Seriously, thats what CCP is more or less telling the public at this point. After the PR nightmare involving t20, CCP is basically trying to blow off this entire incident. After the t20 incident, we KNOW that some of the staff have had some level of interaction with guilds/clans that resulted in said guilds/clans getting a leg up on the competition (however great or small it is).
Suddenly, another EVE scandal is revealed and CCP tells people they're being framed? After months/years of various accusations? Its completely and utterly unbelievable.
But take for example what a hypothetically intelligent chimp living in a zoo would come to believe over time. With sufficient intelligence, it could really only conclude that its entire environment was intelligently designed by one or more members of another species.
Except by that logic, the chimp can only perceive what its creator (or captor) has allowed it to perceive. Thats not very "intelligent" for "intelligent design". Sooner or later, the monkey will grow to the point that it requires more space/food/water and without intervention from the zoo keeper, the monkey will die off.
You find the same issue when you read up on European medieval theology. The Earth is the center of the universe, oh wait oops its not. God made Man out of His image, oh wait then why do we have a worthless appendix and a tail bone? God made Eve from Adam's rib, oh wait then why don't male humans have one less rib than female humans? Rinse and repeat.
And Occam's Razor is inappropriate (and outdated) when you're talking about evolution, let alone the chances of evolution on a galactic or universal scale. Human beings have never gone past our moon and only recently are we sending satellites beyond Pluto, and people want to assume that aliens have never evolved anywhere else in the universe? If alien life WAS out in the universe, it would take DECADES to send and receive radio transmissions from them. They could be bombarding us with transmissions containing blueprints for space travel right now but our technology might not be advanced enough to understand it. Hell, they might have sent radio transmissions to us in the past and we simply never picked it up because SETI wasn't established at the time. The list goes on. Occam's Razor? With billions/trillions of planets in the universe, the simplest answer is that sooner or later, somewhere, somehow an alien civilization will evolve into existence simply because there are so many chances of it happening. Same thing with evolution. With billions/trillions of organisms on Earth, sooner or later, somewhere, somehow a new species will evolve into existence and will simply never be noticed for years/decades/centuries.
Do we need a "technical" set of judges to handle these types of cases?
No, we need a "technical" set of definition for many words made up in the past 20-odd years. Whats a forum? People seem to use the word interchangeably with "message board" and "BBS". Whats the difference between coding and programming? What limitations (if any) are there to fulfill in order to qualify for a "web site"?
Don't forget, people used to call the internet the "world wide web" when we all know thats not quite true. Peer-to-peer? Bandwidth? And it has to be a uniform definition if we want it to be applicable in court cases.
Actually you can. It usually depends on the ground type though. Grass makes practically no noise, dirt is fairly quiet and snow is damned loud if someone's going for a melee attack behind you. More often than not most people simply never notice it over the sounds of gunfire from some other player(s).
1. A ranked system is pointless. Sooner or later, all the "skilled" players will form their own groups (read: clans) and move onto bigger leagues with better prizes. The non-skilled players will eventually go back to public servers when they realize they're barely/if at all breaking even. Griefers (or people who join lower ranked games for fun) will quit as well. You can do the same thing on public servers right now.
2. Players who are on a streak are often times dependent on whos on the server and how the teams are setup. I've played on servers where a single player could get 4~7 kills per round only to drop down to 2~3 when auto-balance kicked in. And don't forget about snipers/campers, who can sometimes have up to 10+ kills streaks simply because they hide behind their team.
3. Little to no profit, and even less fun. Pros will go to private/clan/pro servers or move on to bigger leagues with better prizes and amateurs will go to public/commercial/newbie servers and play for free.
The only way you can create a ranking system in video games is if the game is arcadish like Halo 2. In Halo 2 a good player can dominate a match, but even the best player can't fend off sword or rocket launcher campers, certain weapons are flat-out worthless against vehicles and a lucky (plasma) grenade can mean certain death. Ranks are slow to obtain and unless you REALLY spend some time deranking yourself, you'll eventually be pushed out of newbie matches.
