Eve doesn't suffer for it. The solo player -- playing in the game designed for a multi-player experience -- who feels he is entitled to access content designed for groups, may "suffer," but the game surely does not. Empire space is huge, and soloists can stay there pretty much with no danger. That's Eve's solo game, and it's big, and it's bigger than the "solo games" of most MMOs. If you want to play Eve, but don't want to group, your game is in Empire. If you come to the field with a baseball, and everyone else is playing football, you don't expect everyone else to accommodate you simply because you brought a baseball to a football game. These are online multi-player games. It is absolutely not unreasonable to expect that you need a group to experience them the way the developers intended.
Eve is just more elegant about the way it handles the solo/multiplayer dichotomy than other games. In other MMOs, when you try to access the phat lewts beyond the mountain pass, you'll be informed that there aren't enough people in your group, you need a raid-force, whatever. Eve just lets you go where you want and pay the consequences if you enter Dodge City as a Lone Gunman.
By the way, I read an article in Eon magazine about a solo player who did travel to every system in Eve, taking screengrabs along the way. It was not easy, it was an adventure, but he was good and he did it. So buy a fast, cloaked ship, skill up, and start exploring!
For every sword-and-sorcery or sci-fi themed MMO, there is an offline game, designed from the ground up for solo players. When MMO developers start compromising to accommodate the solo players, the gameplay for the group players is inevitably compromised.
Eve, happily, has resisted this so far, simply because so much of the gameplay flows out of the free-flow Wild West dynamics and economics. You want to be a solo pirate? G'head, Bunky, nothing's stopping you (you'll only catch other startled n00bs, you'll die a lot, and the time v. reward curve will suck, but nothing stops you). The "end game" for Eve is in highly solo-hostile "0.0 space," but there is so much to do in the NPC-policed "Empire Space" that even a soloist shouldn't be able to complain. The soloist always has the option of buying the better gear from his richer grouping brother, but won't be able to derive the best benefit from it (i.e., maximize money made per hour) unless he takes that gear into places where -- if he travels solo -- someone will take it away from him very quickly. The killboards are filled with solo players in their expensive "Marauders" being dragged down by gangs of players in throwaway cruisers and frigates.
...then it needs to change on the front end as well. An author's overall compensation comes down to: "Lookit, we're going to pay you a teensy-weensy amount now so that you can stay breathing long enough to write a sequel, but don't worry, if this thing is really as good as you think it is, you'll make it all up on the back-end residuals."
So if you IP crusaders want to shorten the time it takes for a book to enter public domain (presumably so you all can post your fan fiction without fear of a C&D letter), then make sure the publishers all get the memo to pay authors more up front. Anything else is a bait and switch. To put it into a cube-dweller analogy, it would be as if you were hired at a low base pay but told you would make it up in your end of year bonus. When end-of-year came around, you were told, sorry, we don't do bonuses anymore, oh, and by the way, you're working Christmas, too.
...what kind of Marketing Cuomo's office did to get this story on Slashdot. Political Slashvertisements now? Or was Soulskill just passing some time surfing the website of the NY Attorney General's Office when he came upon this gem?
Maybe for 10 year olds, but certainly not for the rest of us.
Yeah, but ten year olds grow quickly into most industries' key demographic, and yesterday's toys becomes tomorrow's Engines of Commerce. Time was (and not too long ago) that MySpace/Social Networking was the stomping ground of teens and the pervs who pretended they were teens. People working in the "real" web space treated it with scorn (not saying it was not well deserved, but let's stay on message here...), regarding it as that generation's GeoCities, assuming that as the users grew up they would launch their own websites outside of the social networking space if they still had the vanity/blogging bug. And people working in that real web space were wrong. In spades.
So, yeah, I can understand why a mostly-coherent report on networking trends by a 15 year-old (with Morgan Stanley's imprimatur) is getting some buzz. Nobody wants to miss the bus twice in a row.
I agree with you that a lot of projects could use better or more descriptive names, but you've gotta realize that 99% of the time these are people's personal projects that they are either working on because it has some utility to them or because they just want to get experience.
