This pertains to domestically copyrighted sound recordings. Your "who want to be freely heard" presumably own the copyright to their speech and can thus distribute it in any manner they desire. The RIAA only cares about stuff for which they own the copyright.
I actually had a few levels of fighter. When we quit that campaign I was a 3 fighter, 4 rogue, 2 wizard (Elf) and 1 shadowdancer, IIRC. You have to be very careful with multiclassing. Sure, you get better hp (on average, but you can always roll a 1 as a fighter too) attack rolls and some feats, but you also don't get X levels of rogue, wich means more rogue skills, backstab and those nifty evasion abilities.
I'm not claiming my character was perfect by a long shot, it was my first 3rd edition character, made before the DMG even came out. In a later campaign a friend played a rogue and kicked major behind with improved invisibility and sneak attack. I later made a shade rogue/wizard in a forgotton realms campaign who used a wand of darkness on himself and flew above things (when space allowed) sneak attacking with his bow. That was fun, but we only played once.
While that's a perfectly viable way to play a rogue, to insist it's the only way is silly, especially given the whole point of them changing the class name from thief to rogue so as to encompass other rogue-like characters. Besides, by not fighting, you're basically neglecting one of the primary purposes of a rogue, the huge amount of sneak attack damage they can do. What's the point of being able to do +10d6 on a hit if you never melee (sneak attacks are much harder in ranged combat when you can't flank...)
My mistake was going into melee with the young red dragon, even with the shield and an AC of 35 he splatted me in one round. I should have held back and plinked him with my crossbow and saved the sneak attacks for the puds I could pick off in one or two shots.
I guess my other problem is that my first character in 3rd edition was a rogue, and I was immensly pissed off at what I perceived to be major problems with the rogue class. Basically I felt that the rogue should be where the ranger is now melee wise. As it stood, the gnome psion in our group had more hp than my elven rogue at level 10, which was quite distressfull considering my rogue had to melee to survive (I didn't have spring attack yet, and spring attack means no multiple attacks/round) and so much of the system is designed around HP that a 10 con rogue got splatted a lot.
I'm making a Duellist as an alternate for another campaign and wanted the d10 hit dice while taking ranger on the way, since i see duellist following ranger perfectly. Of course I also haven't seen the 3.5 DMG yet (thought it just arrived at home, ordered it from amazon sunday) so maybe they lowered duellist HD too.
I do like the new focus of rangers on light armour skillful hunter types though. I might take it even with the d20 because it fits the character well, depends on if it means I lose feats I need.
However, reducing their HD highlights a flaw from my pov in the D&D conception of rogues. I'm still irate that a freaking Cleric gets d8 and a Rogue gets d6. So I'm some clergyman who spends his life in a monastery praising my deity, and I'm tougher than a guy who grew up on the streets. This show my problem with the Paladin class as a whole, since Clerics originally were basically Templars, and Paladins are basically Templars between fighters and Clerics. Except that since they get the same HD and attack progression as Fighters, and lot of nifty other effects one could consider them better. I don't feel that what Rangers got really warrented the HD drop.
I think 3.0 harm was terribly broken, but I'll conceed that you don't need to buy a $30 book to fix that.
I also thought the Bard class was pretty much broken, and to a lesser degree the fact that a lot of the classes gained a significant amount of power at level 1 then not much else. The bard was merely the largest example of this to some degree. 3.5 seems to do a good job of fixing that. I don't like Rangers having d8 HD, but I also didn't have a problem with 3.0 Rangers at all, which a lot of people did. Oh well.
This is why I tend to a) check online reviews of games and b) rent a game from Blockbuster before purchasing it. Of course it gives more profit to Blockbuster and doesn't really hurt the game sales much since Blockbuster will tend to buy more of a frequently rented game, but it does save me $$'s if the game sucks.
