The Biblical flood includes elements such as Noah's ark, which are very obviously fantasy. The use of "historically verified" and "Noah's ark" in the same sentence sets off some pretty big warning bells
Noah's ark wasn't mentioned in the original post mentioning 'historically verified' portions of the Bible. While Noah is tied to the flood in the Bible, it doesn't mean that one or the other is false simply because one of the two cannot be demonstrated as true, or that both must be true.
If I remember correctly (it hasn't been terribly long, but it's been a while and I've read a lot since), Plato put forth the idea that humanity (and other animals) survived the flood because they either lived on or moved quickly to high ground, and that civilization had to be reborn (so to speak) from isolated groups of survivors. He also stated that it's very possible a great deal of what made up the previous civilization (in terms of tools, craft, and so on) may have been lost, and that it was possible it had happened many times in history (though, of course, they had no record of such things).
Noah's Ark, on the other hand, may or may not be complete fiction, and could simply be an account of a single survivor among many. Overall, I tend to look at the Bible as something written so that the people of the time could understand it and learn from it, with enough factual basis to teach from, rather than complete truth. Some people can't get past the idea that 'God wrote the Bible so it must be true' to see that God may have written the Bible so that it got his point across. Then again, I'm not neccessarily a believer in the first place.
Uhhh... the Flood... Soddom... Gammorah... historically verified?
Not sure on Soddom and Gammorah, but the Flood is specifically mentioned in Plato and other works. It's widely believed to be historically accurate (and can probably be proven by archeological records) that the 'known' world experienced a heavy flood that whiped out a great deal of civilization. You have to remember, though, that the Bible and other ancient texts speak of the world as it would've been seen by it's occupants at that time, namely Europe and the Middle East. It wouldn't be too hard to imagine that a flood could whipe out the low-lying areas of Greek civilization, for instance, which probably would've been centered around the islands and coastal areas for fishing and possibly trade routes along the coast (and overseas eventually).
It's nearly impossible to prove anything in the Bible from a literal standpoint (the world was flooded), but from the point of view from (or for) which it was written it often becomes much easier (a great flood whiped out most of the civilized world as seen from the ancient western/middle eastern civilization). Even spontaneously combusting bushes seem like a near impossibility to some cultures, while they're said to be more commonplace than most think in some parts of the world.
or The Gamecube: the console for people who dont like new characters or gameplay, most people agree that metroid and zelda are the best games on that platform but I already played those on the NES, SNES, N64 etc,
Metroid on the GameCube is an FPS, so unless there's a Metroid FPS out there that I wasn't aware of, you haven't played it yet. That being said, it may be similar to previous FPS games on the N64, I couldn't really say. Personally, the last Nintendo system I owned was an NES, so maybe I'm not as jaded as others (and if I had bought an N64 against my better judgment, maybe I would be).
no online play outside of PSO,
Which may or may not be rectified eventually. I'm not really concerned, because I'll probably connect the PS2, XBox, and GC to the home network at the same time. Besides, I don't have a single game for any of them that supports online play at the moment (or if any of those games do, I never really thought about playing them online).
proprietary everything, the REAL worst controller ever except for simple games that require only one button,
I think the worst controller for a console was the original DreamCast controller, with the XBox S controller coming up next, and the Nintendo controller coming up after that. I like the original XBox controller, and I have a 3rd party controller for the DreamCast that is usable (the controller fits my hands nice, but the triggers stick).
media that forces developers to dumb down a game to fit on the disc,
How many developers are utilizing over 1GB of space on a DVD? Most PC games are still distributed on CDs (and many on one CD at that). Most 1st gen PS2 titles were on CD as well (and some current gen titles still are, or could have been). A small DVD that stores nearly 2 GB is hardly limiting game developers, especially when every developer that went over 650 MB in the past showed they were perfectly capable of doing multi-disc titles.
worse than the PS2 the Gamecube seems to be trying to regress gaming.
If anyone's trying to regress gaming it's the developers and publishers that are willing to flood the market with crap titles. It's almost gotten to the point where I buy games the way I buy books: from only specific authors (developers) that I know put out quality titles, and occasionally taking a look at something that gets enough recommendations by people who's opinions I respect.
The article eventually stated that the outcome, as well as the characters that are played, is based on your actions. Even the biblical text shown in the game is written according to your actions, rather than just spewing out the Bible's text even though you just slammed the part of the Red Sea back closed on Moses and his followers as they could just see the other side.
I'd much prefer a title that evokes the spirit of forgiveness or spiritual fulfillment,
The idea of this (and most other video games, especially RPGs) is to give the gamer at least the illusion that what they do has some effect on the outcome. These guys seem to be actually trying to do that. In other words, someone that plays in an 'evil' manner basically leads the world to damnation, while playing in a 'good' manner would lead the world to salvation, thereby reinforcing much of the Christian teaching not through forcing the player's hand, but by showing the results of the player's actions. Giving it a 'title that evokes the spirit of forgiveness or spiritual fulfillment' would be pretty disappointing to the average gamer that would probably end up sending the whole world to hell at least 1/3rd of the time they play (given that the developers said there would probably be 3 outcomes).
and I'm sure Generic Gamer X (whatever he believes) would as well.
