong so he worked around it, he just couldn't admit what he was doing, not to his bosses and not to the staff.
That's one way of looking at it, and possibly an accurate one in many cases. But...
Once upon a time I worked for a company with a policy that one male member of staff must stay behind for 15-30 mins each night to help the manager lock up. I threw many hissy fits about this because my attitude was, we don't get paid for lunch breaks (because it's "our time") so we should get paid for that enforced 15-30 minutes of "our time" lost by staying to help lock up. Fair enough, right?
The issue got to the point that, literally, I was going to lose my job over it. My opinion by this stage was that the store manager was a total bastard who was exploiting his employees.
It turned out, in case you haven't guessed already, that we were officially staying behind unpaid, but half an hour of overtime was being worked into our salaries for each time we stayed behind. The manager just couldn't say as much because he was breaking company policy to do it.
Ever since then I've been much more careful about where I appoint any bad feeling. I totally regret the way I treated that manager because he was the good guy and he tolerated my bitching time and time again.
Obviously I have no idea about your specific circumstances but the logic behind a very strict clock-in time could be...
A: "When do we want people to start?" B: "7am." A: "Hmm, that's a bit early. What if they're late?" B: "We'll punish them. Dock their pay, something like that." A: "Okay, punishing is one solution. But it would be better if we could get them to just be here on time." B: "Tricky..." A: "Hey, how about we say the start time is 7:30am but then we really hit them hard if they're late?" B: "Yeah, that could work."
Really strict rules are often intended to achieve something slightly different.
But of course I could be talking a load of rubbish, it's just a suggestion:-)
Game commercials in the UK are truly awful. I hesitate to say that they're consistently the worst commercials, but I can't immediately think of any worse ones. (Okay I've thought of one now, a pan-European tampon advert that was dubbed very badly, but that's one ad out of thousands.)
Suffice to say that game ads seem more concerned with showing the publisher's logo and announcing their (generally cringesome) slogan with a laughable voice-over. I always feel kinda embarrassed when a game ad comes on TV because they're just so silly. They would have been appropriate, maybe, 10-15 years ago, but they're unsuitable for the multi-billion dollar industry that games are nowadays.
Methinks most game ads are dreamt up by the publisher, not a professional ad agency that might actually have a clue how to, ya know, sell stuff to people. No doubt a lot of them are produced in-house too.
And the worst offender? Well, I imagine the boys and girls at Electronic Arts are already waving frantically so let's all wave back now. Hi guys! Your ads suck!:-)
I've always had mixed feelings about petitions, especially online petitions. On the one hand I think they're 99% pointless because they won't have any effect. But on the other hand I think it's very important that we have them and that people use them because hey, they *might* work.
As I said, this is the first time I've ever signed a petition. It's not because this is a hugely important issue in the grand scheme of things, but I do think it's something that is clearly wrong and I would like to think (and I do believe) that Valve listen to their customers.
Ideas such as single-player and LAN authentication are generally the result of one person sitting in his office, pondering an issue, thinking of a solution and running with it. Then thousands if not millions of people "suffer" because of that one person's decision. We need to tell that one person that we understand their predicament but on this occasion we feel their solution is wrong.
For instance, nobody *likes* CD checks on games but I've never complained about them. In fact I've defended them many times because they're a minor inconvenience which may stop a lot of piracy. But forcing people to be online to play a singler-player game? Or forcing everyone at a LAN party to be online? Come on! Valve have dropped the ball on this one. Deep down they know it, we just need to tell them that we know it too.
I really don't want Valve / Half-Life to become a "could have been".
ps. In any anti-piracy discussion I always try to point out that I only feel anger towards the *pirates*, not the copyright holders who are trying to defend their livelihood. Pirates have created this situation, Valve are just dealing with it, albeit in a way which I personally dislike.
I'm waaay out of the loop with the Half-Life scene nowadays so I hope I'm not spreading FUD by posting this link. But if Valve do seriously intend to require an Internet connection for single-player and LAN games (apparently NOT just one-time product activation) then I think it would be a very bad thing.
It's time we admit that people and corperations and other corperations and people can have the same name as long as an average consumer could differenciate them, eg based on symbol or product. Not only that, people>corperations.
I'm not going to say you're wrong but I'll ask you to think about this statement from a different perspective...
I'm assuming you see yourself as "people" and therefore, naturally, you're imaging that in a dispute between "people and corporations" you'd be the one getting crushed by the mighty corporation.
But imagine that today, right this minute in fact, you have a great idea for a business. You look into it, do all your research, and slowly the gears start turning. You call yourself "Company Name" and you start trading. It's now about a year later.