That's fine, and God Bless. Keeps 'em off the streets, and all that.
But every time someone criticizes Linux for not having an app that does what such-and-such closed source app does, the response is invariably, "Whaddya mean? KgnuSMEGMA is out of pre-Alpha and does EVERYTHING that program does, and once Joey gets home from camp he's going to be spending the rest of the summer building a killer GUI for all the lusers who don't like the CLI."
Personal project? Or alternative to proprietary commercial? You may choose one.
They're not impressed nor amused by app names like gtkWTF, IAMRECURSIVERECURSIVEIAM, and, especially, The GIMP. Also, stop talking about programs being "stable." Isotopes are "stable." Programs either run well, or are buggy.
People mock Microsoft, but I tell ya... I've worked with people who have no idea what Silverlight is or does, but they want it cuz it sounds cool and has something to do with the Web. It's almost as if Linux developers go out of their way to be non-MS in everything -- including creating marketable names for their wares.
The problem, of course, is that the same guys doing the codewriting are the same guys doing the naming and marketing ("...because, after all, I've written the code, and that's the tough part that really matters, right? And if people don't get the Linus/Stallman/Montypython joke upon which I've based the app's name, then fuck 'em, who needs 'em, I'm only doing it for love anyway...").
Why isn't there any open-source marketing? Maybe some of the bigger projects could reach out to some university business and marketing students who could take on the work in much the same way they attract coders?
An arm with a gun barrel on it doesn't automatically mean PPC any more than it means gauss or autocannon.
You're absolutely right. And if you notice, it's those components which were appropriately open-ended and customizable in MW4. But a shoulder hod of missiles was, well, a shoulder hod of missiles.
Remember, also, that the Computer Game Mechwarrior developers were working within a firmly established canon of what these mechs looked like, and it was important for them -- and the fans -- to respect that legacy. You don't go pay good money to DC to make a Batman game and then decide to let the lead character have heat vision and super-strength because some game players who aren't familiar with Batman demand a lot of customization.
It's not a matter of being cute, it was a matter of improving on the logic of the game. There you were in a Madcat, the most iconic of all the mechs, with what were clearly two shoulders filled with missiles (or something that looked pretty close to them) and you were --- what? saying "Pay no attention to those things that look like missiles, they're REALLY a mix of lasers and machine guns" ?
Video games are a visual medium. Function should follow form, especially in a giant robot. Especially in Multiplayer. Imagine playing Halo online and what looks like a pistol in your opponent's hand is really a BFG.
I think it's cute that people are that obsessed with how it was originally configured in a tabletop game Seems to me you're the guy who should be playing the pen and paper game. Maybe upgrade yourself to a spreadsheet, and you can tweak your mathematical "what ifs" to your heart's content.
Actually I plan on pointing out the major discrepencies as a sign that the bible is in fact fallible and has been manipulated to change it's message over the centuries.
And...? I mean, your point being...?
There's many, many Christian denominations which recognize the Bible as being fallible and contradictory (One of them got to be pretty big, actually: They call themselves the Roman Catholic Church). These denominations rely upon theologians a lot smarter than you or I to tie the last 2000 years of Christian writings together.
But keep talking and carrying on as if Christians care about your ill-informed rants. I understand that Psychobabble is one of the Atheist Fundamentalist sacraments, and you've got freedom to practice your (rather strident and bigoted) religion same as anyone else. But please, don't believe the Christians think of you as a "heretic." Most likely they're not thinking of you at all.
What you do, then, is you print out your post, and save it in a safe place. Then, read it again, on your first child's 9th birthday, and realize what an ass you sounded like in your callow youth. It's very humbling, and good for the soul. When I first started posting on Usenet in 1991, before I had children, I wrote some incredibly stupid and glib things about parents and parenting. I ran across a box filled with print-outs from that era about six months ago (yes, I did print out my Usenet posts... I was in love with the sound of my own voice way back then too) and was startled by my trite ignorance. I am trying to learn from that experience in lots of ways, but it's a wisdom only painfully won.