That about sums it up for me. Theres been so much hype around the game, since its by the people who made God of War, that I'm simply reluctant to buy into anything Sony or the developers claim.
True, but this is a list about who's been influential in the past year. Rain hasn't exactly reshaped music culture outside of (South) Korea and Osama Bin Laden's influence has degraded to releasing a home video every 6 months and then spending half the time on it trying to convince the world that hes still in charge of Al-Qaeda.
Meanwhile, George W. Bush (for better or for worse) meanwhile has led the U.S. into TWO countries, is rivaling Harry Truman in all-time lowest record in approval ratings and has (arguably) (repeatedly) violated the U.S. Constitution. Thats some pretty damned influential stuff compared to the works of other people.
What Mitchell alludes to is the tendency for Nintendo-published titles to overrun the top end of sales charts on Nintendo platforms, leaving third party publishers out of luck sales-wise.
In other news, analysts made the shocking discovery that the Nintendo Gamecube had the least amount of support from third party publishers leaving Nintendo-published titles to overrun the top end of sales charts on the Gamecube.
Some of the people on that list simply aren't that influencial and others are clearly listed simply for name recognition. Rain, a Korean musician? Unless he's the Korean version of the Beatles, I'll pass. Osama Bin Laden? Last time I checked, hes been hiding in a cave fighting his own organization for leadership. George W. Bush at #98?! I hate his policies, but in terms of world influence, hes pretty damned important.
Is it normal for game divisions a year+ after their new console is released to still be in the red?
Actually, yes it is normal for a game division to be in the red a year+ after its release. Video game divisions are always long term investments.
The original Playetation had to be rescued from the gutter by Final Fantasy VII, the PS2 had great sales straight out of the gate but fumbled for a year between crappy games and lack of supply, the Xbox pulled positive sales only when Halo 2 was released and the Xbox 360 is still bleeding out cash.
For a game company like Nintendo (and arguably Sega), its not normal for a game company 1 year+ after their new console is released to still be in the red.
Face it, this is happening simply because of Virginia Tech. Schools have become (more) paranoid of students so ANYONE that writes an essay, a story, a letter, draws a picture, makes a movie, makes a comment that could possibly lead to violence down the line will get you picked up by the authorities. I don't like it personally, but thats what happening.
My friend had a similar situation happen to him after the Columbine High School shooting. He made up a death-list and talked about it to friends and other students in school PRIOR to Columbine. After Columbine, he was picked up by the school administrators and police and spent several days in consoling until they decided that he wasn't serious.
gamers appear to forget they are playing games less readily than film goers forget they are watching a film because they have to participate in the game for it to proceed. They appear to non-games players to be engrossed in what they are doing, but, they are concentrating on making progress, and are unlikely to be emotionally involved
Of course games are less engrossing than movies. The time, money, effort, everything else that goes towards setting up the atmosphere, is MASSIVE compared to ANYTHING video games have shown us.
Sure, SquareEnix delivers some pretty nice FMVs but by the time they're done, players rarely if ever see anything similar again. SotC had huge environments, but if it wasn't for the fact that you ran around from point to point on horseback, people would've criticized the fact that the world is so barren. FPSs limit the perspective of players to near claustrophobic levels (enough with the tunnels already!) MMORPGs either limit players too "squad" sized groups or go overboard with sheer number and overwhelm players with sheer number to unplayable status (WoW raids anyone?)
Until video games deliver Lord of the Rings scale battles without preventing me from taking part in its ENTIRETY, not some stupid, you can only fight the orcs that jump into your preset path, I'll stick to watching movies like 300 to satisfy my bloodlust.
I liked it, but for all the wrong reasons. It was great if were a computer nerd and liked to pick out the technical eye candy, but other than that the movie was honestly terrible.