Riiiight, which is why GTA3/VC sold so well, or, at least, according to the majority-Christian opposition to those games.
I think they meant that if you made evil choices earlier in the game you'd become Judas rather than Jesus (and probably predominantly evil choices at that). If you performed evil acts as Jesus, it'd probably just lead to a different ending rather than to changing characters.
Besides, tech support forums are generally to be used for tech support issues, not for the reporting of bugs that the end-user can't work around. They have other facilities for that.
If a user doesn't have a place to find out that the bug he's experience is something that can't be worked around, then how does he know it doesn't belong in the tech support forums?
Generally a good tech support system would handle both sides because they're connected, and both need to go through the same paths, or information will be lost.
I agree with deleting posts like you mentioned, with no useful information (not to mention that everyone could've found out easily enough they couldn't be a jedi right away), but tech support should at least be part of the funnel through which bugs without work-arounds can be handled, as they're usually going to be the first ones to be contacted anyway. In theory, tech support should be submitting more bug reports than the end users, because the users will come to tech support seeing if their problem has a work-around, and if it's a problem that does not, then tech support can submit the report instead of telling the user to do it (and since tech support would have more experience with submitting bug reports than the average user, they would be able to gather at least some of the information needed and submit a useful report, instead of just 'Ey3 4m a j3d1, butt m3y ph04c3 p0w3rZ d0n w04K!@!~!@ FIX NOW!!! GIVE ITEM ^_^').
It is just sad that rape is involved in video games.
It's always a controversial issue when it comes up. It's in movies and TV shows on occasion and brings up significantly less controversy in either medium. It's often a significant event in a story which can drive a character (in a good way or bad way), yet people tend to have a much more emotional reaction to it than to things like murder and torture, and so it's less often used in any medium.
Do they really have to include that to sell these games
In my experience, it's not included in any top selling game. However, it's a perfectly valid subject that games could address in a positive or negative manner.
At the same time, other cultures are much more likely to portray rape in their media, so perhaps Americans are simply more sensitive (not in the 'we want to help the victims' way, but rather in the 'dont show it to me I want to ignore it so I can convince myself it doesnt happen' way) to it. Did you think that tentacle-porn anime all involved consensual sex? Is it not rape just because the girl is depicted as having an orgasm from the attentions of the multi-tentacled demon?
I pretty much agree with you on this, but want to point out that it's the same way with most MMO games for one simple reason:
they want to be able to change the price without updating umpteen-million different places. For instance: Will the subscription price be printed on the outside of the box?
No, because that box could end up on the shelf somewhere in 2 years when the price is $20/month, and someone will be pissed when they log in and find out the price is $5 more (and the price might've been $12/month when the box went to print but got raised to $15 before it got to the store). So, there's generally one or two places you can go to to find the prices of the current MMO games, and they're usually somewhat hard to find, but it's for the company's own good, and they're not likely to change that.
The game industry decided to go with the ESRB system and is only slowly coming back to realizing that information is more importartant and we need more than just 'M - for mature audiences/17+' to make a truly informed decision about games. The RSAC was pretty much dismantled once everyone decided to use the ESRB, and it took the ESRB this long to realize that the RSAC system had at least something going for it.
Still, without an age rating, it's very unlikely that Congress would've continued to leave the game industry alone for very long. Look at music, there's basically nothing useful in a parental advisory sticker.
One reason Lieberman and torch-waving "me too" followers called off the dogs was because of how complete and detailed the ESRB ratings have become. To Liebermen's credit, he admits and praises this publically.
No, the reason Lieberman stopped waving torches is because it looks rediculous when you're a candidate for VP or President. He's done a complete turn-around on a number of issues, but especially censorship. The ESRB ratings were there before Lieberman even realized there were violent video games out there, it was just another stop for him in his quest to have Marilyn Manson brought up on murder charges (because a 'fan' committed suicide) and to clean the American shores of all of this sex, violence, and satanism that's in today's entertainment.
The only way to explain his current positions is campaigning, because nothing has actually changed in the entertainment industry from the time he started his crusades against it.
The content rating does seems to effect rap and new metal records, though. They would sound silly without the violence and sexism.
I think that was his point. Some games would seem pretty silly if they were released with an E rating. Imagine an E-rated version of GTA, for example. The game might have done just as well, but then again, maybe not.
As for the Explicit Lyrics/Content stickers on albums, there's really no push to keep from getting one. The only real push is to release a 'clean' version for Wal-Mart, since they're the biggest CD retailer in the US, and sometimes don't carry stickered CDs (I haven't figured out when they do or don't yet, I just don't buy any CDs from them).
It's something that's been done in the past, and is probably more common in Japanese titles. Either way, it's so disturbing to certain groups of people that it certainly gets a mention in movie and TV ratings, so it's no big surprise to see the ESRB adding it (and the game that's been mentioned here was quite controversial because of it).
