Aardman Animations has announced the limited run sale of 1200 kiln fired Wallace and Grommit figurines.
Re:Soo... let me get this straight...
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Spammers Sue Spamee
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Sure, and if all he did was went to the ISP and told them to kick out Atriks and they did then it would be the ISP's problem.
The problem is that he went to the ISP and said that they should kick out Atriks because they are spammers. Suddenly the situation changes.
To go back to your example if you tell your landlord to kick your neighbor out and he does so you're golden. However, if you tell your neighbor to kick your neighbor out because he is running a prostitution ring out of his apartment and he does so then your neighbor can sue you for slander because you have made a (possibly) false statement about him.
Now IANAL but if memory serves in order for a statement to be slander the person telling it has to knowingly be making a false statement and the statement has to cause harm to the person it is pertaining to. If Atriks can prove that his statement was false and that he knew it was false he can be found guilty of slander.
The reason this may proceed into court is for two reasons. The first is that as a civil tort Atriks does not have to prove reasonable doubt. They only need preponderance of evidence, which is a much lower standard. The second reason it may make it into court is because a judge is only suppose to throw out a case if it is completely without merit, so if a judge thinks there is any possibilty that Atriks could be innocent of spamming (by the legal definition) he has to let the case proceed.
Is it a screwed up system? In some ways but it is neccessary. If Atriks does not have the right to take the case to court then you might not have the right to take your case to court if someone points a finger at you and calls you a pimp, costing you your apartment and job.
And just for the record I am not Pro-Atriks. My gut feeling from all of this is that they are abusing the system and trying to shaft the person who pointed them out as spammers. All I am really saying is that this is why they are allowed to act this way. The laws that they use also protects you and it is a very difficult to take away that protection from them without giving it up for yourself.
He bases his certainty that there are only seven such factors on the fact that no new factor has been discovered in some twenty years, despite the flourishing state of research in the field known as biogerontology, the science of aging...
Sorry. As smart as this guy may be this is terribly fallacious logic. Some problems only become apparent as other problems are solved.
True enough. He never really says that online gaming is going to die, though he implies that it is a degenerative spiral that gaming won't break out of, and to a certain extent it is true. It is just that there will be new games which break out of the spiral just as there are new shows from time to time which break out of TV's spiral, and that I don't think he really addresses.
Also, he does seem to take a bit of a 'if I don't like it then it's bad for long term' approach. An example of this is his permadeath arguement. It can easily be argued and even shown through games like EQ that a lack of permadeath allows people to build attachments to their characters and those attachments cause them to play longer. Yet because he doesn't like permadeath he argues that it is bad for long term design.
Reading through I find clips from the manual quoted by different posters.
These Sanrio characters are the only ones not controlable by you. They are the main theme and "God" of one Nation. For example, in Hello Kitty World, Hello Kitty reigns supreme as the overseer of the land. With her guidance, love and happiness is abound and people are able to live in the cute land of Kitty Kingdom in Hello Kitty World. Hello Kitty will be there during your important occasions to bless and help you. Hello Kitty will also arrive to give guidance and new missions to residents of her world.
...
Feeding (instruction)
The Player must remember to feed his or her pet every day after the Angel has grown beyond the infancy stage. If this is neglected, the relationship between the Player and the Angel will drop and the Angel would take the Player's life bit by bit until it goes out of control.
Why am I left with image of slaves without numbers toiling to build enormous pyramids to their kitty supreme overseers before offering dark sacrifices upon the altars at the top?
I for one would like to welcome our kitty overlords.
No, I think this is a very good example of what people are saying when they say that Bartle's definition of 'long term bad' is 'something I don't like'. You argue that permadeath is good because it prevents people from becoming too attached to their character and that it's the designer's fault for allowing players to become attached.
So using that logic the most successful long term game would be one in which you are given a brand new character with every log on so you don't have any chance of becoming attached? There's nothing wrong with attachment to a character and in fact attachment to their character has probably kept many EQ players playing for far longer than they would have if they did not have that attachment.
Which is not to say that permadeath can't be good as well. Permadeath is simply a game mechanic and is only good or bad in the context of the entire game. Assuming anything else is formulaic and is comprable to saying that since a well written death scene in a story can be very good every story should be written so that the main character dies.