There's actually no reason why you can't play a field medic in SWG and I saw quite a few and played one myself in the beta. The character I'd likely play right now if I actually bought the game would be a medic/artisan/entertainer cross who basically followed around combat types and healed them, then entertained them in camp to deal with battle fatigue. I managed to play that briefly (but my main character was a wannabe bounty hunter) and it was amusing. People kept telling me to shoot the thing we were fighting and I was like 'ugh, violence!' Some people enjoyed it, some got pissed because in a party of 12 I, the only medic, couldn't keep them all alive when they decided to take on majorly nasty swarms of creatures.
I entirely agree with the sentiment, I just disagreed with the characterization that it was just EQ with wookies. I don't think showing how the game design is in ways radically different from EQ is 'a nitpick.' What you're saying is not that its EQ with star wars races, but that it totally fails to be a good game set in the Star Wars universe and instead is simply another MMORPG dressed up with the Star Wars names.
I think your point really highlights the problem (or at least my problem) with all the MMORPG's to date. Even the ones that were in space, such as Earth and Beyond, did not differ radically in game style, so you might say it was just EQ in space. For me really I didn't want it to be just space ships piloting and mining around. You can do that on Earth and Beyond. I wanted the whole package, being a smuggler interacting with people on a planet, sneaking the contraband to your ship, flying it from system to system without getting caught, selling it to the right people.
One of the largest disappointments for me with SWG was the fact that when you pay to take a shuttle from one city to another on the planet you get a lame loading screen. Technically it should have been trivial for them to do a terrain flyby from the point of view of someone sitting in the shuttle, as you can run across the exact same terrain the shuttle would have to pass. But instead you get the same loading screen you get logging in.
Saying SWG is EQ with star wars races is a gross overgeneralization. As reading the review hints at, gameplay in EQ and SWG are very different, largely due to SWG's lack of hard set classes and also its lack of specific content. In addition, the lack of anything resembling an NPC economy means that there is a different aspect involved there. EQ was run out, kill things, collect loot, sell to vendors. There's no such pattern in SWG. Half the careers don't even need or want to kill things to progress.
I didn't pick it up after beta because what they did do wasn't interesting enough for me beyond a week of play to motivate me. Maybe when they add the space expansion I'll change my mind. But it definitely wasn't just EQ with a star wars theme. In some ways it'd have been better if it was...
Sorry, had a brain fart and thought <ul> was underline for some reason. You'd think I wasn't a web programmer by profession or something, how embarrassing!
Gold's premise is:
If a perfect mirror is used to receive the sunlight and its momentum, the re-emission of that light would gain the same momentum once more, and thus the force exerted on a perfect mirror would be doubled.
Having dropped out of physics to persue the (apparantly dubious) path of a computer scientist, I can't verify Gold's assumption that given a perfect mirror no energy is lost when the light is reflected, though as the child poster mentions there is the redshift/frequency loss effect. So guess I have to bow out at this point.
a perpetual motion machine because the light used by the machine is not diminished in any way by its use, so you could conceivably use that light again and no longer need the sun to provide more.
You don't think the existing MMOG's already do this? I think you seriously underestimate the difficulty of adding content that is balanced and interesting. EQ has been adding content since its inception, and perhaps you could argue that it has a fan base that does not leave, but you also have a fan base that gripes about how badly balanced the new content is and how the new content isn't geared towards them and how easy the new content was to master, etc. So simply having any content is obviously not sufficient, it has to be good content. This is partially what is to blame for the typical content power-spiral, as each newly released batch of content needs to outdo the last and the easiest way to do this is to make it bigger, better, more powerful than it was before.
Also, having so much content that one can't possibly do it all isn't nearly as important if you know from the outset that the content is simply more of the same level treadmill over and over. This means your content has to be involved, which takes both more time and more skill to develop as well as more quality control work.
Right, and as I said, I don't see the concept of the limitations as being useful to the definition of art. It is perhaps useful in the definition of a talented artist, but one cannot look at a particular work/activity and say 'Oh, he overcame limitations therefore it is art.' There is much that requires one to overcome limitations which would still not be art. Hence the concept of limitations in the discussion of what art is has no meaning as it profides no useful distinction.