Yeah you not alone with the dropship tutorial thing, it's been broken for everybody for weeks and they don't seem to care, the don't even include it in 'known bugs' (even thought it is one).
Yeah, I found it on the message board. Also, when I click on the 'known bugs' link provided in one of the messages from the moderator, it comes up with a slick page with no text in the 'known bugs' section.
Most users end up rebooting when they get to that screen because they don't know you can press 'ESC' to bring up a menu (seems obvious, but it's not when your in game, as you'd never expect the turorial of all things to be completly busted.
Actually, the menu doesn't come up when I press escape at that point of the tutorial. Bonus Bug;) I press Ctrl+Alt+Del (brings up the task manager in the background) and then the start button on the keyboard to bring me back to the desktop/start menu, then kill PlanetSide in the task manager.
An enterpising users discoverd you can edit one of the data files with a HEX editor to get round it, but that's hardly a good thing:(
That would've been nice to know as at least a work-around, though. At least I could finish the tutorial that way.
It is a good game though, when it's working:)
The developers do seem to have some good ideas about how make it longer lasting and introduce a little more depth, which is a good thing.
I hope they are allowed to carry out their plans and that SOE don't get too complacent with it.
It's a very fun game (definately CFT/CS for a new generation). I hear a *lot* of CS players moving over to it, simply because of the bigger scope. I hope they stay around despite the monthly fee though (I could see a lot of users not wanting to cough up after being able to play games like CS for free).
Personally, it looks a lot more like Tribes or TF to me, maybe even more like what those games should have been. I even hopped back on IRC last nite to see if any of my clanmates or anyone else I know is playing, and though most people weren't around last nite, there do seem to be a few people at least interested in the game (but waiting for other people to try it and let them know how it is). Of course, with all of the DAoC and EQ junkies I know from the TF/TFC/CS scene, it's hard to tell if any of them would be willing to add another MMO game or drop EQ or DAoC for it.
I bought PlanetSide last nite to curb my itch to grab SWG. I'm glad I did, because PlanetSide looks amazing and seems like something I'd be more likely to stick with for a while.
At the same time, I hit a bug in the tutorial where the continents were locked so I couldn't use the map interface to tell my dropship where to go. Since completing each tutorial opens the next one (after the first two), I can't finish the tutorial section.
I logged onto the game, ran around for a little while to see if I could find some area where I could practice a little (one of the tutorials mentioned a firing range or something like that), but instead got run over by a teammate in a vehicle (yes, I did get out of his way, he turned to get me), and generally didn't find anything to do without going straight to battle. Then when I decided to make my way back towards the center of the base to hitch a ride out to battle, I got disconnected from the server.
All of that being said, I'm hoping it'll be a better experience once I get to really playing. The graphics are certainly amazing, and the controls feel like your fairly standard fps controls.
If Apple had used an "optimized" configuration and achieved numbers 2x Dell's, this thread would instead be about how the numbers are BS and meaningless because Apple was using software tricks to make their hardware look better.
Actually, I would think that if Apple had used Dell's numbers, you'd see people asking why they didn't use Intel's numbers, or AMD's numbers. That was pretty much my point, because Dell's numbers are just about the lowest numbers on the SPEC site for x86 processors, yet they're still higher than Apple's numbers for similar Dell machines.
Indeed, that has been the traditional feedback that Apple has received (in many cases, correctly) for previous benchmarks they've published.
Actually, most of the benchmarks I've seen from Apple are simply numbers with little or no explanation, and rarely even enough configuration information to be reproduced. SPEC, obviously, requires a certain amount of information in order to publish the benchmark numbers in the first place.
The notion of controlling variables in an experiment is a really basic one, and it really disturbs me how people don't seem to be able to grasp this basic scientific concept.
The point is that the fundamental differences in the architecture and the differences in the level of work on the compiler make this attempt at controlling the compiler as a variable impractical at best. Because the compiler has different people working on the ppc and x86 backends, and the levels of knowledge and effort differ, you will get different results.
As for which backend receives the most effort, at least in terms of number of people working on it and number of changes over time, of course it would be x86, because the majority of people using it are using it on x86. This will continue to be true as x86 & Linux increase market share vs. Unix & other processors (Sparc, PPC, etc). As I've said before, (though maybe not in this thread) if IBM can get better numbers on the G5 with a different compiler (ie their own), then it's almost guaranteed that we'll see those numbers eventually. Why Apple wouldn't work with IBM and Motorolla to make gcc the best compiler possible for PPC I don't know, because it just doesn't make sense if they really are using it to compile OS X.
yes. Wonderful how that works, isn't it? I complain about rate increases when people bitch about wanting the mail to remain regulated (to keep prices down), but when it comes right down to it, I'd pay more money to send the few things I do mail out if they would stop delivering crap to my mailbox.
...how the Founding Fathers promised the democracy. Our government is 100% by the people, for the people (as every vote goes counted, and everyone gets to vote).