Because you called him 'this ranter' I have a feeling you don't really know who Bartle is. He's quite a bit above some ill informed hack who's just pounding on the keys of his keyboard and calling it an article.
That said, I also don't think he's some sort of omniscient God who is never wrong. Bartle is a human, just like all of us, with his own perspectives, prejudices, and agendas. He's as fallible as any and as likely to over simplify and draw false conclusions, which I believe is what is happening in this case.
Bartle bases his assumptions around a four point argument:
Point #1: Virtual worlds live or die by their ability to attract newbies
Point #2: Newbies won't play a virtual world that has a major feature they don't like.
Point #3: Players judge all virtual worlds as a reflection of the one they first got into.
Point #4: Many players will think some poor design choices are good.
All of these points are, at least to some extent, true. However, I can easily paraphrase those points and apply them to the television industry (as well.
Point #1: TV shows live or die by their ability to attract new viewers.
Point #2: New viewers won't watch a TV show that has a major element they don't like.
Point #3: Viewers judge all television shows as a reflection of their favorites.
Point #4: Many viewers will think some poor writing choices are good.
All of these arguments are roughly as valid as the arguments that Bartle makes. I'm a little to lazy at the moment to defend these arguments point by point as Bartle did but I think most of you are smart enough to see the truth to these statements. Following the same logic chain television is doomed to failure because for a new show to succeed it has to have the same features that caused previous shows to fail.
Obviously this is not the case. Television is a very alive and thriving industry and it doesn't really look to anyone like it is going to disappear any time soon. Certainly there is a lot of junk on TV and the industry encourages formulaic pap, but no one can really argue that the industry is in any danger of collapse.
I use this counter example because games, just like television, are a form of entertainment. They aren't an art form. They aren't a neccessity (though some EQ players might disagree if you were to try to unplug them). People play them because they enjoy doing so.
There are, of course, major differences between online games and television. Differences are things such as interactivity with the story, the ability to interact with other people enjoying the same entertainment, and the real time nature of games (you can't videotape the Nagafen raid that you are unable to attend so that you can run it later).
However, I think one of the biggest differences is simply age. Television has been evolving for over fifty years. In the beginning there were a handful of channels with a dozen shows a piece. Most youngsters probably never experienced it but it use to be that even the big networks would sign off at the end of the night and not broadcast anything until the morning because they simply didn't have enough content to show stuff 24 hours a day. Now there are hundreds of channels that run for 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Likewise there's only a handful of games out there right now, but the industry is growing. As it grows it evolves. Some of the evolution is bad. 'Bad genes' get passed from game to game because players demand it. As it begins to cost more and more money to make a game investors become less and less likely to invest in games that lack 'proven' features and that try to do something new and innovative, but these are the same obstacles that face TV programming right now. Shows cost far more to make than they use to. Producers are less likely to give money to shows that don't follow the typical 'formulas' because they would rather invest in something safer.
But new shows do get made. Innovative shows get made. Sure, most of television is a vast wasteland o
As one anonymous coward has already said, there is not a lot of similarity between the two, though on a superficial level they might look the same.
Endorphin works by taking either a clip, pose, or preprogrammed behavior and making a virtual actor attempt to complete that action. In attempting to do so it generates a new animation sequence.
One example that is shown is a virtual actor running along (getting most of its animation from a looped running animation, I believe). A second virtual actor comes up from behind and at a certain frame is instructed to leap and tackle the first actor. The sequennce of animation from that point (actor 2's leap and grab of actor 1, how the two actors fall, etc.) is then generated almost completely by Endorphin. If actor 2 is too far away when he is told to tackle he will completely miss actor 1 and fall on his virtual face. If he is a bit closer he will grab actor 1 about the lower legs to bring him down, if he is closer he will grab him about the waist. If he strikes from a different angle the animations will likewise be changed.
In short Endorphin creates whole new animations from the events it is given.
Massive on the other hand is actually quite a different beast. Massive will take a group of virtual actors and decide that at this moment they will attack or dodge or parry or run away or any one of a number of choices. It will then make each of those actors play the appropriate clips. As a quick example Orc A and Orc B are close together and in combat. Massive decides through its mechanisms that Orc A will attack Orc B with a forehand swing and will hit and kill Orc B. Massive then tells Orc A to begin playing its forehand attack animation and Orc B to play its failed dodge animation. At a certain part Orc A plays the animation for a forehand hit and Orc B will begin to play its killed by forehand attack animation.