I never assumed Wii would ever have any titles other than for kids or yoga-moms, and, being neither, never bought a Wii. I have not yet had cause to regret that decision. Did Nintendo ever market the console as a zombie-basher?
...Doctorow published his grocery list. Slashdot trumped that up into a story as well
Taco -- Please, d00d, we're begging you. Maybe he's great fun and always buys a round at the parties and conferences you both frequent, but the boy has jumped the shark. Ya gotta learn to separate your work from your personal...
We've just received word that the Oval Office has mandated the new element be called "Obamanium." That whole voting thing is so-o-o-o-o-o 2008 Democratic Republic...
One Reason for the Hate: Marketing Bozos
on
One-Tweet Wonders
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I'm finding a lot of resentment towards Twitter within my professional circle because of the notion, floated by the Marketing Suits, that one "simply must Twitter." A lot of these folks -- Olde Skool writers, comedians, entertainers -- feel they missed the boat when the MySpace wave hit, and don't want to make the mistake again. So they hold their noses and jump into every new social networking trend that the trendoids say they should be jumping into. Some days it's kind of like watching a platoon of Marines dressing in lemon chiffon gowns and working the room at a gay bachelor party because their intel has told them Al Quaeda just might be jumping out of the cake later, on other days it's like listening to the Pink Floyd disco album that was released in the late 70s/early 80s. Happily, I'm easily amused.
Slashdot Mirror
Negroponte sounds like he was the kind of kid that even the geeks stuffed into lockers.
And what a shame, cuz he's always seemed like such a pleasant, down-to-earth, inclusive fellow...
Eve also suffers hugely for it
Eve doesn't suffer for it. The solo player -- playing in the game designed for a multi-player experience -- who feels he is entitled to access content designed for groups, may "suffer," but the game surely does not. Empire space is huge, and soloists can stay there pretty much with no danger. That's Eve's solo game, and it's big, and it's bigger than the "solo games" of most MMOs. If you want to play Eve, but don't want to group, your game is in Empire. If you come to the field with a baseball, and everyone else is playing football, you don't expect everyone else to accommodate you simply because you brought a baseball to a football game. These are online multi-player games. It is absolutely not unreasonable to expect that you need a group to experience them the way the developers intended.
Eve is just more elegant about the way it handles the solo/multiplayer dichotomy than other games. In other MMOs, when you try to access the phat lewts beyond the mountain pass, you'll be informed that there aren't enough people in your group, you need a raid-force, whatever. Eve just lets you go where you want and pay the consequences if you enter Dodge City as a Lone Gunman.
By the way, I read an article in Eon magazine about a solo player who did travel to every system in Eve, taking screengrabs along the way. It was not easy, it was an adventure, but he was good and he did it. So buy a fast, cloaked ship, skill up, and start exploring!
For every sword-and-sorcery or sci-fi themed MMO, there is an offline game, designed from the ground up for solo players. When MMO developers start compromising to accommodate the solo players, the gameplay for the group players is inevitably compromised.
Eve, happily, has resisted this so far, simply because so much of the gameplay flows out of the free-flow Wild West dynamics and economics. You want to be a solo pirate? G'head, Bunky, nothing's stopping you (you'll only catch other startled n00bs, you'll die a lot, and the time v. reward curve will suck, but nothing stops you). The "end game" for Eve is in highly solo-hostile "0.0 space," but there is so much to do in the NPC-policed "Empire Space" that even a soloist shouldn't be able to complain. The soloist always has the option of buying the better gear from his richer grouping brother, but won't be able to derive the best benefit from it (i.e., maximize money made per hour) unless he takes that gear into places where -- if he travels solo -- someone will take it away from him very quickly. The killboards are filled with solo players in their expensive "Marauders" being dragged down by gangs of players in throwaway cruisers and frigates.
...then it needs to change on the front end as well. An author's overall compensation comes down to: "Lookit, we're going to pay you a teensy-weensy amount now so that you can stay breathing long enough to write a sequel, but don't worry, if this thing is really as good as you think it is, you'll make it all up on the back-end residuals."
