John Smedley needs to do homework on the game that his company produces before he opens his trap.
For instance, there's several things I saw in his responses that bugged me.
Well, first of all I would have to say that in Asia, the subscription model is definitely, by far, the number one model. Revenue wise, it's about 75 percent of the market. Look at World of Warcraft, Legend of Mir, Legend of MU...all are very high-priced subscriptions, by the way.
I don't know about in Asia, but in the US, the subscription prices for Star Wars Galaxies, Everquest II, and World of Warcraft are all about the same. So, why aren't they listed there, too?
With EverQuest 1, we learned an important lesson. We put it out in Korea and it didn't do very well. Why? Because it wasn't a Korean game. And we didn't make any effort whatsoever, beyond basic translation, to make it adaptable to that market.
Take something simple: for example, mouse control. When you're playing in a PC Bang, there are people that want to play with one hand--holding a cigarette in one hand and controlling the mouse in the other. They want to play the entire game that way; touching the keyboard rarely.
Obviously, you haven't learned it as well as you thought. SWG used to be close to one hand playable, but you removed the "hold right mouse button to run" feature from SWG in the NGE upgrade. That means, you can turn and shoot with one hand, but you can't actually move.
WoW, on the other hand, lets me:
Turn the camera by holding down the left mouse button.
Turn my character by holding down the right mouse button.
Move forward by holding down both mouse buttons.
Click targets and buttons when no mouse buttons are held down.
Click group member portraits to target them.
Click the icons in the lower right to open up different parts of the interface.
With the exception of chat and logging in, there's nothing I can't do using just the mouse. That's something I don't remember being able to do in SWG or EQ2, both of which came out after EQ1. SWG's switching cursor modes made this particularly impossible.
Now, having commented on John's comments above, I also have to say this: Word of mouth is a powerful thing. I know 10 people that myself and my brother convinced to buy World of Warcraft, after we played it in Open Beta. These people closed their various Everquest, Everquest 2, and City of Heroes accounts to play WoW.
SWG, on the other hand, is getting disrecommended by people, because, quite frankly, you ruined the experience for them.
While we're on the subject of ruining SWG, Julio Torres, SWG's Producer at LucasArts, said
After receiving feedback from members of the community, conducting extensive focus tests, and evaluating the combat systems of other games in the genre, we are confident this new fast-action combat truly delivers what players, fans, and gamers have come to expect from a Star Wars experience.
This is pure, unadulterated bullshit. Your changes blind-sided everyone, even your own Player Correspondants, who are your main "focus group," and the people who you "officially" asked for opinions on fixing the game. They're the people you should be listening to. They're the people who, the day that the NGE was unveiled, said "we didn't know about this in advance." (I can't find the exact quote, as the NGE boards are hidden on the SWG Forums.)
In fact, you willfully withheld information from them and the community about the changes that you were about to make to the game, until the very day the changes went up on the test servers, the day after you shipped pre-orders for the latest expansion, even advertising things like this:
I wonder if anyone will ever get around to making a distributed MMORPG. Something where different parts of the game world would be hosted by different operators.
I suppose that would open a whole new slew of issues, though.
Regarding plugin security:s do The idea is that you do not want to let sites trick people into pushing yes. There have been several demonstrated attacks which do this: Having a game which requires quickly and repeatedly clicking a spot on the page, and then popping up the dialogue right underneath it is one. While this can be prevented by disabling the "yes" button for a small amount of time (as Firefox does with these dialogues anyway) I think they thought: "better safe than sorry."
I think that the grandparent is trying to say that the Firefox plugin notification should be done like the popup notification is done, which, incidently, is exactly how XP SP2 IE does them.
I hate playing devil's advocate for Microsoft, but when dealing with a laptop that came out in 2004, an OS released in 2005 (Ubuntu 5.10) should have better hardware support out of the box than an OS released in 2001 (Windows XP), when you don't have the CD that the manufacturer conveniently loaded all the drivers on to prevent this problem.