Yes, the limitations are there. Limitations are present in just about any activity. How does looking at the limitations an artist surmounted further the understanding of the work or the understanding that the work is art? In some specific cases it may, but in the general case I don't see that it does.
My contention however is that you're focussing and stressing limitation which is not at all correct. A painter doesn't paint because by painting they limit themselves, a painter paints because they are MORE expressive in that medium. I think that to call this 'overcoming a limitation' is not really very useful in describing art or what the artist does. As an artist I don't say 'ok, I have a message I want to convey. What artifical or non-artificial limitatons can I now overcome to express this message.' I say, 'I have a message to express, what medium will allow me to express this in the most interesting manner.'
Yes, in expressing something when painting I have to overcome certain limitations, but this is a given in any communication, as nobody has the ability to transfer the entirety of someone's understanding about a message to another person.
You didn't define art, particularly since you used 'creatively' in your definition, which means you have to define 'creative.' If you examine some of your examples of different media a better definition of art creeps forth - Art (capitals intentional) is about expressing and communicating something to an audience. The chosen limitations aren't the issue, and in fact detract from the issue. An artist uses the medium they are the LEAST limited in. Writers don't choose music as a medium because they are better at expressing themself with the written word. If art was about limitations, they would do the opposite...
I've said to many people that FFX is not a game, its a slightly interactive movie with a number of embedded sub-games, some of which replace the play button.
For some of the people I've discussed this with, they found that they'd have enjoyed FFX more if for example there wasn't the necessity to fight a bunch of things in between the spectacular cut scenes. In the case of Kingdom Hearts, for me, the game mechanics actually ended up detracting from the story so much that I wasn't motivated to keep playing: I have to hit the attack button how many stupid more times so I can continue with the plot?
I think this is more of a statement on the current selection of games, not on the medium itself. The vast majority of MUDS are also crap hack and slash monstrosities with no plot or imagination. It's just easier to go that route in graphics. Try something with an involved plot like Planescape: Torment or Fallout. To me these easily outdo all but the best MUDs (including the one I admin to my chagrin.)
I have pretty much the minimum specs for the beta, 1Ghz Athalon, 512MB memory, Geforce II video.
Up until yesterday performance wasn't stellar but quite acceptable to me. After patching last night it took me 3 seconds to get any action through and my max framerate in the middle of nowhere was 7 fps. Also, the sound was horribly messed up. I'm hoping it was server problems and is cleared up tonight.
There's a section in the analysis on expansions, where he comes to the conclusion that expansions aren't a significant impact on subscriber growth, although he also notes at many points that a particular MMOG experiences growth of small or significant value in the subscriber base due to the release of an expansion. I'd be interested in seeing more analysis on this really.
To continue with conjecture, I somewhat feel that the release of expansions is beneficial from a marketing standpoint, but they would likely benefit even more if as Bruce Woodcock said they contain "substantial new features" and also if there was some benefit to existing customers and no large buy-in penalty to new customers (though at least with EQ you can generally buy the entire series for only a slightly inflated price, I saw the Gold Box when Planes of Power was released for $60. Of course I said 'Hmm $60 * 5 accounts for a game I don't really play anymore. I guess not.)
The second gripe is the release of expansion packs. Why do I have to go out and buy an expansion pack for the game I'm already paying a significant monthly fee for. Also, considering that most of the expansion packs I've purchased haven't been worth more than one or two monthly updates, why are they almost as much as the original retail release. This in my opinion is a better example of squeezing the consumer for every penny they have.
The one advantage expansion packs have from a marketing/publisher standpoint is that a new expansion pack is a new product on the shelves, attracting new customers. Sure, all the existing customer base would prefer to just get the monthly update, but as anecdotal evidence compare AC's lifecycle to EQ's. Many people felt AC had a better game (which is another topic entirely) but because they took forever to release an on-the-shelves expansion they didn't garner the drop in/impulse buy sales that EQ with its new expansion ever 6-9 months gains. I think the import of this style of marketing, as was mentioned elsewhere in the thread, is underrated. Of course I also agree that SWG isn't a typical beastie when it comes to marketing.