So if you IP crusaders want to shorten the time it takes for a book to enter public domain (presumably so you all can post your fan fiction without fear of a C&D letter), then make sure the publishers all get the memo to pay authors more up front. Anything else is a bait and switch. To put it into a cube-dweller analogy, it would be as if you were hired at a low base pay but told you would make it up in your end of year bonus. When end-of-year came around, you were told, sorry, we don't do bonuses anymore, oh, and by the way, you're working Christmas, too.
...what kind of Marketing Cuomo's office did to get this story on Slashdot. Political Slashvertisements now? Or was Soulskill just passing some time surfing the website of the NY Attorney General's Office when he came upon this gem?
Maybe for 10 year olds, but certainly not for the rest of us.
Yeah, but ten year olds grow quickly into most industries' key demographic, and yesterday's toys becomes tomorrow's Engines of Commerce. Time was (and not too long ago) that MySpace/Social Networking was the stomping ground of teens and the pervs who pretended they were teens. People working in the "real" web space treated it with scorn (not saying it was not well deserved, but let's stay on message here...), regarding it as that generation's GeoCities, assuming that as the users grew up they would launch their own websites outside of the social networking space if they still had the vanity/blogging bug. And people working in that real web space were wrong. In spades.
So, yeah, I can understand why a mostly-coherent report on networking trends by a 15 year-old (with Morgan Stanley's imprimatur) is getting some buzz. Nobody wants to miss the bus twice in a row.
I agree with you that a lot of projects could use better or more descriptive names, but you've gotta realize that 99% of the time these are people's personal projects that they are either working on because it has some utility to them or because they just want to get experience.
That's fine, and God Bless. Keeps 'em off the streets, and all that.
But every time someone criticizes Linux for not having an app that does what such-and-such closed source app does, the response is invariably, "Whaddya mean? KgnuSMEGMA is out of pre-Alpha and does EVERYTHING that program does, and once Joey gets home from camp he's going to be spending the rest of the summer building a killer GUI for all the lusers who don't like the CLI."
Personal project? Or alternative to proprietary commercial? You may choose one.
They're not impressed nor amused by app names like gtkWTF, IAMRECURSIVERECURSIVEIAM, and, especially, The GIMP. Also, stop talking about programs being "stable." Isotopes are "stable." Programs either run well, or are buggy.
People mock Microsoft, but I tell ya... I've worked with people who have no idea what Silverlight is or does, but they want it cuz it sounds cool and has something to do with the Web. It's almost as if Linux developers go out of their way to be non-MS in everything -- including creating marketable names for their wares.
The problem, of course, is that the same guys doing the codewriting are the same guys doing the naming and marketing ("...because, after all, I've written the code, and that's the tough part that really matters, right? And if people don't get the Linus/Stallman/Montypython joke upon which I've based the app's name, then fuck 'em, who needs 'em, I'm only doing it for love anyway...").
Why isn't there any open-source marketing? Maybe some of the bigger projects could reach out to some university business and marketing students who could take on the work in much the same way they attract coders?
An arm with a gun barrel on it doesn't automatically mean PPC any more than it means gauss or autocannon.
You're absolutely right. And if you notice, it's those components which were appropriately open-ended and customizable in MW4. But a shoulder hod of missiles was, well, a shoulder hod of missiles.
Remember, also, that the Computer Game Mechwarrior developers were working within a firmly established canon of what these mechs looked like, and it was important for them -- and the fans -- to respect that legacy. You don't go pay good money to DC to make a Batman game and then decide to let the lead character have heat vision and super-strength because some game players who aren't familiar with Batman demand a lot of customization.
It's not a matter of being cute, it was a matter of improving on the logic of the game. There you were in a Madcat, the most iconic of all the mechs, with what were clearly two shoulders filled with missiles (or something that looked pretty close to them) and you were --- what? saying "Pay no attention to those things that look like missiles, they're REALLY a mix of lasers and machine guns" ?