Over time you build up a good reputation and you supply good quality products at fair prices, and you become a very rich company. Now we're ten years down the line. Things are going great!
Then something called "The Internet" arrives. It's all about computers and stuff and it doesn't interest you and it has nothing to do with your company. But then a few years later it becomes much more mainstream and you realise that for your company, your good company which sells good products at fair prices, this is a new advertising medium. So you go to register CompanyName.com.
Now you discover that someone has already registered your domain name. And they're using it to tell people that your products suck and you're ripping everyone off!
You decide that the right thing to do is take the domain name away from them.
The case ends up in court: Company Name vs Individual Person
I'm in the UK and just last week I asked British Telecom if there was a way to block all calls that withheld the caller ID info. I've been getting a lot of nuisance calls lately.
BT: "Yes there is sir! And it'll cost you 40 pounds per year."
That's right, 40 quid to *not* receive nuisance calls.
Always remember when dealing with phone service providers and telemarketing companies that it's in the phone service provider's best interest if the telemarketer DOES call you.
Why exactly would a telecom company want to STOP people from calling you?
My favourite mouse is/was the Microsoft Optical with the scroll-wheel and side-buttons.
I don't use it anymore because it doesn't match the colour of my current PC and I'm shallow like that, but I always liked this combination of button functions:
Left side button for shift, right side button for alt-tab.
With those buttons I could open a hyperlink in a new window without using the keyboard and without having to use the context menu, and then again with just the mouse I could alt-tab back to the previous window. This was useful for opening a lot of links in new windows for reading later, which is something I do a lot.
In fact I think I can live with the mismatched colour so maybe it's time to swap back...
Note that this is another "critical" security update which includes an unconnected non-disclosure clause in the license agreement:
You may not disclose the results of any benchmark test of the.NET Framework component of the OS Components to any third party without Microsoft's prior written approval.
So if you want to keep your Windows system secure then you must also agree to be gagged.
I'm amazed that Slashdot has never covered Microsoft's extraneous clauses in critical updates. Seems to me like something which is clearly "wrong" and yet it goes unchallenged. Odd.
Here's the problem, as I see it; your average board is infested with trolls, astroturfers, prima donnas, moderators and other pestilences, but, somewhere in there you can find people who are actually enjoying the game, or people having actual problems with the game, or both. These people are giving their honest opinions of the situation, and from there, I can get a glimpse of how well a game has been put together.
And therein lies the problem.
Yes, some people -- you, me, anyone else with experience of games forums -- will know to separate the wheat from the chaff and they'll be able to form a balanced view of what people think about the game. Other people, perhaps even the majority of other people, will see a lot of whining and they'll assume the game sucks. This is what developers fear.
While it is true that most forums are plagued by trolls and screaming, petulant adolescents, hiding behind anonymity while they snipe at anything anyone holds dear, it's also the one of very few places to find an honest opinon about a given game.
I agree with the first part of what you said, but the bit I've marked in bold doesn't make sense to me. How can all that sniping be an "honest" opinion about a game?
Maybe I'm just midunderstanding you, but there seems to be a common feeling that negativity equates to honesty, while positivity and neutrality are irrelevant.
I'd say that a game's forum is one of the *last* places you'd get an overall honest opinion of a game. You'll see a lot of negativity, both legitimate and unfair, but you'll see very little positivity so the impression you get will be skewed.
It's a good decision for exactly the reason stated.
Anyone going to a game's forum will find countless complaints and very little positivity, an unbalanced ratio that is of course NOT representative of the majority of players. It creates an inaccurate impression of what people think of the game, which in turn may discourage other people from playing it.
Now you may say that it's also 'hiding' the legitimate complaints from potential customers, and of course that's true. However, it has only come about after many years of openness from all (or nearly all?) games companies.
The reason is has got to this stage is that the vast majority of people posting on a game's forum will be very angry, very vocal, very rude and somewhat-obsessive. If you want to blame someone for this decision then blame them, because they have created the situation that is now being addressed.
To be clear: I don't *like* the decision, but I understand and agree with it.
Also see the Vth amendment to the US constitution (void where prohibited): "nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself".
That's a good point. I hadn't considered that. (I'm actually in the UK but as we're talking about a US industry targeting US citizens, obviously the Constitution is relevant.)
I think my original comment stands true, though, despite the various squawks of troll and "mod down":-)
Of course it's good legal advice that people should NOT jump up and shout "I did it!" when accused of something.