Slashdot Mirror
100 Elephants worth at least!
This pertains to domestically copyrighted sound recordings. Your "who want to be freely heard" presumably own the copyright to their speech and can thus distribute it in any manner they desire. The RIAA only cares about stuff for which they own the copyright.
I actually had a few levels of fighter. When we quit that campaign I was a 3 fighter, 4 rogue, 2 wizard (Elf) and 1 shadowdancer, IIRC. You have to be very careful with multiclassing. Sure, you get better hp (on average, but you can always roll a 1 as a fighter too) attack rolls and some feats, but you also don't get X levels of rogue, wich means more rogue skills, backstab and those nifty evasion abilities.
I'm not claiming my character was perfect by a long shot, it was my first 3rd edition character, made before the DMG even came out. In a later campaign a friend played a rogue and kicked major behind with improved invisibility and sneak attack. I later made a shade rogue/wizard in a forgotton realms campaign who used a wand of darkness on himself and flew above things (when space allowed) sneak attacking with his bow. That was fun, but we only played once.
While that's a perfectly viable way to play a rogue, to insist it's the only way is silly, especially given the whole point of them changing the class name from thief to rogue so as to encompass other rogue-like characters. Besides, by not fighting, you're basically neglecting one of the primary purposes of a rogue, the huge amount of sneak attack damage they can do. What's the point of being able to do +10d6 on a hit if you never melee (sneak attacks are much harder in ranged combat when you can't flank...)
My mistake was going into melee with the young red dragon, even with the shield and an AC of 35 he splatted me in one round. I should have held back and plinked him with my crossbow and saved the sneak attacks for the puds I could pick off in one or two shots.
I guess my other problem is that my first character in 3rd edition was a rogue, and I was immensly pissed off at what I perceived to be major problems with the rogue class. Basically I felt that the rogue should be where the ranger is now melee wise. As it stood, the gnome psion in our group had more hp than my elven rogue at level 10, which was quite distressfull considering my rogue had to melee to survive (I didn't have spring attack yet, and spring attack means no multiple attacks/round) and so much of the system is designed around HP that a 10 con rogue got splatted a lot.
I'm making a Duellist as an alternate for another campaign and wanted the d10 hit dice while taking ranger on the way, since i see duellist following ranger perfectly. Of course I also haven't seen the 3.5 DMG yet (thought it just arrived at home, ordered it from amazon sunday) so maybe they lowered duellist HD too.
I do like the new focus of rangers on light armour skillful hunter types though. I might take it even with the d20 because it fits the character well, depends on if it means I lose feats I need.
However, reducing their HD highlights a flaw from my pov in the D&D conception of rogues. I'm still irate that a freaking Cleric gets d8 and a Rogue gets d6. So I'm some clergyman who spends his life in a monastery praising my deity, and I'm tougher than a guy who grew up on the streets. This show my problem with the Paladin class as a whole, since Clerics originally were basically Templars, and Paladins are basically Templars between fighters and Clerics. Except that since they get the same HD and attack progression as Fighters, and lot of nifty other effects one could consider them better. I don't feel that what Rangers got really warrented the HD drop.
I think 3.0 harm was terribly broken, but I'll conceed that you don't need to buy a $30 book to fix that.
I also thought the Bard class was pretty much broken, and to a lesser degree the fact that a lot of the classes gained a significant amount of power at level 1 then not much else. The bard was merely the largest example of this to some degree. 3.5 seems to do a good job of fixing that. I don't like Rangers having d8 HD, but I also didn't have a problem with 3.0 Rangers at all, which a lot of people did. Oh well.
This presumes luddism is genetic...
In the far future luddites won't be extinct, they'll just be entities modern luddites would denounce as transhuman monstrosities
This is why I tend to a) check online reviews of games and b) rent a game from Blockbuster before purchasing it. Of course it gives more profit to Blockbuster and doesn't really hurt the game sales much since Blockbuster will tend to buy more of a frequently rented game, but it does save me $$'s if the game sucks.
