There has to be at least 100,000 Slashdotters who played the crap out of that game and got damn good at math as a direct result of associating math with fun.
PvE is pointless. A lot of people want to play PvP.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. I haven't seen stats for server size in awhile, but a year or two ago, with all the major MMORPGs combined the PVE server population was around 80% compared to the 20% held by PVP.
more people would rather just play a game with their friends than worry about being ganked. it's pretty much the way I've looked at it since UO opened up PVP.
I was looking at it last night and it looks to be a cyberpunk FPS set in a persistant world. which is something I've wanted for awhile (no, Neocron doesn't count. I demand twitch action)
it seems pretty interesting and I wish I had registered last night, since now the site is slashdotted.
my vote goes for Timothy Steven Clark, who did the music for Tribes 2 and its predecessors, Tribes, Starsiege and Earthsiege, as well as
Aces Over Europe and a bunch of others.
How long do you think before we see an article on "Father of the PSP admits Sony made mistakes"?
Well, being that he's a high-ranking corporate figure in Japan, he's not going to, unless it's in conjunction with him retiring. His response is classic corporate Japanese. He's not going to admit to screwing up, publically. He'll just tell his engineers to fix it as quietly as possible and then when people stop returning units say, "Well, that flaw wasn't that bad after all, was it?"
I used to be an airborne Ranger. While prepping our equipment during an airborne operation, a lot of times, guys would be doing radio checks as well as using their radios to communicate with guys in other airplanes and guys that were already on the ground.
We're talking radios with 5 watt transmit power, minimum. If we weren't screwing up instruments then, I have a really hard time believing that low-power interferrence is that big of a problem. instruments have to be pretty on, or we'd have a misdrop and drop in some farmer's field or something, which didn't happen, so I'm pretty sure we didn't screw them up badly, if at all.
I'm pretty sure that the FAA is just paranoid about their restrictions.
I wouldn't worry about playing games on airplanes.
kind of. part of the attraction is meeting new people or people that you only know by their handle. being surrounded by a crap load of fellow geeks in the flesh can be a great opportunity to meet new people.
in more than one large LAN, I ran into people that were a friend of a friend of a friend, that I thought were pretty cool and would likely not have met otherwise.
true, playing games isn't as close as it is in a smaller scale LAN, but in larger LANs, people tend to keep joining the same servers, often with people physically located near them, making it more of a bonus to have more people than a detriment.
if you've got the horsepower and hard drive space for it, run a video capture utility while you're making your impaired tests. nothing jogs your memory like seeing yourself do something stupid.
just be sure that you set it up while you're fresh, so that it's ridiculously easy for you to use it and not fuck it up.
I rather liked the death penalties in Horizons. You couldn't just rack up death points, but if you took a couple deaths a night, it wasn't a big deal.
Here's how they worked for those of you unfamiliar:
Dying gives you a Death Point.
Death Points go away after 8 hours of real time, whether or not you're online.
Eating a variety of foods can reduce the time until the next DP goes away by about 5 minutes, on average. Eating the same foods repetatively has a significantly reduced effect.
1st DP: No ill effects
2nd DP: ~5% penalty for all skills for ~5 minutes
3rd DP: ~10% penalty for all skills for ~10
and so on. I think the percentage capped off at around 30-50%. I'm not sure how long the penalties would stay in effect for if you had a crapload of DPs.
So long as you took care to stay alive, you never really had a big penalty against you, but if you got careless, you'd pay the price, which is basically how I think it ought to be.
I kind of doubt that this will have the impact you think it will. it's an advancement in technology, no doubt. there will be people that will snap it up and use it until something better comes along, but the difference in quality between the 720X480 DVD standard and whatever the hell HD video uses just isn't apparent with the average consumer's TV
there's a certain "who cares" factor that needs to be reached for the market to have a massive turn-over to a new format.
until people can pick up a HD-TV that's 50" or more for about $500, there's not going to be enough of a market base of people that can tell the difference for it to matter to the consumer.
don't get me wrong, in some circles, these things will be like gold. but it won't be the home video market for some time.
or if you're really interested in linux gaming, get on board with a big dev company and quietly work on a linux client and add it into the final product.
if your bosses ever ask about it, tell em marketing asked you to do it.
Horizons and Shadowbane get stuck off on the side because they do things differently from the pack.
it reminds me of IE's domination of the browser world. there's better stuff out there, but people are used to seeing the same thing over and over and don't feel like going another route.
which is really a shame. I've been playing Horizons since it went live and had a hell of a fun time with it. I've got buddies that sing the praises of Shadowbane, but by and large those two games are dying off.
get a robot to look atonishingly human, but noooooot quite, and it'll wind up looking like a fresh corpse; very human, but not lifelike. that's not exactly comforting.
approximating would be fine by me, though. I think I'd actually prefer one with chromed metal, anyways.
actually, I remember sitting in an extra sleasy bar in germany watching a sex olympics on television.
IIRC, there was a man draped in greece's flag nailing the hell out of a chick on an outdoor stage and then a few minutes later, he threw his arms up and cheered, and then the rather large crowd went nuts.
there was a bunch of quick discussion and then numbers from the judges, but not speaking german and never seeing anything like that on television, I had no idea what the hell was going on.
although I hated cliff racers early on, after I had an insane amount of spell casting ability and my player-made spell (vas por flam;) max fire damage, max blast radius) cliff racers became the source of great amusement as I blew away a crap load with a single shot.
Currency trading is wrong and contributes to the decay of the game
Yeah, because no one ever gives someone an advantage they didn't earn in an online RPG.
well, except people who power-level others. and friends that pump up friends with ultra-twink gear. oh, and people that just out-grew a set of equipment and are willing to give it away for free.
about the only thing wrong with item currency exchanges is that it's an unfair advantage over other players that stick solely to the game. but, it's not like they're the only ones out there "cheating". In fact, about the only ones in persistant world games not cheating are those weirdo role-players sitting in the bars and taverns just hanging out and absolute noobs.
