Thats not really true, casual gaming brings in a lot of money. My wife recently fell in love with the demo for Bejeweled 2. But its $19.99. WTF? A game that I could program myself in a few weeks is $19.99 (Yes you could make the silly argument about I should then, but 19.99 isn't worth weeks of my time, it might be if I could sell the game, but its copyrighted.. Almost makes one want to pirate it.)
That makes no sense. So is the original programmers time not worth as much as yours then? He should give the game away for free, but if your positions were reversed then you would sell it? Huh??
Scripting the fight is by far the most reliable for the developers to guarantee that the players have fun.
That depends on the players.
Only partially. Yes, the players have to be open to the fact that the fight isn't the same every time and they can't just download the strategy guide. But making that system fun depends a lot more on the ability of the devs to design and balance the encounter. That I guarantee. That task is not trivial. You can't just hand everything over to some fancy AI algorithim and expect it to result in a fun experience.
he will behave the same way in all 500 fights". BO-RING!... That's supposed to be fun?
It only get's boring when you starting beating him over and over. No argument there; I agree. However the fight is fun the first couple times you do it. And it's very fun if you don't download the strategy but instead try to develop it yourself (or if your guild is the first to try). If they switch to some advanced AI they run the risk of losing even that level of fun if it's not balanced properly. BTW, I think this concept of guilds running instances over and over again is stupid. These games need better endgame content that doesn't involve repeating the same fight 500 times. Even if the AI was adaptave that would still be boring.
Now, don't get me wrong. I think smarter, more adaptive enemies are a great idea. But at this point only in some places. Other less important encounters. And the devs will have to realize that they will be spending a *lot* of time (probably post release) tweaking those encounters. It will take a lot of experince at balancing those types of encounters before they should try using that sort of a system for a major boss fight.
I definitely agree that encounters with fancy adaptive AI would be better, but my point is that learning how to design them is significantly more work then you seem to think. Far more then the current, fully scripted encounters. That also makes them very risky. If they get it wrong then their game tanks. That's why I said that Ragnaros, the end boss of WoW, would not be a good place to experiment with this type of a system. They need to learn how to do it first.
You'll noticed that I said you will find heuristics that make it too hard (like targeting healers first or not emerging) and you have to purposely dumb it down to meet your user's needs.
Here's the trick. Balancing the encounter. You dismiss it in one sentence like it's easy, but it's by far the hardest part of the entire exercise; far harder than simply developing these ai heuristics you're suggesting.
These larger 40 player raid encounters have to be carfully balanced so that it's not too hard and not too easy and there's no silly 'ai exploits'. And it has to be fun. Trying to write a fancy ai algorithim that was properly balanced and fun would be a nightmare. There's all sorts of problems, including complaints from guilds who discover that Rag is harder for them then for some other guild because of some wierd ai learning code.
Ragnaros is the original end boss of WoW. That developers can't screw that encounter up. Scripting the fight is by far the most reliable for the developers to guarantee that the players have fun. Anything else is playing with fire.
'Menu based battle mechanics', although common, definitely aren't a requirement. Forgotten so soon about Oblivion? And Diablo didn't have menu driven battles either. And as far as mmorpg's like WoW it's questionable to call the action bar a "menu".
I'm curious as to why you say an xp system isn't necessary? Consider an 'xp system' to mean, in general terms, a system for improving statistics related to your character(s). What examples are there of RPGs that don't have that? That sounds like the basic requirement to me.
Paul has given clear direction that Intel must "re-structure, re-size, and re-purpose" in a "relentless pursuit of efficiency." As a result, all organizations, including Intel Information Technology (IT), have been given new spending and headcount targets and a corporate effort has been launched to determine how to streamline Intel to make our company more agile and more competitive long term.
Translation: Paul has no idea how to fix the problem but he needs to make the board think that he's actually doing something positive so he's just going to cut spending, dress it up in a bunch of corporate-speak nonsense, then cross his fingers and hope everything works out.
IT's response is clear. blah blah blah.. we must streamline our organization.. blah blah blah.. and remove unnecessary overhead across the organization. blah blah blah.. must develop a more compact, less hierarchical organizational structure.. blah blah
Translation: We're firing people.