Mining for coal/gold and drilling for oil/natural gas in Alaska is virtually impossible politically and economically. Any politician that even jokes about mining or drilling for coal/gold and oil/natural gas in Alaska would be committing political suicide. Economically, theres no infrastructure to transport the machinery in or the raw materials out. You'd spend decades just trying to pay off initial expenses. Forget about government kickbacks too. You'd have to go through Canada and they won't give anyone the go-ahead without some serious kickbacks of their own.
Salmon isn't as cheap or plentiful as many would have you believe anymore. Decades of damming rivers and overfishing have destroyed their numbers and attempts to domestically "farm" fish simply turn into biology disasters (lack of oxygen in the water, questionable food expense-fish revenue cost ratio, widespread growth of fish diseases, etc). Whiskey is a very, very luxurious item for the average Russian. It may be an untapped market, but without huge amounts of advertising, any type of new luxury item introduction into the Russian market will be a total waste of time and money.
I can't comment on the Seikan tunnel but the Chunnel is largely worthless economically. Think about it, what are you going to trade between France and England? Wine? Cheese? Bread? England and France are developed countries, they don't need to import/export large amounts of steel and most countries outside of France could trade quicker and cheaper through naval freighters.
Russia and Alaska on the other hand could SERIOUSLY benefit from this tunnel though. Russian coal, gold, oil, natural gas, caviar, vodka going one way, American electronics, specialized machinery, steel, foodstuffs and cars going the other. Obviously there'd need to be some serious infrastructure improvement around the area but if the plan gets the go-ahead, local officials will find themselves swarmed by construction contractors bidding on the job. (A new trans-Siberian railway? A U.S.-Canada-Alaska highway/railway?)
Realistically, people will always talk about events no matter when you hear about it and thats fine. Sooner or later it'll come out so you might as well get it out of the way early. After all, realistically anything we say or do will be meaningless since we're so far down the totem pole in decision making.
THE PROBLEM is when you have politicians trying to milk an incident for their own purposes/agenda. Jack Thompson is blaming games? Well what the f*** is he saying that for? For all we know (at this point), the shooter could've been an alien in disguise killing humans for fun. Maybe the shooter HATED video games and was actually targeting students who were known hardcore gamers.
The stuff that people like Jack Thompson says is the problem with the mass media age, not bloggers or small time commenter's like the vast majority of/.'ers.
So your solution is 'Give everyone a gun!'. My solution is 'Don't give crazy people guns.'
Your way the crazy guy only manages to kill 3 or 4 people before someone else shoots him. My way, nobody gets shot.
Ok, thats fine with me as long as I'm the one who gets to decide who's crazy. That said, I think you're crazy and everyone else is sane, now where do I pick up my new gun?
Seriously, this scenario has been played out to death by philosophers all throughout history. Should the military be the only ones who get guns? Well who controls the military? A few, rich, ultra-elite minority put into power through a rigged election process created by the same people you're putting into power. Oh yeah, that sounds really safe/sarcasm.
"Responsible/Sane" adults? Now you're going up against human nature. Good luck there, call me when you figure out how to remove rage, anger, jealousy and other emotions from humans.
No one? Oh great, now we'd spend all our guy arguing time on the security concerns of knife owners. Then we can argue until we're down to who's allowed own rocks and pointy sticks.
And maybe, just maybe we should start arguing over who's allowed to use their hands, feet and head in fear of them using them for lethal hand-to-hand combat moves.
I can't comment on Okami (which was arguably a "lets finish this last project, pray it makes a profit, but fold the company anyway cause this isn't working out") or God Hand, but Viewtiful Joe butchered itself after the first game. The first sequel was released on the PS2, so it alienated the GC audience, the only people to have bought/owned the first game. Not a very logical move.
Not with Donkey Kong but with Super Mario Bros (1)? I thought it got taken down cause they didn't get permission beforehand. Hopefully they have permission this time.
and he'll come back with all his friends demanding a bigger, sweeter, better cookie each time.
Most CRPG developer simply couldn't keep up or implement user made content. Ultima, Wizardry and basically any Sierra adventure game all failed in this manner. Games like Nethack, Neverwinter Nights 1 (2 is a buggy mess) and the Elder Scrolls succeeded and continue to enjoy success as traditional CRPGs.