Surprisingly, Wikipedia talks about the difference between Systems Hungarian and Apps Hungarian... each one being named after the division of Microsoft that primarily used it.
The difference between them boiled down to a misunderstanding by the Systems team as to what the author of Hungarian Notation actually meant.
An issue that sometimes gets skipped is brace style.
Some people prefer the "one true brace" method, where things look like this (pretend the code is indented properly):
if (this < that) { some code; } else { some other code; }
and some people prefer opening braces on the same line, like this:
if (this < that) { some code; } else { some other code; }
Having one style for braces makes it easier to follow.
Rather than that, couldn't we just use an unblockable port...like 80 so that if the isp wanted to block it they would drown in complaints. Port 80 with ssl would work nicely I think, and add in firefox to the p2p so you don't have a program clash problem.
Recap; Can't block port 80 without all your users screaming and if they want to decrypt ssl then every financial institution will scream as well.
Some ISPs, like mine, transparently proxy everything on port 80. Since HTTPS (HTTP protocol over SSL/TLS) doesn't use port 80, I'm willing to bet it will kick and scream when invalid requests are sent to port 80.
I used to need to take Firefox with me when I went to uni, but they seem to have added Firefox to their drive images. Of course, being FF 1.03, it's a bit out of date, but I oddly have Power User privileges on these machines...
I reckon that in any anti-DMCA suit that tried to lean on this one, it would come down to the word "essential", where "rick-ass corporations protecting their proffit-making at the expense of fair use" is considered an "essential" aspect of the product.
I think you mis-read the statement (or maybe were intentionally mis-reading it to take a stab at corporations), but it said that the changes must be essential to utilize the product.
Honestly, if the EU (for example) decided to set up its own DNS servers with new tlds and mandate that ISPs there use their root servers ICANN would almost have to honor it. There is no way they would get away with just cutting off Europe. People would be pissed (because there is money there).
That is, if the EU's constituent nations agree to it.
I'll be the first to admit that I'm not European, but from my understanding, the EU gains its powers from its consituent nations. This is the opposite of the United States, which passes powers down to its constituent states.
...the result was nothing less than the level of excellence that we have come to expect from Blizzard.
Need I remind everyone of the BNetD case?
For those to lazy to read TFA, Blizzard took these guys to court for reverse engineering and creating a Battle.Net client. In the end, it was ruled that the EULA overrides personal rights. Rediculous IMO.
No, Blizzard took them to court for creating a Battle.Net server. The Battle.Net client is built into the games that support it.
I can see why they sued, too. Most of a Blizzard product's life cycle is as a multiplayer game. Battle.Net is a free online service that you could connect to... provided you had a real CD key, as, unlike the game itself, Blizzard has a list of valid CD keys, rather than relying on an algorithm to check them.
BNetD, on the other hand, had no CD key requirement. Surprise! The DMCA says that you can't bypass anti-circumvention technique, of which Battle.Net's CD key check qualifies.
The smallest programming language manual I have ever owned (and I've owned quite a number), has to be "The C Programming Language", often hailed as the One True Reference to the language. How can it be that complex if the manual is less than half the size of most of my other manuals? I think languages (in general) have got more complex since then. The size of the.Net Framework is huge, there's no way that's simpler than the C standard library. Then you've got to think about reflection, inheritance, dozens of things that C just doesn't have.
I don't like.NET, but I do feel I have to ask this...
When's the last time you've seen an application written in C that only used the standard C library?
Because we all know how much Goldeneye sucked on the N64... (Prove that you hate karma by giving me some good mod points)
Yes, it did. It really shows if you've ever played an FPS on a PC prior to playing Goldeneye. Goldeneye feels like you're stuck in molasses.
In addition to Goldeneye being so freaking slow, the mouse is much better at turning and aiming than a gamepad is. There's no noticable limitation on how fast you can turn with a mouse.