Taking these steps will require the redeployment of some IT personnel. Redeployment, or the effort to move employees to areas of greater return when there is a change in business conditions, is a standard practice that allows Intel to remain competitive and increases opportunities for employees.
Translation: After the firings we're going to be reassigning everyone who's left to random projects that they have zero experience with. This will be more efficient.
Thank you,
Oh, and ahh, don't forget that next friday is hawaiian shirt day.
The only bug that I'm aware of is that shopkeepers' gold on-hand doesn't decrease when you sell them things. Whoops!
That's not a bug. That number doesn't represent the merchant's amount of gold; it represents the most he is willing to pay for a single transaction (single item). The number goes up if you reach master level in mercantile. The merchants, like most other games, have an infinite amount of gold. Aside from the fact that it is very unintuitive, I think it's a better system then morrowind.
Nobody said that one unbalanced weight is 'obvious' or not 'patent-worthy'. It almost certainly is patented, but the point is that it's a different patent then the one Sony violated.
So because you gave it one try and couldn't get it to work for whatever reason, that has to mean that everyone else who claims it works fine must be lying?
It starts off by fabricating an opinion. Forget what he actually said; let's pretend he said something different because that's what you prefer to argue against.
Did you read the release notes for your version of Cedega? Did you search through the nearly 2500 posts dedicated to Source games on the Cedega discussion forums? Did you look anywhere else on the web for help?
Then you go on to completely miss the point. Windows games work out the box 95% of the time. And if something doesn't work, you can almost always fix it with a quick driver update or a quick glance at the forums; your problem is almost guranteed to seen by others and the topic of very easy to find a discussion.
With Cedega finding the answer to a problem might be 10 minutes or might be never. Many problems are very hard to debug; crashes, hangs, or just painful framerates. They're also very hard to search the forums for; what do you look for? "It hangs"? Good luck with that. Did you search through the nearly 2500 posts. HAHAHA.. you made my point for me.
Or did you just give up and start badmouthing a program because you couldn't get it to do something that many other people can?
Don't be an asshole. He didn't 'badmouth' it. He simply described how it didn't work for him. You have absolutly no idea what percentage of people who try Cedega actually get it to work so don't presume you do.
FWIW, I played HL2 (and SimCity 4 and GTA3:VC) with few to no problems with Cedega 4.3 . It's not impossible if you're willing to actually configure your installation properly.
Just because you got it to work doesn't mean it will work for everybody. I run ubuntu on my computer and I play native games fine (NWN, quake4, unreal tournament, etc). I couldn't get Cedega to play the games I wanted for all my efforts (which included seaching forums and such). WoW crashed on startup everytime with some generic error and Morrowind ran impossibly slow. You seem to think everyone who can't get it to work must be either stupid or lazy. You need to pull your head out of your ass. Cedega is flakey. Sometimes it just wont work.
Hopefully it's improving. Maybe eventually it will be worth paying for; but as far as I'm concerned it's not there yet. I really hate paying for something only to discover after I get it that it doesn't work. I paid 15 bucks and got nothing for it. That's the reason I will probably never try Cedega again; I'll just stick to wine.
I'm fine with laws that protect people from each other. I'm against laws that attempt to protect people from themselves. Seems simple enough to me.
I don't think it's quite so black and white. Nothing happens in a vacuum. Fast food corporations do everything within thier power to encourage people to eat unhealthy portions of thier food.
The entire point is that you can be open about your sexuality with your guild members and not have to worry about being harrassed or kicked out. In a normal guild you would probably have to work to keep it a secret. You may say the keeping that secret is easy in a game like this, and maybe it is, but having to do that is something that straight people don't have to do.
Straight couples play together openly all the time. That's something that gay people can't do without a guild like this. Also, a lot of people develop strong friendships with other players that they meet online. That's also hard to do if you have to keep your sexuality a secret. A guild like this means you don't have to worry about people you thought were close friends suddenly turning away from you when they find out you're gay.
Oh, and I completely disagree with your opinion that youth should be 'protected' from controversial issues of politics, religion, or sexual orientation. Those aren't evils that we should keep from our kids. They are topics that should be openly discussed and the more exposure young people have to the controversy the more likely they are to be open to the ideas of both sides. Hiding kids from the realities of the world is not protecting thier interests; expecially the age group that plays WoW.