I think you might want to take a look at how the Founding Fathers setup the voting system in the US again. Not to mention the things they implemented in the first decade or so to prevent 'uninformed' people from voting.
All of that being said, when I lived in California the only time my vote counted was in local elections (up to the level of the House of Representatives). Once you got to a state-wide election, there was really no point, regardless of what system was used, because about 45-50% of California's voters are liberal Democrats (or think that liberal Democrats are the people they want to vote for). This means that every Presidential election you have close to 50% of California's votes being ignored, which comes to 10s of millions of people, whether they're Republicans or third party voters (and regardless of what people might think about 3rd party voting, you can't make 3rd party votes count unless you vote 3rd party).
Yeah, I had a number of friends that took sociology around the same time I took Social Psychology, and it essentially said the same thing in a slightly different way (from a different perspective, more or less). I've basically been in school on and off for the last 7 years, as time and the travel requirements of my job permit. Luckily, I've been able to take a pretty broad set of courses over that period because, for the most part, if I simply took comp sci classes all the time I'd get bored out of my mind with the pace of them.
Except that you can't have a lightsaber until you play long enough to unlock a Jedi slot, and you can't buy the Falcon until they release the expansion that adds in space vehicles.
Maybe they want a nice big front load on their investment? The life of a game is maybe 3-4 years if they can keep up the interest with âaddedâ(TM) features and expansion packs. Yes at $15 a month for maybe 48 months times the average of however many players they get to play the game through its life. That is a lot of cash. The rub is that lot of cash just covers the server and bandwidth costs plus some to keep the updates for the content and code maintenance going with a sliver of profit left over.
You skipped Math 101 before you took your business courses. Sony makes most of their profit on Everquest from subscribers that stay for 6 months or more, which is roughly $110 on the older subscription plans and would be $140 on the worst-case SWG plan (ie someone paying monthly), nevermind the $75 deluxe edition (or whatever it's called). The profit on Everquest has been estimated at 40% for subscriptions, which wouldn't even count the initial purchase. The initial cost incurred by Sony before the game is released is a fixed amount, recovered by selling X number of boxes at $50 a pop (some of which goes to Lucas Arts in this case, some of which goes to the retailer, and so on). If they did their estimates properly and setup their servers (and tested them) to handle Y number of users * 1.5 (or 2) so that they had enough load to handle the number of boxes they expected to sell in the first month plus some overhead just in case their load estimates were off or more people bought in, then they wouldn't have increased costs in their first month to deal with the server load. More than likely with a game like SWG that has been long anticipated and has large numbers of pre-orders, they'll recover most of their initial costs in the first week, if not all of them. From that point on, their $50 sales are mostly profit, and some of it is going to cover the first month they gave everyone, plus the initial round of fixes that is always going to happen when the largest number of players you've ever had hits your servers.
Think about it. How much do you pay just for your internet connection? I pay $40 a month for my cable modem. The servers have to have a connection to the net too. They have to pay by the amount of bandwidth they use and pay at a lower rate than you or I could get.but they have to pay access fees for 30,000+ users at a time for years.
You have no idea how much bandwidth costs when you're getting into the realm of needing to connect 30,000+ users with 5-10K/sec streams, do you? At the lowest, they'll need a 150,000K/sec connection for each server (assuming individual servers with individual connections, which isn't the case, but would actually cost more than having small load-balanced servers with multiple connections through the same provider). For that kind of bandwidth you'd probably be looking at $100-200K/year, give or take depending on the kind of deals you strike up with the provider and who your provider is (and what kind of bandwidth they have to give you). 30,000 users at $15/month is $450,000/month, subtract 5-10% at the most for the credit card authorization/collection (in fact it's usually more like 2%). Even if they're paying $1-1.2M/year for bandwidth for 30,000 users they still recover the money with 2 months of subscription revenue (but none of that revenue starts coming in until one month after launch), and most of that bandwidth cost is actually going to be factored into your initial costs, because a good amount of that payment will be up front, especially in setup fees. You could even increase your bandwidth in the second year at the same price under many circumstances, because bandwidth costs go down over time, as do hardware costs for the servers that all of this crap runs on, and your support costs also decrease over time as more users know what they're doing and actually help each other instead of forcing every user to come to you for every little problem.
SOE spent a couple of years developing the game engin
If I remember correctly, the time period is when the only Jedi were basically Obi-wan, Yoda, Darth Vader, and the Emperor, and Luke was basically hidden away (in other words, after the Clone Wars and before Episode IV).
unless there have been lots of favourable reviews PRIOR to release from reputable gaming sites.
A review PRIOR to launch pretty much prohibits a gaming site from being reputable when it comes to most games, as the game wouldn't normally even get to the reviewer (if it were an advance copy) until maybe a couple of days before it was available in stores, at best.
As for Enter the Matrix, there were plenty of previews of the game, but we all know those are pretty much ads anyway. I bought it for the XBox, and haven't played it a great deal, but didn't really see any problems with it, either. It's a pretty standard 3rd person game with the Matrix setting pretty much intact.