There was a point in gaming history when the CRPG was viewed as the "hard" genre; the genre that required the largest investment in time and energy but which offered the greatest rewards.
Yeah, and that point passed by years ago. Nowadays console RPGs require almost 50+ hours of gameplay just to beat the main storyline start to finish without working on side-quests. They also reward you with Hollywood-style cinemas, fully orchestrated music and a profound sense of accomplishment. Last time I checked, Nethack was still offering a silent, static screen of text as an ending with nothing else to do but play again as a different class.
You twist the tail of the dragon and you get burnt then eaten.. is this such a big fucking surprise?
Since when did school principles turn into fire-breathing, child eating dragons?
The issue isn't over the fact that the kids were punished, its the fact that the guy simply went overboard in tracking down the culprits. What next? Do we need to pass Patriot Act II if some prankster manages to fly into the U.S. with a brick of clay labeled "This is a bomb"?
In a country where gasoline costs more than $4 a gallon, at least $1 more than the U.S. price, enthusiasts tweak their cars and hone driving techniques to cut fuel bills and gain bragging rights.
Cutting down on fuel bills AND bragging rights? Where do I sign!?
That they get a real budget next time they work on a project like this. I'll admit that I thought the series had its ups and downs (more Tex, less O'Malley) but you can't really expect A+ material every episode considering this is machinima. Next time the Red vs. Blue team gets together, hopefully they'll have a real budget instead of getting by on donations and subscriptions.
Slashdot Mirror
Suddenly, another EVE scandal is revealed and CCP tells people they're being framed? After months/years of various accusations? Its completely and utterly unbelievable.
If the U.S. is supposed to be the big, bad DMCA exporter and another country suddenly one-ups the U.S., I'd say theres a LOT to be worried about.
Except by that logic, the chimp can only perceive what its creator (or captor) has allowed it to perceive. Thats not very "intelligent" for "intelligent design". Sooner or later, the monkey will grow to the point that it requires more space/food/water and without intervention from the zoo keeper, the monkey will die off.
You find the same issue when you read up on European medieval theology. The Earth is the center of the universe, oh wait oops its not. God made Man out of His image, oh wait then why do we have a worthless appendix and a tail bone? God made Eve from Adam's rib, oh wait then why don't male humans have one less rib than female humans? Rinse and repeat.
And Occam's Razor is inappropriate (and outdated) when you're talking about evolution, let alone the chances of evolution on a galactic or universal scale. Human beings have never gone past our moon and only recently are we sending satellites beyond Pluto, and people want to assume that aliens have never evolved anywhere else in the universe? If alien life WAS out in the universe, it would take DECADES to send and receive radio transmissions from them. They could be bombarding us with transmissions containing blueprints for space travel right now but our technology might not be advanced enough to understand it. Hell, they might have sent radio transmissions to us in the past and we simply never picked it up because SETI wasn't established at the time. The list goes on. Occam's Razor? With billions/trillions of planets in the universe, the simplest answer is that sooner or later, somewhere, somehow an alien civilization will evolve into existence simply because there are so many chances of it happening. Same thing with evolution. With billions/trillions of organisms on Earth, sooner or later, somewhere, somehow a new species will evolve into existence and will simply never be noticed for years/decades/centuries.
Playing Halo 3 beta.
No, we need a "technical" set of definition for many words made up in the past 20-odd years. Whats a forum? People seem to use the word interchangeably with "message board" and "BBS". Whats the difference between coding and programming? What limitations (if any) are there to fulfill in order to qualify for a "web site"?
Don't forget, people used to call the internet the "world wide web" when we all know thats not quite true. Peer-to-peer? Bandwidth? And it has to be a uniform definition if we want it to be applicable in court cases.
Actually you can. It usually depends on the ground type though. Grass makes practically no noise, dirt is fairly quiet and snow is damned loud if someone's going for a melee attack behind you. More often than not most people simply never notice it over the sounds of gunfire from some other player(s).