Also, specifically with respect to homosexuality (though slightly off the topic of WoW), young kids will accept it *much* easier then adults. A child who is introduced to the idea at very young age will be much more likely to accept it and be comfortable with it when they get older.
I posted this on the article's comments section but it'll probably get more attention here so I'm reposting it. I hate all the ads on that site too.
From the article:
Second, a short but intense experience is definitely better than a long game that's repetitive.
I don't think that is a universal truth. It depends on the way you play games.
Take "God of War" for example. An excellent game by most standards, and one that definitly falls into the category of "short but intense". I bought it because of the great reviews. After playing for a couple days I was dissappointed. Not because I didn't like it; it was an excellent game. Rather, because I felt it should have been a rental. It was short, intense, great fun, but had little replay value.
Most reviewers reserve the phrase 'it's a rental' for mediocre games; it generally indicates a bad review. I think that's completly wrong. Bad games don't get better just by renting them. I think the perfect rental game is short, intense, but with limited replay value. "God of War" is the perfect rental. You can pay $5 to rent it and have the same experience as the guy who bought it for $50.
That fact that a game is "long and repetitve" is only a bad thing if you overemphasize the goal of finishing it. You don't have to finish games to enjoy them. I prefer spending my money on a longer game. I'll play it for a week or two, I'll have fun, and then I'll stop playing for a month or two. Then I'll come back and play for a few more weeks, and have just as much fun as I did when the game was new. These types of games give me the greatest value for my money and are the ones I feel are really worth the $50.
On point number one. There are quite a few players from North America with bad English. Particularly here in Canada where there are a very large number of foreign students.
Also, on example of the Hunter; he probably wasn't a farmer just a really annoying player. If he was as annoying as you describe then I don't fault you for kicking him, but the example is a little offtopic.
Actually City of Heroes was the first to have this feature. If I'm remembering right, originally it allowed lower level toons to be a higher level toon's sidekick, artifically inflating the lower level's fighting abilities while near-by the high level character. Later they added the "reverse" sidekick/mentor option, allowing a high level character to be a low level character's sidekick and thus reducing the higher level's fighting abilities & available skills.
I think you missed the point. He's saying that it should be possible to group with higher level characters (who don't have their stats adjusted) for the purpose of adventuring, not leveling.
The levels are goals
He's saying that they shouldn't be the primary goals. And I agree. The goals should be focused on adventuring and exploring and overcoming challenges, like the PnP game.
In all the games today the focus is generally to aquire levels and to aquire loot (not including pvp related stuff). We have enough of those games. Wouldn't it be great to have a game where those goals were secondary to simply having fun and adventuring in the old fashion PnP style? There are some people who try to play WoW that way, but the experience is not very rewarding because all the content is designed for the other type of player; the one who just wants loot and xp.
I think that this concept can be captured properly in a game and I'm waiting for someone to do it. NWN can do it but only because they turned over control of the content to the players. Maybe this game will be close; we'll see.
But there must be a little bit more to it then that. From the article, this guy who just bought this space station is going to have all sorts of income sources, like hunting/mining taxes and merchant stall rentals, etc. Is that uncommon?
How does this Project Entropia thing work? From the web site:
The real cash economy means that the internal Project Entropia economy is linked to the real world economy, by using a currency called the Project Entropia Dollar (PED), which have a fixed exchange rate to the US Dollar (10 PED equals 1 USD).... A unique aspect of Project Entropia is that a player may elect to transfer PED back into real life currency, thereby enabling them to earn real money while playing an online computer game.
As I understand it, every game economy needs sources and sinks for the currency. I suppose players withdrawing this ped currency out into real usd would work as a sink, but what are the sources? In a completely virutal economy the game can just create money out of thin air, but in this system they can't do that. Are there some players that just constantly pay to play, and other that collect profits and earn thier money?
The industry giants WANT it to be that way. In reality, it isn't (yet), although the DMCA and other poor laws allow them to act as though it is under certain circumstances.
So has the validity of shrink wrap licenses been sucessfully challenged in some court case that I haven't heard about? I'd like to see a reference for that.