But the point I wanted to make (and very nearly did!) is that the EFF has made a clear jump from defending the innocent to defending the probably-guilty. This is where law-abiding people should stop supporting the EFF, or at least stop supporting them on this issue, in my opinion. Obviously a lot of Slashfolk will disagree with me but it's a discussion and I'm entitled to disagree with the majority, just as they're entitled to mod my comment down.
Slashdot Mirror
Bizarrely it was only this morning that I thought, I wish there was a free or cut-down version of Maya available. It would be a huge help for a small, non-commercial game that I'm working on as a hobby. And now my hopes have been answered! Sort of...
The trouble is that it's so cut-down that it can't really be described as "free for personal use". The watermarks prevent you from doing anything useful with what you create, even non-commercially. The lack of SDK and plug-in support prevent it from being used for non-commercial game development. It even uses a different, non-standard file format.
In my opinion, this is nothing more than an advert for the full version. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but please let's not give credit where it isn't due. There's no community spirit here. No generosity for non-commercial game developers who could really benefit from a free version of Maya. This is a 133Mb advert and the download is even set-up in such a way that you can't use a download manager without some tweaking.
Could have been great. Isn't.
The USSR would have fought a war if it thought it could win. China would fight a war over honour, real or perceived, win or lose.
I may be in the minority but I consider this bad news.
0 618.stm
Up until now the only countries with serious 'access' to space have been the US and Russia and, for all their faults, I don't fear those countries. In some ways I trust them, and in other ways I trust them to fear the other and the rest of the world. Either way, I think they'll behave themselves.
China? I'm not so sure.
This is just my opinion, of course, and I won't even attempt to back it up with any hard evidence because I know next-to-nothing on the subject. I'm simply talking as a citizen of the Earth who has a right to be concerned for the future of the planet and the species.
What I will say, though, is this...
Do you believe that China's interest in space is purely civilian?
Well last week, a spokesman for the Chinese government was quoted as saying: "China has never and will never participate in an arms race of any form in outer space."
Most people would assume that China intends to compete for military control of space, or at least to have a strong military presence. Most people would have accepted that. But if the Chinese government is already lying about its plans for space then I find that to be most worrying.
Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/318
Harry Potter and Thriller are extreme examples of successful products. Most books/albums don't sell as many copies.
I'm not going to research this but just for the sake of argument, let's say EverQuest sold half a million copies at $40 per copy. That's $20m. Monthly subscription is $10 approx isn't it? So those 460,000 subscribers are paying $4.6m per month. For one year that's a total of $75.2m.
The majority of movies would be lucky to make that much money from ticket sales, sell-through and TV rights combined. I'd be surprised if any book has ever made that much.
If you want to check my posting history then you'll see that I'm strongly anti-piracy and supportive of pretty much *anything* that copyright holders do to defend their livelihood.
But I disapprove of this technology.
What if it believes a genuine installation of the game is in fact a pirated copy? What if it then sets about slowly punishing the person who has done nothing worse than purchase a game?
This technology, a piece of software and therefore objective by definition, is attempting to make subjective, semi-human judgements. The only way such technology would be acceptable is if it was 100% reliable and fault proof.
Do you want them testing it on your system?
And you just *know* the next step will be punitive file deletions, hard drive formatting, etc.
Unless there is a radical change in the thinking of TV execs, the future of TV is more phone-to-vote 'interactive' shows and more on-screen corporate logos and scrolling messages.
This seems to be their focus nowadays.
Making good programmes that people actually want to watch because of what the program *is* doesn't appear to be very important nowadays. Execs seem satisfied to get ratings by attracting huge armies of teenagers armed with mobile phones and opinions because (a) they'll call the vote lines and (b) they're the target demographic for advertisers.
Based on current trends, anything genuinely pro-viewer has only a limited place in the future of television.
You're saying that you want to create a system to achieve one specific goal, but the design should include a way for you to claim that you never intended it to be used in that way.
Now I realise that you're not talking about piracy, but this is exactly the mentality that has caused a lot of good folk (myself included) to lose sympathy for *any* p2p system that is used for piracy. The dishonesty is insulting. I'd have much more respect for a company/organisation that set up a "pro-piracy" p2p system and then defended its use for piracy. Sure they'd lose, but at least they'd have a shred of dignity in doing so.
Picture some guy in a repressive third-world country, standing outside a police station, lobbing grenades in and spraying the place with machine gun fire. Then when the cops come running out he hides the gun behind his back and shouts "It wasn't me! The guy who did it ran away!". That guy's face ain't going on no t-shirt. But analogically, that's not a million miles away from what p2p companies are doing with da system and eeeevil copyright holders, and some people hold them up as modern heroes.