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The Biblical flood includes elements such as Noah's ark, which are very obviously fantasy. The use of "historically verified" and "Noah's ark" in the same sentence sets off some pretty big warning bells
Noah's ark wasn't mentioned in the original post mentioning 'historically verified' portions of the Bible. While Noah is tied to the flood in the Bible, it doesn't mean that one or the other is false simply because one of the two cannot be demonstrated as true, or that both must be true.
If I remember correctly (it hasn't been terribly long, but it's been a while and I've read a lot since), Plato put forth the idea that humanity (and other animals) survived the flood because they either lived on or moved quickly to high ground, and that civilization had to be reborn (so to speak) from isolated groups of survivors. He also stated that it's very possible a great deal of what made up the previous civilization (in terms of tools, craft, and so on) may have been lost, and that it was possible it had happened many times in history (though, of course, they had no record of such things).
Noah's Ark, on the other hand, may or may not be complete fiction, and could simply be an account of a single survivor among many. Overall, I tend to look at the Bible as something written so that the people of the time could understand it and learn from it, with enough factual basis to teach from, rather than complete truth. Some people can't get past the idea that 'God wrote the Bible so it must be true' to see that God may have written the Bible so that it got his point across. Then again, I'm not neccessarily a believer in the first place.
Uhhh ... the Flood ... Soddom ... Gammorah ... historically verified?
Not sure on Soddom and Gammorah, but the Flood is specifically mentioned in Plato and other works. It's widely believed to be historically accurate (and can probably be proven by archeological records) that the 'known' world experienced a heavy flood that whiped out a great deal of civilization. You have to remember, though, that the Bible and other ancient texts speak of the world as it would've been seen by it's occupants at that time, namely Europe and the Middle East. It wouldn't be too hard to imagine that a flood could whipe out the low-lying areas of Greek civilization, for instance, which probably would've been centered around the islands and coastal areas for fishing and possibly trade routes along the coast (and overseas eventually).
It's nearly impossible to prove anything in the Bible from a literal standpoint (the world was flooded), but from the point of view from (or for) which it was written it often becomes much easier (a great flood whiped out most of the civilized world as seen from the ancient western/middle eastern civilization). Even spontaneously combusting bushes seem like a near impossibility to some cultures, while they're said to be more commonplace than most think in some parts of the world.
or The Gamecube: the console for people who dont like new characters or gameplay, most people agree that metroid and zelda are the best games on that platform but I already played those on the NES, SNES, N64 etc,
Metroid on the GameCube is an FPS, so unless there's a Metroid FPS out there that I wasn't aware of, you haven't played it yet. That being said, it may be similar to previous FPS games on the N64, I couldn't really say. Personally, the last Nintendo system I owned was an NES, so maybe I'm not as jaded as others (and if I had bought an N64 against my better judgment, maybe I would be).
no online play outside of PSO,
Which may or may not be rectified eventually. I'm not really concerned, because I'll probably connect the PS2, XBox, and GC to the home network at the same time. Besides, I don't have a single game for any of them that supports online play at the moment (or if any of those games do, I never really thought about playing them online).
proprietary everything, the REAL worst controller ever except for simple games that require only one button,
I think the worst controller for a console was the original DreamCast controller, with the XBox S controller coming up next, and the Nintendo controller coming up after that. I like the original XBox controller, and I have a 3rd party controller for the DreamCast that is usable (the controller fits my hands nice, but the triggers stick).
media that forces developers to dumb down a game to fit on the disc,
How many developers are utilizing over 1GB of space on a DVD? Most PC games are still distributed on CDs (and many on one CD at that). Most 1st gen PS2 titles were on CD as well (and some current gen titles still are, or could have been). A small DVD that stores nearly 2 GB is hardly limiting game developers, especially when every developer that went over 650 MB in the past showed they were perfectly capable of doing multi-disc titles.
worse than the PS2 the Gamecube seems to be trying to regress gaming.
If anyone's trying to regress gaming it's the developers and publishers that are willing to flood the market with crap titles. It's almost gotten to the point where I buy games the way I buy books: from only specific authors (developers) that I know put out quality titles, and occasionally taking a look at something that gets enough recommendations by people who's opinions I respect.
The article eventually stated that the outcome, as well as the characters that are played, is based on your actions. Even the biblical text shown in the game is written according to your actions, rather than just spewing out the Bible's text even though you just slammed the part of the Red Sea back closed on Moses and his followers as they could just see the other side.
I'd much prefer a title that evokes the spirit of forgiveness or spiritual fulfillment,
The idea of this (and most other video games, especially RPGs) is to give the gamer at least the illusion that what they do has some effect on the outcome. These guys seem to be actually trying to do that. In other words, someone that plays in an 'evil' manner basically leads the world to damnation, while playing in a 'good' manner would lead the world to salvation, thereby reinforcing much of the Christian teaching not through forcing the player's hand, but by showing the results of the player's actions. Giving it a 'title that evokes the spirit of forgiveness or spiritual fulfillment' would be pretty disappointing to the average gamer that would probably end up sending the whole world to hell at least 1/3rd of the time they play (given that the developers said there would probably be 3 outcomes).
and I'm sure Generic Gamer X (whatever he believes) would as well.