Personally, I don't have a problem with shrink wrap licenses. A publisher has the right to license thier software instead of sell it. The 'shrink wrap license' is just a convenient distribution system.
Why? Let's turn this around.
When you buy a book, you buy a "license to read". It's not like buying a toaster however much you may wish it to be.
When you buy a movie, you buy a "license to watch". It's not like buying a toaster however much you may wish it to be.
When you buy a listen, you buy a "license to listen". It's not like buying a toaster however much you may wish it to be.
Those examples are ridiculous. As is the concept that software is considered differently.
You're talking about the way you think the industry should work. I'm talking about the way it actually works. The fact is, when you buy software, you're buying a license.
You don't need a license to use something you've bought.
What they bought _was_ a license. Nothing more. When you buy any software you're not buying a copy of the binaries to do with as you please. What you're buying is a license to use the software. And the only thing you're allowed to do with it is exacly what the license says. Period.
You need a license to copy, modify, and distribute it outside of fair-use.
That applies to music, movies, books, etc, but it does _not_ apply to software. Nobody really buys software. We just buy licenses. It's not like buying a toaster however much you may wish it to be.
he died doing what he loved. How many of us get to die doing what we enjoy? I envy him.
I seriously hope you didn't RTFA.
He was 28. He died of heart failure because he was addicted enough to sit and play games for 50 straight hours without adequate sleep or food.
You shouldn't envy him. Pity him because he was an addict who didn't get proper help, but don't envy him.
Besides, how do you know he loved it? People are often addicted to things they don't like. Gambling, for example. They start out enjoying it, but when it becomes an addiction even if they start to dislike it that doesn't matter anymore. Addicts just feel a compulsive need to continue thier addiction regardless of whether or not they like it.
Slashdot Mirror
Thats not really true, casual gaming brings in a lot of money. My wife recently fell in love with the demo for Bejeweled 2. But its $19.99. WTF? A game that I could program myself in a few weeks is $19.99 (Yes you could make the silly argument about I should then, but 19.99 isn't worth weeks of my time, it might be if I could sell the game, but its copyrighted.. Almost makes one want to pirate it.)
That makes no sense. So is the original programmers time not worth as much as yours then? He should give the game away for free, but if your positions were reversed then you would sell it? Huh??
Scripting the fight is by far the most reliable for the developers to guarantee that the players have fun.
... That's supposed to be fun?
That depends on the players.
Only partially. Yes, the players have to be open to the fact that the fight isn't the same every time and they can't just download the strategy guide. But making that system fun depends a lot more on the ability of the devs to design and balance the encounter. That I guarantee. That task is not trivial. You can't just hand everything over to some fancy AI algorithim and expect it to result in a fun experience.
he will behave the same way in all 500 fights". BO-RING!
It only get's boring when you starting beating him over and over. No argument there; I agree. However the fight is fun the first couple times you do it. And it's very fun if you don't download the strategy but instead try to develop it yourself (or if your guild is the first to try). If they switch to some advanced AI they run the risk of losing even that level of fun if it's not balanced properly. BTW, I think this concept of guilds running instances over and over again is stupid. These games need better endgame content that doesn't involve repeating the same fight 500 times. Even if the AI was adaptave that would still be boring.
Now, don't get me wrong. I think smarter, more adaptive enemies are a great idea. But at this point only in some places. Other less important encounters. And the devs will have to realize that they will be spending a *lot* of time (probably post release) tweaking those encounters. It will take a lot of experince at balancing those types of encounters before they should try using that sort of a system for a major boss fight.
I definitely agree that encounters with fancy adaptive AI would be better, but my point is that learning how to design them is significantly more work then you seem to think. Far more then the current, fully scripted encounters. That also makes them very risky. If they get it wrong then their game tanks. That's why I said that Ragnaros, the end boss of WoW, would not be a good place to experiment with this type of a system. They need to learn how to do it first.
I mean, yea, Mario is has a lot of games, but the franchise is like "The Godfather"
That game would rule.
Or maybe not..
You'll noticed that I said you will find heuristics that make it too hard (like targeting healers first or not emerging) and you have to purposely dumb it down to meet your user's needs.