2. Players who are on a streak are often times dependent on whos on the server and how the teams are setup. I've played on servers where a single player could get 4~7 kills per round only to drop down to 2~3 when auto-balance kicked in. And don't forget about snipers/campers, who can sometimes have up to 10+ kills streaks simply because they hide behind their team.
3. Little to no profit, and even less fun. Pros will go to private/clan/pro servers or move on to bigger leagues with better prizes and amateurs will go to public/commercial/newbie servers and play for free.
The only way you can create a ranking system in video games is if the game is arcadish like Halo 2. In Halo 2 a good player can dominate a match, but even the best player can't fend off sword or rocket launcher campers, certain weapons are flat-out worthless against vehicles and a lucky (plasma) grenade can mean certain death. Ranks are slow to obtain and unless you REALLY spend some time deranking yourself, you'll eventually be pushed out of newbie matches.
That about sums it up for me. Theres been so much hype around the game, since its by the people who made God of War, that I'm simply reluctant to buy into anything Sony or the developers claim.
Meanwhile, George W. Bush (for better or for worse) meanwhile has led the U.S. into TWO countries, is rivaling Harry Truman in all-time lowest record in approval ratings and has (arguably) (repeatedly) violated the U.S. Constitution. Thats some pretty damned influential stuff compared to the works of other people.
In other news, analysts made the shocking discovery that the Nintendo Gamecube had the least amount of support from third party publishers leaving Nintendo-published titles to overrun the top end of sales charts on the Gamecube.
Some of the people on that list simply aren't that influencial and others are clearly listed simply for name recognition. Rain, a Korean musician? Unless he's the Korean version of the Beatles, I'll pass. Osama Bin Laden? Last time I checked, hes been hiding in a cave fighting his own organization for leadership. George W. Bush at #98?! I hate his policies, but in terms of world influence, hes pretty damned important.
Actually, yes it is normal for a game division to be in the red a year+ after its release. Video game divisions are always long term investments.
The original Playetation had to be rescued from the gutter by Final Fantasy VII, the PS2 had great sales straight out of the gate but fumbled for a year between crappy games and lack of supply, the Xbox pulled positive sales only when Halo 2 was released and the Xbox 360 is still bleeding out cash.
For a game company like Nintendo (and arguably Sega), its not normal for a game company 1 year+ after their new console is released to still be in the red.
My friend had a similar situation happen to him after the Columbine High School shooting. He made up a death-list and talked about it to friends and other students in school PRIOR to Columbine. After Columbine, he was picked up by the school administrators and police and spent several days in consoling until they decided that he wasn't serious.
Of course games are less engrossing than movies. The time, money, effort, everything else that goes towards setting up the atmosphere, is MASSIVE compared to ANYTHING video games have shown us.
Sure, SquareEnix delivers some pretty nice FMVs but by the time they're done, players rarely if ever see anything similar again. SotC had huge environments, but if it wasn't for the fact that you ran around from point to point on horseback, people would've criticized the fact that the world is so barren. FPSs limit the perspective of players to near claustrophobic levels (enough with the tunnels already!) MMORPGs either limit players too "squad" sized groups or go overboard with sheer number and overwhelm players with sheer number to unplayable status (WoW raids anyone?)
Until video games deliver Lord of the Rings scale battles without preventing me from taking part in its ENTIRETY, not some stupid, you can only fight the orcs that jump into your preset path, I'll stick to watching movies like 300 to satisfy my bloodlust.
I liked it, but for all the wrong reasons. It was great if were a computer nerd and liked to pick out the technical eye candy, but other than that the movie was honestly terrible.
Salmon isn't as cheap or plentiful as many would have you believe anymore. Decades of damming rivers and overfishing have destroyed their numbers and attempts to domestically "farm" fish simply turn into biology disasters (lack of oxygen in the water, questionable food expense-fish revenue cost ratio, widespread growth of fish diseases, etc). Whiskey is a very, very luxurious item for the average Russian. It may be an untapped market, but without huge amounts of advertising, any type of new luxury item introduction into the Russian market will be a total waste of time and money.