Hmm, I don't agree, but maybe I rambled a bit before and didn't make myself clear.
This is how it was...
1. Company policy was that people stay behind but aren't paid.
2. The manager's stated policy was that he agreed with company policy and abided by it.
3. But really the manager disagreed with company policy so he paid people half an hour's wage for, ahem, "other work" that they hadn't actually done.
He was a good manager, don't get me wrong. The only "lie" he told was the lie he had to tell to pay people fairly but not get in trouble himself. He knew that company policy was wrong so he worked around it, he just couldn't admit what he was doing, not to his bosses and not to the staff.
That's one way of looking at it, and possibly an accurate one in many cases. But...
Once upon a time I worked for a company with a policy that one male member of staff must stay behind for 15-30 mins each night to help the manager lock up. I threw many hissy fits about this because my attitude was, we don't get paid for lunch breaks (because it's "our time") so we should get paid for that enforced 15-30 minutes of "our time" lost by staying to help lock up. Fair enough, right?
The issue got to the point that, literally, I was going to lose my job over it. My opinion by this stage was that the store manager was a total bastard who was exploiting his employees.
It turned out, in case you haven't guessed already, that we were officially staying behind unpaid, but half an hour of overtime was being worked into our salaries for each time we stayed behind. The manager just couldn't say as much because he was breaking company policy to do it.
Ever since then I've been much more careful about where I appoint any bad feeling. I totally regret the way I treated that manager because he was the good guy and he tolerated my bitching time and time again.
Obviously I have no idea about your specific circumstances but the logic behind a very strict clock-in time could be...
:-)
A: "When do we want people to start?"
B: "7am."
A: "Hmm, that's a bit early. What if they're late?"
B: "We'll punish them. Dock their pay, something like that."
A: "Okay, punishing is one solution. But it would be better if we could get them to just be here on time."
B: "Tricky..."
A: "Hey, how about we say the start time is 7:30am but then we really hit them hard if they're late?"
B: "Yeah, that could work."
Really strict rules are often intended to achieve something slightly different.
But of course I could be talking a load of rubbish, it's just a suggestion
Game commercials in the UK are truly awful. I hesitate to say that they're consistently the worst commercials, but I can't immediately think of any worse ones. (Okay I've thought of one now, a pan-European tampon advert that was dubbed very badly, but that's one ad out of thousands.)
:-)
Suffice to say that game ads seem more concerned with showing the publisher's logo and announcing their (generally cringesome) slogan with a laughable voice-over. I always feel kinda embarrassed when a game ad comes on TV because they're just so silly. They would have been appropriate, maybe, 10-15 years ago, but they're unsuitable for the multi-billion dollar industry that games are nowadays.
Methinks most game ads are dreamt up by the publisher, not a professional ad agency that might actually have a clue how to, ya know, sell stuff to people. No doubt a lot of them are produced in-house too.
And the worst offender? Well, I imagine the boys and girls at Electronic Arts are already waving frantically so let's all wave back now. Hi guys! Your ads suck!
Same here. Looks like this a UI feature they need to improve.
I've always had mixed feelings about petitions, especially online petitions. On the one hand I think they're 99% pointless because they won't have any effect. But on the other hand I think it's very important that we have them and that people use them because hey, they *might* work.
As I said, this is the first time I've ever signed a petition. It's not because this is a hugely important issue in the grand scheme of things, but I do think it's something that is clearly wrong and I would like to think (and I do believe) that Valve listen to their customers.
Ideas such as single-player and LAN authentication are generally the result of one person sitting in his office, pondering an issue, thinking of a solution and running with it. Then thousands if not millions of people "suffer" because of that one person's decision. We need to tell that one person that we understand their predicament but on this occasion we feel their solution is wrong.
For instance, nobody *likes* CD checks on games but I've never complained about them. In fact I've defended them many times because they're a minor inconvenience which may stop a lot of piracy. But forcing people to be online to play a singler-player game? Or forcing everyone at a LAN party to be online? Come on! Valve have dropped the ball on this one. Deep down they know it, we just need to tell them that we know it too.
I really don't want Valve / Half-Life to become a "could have been".
ps. In any anti-piracy discussion I always try to point out that I only feel anger towards the *pirates*, not the copyright holders who are trying to defend their livelihood. Pirates have created this situation, Valve are just dealing with it, albeit in a way which I personally dislike.
Vaguely on-topic. This is the first petition I've ever signed...