Here's the trick. Balancing the encounter. You dismiss it in one sentence like it's easy, but it's by far the hardest part of the entire exercise; far harder than simply developing these ai heuristics you're suggesting.
These larger 40 player raid encounters have to be carfully balanced so that it's not too hard and not too easy and there's no silly 'ai exploits'. And it has to be fun. Trying to write a fancy ai algorithim that was properly balanced and fun would be a nightmare. There's all sorts of problems, including complaints from guilds who discover that Rag is harder for them then for some other guild because of some wierd ai learning code.
Ragnaros is the original end boss of WoW. That developers can't screw that encounter up. Scripting the fight is by far the most reliable for the developers to guarantee that the players have fun. Anything else is playing with fire.
'Menu based battle mechanics', although common, definitely aren't a requirement. Forgotten so soon about Oblivion? And Diablo didn't have menu driven battles either. And as far as mmorpg's like WoW it's questionable to call the action bar a "menu".
I'm curious as to why you say an xp system isn't necessary? Consider an 'xp system' to mean, in general terms, a system for improving statistics related to your character(s). What examples are there of RPGs that don't have that? That sounds like the basic requirement to me.
Paul has given clear direction that Intel must "re-structure, re-size, and re-purpose" in a "relentless pursuit of efficiency." As a result, all organizations, including Intel Information Technology (IT), have been given new spending and headcount targets and a corporate effort has been launched to determine how to streamline Intel to make our company more agile and more competitive long term.
.. blah blah blah.. and remove unnecessary overhead across the organization. blah blah blah.. must develop a more compact, less hierarchical organizational structure.. blah blah
Translation: Paul has no idea how to fix the problem but he needs to make the board think that he's actually doing something positive so he's just going to cut spending, dress it up in a bunch of corporate-speak nonsense, then cross his fingers and hope everything works out.
IT's response is clear. blah blah blah.. we must streamline our organization
Translation: We're firing people.
Taking these steps will require the redeployment of some IT personnel. Redeployment, or the effort to move employees to areas of greater return when there is a change in business conditions, is a standard practice that allows Intel to remain competitive and increases opportunities for employees.
Translation: After the firings we're going to be reassigning everyone who's left to random projects that they have zero experience with. This will be more efficient.
Thank you,
Oh, and ahh, don't forget that next friday is hawaiian shirt day.
The only bug that I'm aware of is that shopkeepers' gold on-hand doesn't decrease when you sell them things. Whoops! That's not a bug. That number doesn't represent the merchant's amount of gold; it represents the most he is willing to pay for a single transaction (single item). The number goes up if you reach master level in mercantile. The merchants, like most other games, have an infinite amount of gold. Aside from the fact that it is very unintuitive, I think it's a better system then morrowind.
Try reading the article.
Nobody said that one unbalanced weight is 'obvious' or not 'patent-worthy'. It almost certainly is patented, but the point is that it's a different patent then the one Sony violated.
These types of posts infuriate me.
So because you gave it one try and couldn't get it to work for whatever reason, that has to mean that everyone else who claims it works fine must be lying?
It starts off by fabricating an opinion. Forget what he actually said; let's pretend he said something different because that's what you prefer to argue against.
Did you read the release notes for your version of Cedega? Did you search through the nearly 2500 posts dedicated to Source games on the Cedega discussion forums? Did you look anywhere else on the web for help?
Then you go on to completely miss the point. Windows games work out the box 95% of the time. And if something doesn't work, you can almost always fix it with a quick driver update or a quick glance at the forums; your problem is almost guranteed to seen by others and the topic of very easy to find a discussion.
With Cedega finding the answer to a problem might be 10 minutes or might be never. Many problems are very hard to debug; crashes, hangs, or just painful framerates. They're also very hard to search the forums for; what do you look for? "It hangs"? Good luck with that. Did you search through the nearly 2500 posts. HAHAHA.. you made my point for me.
Or did you just give up and start badmouthing a program because you couldn't get it to do something that many other people can?
Don't be an asshole. He didn't 'badmouth' it. He simply described how it didn't work for him. You have absolutly no idea what percentage of people who try Cedega actually get it to work so don't presume you do.