There's actually no reason why you can't play a field medic in SWG and I saw quite a few and played one myself in the beta. The character I'd likely play right now if I actually bought the game would be a medic/artisan/entertainer cross who basically followed around combat types and healed them, then entertained them in camp to deal with battle fatigue. I managed to play that briefly (but my main character was a wannabe bounty hunter) and it was amusing. People kept telling me to shoot the thing we were fighting and I was like 'ugh, violence!' Some people enjoyed it, some got pissed because in a party of 12 I, the only medic, couldn't keep them all alive when they decided to take on majorly nasty swarms of creatures.
I entirely agree with the sentiment, I just disagreed with the characterization that it was just EQ with wookies. I don't think showing how the game design is in ways radically different from EQ is 'a nitpick.' What you're saying is not that its EQ with star wars races, but that it totally fails to be a good game set in the Star Wars universe and instead is simply another MMORPG dressed up with the Star Wars names.
I think your point really highlights the problem (or at least my problem) with all the MMORPG's to date. Even the ones that were in space, such as Earth and Beyond, did not differ radically in game style, so you might say it was just EQ in space. For me really I didn't want it to be just space ships piloting and mining around. You can do that on Earth and Beyond. I wanted the whole package, being a smuggler interacting with people on a planet, sneaking the contraband to your ship, flying it from system to system without getting caught, selling it to the right people.
One of the largest disappointments for me with SWG was the fact that when you pay to take a shuttle from one city to another on the planet you get a lame loading screen. Technically it should have been trivial for them to do a terrain flyby from the point of view of someone sitting in the shuttle, as you can run across the exact same terrain the shuttle would have to pass. But instead you get the same loading screen you get logging in.
Saying SWG is EQ with star wars races is a gross overgeneralization. As reading the review hints at, gameplay in EQ and SWG are very different, largely due to SWG's lack of hard set classes and also its lack of specific content. In addition, the lack of anything resembling an NPC economy means that there is a different aspect involved there. EQ was run out, kill things, collect loot, sell to vendors. There's no such pattern in SWG. Half the careers don't even need or want to kill things to progress.
I didn't pick it up after beta because what they did do wasn't interesting enough for me beyond a week of play to motivate me. Maybe when they add the space expansion I'll change my mind. But it definitely wasn't just EQ with a star wars theme. In some ways it'd have been better if it was...
Sorry, had a brain fart and thought <ul> was underline for some reason. You'd think I wasn't a web programmer by profession or something, how embarrassing!
Gold's premise is: Having dropped out of physics to persue the (apparantly dubious) path of a computer scientist, I can't verify Gold's assumption that given a perfect mirror no energy is lost when the light is reflected, though as the child poster mentions there is the redshift/frequency loss effect. So guess I have to bow out at this point.- is
a perpetual motion machine because the light used by the machine is not diminished in any way by its use, so you could conceivably use that light again and no longer need the sun to provide more.You don't think the existing MMOG's already do this? I think you seriously underestimate the difficulty of adding content that is balanced and interesting. EQ has been adding content since its inception, and perhaps you could argue that it has a fan base that does not leave, but you also have a fan base that gripes about how badly balanced the new content is and how the new content isn't geared towards them and how easy the new content was to master, etc. So simply having any content is obviously not sufficient, it has to be good content. This is partially what is to blame for the typical content power-spiral, as each newly released batch of content needs to outdo the last and the easiest way to do this is to make it bigger, better, more powerful than it was before.
Also, having so much content that one can't possibly do it all isn't nearly as important if you know from the outset that the content is simply more of the same level treadmill over and over. This means your content has to be involved, which takes both more time and more skill to develop as well as more quality control work.
Looks like it was server problems, or they fixed it. I'm running reasonably again after patching today.
Right, and as I said, I don't see the concept of the limitations as being useful to the definition of art. It is perhaps useful in the definition of a talented artist, but one cannot look at a particular work/activity and say 'Oh, he overcame limitations therefore it is art.' There is much that requires one to overcome limitations which would still not be art. Hence the concept of limitations in the discussion of what art is has no meaning as it profides no useful distinction.