Protest of Half-Life 2's requirement of an internet connection for Single Player and Lan Party games.
I'm waaay out of the loop with the Half-Life scene nowadays so I hope I'm not spreading FUD by posting this link. But if Valve do seriously intend to require an Internet connection for single-player and LAN games (apparently NOT just one-time product activation) then I think it would be a very bad thing.
Thanks to Blue's News for the link.
I'm assuming you see yourself as "people" and therefore, naturally, you're imaging that in a dispute between "people and corporations" you'd be the one getting crushed by the mighty corporation.
But imagine that today, right this minute in fact, you have a great idea for a business. You look into it, do all your research, and slowly the gears start turning. You call yourself "Company Name" and you start trading. It's now about a year later.
Over time you build up a good reputation and you supply good quality products at fair prices, and you become a very rich company. Now we're ten years down the line. Things are going great!
Then something called "The Internet" arrives. It's all about computers and stuff and it doesn't interest you and it has nothing to do with your company. But then a few years later it becomes much more mainstream and you realise that for your company, your good company which sells good products at fair prices, this is a new advertising medium. So you go to register CompanyName.com.
Now you discover that someone has already registered your domain name. And they're using it to tell people that your products suck and you're ripping everyone off!
You decide that the right thing to do is take the domain name away from them.
The case ends up in court: Company Name vs Individual Person
Remember: It's *your* company.
Who should win?
I'm in the UK and just last week I asked British Telecom if there was a way to block all calls that withheld the caller ID info. I've been getting a lot of nuisance calls lately.
BT: "Yes there is sir! And it'll cost you 40 pounds per year."
That's right, 40 quid to *not* receive nuisance calls.
Always remember when dealing with phone service providers and telemarketing companies that it's in the phone service provider's best interest if the telemarketer DOES call you.
Why exactly would a telecom company want to STOP people from calling you?
#include "no_european_symbols_on_slashdot_complaint.txt"
My favourite mouse is/was the Microsoft Optical with the scroll-wheel and side-buttons.
I don't use it anymore because it doesn't match the colour of my current PC and I'm shallow like that, but I always liked this combination of button functions:
Left side button for shift, right side button for alt-tab.
With those buttons I could open a hyperlink in a new window without using the keyboard and without having to use the context menu, and then again with just the mouse I could alt-tab back to the previous window. This was useful for opening a lot of links in new windows for reading later, which is something I do a lot.
In fact I think I can live with the mismatched colour so maybe it's time to swap back...
I'm amazed that Slashdot has never covered Microsoft's extraneous clauses in critical updates. Seems to me like something which is clearly "wrong" and yet it goes unchallenged. Odd.
Yes, some people -- you, me, anyone else with experience of games forums -- will know to separate the wheat from the chaff and they'll be able to form a balanced view of what people think about the game. Other people, perhaps even the majority of other people, will see a lot of whining and they'll assume the game sucks. This is what developers fear.
Maybe I'm just midunderstanding you, but there seems to be a common feeling that negativity equates to honesty, while positivity and neutrality are irrelevant.
I'd say that a game's forum is one of the *last* places you'd get an overall honest opinion of a game. You'll see a lot of negativity, both legitimate and unfair, but you'll see very little positivity so the impression you get will be skewed.
It's a good decision for exactly the reason stated.
Anyone going to a game's forum will find countless complaints and very little positivity, an unbalanced ratio that is of course NOT representative of the majority of players. It creates an inaccurate impression of what people think of the game, which in turn may discourage other people from playing it.
Now you may say that it's also 'hiding' the legitimate complaints from potential customers, and of course that's true. However, it has only come about after many years of openness from all (or nearly all?) games companies.
The reason is has got to this stage is that the vast majority of people posting on a game's forum will be very angry, very vocal, very rude and somewhat-obsessive. If you want to blame someone for this decision then blame them, because they have created the situation that is now being addressed.
To be clear: I don't *like* the decision, but I understand and agree with it.
I think my original comment stands true, though, despite the various squawks of troll and "mod down"
Of course it's good legal advice that people should NOT jump up and shout "I did it!" when accused of something.
But the point I wanted to make (and very nearly did!) is that the EFF has made a clear jump from defending the innocent to defending the probably-guilty. This is where law-abiding people should stop supporting the EFF, or at least stop supporting them on this issue, in my opinion. Obviously a lot of Slashfolk will disagree with me but it's a discussion and I'm entitled to disagree with the majority, just as they're entitled to mod my comment down.
Sorry if I was a bit inflammatory at first