I know someone is going to bring Halo up, so I'll beat you to the punch:
The PC version will feature a faithful port of Halo's acclaimed story-based campaign that won't be changed in any substantive way. However, conventional mouse and keyboard controls give PC players an advantage that would make the game too easy if the difficulty settings weren't rebalanced somewhat. Pitchford mentioned that the harder settings might need the most tweaking, since the legendary difficulty should still be terrifically hard. Bungie is working closely with Gearbox and has provided some insight on how to maintain the game's balance.
However, the team found that the simple step of removing the auto-aim assistance from the game (necessary to compensate for the inaccuracy of the joypad) ramped the difficulty up sufficiently, and no other balance changes were required.
It clearly says "Instead of the newest killer rig from Alienware, Falcon Northwest, Voodoo, etc... how about a system for the rest of us with a realistic budget starting from scratch?" on the very first page.
Isn't it interesting that Blizzard scheduled Blizzcon for the same weekend as this event? It's not like Blizzard would try to steal the headlines or anything...
They'd be retarded. First of all, the root domain ".com" doesn't matter that much; anyone who's got a big-name.com has bought rights to it for years and years to come, and if another country tried to distrupt them, those companies would go bonkers on that country.
Secondly, Other countries already have their version of ".com", though many believe that we should follow their lead as well (.co.uk,.co.fr; why not replace.com with.co.us?).
...because, although.com has a large number of US companies in it, it is not solely composed of US companies. The only statistic that I can readily locate is from late 1997, and only shows 71.6% being owned by US companies.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh well, he's Lead Engineer, at any rate... the position that counts.
For instance, there's several things I saw in his responses that bugged me.
I don't know about in Asia, but in the US, the subscription prices for Star Wars Galaxies, Everquest II, and World of Warcraft are all about the same. So, why aren't they listed there, too?
Obviously, you haven't learned it as well as you thought. SWG used to be close to one hand playable, but you removed the "hold right mouse button to run" feature from SWG in the NGE upgrade. That means, you can turn and shoot with one hand, but you can't actually move.
WoW, on the other hand, lets me:
With the exception of chat and logging in, there's nothing I can't do using just the mouse. That's something I don't remember being able to do in SWG or EQ2, both of which came out after EQ1. SWG's switching cursor modes made this particularly impossible.
Now, having commented on John's comments above, I also have to say this: Word of mouth is a powerful thing. I know 10 people that myself and my brother convinced to buy World of Warcraft, after we played it in Open Beta. These people closed their various Everquest, Everquest 2, and City of Heroes accounts to play WoW.
SWG, on the other hand, is getting disrecommended by people, because, quite frankly, you ruined the experience for them.
While we're on the subject of ruining SWG, Julio Torres, SWG's Producer at LucasArts, said
This is pure, unadulterated bullshit. Your changes blind-sided everyone, even your own Player Correspondants, who are your main "focus group," and the people who you "officially" asked for opinions on fixing the game. They're the people you should be listening to. They're the people who, the day that the NGE was unveiled, said "we didn't know about this in advance." (I can't find the exact quote, as the NGE boards are hidden on the SWG Forums.)
In fact, you willfully withheld information from them and the community about the changes that you were about to make to the game, until the very day the changes went up on the test servers, the day after you shipped pre-orders for the latest expansion, even advertising things like this:
How about a Persistant Object Reusability Network?
I ask the same thing about my local paper every time I pick it up.
The difference is, your local newspaper pays places like the Associated Press to reprint articles that AP editors have written.
Isn't "prudish nymph" an oxymoron? :)
I suppose that would open a whole new slew of issues, though.
I think that the grandparent is trying to say that the Firefox plugin notification should be done like the popup notification is done, which, incidently, is exactly how XP SP2 IE does them.
Seeing this made me wonder how the other classes were defined, I was thinking...