I've never used them, but if someone's not willing to put forth the effort, but willing to shell out the extra cash to play, why the hell not?
Slashdot Mirror
There has to be at least 100,000 Slashdotters who played the crap out of that game and got damn good at math as a direct result of associating math with fun.
nah, the RIAA sent out its copyright ninjas to take the old girl out.
whoever owns http://goldenh.dyndns.org/ is gonna be upset with you in the morning. :p
I wouldn't be so sure about that. I haven't seen stats for server size in awhile, but a year or two ago, with all the major MMORPGs combined the PVE server population was around 80% compared to the 20% held by PVP.
more people would rather just play a game with their friends than worry about being ganked. it's pretty much the way I've looked at it since UO opened up PVP.
it seems pretty interesting and I wish I had registered last night, since now the site is slashdotted.
my vote goes for Timothy Steven Clark, who did the music for Tribes 2 and its predecessors, Tribes, Starsiege and Earthsiege, as well as Aces Over Europe and a bunch of others.
Well, being that he's a high-ranking corporate figure in Japan, he's not going to, unless it's in conjunction with him retiring. His response is classic corporate Japanese. He's not going to admit to screwing up, publically. He'll just tell his engineers to fix it as quietly as possible and then when people stop returning units say, "Well, that flaw wasn't that bad after all, was it?"
out of curiousity, what kind of effects were we causing?
We're talking radios with 5 watt transmit power, minimum. If we weren't screwing up instruments then, I have a really hard time believing that low-power interferrence is that big of a problem. instruments have to be pretty on, or we'd have a misdrop and drop in some farmer's field or something, which didn't happen, so I'm pretty sure we didn't screw them up badly, if at all.
I'm pretty sure that the FAA is just paranoid about their restrictions.
I wouldn't worry about playing games on airplanes.
in more than one large LAN, I ran into people that were a friend of a friend of a friend, that I thought were pretty cool and would likely not have met otherwise.
true, playing games isn't as close as it is in a smaller scale LAN, but in larger LANs, people tend to keep joining the same servers, often with people physically located near them, making it more of a bonus to have more people than a detriment.
just be sure that you set it up while you're fresh, so that it's ridiculously easy for you to use it and not fuck it up.
Maybe he means going well, by the perspective of the guys raking in the cash.
Here's how they worked for those of you unfamiliar:
Dying gives you a Death Point.
Death Points go away after 8 hours of real time, whether or not you're online.
Eating a variety of foods can reduce the time until the next DP goes away by about 5 minutes, on average. Eating the same foods repetatively has a significantly reduced effect.
1st DP: No ill effects
2nd DP: ~5% penalty for all skills for ~5 minutes
3rd DP: ~10% penalty for all skills for ~10
and so on. I think the percentage capped off at around 30-50%. I'm not sure how long the penalties would stay in effect for if you had a crapload of DPs.
I personally never had more than 8, though I know some guildies that got the crap kicked out of them during raids against the Avatar of Pain (shameless plug: Click here for a video of my personal war agaisnt the AoP) and got around 30.
So long as you took care to stay alive, you never really had a big penalty against you, but if you got careless, you'd pay the price, which is basically how I think it ought to be.
there's a certain "who cares" factor that needs to be reached for the market to have a massive turn-over to a new format.
until people can pick up a HD-TV that's 50" or more for about $500, there's not going to be enough of a market base of people that can tell the difference for it to matter to the consumer.
don't get me wrong, in some circles, these things will be like gold. but it won't be the home video market for some time.
put that in my pipe and smoke it!
that's a very handy trick to get away from the hard on the eyes color scheme here.
if your bosses ever ask about it, tell em marketing asked you to do it.
it reminds me of IE's domination of the browser world. there's better stuff out there, but people are used to seeing the same thing over and over and don't feel like going another route.
which is really a shame. I've been playing Horizons since it went live and had a hell of a fun time with it. I've got buddies that sing the praises of Shadowbane, but by and large those two games are dying off.
and if you're interested in seeing Horizons through my eyes, check out the video that I put together
approximating would be fine by me, though. I think I'd actually prefer one with chromed metal, anyways.
IIRC, there was a man draped in greece's flag nailing the hell out of a chick on an outdoor stage and then a few minutes later, he threw his arms up and cheered, and then the rather large crowd went nuts.
there was a bunch of quick discussion and then numbers from the judges, but not speaking german and never seeing anything like that on television, I had no idea what the hell was going on.
some troll has likely already changed it, to screw over all the other slashdotters. happens about everytime a user name and password gets posted :-/
although I hated cliff racers early on, after I had an insane amount of spell casting ability and my player-made spell (vas por flam ;) max fire damage, max blast radius) cliff racers became the source of great amusement as I blew away a crap load with a single shot.
there was a huge amount of ammo wasted by me in the first few levels of Unreal 2.
if the army ever sends me to a jungle-filled country...
http://imdb.com/title/tt0076987/
http://imdb.com/title/tt0076759/
Yeah, because no one ever gives someone an advantage they didn't earn in an online RPG.
well, except people who power-level others. and friends that pump up friends with ultra-twink gear. oh, and people that just out-grew a set of equipment and are willing to give it away for free.
about the only thing wrong with item currency exchanges is that it's an unfair advantage over other players that stick solely to the game. but, it's not like they're the only ones out there "cheating". In fact, about the only ones in persistant world games not cheating are those weirdo role-players sitting in the bars and taverns just hanging out and absolute noobs.
I've never used them, but if someone's not willing to put forth the effort, but willing to shell out the extra cash to play, why the hell not?