Video games are a visual medium. Function should follow form, especially in a giant robot. Especially in Multiplayer. Imagine playing Halo online and what looks like a pistol in your opponent's hand is really a BFG.
I think it's cute that people are that obsessed with how it was originally configured in a tabletop game
Seems to me you're the guy who should be playing the pen and paper game. Maybe upgrade yourself to a spreadsheet, and you can tweak your mathematical "what ifs" to your heart's content.
Reminds me of the days when bandwidth was *really* expensive and Biz Dev Guys were cheap:
Meetings with new site managers went something like this:
"The Good News: Traffic is 500 times more than predicted; The Bad News: Traffic is 500 times more than predicted..."
Actually I plan on pointing out the major discrepencies as a sign that the bible is in fact fallible and has been manipulated to change it's message over the centuries.
And...? I mean, your point being...?
There's many, many Christian denominations which recognize the Bible as being fallible and contradictory (One of them got to be pretty big, actually: They call themselves the Roman Catholic Church). These denominations rely upon theologians a lot smarter than you or I to tie the last 2000 years of Christian writings together.
But keep talking and carrying on as if Christians care about your ill-informed rants. I understand that Psychobabble is one of the Atheist Fundamentalist sacraments, and you've got freedom to practice your (rather strident and bigoted) religion same as anyone else. But please, don't believe the Christians think of you as a "heretic." Most likely they're not thinking of you at all.
I think it's more about that people who are good at math, are inteligent.
I love it that you misspelled intelligent. That's, like, so meta of you. Very arch and well done.
oh, wait...
It's an Orientation.
Get with the program.
I'm no parent
What you do, then, is you print out your post, and save it in a safe place. Then, read it again, on your first child's 9th birthday, and realize what an ass you sounded like in your callow youth. It's very humbling, and good for the soul. When I first started posting on Usenet in 1991, before I had children, I wrote some incredibly stupid and glib things about parents and parenting. I ran across a box filled with print-outs from that era about six months ago (yes, I did print out my Usenet posts... I was in love with the sound of my own voice way back then too) and was startled by my trite ignorance. I am trying to learn from that experience in lots of ways, but it's a wisdom only painfully won.
My kids have real pets, for which they very responsibly care.
They also play Webkinz.
What's your point? Or was that just a condescending breeder-hating snark?
I never assumed Wii would ever have any titles other than for kids or yoga-moms, and, being neither, never bought a Wii. I have not yet had cause to regret that decision. Did Nintendo ever market the console as a zombie-basher?
Yeah, and Obama's team (hockey, basketball or what, no one knows)
I'm reasonably sure it's not a hockey team...
While your post makes sense, I simply don't see Google as being willing to join that group of people.
"Willing?" Who said anything about "Willing"? What's "Willing" got to do with anything?
...to contract with Google to do it for them.
Why build when you can outsource?
...Doctorow published his grocery list. Slashdot trumped that up into a story as well
Taco -- Please, d00d, we're begging you. Maybe he's great fun and always buys a round at the parties and conferences you both frequent, but the boy has jumped the shark. Ya gotta learn to separate your work from your personal...
I don't consider Charles Bukowski art.
We've just received word that the Oval Office has mandated the new element be called "Obamanium." That whole voting thing is so-o-o-o-o-o 2008 Democratic Republic...
I'm finding a lot of resentment towards Twitter within my professional circle because of the notion, floated by the Marketing Suits, that one "simply must Twitter." A lot of these folks -- Olde Skool writers, comedians, entertainers -- feel they missed the boat when the MySpace wave hit, and don't want to make the mistake again. So they hold their noses and jump into every new social networking trend that the trendoids say they should be jumping into. Some days it's kind of like watching a platoon of Marines dressing in lemon chiffon gowns and working the room at a gay bachelor party because their intel has told them Al Quaeda just might be jumping out of the cake later, on other days it's like listening to the Pink Floyd disco album that was released in the late 70s/early 80s. Happily, I'm easily amused.
Sometimes, I want something to actually be MINE.
Then write yourself a song or a novel.