Riiiight, which is why GTA3/VC sold so well, or, at least, according to the majority-Christian opposition to those games.
I think they meant that if you made evil choices earlier in the game you'd become Judas rather than Jesus (and probably predominantly evil choices at that). If you performed evil acts as Jesus, it'd probably just lead to a different ending rather than to changing characters.
I think the 50 was so (I gotta go lvl so I can...)
Besides, tech support forums are generally to be used for tech support issues, not for the reporting of bugs that the end-user can't work around. They have other facilities for that.
If a user doesn't have a place to find out that the bug he's experience is something that can't be worked around, then how does he know it doesn't belong in the tech support forums?
Generally a good tech support system would handle both sides because they're connected, and both need to go through the same paths, or information will be lost.
I agree with deleting posts like you mentioned, with no useful information (not to mention that everyone could've found out easily enough they couldn't be a jedi right away), but tech support should at least be part of the funnel through which bugs without work-arounds can be handled, as they're usually going to be the first ones to be contacted anyway. In theory, tech support should be submitting more bug reports than the end users, because the users will come to tech support seeing if their problem has a work-around, and if it's a problem that does not, then tech support can submit the report instead of telling the user to do it (and since tech support would have more experience with submitting bug reports than the average user, they would be able to gather at least some of the information needed and submit a useful report, instead of just 'Ey3 4m a j3d1, butt m3y ph04c3 p0w3rZ d0n w04K!@!~!@ FIX NOW!!! GIVE ITEM ^_^').
It is just sad that rape is involved in video games.
It's always a controversial issue when it comes up. It's in movies and TV shows on occasion and brings up significantly less controversy in either medium. It's often a significant event in a story which can drive a character (in a good way or bad way), yet people tend to have a much more emotional reaction to it than to things like murder and torture, and so it's less often used in any medium.
Do they really have to include that to sell these games
In my experience, it's not included in any top selling game. However, it's a perfectly valid subject that games could address in a positive or negative manner.
At the same time, other cultures are much more likely to portray rape in their media, so perhaps Americans are simply more sensitive (not in the 'we want to help the victims' way, but rather in the 'dont show it to me I want to ignore it so I can convince myself it doesnt happen' way) to it. Did you think that tentacle-porn anime all involved consensual sex? Is it not rape just because the girl is depicted as having an orgasm from the attentions of the multi-tentacled demon?
I pretty much agree with you on this, but want to point out that it's the same way with most MMO games for one simple reason:
they want to be able to change the price without updating umpteen-million different places. For instance:
Will the subscription price be printed on the outside of the box?
No, because that box could end up on the shelf somewhere in 2 years when the price is $20/month, and someone will be pissed when they log in and find out the price is $5 more (and the price might've been $12/month when the box went to print but got raised to $15 before it got to the store). So, there's generally one or two places you can go to to find the prices of the current MMO games, and they're usually somewhat hard to find, but it's for the company's own good, and they're not likely to change that.
The game industry decided to go with the ESRB system and is only slowly coming back to realizing that information is more importartant and we need more than just 'M - for mature audiences/17+' to make a truly informed decision about games. The RSAC was pretty much dismantled once everyone decided to use the ESRB, and it took the ESRB this long to realize that the RSAC system had at least something going for it.
Still, without an age rating, it's very unlikely that Congress would've continued to leave the game industry alone for very long. Look at music, there's basically nothing useful in a parental advisory sticker.
One reason Lieberman and torch-waving "me too" followers called off the dogs was because of how complete and detailed the ESRB ratings have become. To Liebermen's credit, he admits and praises this publically.
No, the reason Lieberman stopped waving torches is because it looks rediculous when you're a candidate for VP or President. He's done a complete turn-around on a number of issues, but especially censorship. The ESRB ratings were there before Lieberman even realized there were violent video games out there, it was just another stop for him in his quest to have Marilyn Manson brought up on murder charges (because a 'fan' committed suicide) and to clean the American shores of all of this sex, violence, and satanism that's in today's entertainment.
The only way to explain his current positions is campaigning, because nothing has actually changed in the entertainment industry from the time he started his crusades against it.
The content rating does seems to effect rap and new metal records, though. They would sound silly without the violence and sexism.
I think that was his point. Some games would seem pretty silly if they were released with an E rating. Imagine an E-rated version of GTA, for example. The game might have done just as well, but then again, maybe not.
As for the Explicit Lyrics/Content stickers on albums, there's really no push to keep from getting one. The only real push is to release a 'clean' version for Wal-Mart, since they're the biggest CD retailer in the US, and sometimes don't carry stickered CDs (I haven't figured out when they do or don't yet, I just don't buy any CDs from them).
It's something that's been done in the past, and is probably more common in Japanese titles. Either way, it's so disturbing to certain groups of people that it certainly gets a mention in movie and TV ratings, so it's no big surprise to see the ESRB adding it (and the game that's been mentioned here was quite controversial because of it).