FWIW, I played HL2 (and SimCity 4 and GTA3:VC) with few to no problems with Cedega 4.3 . It's not impossible if you're willing to actually configure your installation properly.
Just because you got it to work doesn't mean it will work for everybody. I run ubuntu on my computer and I play native games fine (NWN, quake4, unreal tournament, etc). I couldn't get Cedega to play the games I wanted for all my efforts (which included seaching forums and such). WoW crashed on startup everytime with some generic error and Morrowind ran impossibly slow. You seem to think everyone who can't get it to work must be either stupid or lazy. You need to pull your head out of your ass. Cedega is flakey. Sometimes it just wont work.
Hopefully it's improving. Maybe eventually it will be worth paying for; but as far as I'm concerned it's not there yet. I really hate paying for something only to discover after I get it that it doesn't work. I paid 15 bucks and got nothing for it. That's the reason I will probably never try Cedega again; I'll just stick to wine.
I'm fine with laws that protect people from each other. I'm against laws that attempt to protect people from themselves. Seems simple enough to me.
I don't think it's quite so black and white. Nothing happens in a vacuum. Fast food corporations do everything within thier power to encourage people to eat unhealthy portions of thier food.
[i]The problem with the Garriots' predictions is that online is a medium, not a genre.[/i] QFT
The entire point is that you can be open about your sexuality with your guild members and not have to worry about being harrassed or kicked out. In a normal guild you would probably have to work to keep it a secret. You may say the keeping that secret is easy in a game like this, and maybe it is, but having to do that is something that straight people don't have to do.
Straight couples play together openly all the time. That's something that gay people can't do without a guild like this. Also, a lot of people develop strong friendships with other players that they meet online. That's also hard to do if you have to keep your sexuality a secret. A guild like this means you don't have to worry about people you thought were close friends suddenly turning away from you when they find out you're gay.
Oh, and I completely disagree with your opinion that youth should be 'protected' from controversial issues of politics, religion, or sexual orientation. Those aren't evils that we should keep from our kids. They are topics that should be openly discussed and the more exposure young people have to the controversy the more likely they are to be open to the ideas of both sides. Hiding kids from the realities of the world is not protecting thier interests; expecially the age group that plays WoW.
Also, specifically with respect to homosexuality (though slightly off the topic of WoW), young kids will accept it *much* easier then adults. A child who is introduced to the idea at very young age will be much more likely to accept it and be comfortable with it when they get older.
I posted this on the article's comments section but it'll probably get more attention here so I'm reposting it. I hate all the ads on that site too.
From the article:
Second, a short but intense experience is definitely better than a long game that's repetitive.
I don't think that is a universal truth. It depends on the way you play games.
Take "God of War" for example. An excellent game by most standards, and one that definitly falls into the category of "short but intense". I bought it because of the great reviews. After playing for a couple days I was dissappointed. Not because I didn't like it; it was an excellent game. Rather, because I felt it should have been a rental. It was short, intense, great fun, but had little replay value.
Most reviewers reserve the phrase 'it's a rental' for mediocre games; it generally indicates a bad review. I think that's completly wrong. Bad games don't get better just by renting them. I think the perfect rental game is short, intense, but with limited replay value. "God of War" is the perfect rental. You can pay $5 to rent it and have the same experience as the guy who bought it for $50.
That fact that a game is "long and repetitve" is only a bad thing if you overemphasize the goal of finishing it. You don't have to finish games to enjoy them. I prefer spending my money on a longer game. I'll play it for a week or two, I'll have fun, and then I'll stop playing for a month or two. Then I'll come back and play for a few more weeks, and have just as much fun as I did when the game was new. These types of games give me the greatest value for my money and are the ones I feel are really worth the $50.
On point number one. There are quite a few players from North America with bad English. Particularly here in Canada where there are a very large number of foreign students. Also, on example of the Hunter; he probably wasn't a farmer just a really annoying player. If he was as annoying as you describe then I don't fault you for kicking him, but the example is a little offtopic.
Actually City of Heroes was the first to have this feature. If I'm remembering right, originally it allowed lower level toons to be a higher level toon's sidekick, artifically inflating the lower level's fighting abilities while near-by the high level character. Later they added the "reverse" sidekick/mentor option, allowing a high level character to be a low level character's sidekick and thus reducing the higher level's fighting abilities & available skills.