Yes, the limitations are there. Limitations are present in just about any activity. How does looking at the limitations an artist surmounted further the understanding of the work or the understanding that the work is art? In some specific cases it may, but in the general case I don't see that it does.
My contention however is that you're focussing and stressing limitation which is not at all correct. A painter doesn't paint because by painting they limit themselves, a painter paints because they are MORE expressive in that medium. I think that to call this 'overcoming a limitation' is not really very useful in describing art or what the artist does. As an artist I don't say 'ok, I have a message I want to convey. What artifical or non-artificial limitatons can I now overcome to express this message.' I say, 'I have a message to express, what medium will allow me to express this in the most interesting manner.'
Yes, in expressing something when painting I have to overcome certain limitations, but this is a given in any communication, as nobody has the ability to transfer the entirety of someone's understanding about a message to another person.
Does that make more sense?
You didn't define art, particularly since you used 'creatively' in your definition, which means you have to define 'creative.' If you examine some of your examples of different media a better definition of art creeps forth - Art (capitals intentional) is about expressing and communicating something to an audience. The chosen limitations aren't the issue, and in fact detract from the issue. An artist uses the medium they are the LEAST limited in. Writers don't choose music as a medium because they are better at expressing themself with the written word. If art was about limitations, they would do the opposite...
I've said to many people that FFX is not a game, its a slightly interactive movie with a number of embedded sub-games, some of which replace the play button.
For some of the people I've discussed this with, they found that they'd have enjoyed FFX more if for example there wasn't the necessity to fight a bunch of things in between the spectacular cut scenes. In the case of Kingdom Hearts, for me, the game mechanics actually ended up detracting from the story so much that I wasn't motivated to keep playing: I have to hit the attack button how many stupid more times so I can continue with the plot?
I think this is more of a statement on the current selection of games, not on the medium itself. The vast majority of MUDS are also crap hack and slash monstrosities with no plot or imagination. It's just easier to go that route in graphics. Try something with an involved plot like Planescape: Torment or Fallout. To me these easily outdo all but the best MUDs (including the one I admin to my chagrin.)
I have pretty much the minimum specs for the beta, 1Ghz Athalon, 512MB memory, Geforce II video. Up until yesterday performance wasn't stellar but quite acceptable to me. After patching last night it took me 3 seconds to get any action through and my max framerate in the middle of nowhere was 7 fps. Also, the sound was horribly messed up. I'm hoping it was server problems and is cleared up tonight.
There's a section in the analysis on expansions, where he comes to the conclusion that expansions aren't a significant impact on subscriber growth, although he also notes at many points that a particular MMOG experiences growth of small or significant value in the subscriber base due to the release of an expansion. I'd be interested in seeing more analysis on this really.
To continue with conjecture, I somewhat feel that the release of expansions is beneficial from a marketing standpoint, but they would likely benefit even more if as Bruce Woodcock said they contain "substantial new features" and also if there was some benefit to existing customers and no large buy-in penalty to new customers (though at least with EQ you can generally buy the entire series for only a slightly inflated price, I saw the Gold Box when Planes of Power was released for $60. Of course I said 'Hmm $60 * 5 accounts for a game I don't really play anymore. I guess not.)
They've already considered this. Whether their solution is sufficient remains to be seen.
The one advantage expansion packs have from a marketing/publisher standpoint is that a new expansion pack is a new product on the shelves, attracting new customers. Sure, all the existing customer base would prefer to just get the monthly update, but as anecdotal evidence compare AC's lifecycle to EQ's. Many people felt AC had a better game (which is another topic entirely) but because they took forever to release an on-the-shelves expansion they didn't garner the drop in/impulse buy sales that EQ with its new expansion ever 6-9 months gains. I think the import of this style of marketing, as was mentioned elsewhere in the thread, is underrated. Of course I also agree that SWG isn't a typical beastie when it comes to marketing.