Yeah you not alone with the dropship tutorial thing, it's been broken for everybody for weeks and they don't seem to care, the don't even include it in 'known bugs' (even thought it is one).
;) I press Ctrl+Alt+Del (brings up the task manager in the background) and then the start button on the keyboard to bring me back to the desktop/start menu, then kill PlanetSide in the task manager.
:(
:)
Yeah, I found it on the message board. Also, when I click on the 'known bugs' link provided in one of the messages from the moderator, it comes up with a slick page with no text in the 'known bugs' section.
Most users end up rebooting when they get to that screen because they don't know you can press 'ESC' to bring up a menu (seems obvious, but it's not when your in game, as you'd never expect the turorial of all things to be completly busted.
Actually, the menu doesn't come up when I press escape at that point of the tutorial. Bonus Bug
An enterpising users discoverd you can edit one of the data files with a HEX editor to get round it, but that's hardly a good thing
That would've been nice to know as at least a work-around, though. At least I could finish the tutorial that way.
It is a good game though, when it's working
The developers do seem to have some good ideas about how make it longer lasting and introduce a little more depth, which is a good thing.
I hope they are allowed to carry out their plans and that SOE don't get too complacent with it.
It's a very fun game (definately CFT/CS for a new generation). I hear a *lot* of CS players moving over to it, simply because of the bigger scope. I hope they stay around despite the monthly fee though (I could see a lot of users not wanting to cough up after being able to play games like CS for free).
Personally, it looks a lot more like Tribes or TF to me, maybe even more like what those games should have been. I even hopped back on IRC last nite to see if any of my clanmates or anyone else I know is playing, and though most people weren't around last nite, there do seem to be a few people at least interested in the game (but waiting for other people to try it and let them know how it is). Of course, with all of the DAoC and EQ junkies I know from the TF/TFC/CS scene, it's hard to tell if any of them would be willing to add another MMO game or drop EQ or DAoC for it.
I bought PlanetSide last nite to curb my itch to grab SWG. I'm glad I did, because PlanetSide looks amazing and seems like something I'd be more likely to stick with for a while.
At the same time, I hit a bug in the tutorial where the continents were locked so I couldn't use the map interface to tell my dropship where to go. Since completing each tutorial opens the next one (after the first two), I can't finish the tutorial section.
I logged onto the game, ran around for a little while to see if I could find some area where I could practice a little (one of the tutorials mentioned a firing range or something like that), but instead got run over by a teammate in a vehicle (yes, I did get out of his way, he turned to get me), and generally didn't find anything to do without going straight to battle. Then when I decided to make my way back towards the center of the base to hitch a ride out to battle, I got disconnected from the server.
All of that being said, I'm hoping it'll be a better experience once I get to really playing. The graphics are certainly amazing, and the controls feel like your fairly standard fps controls.
If Apple had used an "optimized" configuration and achieved numbers 2x Dell's, this thread would instead be about how the numbers are BS and meaningless because Apple was using software tricks to make their hardware look better.
Actually, I would think that if Apple had used Dell's numbers, you'd see people asking why they didn't use Intel's numbers, or AMD's numbers. That was pretty much my point, because Dell's numbers are just about the lowest numbers on the SPEC site for x86 processors, yet they're still higher than Apple's numbers for similar Dell machines.
Indeed, that has been the traditional feedback that Apple has received (in many cases, correctly) for previous benchmarks they've published.
Actually, most of the benchmarks I've seen from Apple are simply numbers with little or no explanation, and rarely even enough configuration information to be reproduced. SPEC, obviously, requires a certain amount of information in order to publish the benchmark numbers in the first place.
The notion of controlling variables in an experiment is a really basic one, and it really disturbs me how people don't seem to be able to grasp this basic scientific concept.
The point is that the fundamental differences in the architecture and the differences in the level of work on the compiler make this attempt at controlling the compiler as a variable impractical at best. Because the compiler has different people working on the ppc and x86 backends, and the levels of knowledge and effort differ, you will get different results.
As for which backend receives the most effort, at least in terms of number of people working on it and number of changes over time, of course it would be x86, because the majority of people using it are using it on x86. This will continue to be true as x86 & Linux increase market share vs. Unix & other processors (Sparc, PPC, etc). As I've said before, (though maybe not in this thread) if IBM can get better numbers on the G5 with a different compiler (ie their own), then it's almost guaranteed that we'll see those numbers eventually. Why Apple wouldn't work with IBM and Motorolla to make gcc the best compiler possible for PPC I don't know, because it just doesn't make sense if they really are using it to compile OS X.
yes. Wonderful how that works, isn't it? I complain about rate increases when people bitch about wanting the mail to remain regulated (to keep prices down), but when it comes right down to it, I'd pay more money to send the few things I do mail out if they would stop delivering crap to my mailbox.
yes ;)
...how the Founding Fathers promised the democracy. Our government is 100% by the people, for the people (as every vote goes counted, and everyone gets to vote).