I think you missed the point. He's saying that it should be possible to group with higher level characters (who don't have their stats adjusted) for the purpose of adventuring, not leveling.
The levels are goals
He's saying that they shouldn't be the primary goals. And I agree. The goals should be focused on adventuring and exploring and overcoming challenges, like the PnP game.
In all the games today the focus is generally to aquire levels and to aquire loot (not including pvp related stuff). We have enough of those games. Wouldn't it be great to have a game where those goals were secondary to simply having fun and adventuring in the old fashion PnP style? There are some people who try to play WoW that way, but the experience is not very rewarding because all the content is designed for the other type of player; the one who just wants loot and xp.
I think that this concept can be captured properly in a game and I'm waiting for someone to do it. NWN can do it but only because they turned over control of the content to the players. Maybe this game will be close; we'll see.
You'd think in a tech forum like Slashdot, Sci Fi would win hands down.
Except that you're comparing the potential of the genres, where as the rest of us are the comparing actual games.
It's simple: SWG sucks, WOW is fun. It's not a comment on Sci-Fi versus Fantasy at all.
Don't forget KOTOR, which was a big success. If sombody could make a Star Wars MMOG that was good, then we'd be all over it.
Moderators too.
Interesting.
But there must be a little bit more to it then that. From the article, this guy who just bought this space station is going to have all sorts of income sources, like hunting/mining taxes and merchant stall rentals, etc. Is that uncommon?
How does this Project Entropia thing work? From the web site:
... A unique aspect of Project Entropia is that a player may elect to transfer PED back into real life currency, thereby enabling them to earn real money while playing an online computer game.
The real cash economy means that the internal Project Entropia economy is linked to the real world economy, by using a currency called the Project Entropia Dollar (PED), which have a fixed exchange rate to the US Dollar (10 PED equals 1 USD).
As I understand it, every game economy needs sources and sinks for the currency. I suppose players withdrawing this ped currency out into real usd would work as a sink, but what are the sources? In a completely virutal economy the game can just create money out of thin air, but in this system they can't do that. Are there some players that just constantly pay to play, and other that collect profits and earn thier money?
The industry giants WANT it to be that way. In reality, it isn't (yet), although the DMCA and other poor laws allow them to act as though it is under certain circumstances.
So has the validity of shrink wrap licenses been sucessfully challenged in some court case that I haven't heard about? I'd like to see a reference for that.
Personally, I don't have a problem with shrink wrap licenses. A publisher has the right to license thier software instead of sell it. The 'shrink wrap license' is just a convenient distribution system.
Why? Let's turn this around. When you buy a book, you buy a "license to read". It's not like buying a toaster however much you may wish it to be. When you buy a movie, you buy a "license to watch". It's not like buying a toaster however much you may wish it to be. When you buy a listen, you buy a "license to listen". It's not like buying a toaster however much you may wish it to be. Those examples are ridiculous. As is the concept that software is considered differently.
You're talking about the way you think the industry should work. I'm talking about the way it actually works. The fact is, when you buy software, you're buying a license.
You don't need a license to use something you've bought.
What they bought _was_ a license. Nothing more. When you buy any software you're not buying a copy of the binaries to do with as you please. What you're buying is a license to use the software. And the only thing you're allowed to do with it is exacly what the license says. Period.
You need a license to copy, modify, and distribute it outside of fair-use.
That applies to music, movies, books, etc, but it does _not_ apply to software. Nobody really buys software. We just buy licenses. It's not like buying a toaster however much you may wish it to be.
he died doing what he loved. How many of us get to die doing what we enjoy? I envy him.
I seriously hope you didn't RTFA.
He was 28. He died of heart failure because he was addicted enough to sit and play games for 50 straight hours without adequate sleep or food.
You shouldn't envy him. Pity him because he was an addict who didn't get proper help, but don't envy him.
Besides, how do you know he loved it? People are often addicted to things they don't like. Gambling, for example. They start out enjoying it, but when it becomes an addiction even if they start to dislike it that doesn't matter anymore. Addicts just feel a compulsive need to continue thier addiction regardless of whether or not they like it.