Russia and Alaska on the other hand could SERIOUSLY benefit from this tunnel though. Russian coal, gold, oil, natural gas, caviar, vodka going one way, American electronics, specialized machinery, steel, foodstuffs and cars going the other. Obviously there'd need to be some serious infrastructure improvement around the area but if the plan gets the go-ahead, local officials will find themselves swarmed by construction contractors bidding on the job. (A new trans-Siberian railway? A U.S.-Canada-Alaska highway/railway?)
THE PROBLEM is when you have politicians trying to milk an incident for their own purposes/agenda. Jack Thompson is blaming games? Well what the f*** is he saying that for? For all we know (at this point), the shooter could've been an alien in disguise killing humans for fun. Maybe the shooter HATED video games and was actually targeting students who were known hardcore gamers.
The stuff that people like Jack Thompson says is the problem with the mass media age, not bloggers or small time commenter's like the vast majority of /.'ers.
Your way the crazy guy only manages to kill 3 or 4 people before someone else shoots him. My way, nobody gets shot.
Ok, thats fine with me as long as I'm the one who gets to decide who's crazy. That said, I think you're crazy and everyone else is sane, now where do I pick up my new gun?
Seriously, this scenario has been played out to death by philosophers all throughout history. Should the military be the only ones who get guns? Well who controls the military? A few, rich, ultra-elite minority put into power through a rigged election process created by the same people you're putting into power. Oh yeah, that sounds really safe /sarcasm.
"Responsible/Sane" adults? Now you're going up against human nature. Good luck there, call me when you figure out how to remove rage, anger, jealousy and other emotions from humans.
No one? Oh great, now we'd spend all our guy arguing time on the security concerns of knife owners. Then we can argue until we're down to who's allowed own rocks and pointy sticks.
And maybe, just maybe we should start arguing over who's allowed to use their hands, feet and head in fear of them using them for lethal hand-to-hand combat moves.
I can't comment on Okami (which was arguably a "lets finish this last project, pray it makes a profit, but fold the company anyway cause this isn't working out") or God Hand, but Viewtiful Joe butchered itself after the first game. The first sequel was released on the PS2, so it alienated the GC audience, the only people to have bought/owned the first game. Not a very logical move.
Not with Donkey Kong but with Super Mario Bros (1)? I thought it got taken down cause they didn't get permission beforehand. Hopefully they have permission this time.
Most CRPG developer simply couldn't keep up or implement user made content. Ultima, Wizardry and basically any Sierra adventure game all failed in this manner. Games like Nethack, Neverwinter Nights 1 (2 is a buggy mess) and the Elder Scrolls succeeded and continue to enjoy success as traditional CRPGs.
There was a point in gaming history when the CRPG was viewed as the "hard" genre; the genre that required the largest investment in time and energy but which offered the greatest rewards.
Yeah, and that point passed by years ago. Nowadays console RPGs require almost 50+ hours of gameplay just to beat the main storyline start to finish without working on side-quests. They also reward you with Hollywood-style cinemas, fully orchestrated music and a profound sense of accomplishment. Last time I checked, Nethack was still offering a silent, static screen of text as an ending with nothing else to do but play again as a different class.
Since when did school principles turn into fire-breathing, child eating dragons?
The issue isn't over the fact that the kids were punished, its the fact that the guy simply went overboard in tracking down the culprits. What next? Do we need to pass Patriot Act II if some prankster manages to fly into the U.S. with a brick of clay labeled "This is a bomb"?
Cutting down on fuel bills AND bragging rights? Where do I sign!?
That they get a real budget next time they work on a project like this. I'll admit that I thought the series had its ups and downs (more Tex, less O'Malley) but you can't really expect A+ material every episode considering this is machinima. Next time the Red vs. Blue team gets together, hopefully they'll have a real budget instead of getting by on donations and subscriptions.