I think you might want to take a look at how the Founding Fathers setup the voting system in the US again. Not to mention the things they implemented in the first decade or so to prevent 'uninformed' people from voting.
All of that being said, when I lived in California the only time my vote counted was in local elections (up to the level of the House of Representatives). Once you got to a state-wide election, there was really no point, regardless of what system was used, because about 45-50% of California's voters are liberal Democrats (or think that liberal Democrats are the people they want to vote for). This means that every Presidential election you have close to 50% of California's votes being ignored, which comes to 10s of millions of people, whether they're Republicans or third party voters (and regardless of what people might think about 3rd party voting, you can't make 3rd party votes count unless you vote 3rd party).
Yeah, I had a number of friends that took sociology around the same time I took Social Psychology, and it essentially said the same thing in a slightly different way (from a different perspective, more or less). I've basically been in school on and off for the last 7 years, as time and the travel requirements of my job permit. Luckily, I've been able to take a pretty broad set of courses over that period because, for the most part, if I simply took comp sci classes all the time I'd get bored out of my mind with the pace of them.
Except that you can't have a lightsaber until you play long enough to unlock a Jedi slot, and you can't buy the Falcon until they release the expansion that adds in space vehicles.
Welcome to business 101
Maybe they want a nice big front load on their investment? The life of a game is maybe 3-4 years if they can keep up the interest with âaddedâ(TM) features and expansion packs. Yes at $15 a month for maybe 48 months times the average of however many players they get to play the game through its life. That is a lot of cash. The rub is that lot of cash just covers the server and bandwidth costs plus some to keep the updates for the content and code maintenance going with a sliver of profit left over.
You skipped Math 101 before you took your business courses. Sony makes most of their profit on Everquest from subscribers that stay for 6 months or more, which is roughly $110 on the older subscription plans and would be $140 on the worst-case SWG plan (ie someone paying monthly), nevermind the $75 deluxe edition (or whatever it's called). The profit on Everquest has been estimated at 40% for subscriptions, which wouldn't even count the initial purchase. The initial cost incurred by Sony before the game is released is a fixed amount, recovered by selling X number of boxes at $50 a pop (some of which goes to Lucas Arts in this case, some of which goes to the retailer, and so on). If they did their estimates properly and setup their servers (and tested them) to handle Y number of users * 1.5 (or 2) so that they had enough load to handle the number of boxes they expected to sell in the first month plus some overhead just in case their load estimates were off or more people bought in, then they wouldn't have increased costs in their first month to deal with the server load. More than likely with a game like SWG that has been long anticipated and has large numbers of pre-orders, they'll recover most of their initial costs in the first week, if not all of them. From that point on, their $50 sales are mostly profit, and some of it is going to cover the first month they gave everyone, plus the initial round of fixes that is always going to happen when the largest number of players you've ever had hits your servers.
Think about it. How much do you pay just for your internet connection? I pay $40 a month for my cable modem. The servers have to have a connection to the net too. They have to pay by the amount of bandwidth they use and pay at a lower rate than you or I could get.but they have to pay access fees for 30,000+ users at a time for years.
You have no idea how much bandwidth costs when you're getting into the realm of needing to connect 30,000+ users with 5-10K/sec streams, do you? At the lowest, they'll need a 150,000K/sec connection for each server (assuming individual servers with individual connections, which isn't the case, but would actually cost more than having small load-balanced servers with multiple connections through the same provider). For that kind of bandwidth you'd probably be looking at $100-200K/year, give or take depending on the kind of deals you strike up with the provider and who your provider is (and what kind of bandwidth they have to give you). 30,000 users at $15/month is $450,000/month, subtract 5-10% at the most for the credit card authorization/collection (in fact it's usually more like 2%). Even if they're paying $1-1.2M/year for bandwidth for 30,000 users they still recover the money with 2 months of subscription revenue (but none of that revenue starts coming in until one month after launch), and most of that bandwidth cost is actually going to be factored into your initial costs, because a good amount of that payment will be up front, especially in setup fees. You could even increase your bandwidth in the second year at the same price under many circumstances, because bandwidth costs go down over time, as do hardware costs for the servers that all of this crap runs on, and your support costs also decrease over time as more users know what they're doing and actually help each other instead of forcing every user to come to you for every little problem.
SOE spent a couple of years developing the game engin
If I remember correctly, the time period is when the only Jedi were basically Obi-wan, Yoda, Darth Vader, and the Emperor, and Luke was basically hidden away (in other words, after the Clone Wars and before Episode IV).
unless there have been lots of favourable reviews PRIOR to release from reputable gaming sites.
A review PRIOR to launch pretty much prohibits a gaming site from being reputable when it comes to most games, as the game wouldn't normally even get to the reviewer (if it were an advance copy) until maybe a couple of days before it was available in stores, at best.
As for Enter the Matrix, there were plenty of previews of the game, but we all know those are pretty much ads anyway. I bought it for the XBox, and haven't played it a great deal, but didn't really see any problems with it, either. It's a pretty standard 3rd person game with the Matrix setting pretty much intact.