//Interesting code here
public class Debian extends Linux {
public Debian() {
super();
this.apt();
}
}
public abstract class Linux implements POSIX, GNU {
public Linux() {
}
}
I hate playing devil's advocate for Microsoft, but when dealing with a laptop that came out in 2004, an OS released in 2005 (Ubuntu 5.10) should have better hardware support out of the box than an OS released in 2001 (Windows XP), when you don't have the CD that the manufacturer conveniently loaded all the drivers on to prevent this problem.
Surprisingly, Wikipedia talks about the difference between Systems Hungarian and Apps Hungarian... each one being named after the division of Microsoft that primarily used it.
The difference between them boiled down to a misunderstanding by the Systems team as to what the author of Hungarian Notation actually meant.
An issue that sometimes gets skipped is brace style. Some people prefer the "one true brace" method, where things look like this (pretend the code is indented properly):
and some people prefer opening braces on the same line, like this:Having one style for braces makes it easier to follow.We'll start paying as soon as you start paying royalties to the US for DNS, FTP, SMTP, POP, IMAP, and, for that matter, TCP/IP packets.
I guess this shows which one has better support for the protocol. ;^)
Recap; Can't block port 80 without all your users screaming and if they want to decrypt ssl then every financial institution will scream as well.
Some ISPs, like mine, transparently proxy everything on port 80. Since HTTPS (HTTP protocol over SSL/TLS) doesn't use port 80, I'm willing to bet it will kick and scream when invalid requests are sent to port 80.
For the record, HTTPS uses port 443.
I don't know, I think one or all of the bazillion articles on Internet Governance lately might be shittier.
I used to need to take Firefox with me when I went to uni, but they seem to have added Firefox to their drive images. Of course, being FF 1.03, it's a bit out of date, but I oddly have Power User privileges on these machines...
If it looks like a duck, and sounds like a duck, then it must be a duck. :P
I think you mis-read the statement (or maybe were intentionally mis-reading it to take a stab at corporations), but it said that the changes must be essential to utilize the product.
That is, if the EU's constituent nations agree to it.
I'll be the first to admit that I'm not European, but from my understanding, the EU gains its powers from its consituent nations. This is the opposite of the United States, which passes powers down to its constituent states.
Need I remind everyone of the BNetD case?
For those to lazy to read TFA, Blizzard took these guys to court for reverse engineering and creating a Battle.Net client. In the end, it was ruled that the EULA overrides personal rights. Rediculous IMO.
No, Blizzard took them to court for creating a Battle.Net server. The Battle.Net client is built into the games that support it.
I can see why they sued, too. Most of a Blizzard product's life cycle is as a multiplayer game. Battle.Net is a free online service that you could connect to... provided you had a real CD key, as, unlike the game itself, Blizzard has a list of valid CD keys, rather than relying on an algorithm to check them.
BNetD, on the other hand, had no CD key requirement. Surprise! The DMCA says that you can't bypass anti-circumvention technique, of which Battle.Net's CD key check qualifies.
Mod parent up. :D
I don't like .NET, but I do feel I have to ask this...
When's the last time you've seen an application written in C that only used the standard C library?
Yes, it did. It really shows if you've ever played an FPS on a PC prior to playing Goldeneye. Goldeneye feels like you're stuck in molasses.
In addition to Goldeneye being so freaking slow, the mouse is much better at turning and aiming than a gamepad is. There's no noticable limitation on how fast you can turn with a mouse.
I know someone is going to bring Halo up, so I'll beat you to the punch:
Source: Gamespot Article Halo PC Update, emphasis mine.
Exactly what did they change?
Source: Eurogamer Halo PC PreviewIt clearly says "Instead of the newest killer rig from Alienware, Falcon Northwest, Voodoo, etc... how about a system for the rest of us with a realistic budget starting from scratch?" on the very first page.
Isn't it interesting that Blizzard scheduled Blizzcon for the same weekend as this event? It's not like Blizzard would try to steal the headlines or anything...
Secondly, Other countries already have their version of ".com", though many believe that we should follow their lead as well (.co.uk, .co.fr; why not replace .com with .co.us?).