Massive never really generates any new animations but instead will use the clips that it has already been given.
So essentially Endorphin will make a new clip but has to be told what the event is. Massive on the other hand will decide what the event is but uses pregenerated clips. Hope that helps.
Yes, I recognize that the bulk charge would be considerably lower than the individual charge of $.20. However, the credit card companies will realize the same thing and will adjust their rates. the 1.59% rate is based around the fact that the credit card company knows it will be getting an additional $.20. In fact the same company I got the 1.59% rate from does have other programs for internet retailers where they do not have the individual charge per card and the rates go up to closer to 2.5%.
As for the notion that Sony can get the credit card companies to give them a rate that is less than half the rate you can get I will have to remain skeptical on that without better information. The reason for this is because I to have been a store owner and I know that we paid roughly 50% of the list price to our distributors for the items taht we sold (books). I also know that they paid roughly 50% of what they charged us to the publishers. In general the markup for any item is roughly 100%, and yes, this is a gross generalization and I am sure there are specific incidents where it is not the case but it is extensive enough for my use. There are always cases of luxury goods and new services where the rate will be higher until new competition causes the market to adjust but credit cards are so prevalent in society that I doubt they fall into either of those camps.
If we assume that the credit card companies have a 150% markup on the 2.5% that they charge you, which is a very good rate, we find that the credit card companies need about 1% of the finance charges just for survival. Giving Sony half your rate means that the profit margin for the credit card company has just dropped from 150% to 25%, so rather than only half the applicable profits the credit card companies are making one sixth the applicable profits.
Will a credit card company slash its profits this badly for a company with around half a million customers? Probably not, because those really aren't big numbers for them. While most companies do not post the number of customers they have we can make some quick Fermi calculations based on quarterly earnings.
Walmart, which I admit is a big company, reported sales of about $75 billion in the first quarter of 2004. If we assume that the average sale is $50 then we end up with a total of nearly half a billion sales per month, 3 orders of magnitude higher than SOE. Now in a case like that you might get the credit card companies willing to cut their profits that severely but I doubt they would regard a company like SOE as big enough to do something like that.
Meridian 59 actually proceeded Ultima Online and before that you had Neverwinter Nights on America Online, and then of course before all of that you had MUDs.
Not that Ultima Online isn't a great game and brought the online community up to a new level, but it was about as ground breaking as EQ.
The rates given there vary between a little over 5.5% and 7%, so it would seem there is at least some basis for Patrovsky and Mulligan's numbers. However I will also go on to say that researching other sites shows those numbers to be high.
Doing a bit more research I was able to find a rate as low as 1.59% plus $.20 which would render a charge of 2.88% by the time the charge is actually completed. Naturally I agree that SOE with its corporate muscle could push the rate down a bit more but I find it very hard to believe they would be able to get the actual rate down to less than 1%
So from my standpoint I think it is probably no more fair to say that Mulligan and Patrovsky are lying in their statement of 5% then it is to say that you are lying in your statement of less than 1%. Both parties have reasons for believing their numbers to be good, both of them are probably a bit off the mark, and in fact probably by close to the same multiple (around 2.5). I have noticed other numbers they have thrown out that I consider somewhat suspect but they are not so far off as to render their entire estimates invalid. This is why I have encouraged you to post your own numbers. They seem to provide a good Fermi approximation that equates to around a cost of $9 per customer per month to keep the game running, 3 times your estimate.
My suspicion is that the truth lies somewhere in between the two numbers, most likely in the range of $6-7 a month per customer. I believe that Mulligan and Patrovsky are using large numbers for credit card rates, salaries, rent, and equipment, shortening the lifespan of the equipment, and otherwise making their estimates high in a sort of 'worst case' scenario. You on the other hand are probably glossing over minor charges such as bandwidth and health care benefits that add up faster than you think and are coming up with a low estimate in a sort of 'best case' scenario.
Actually, since the company pays a base 4-5% to the credit card company just to accept the charge (all retailers pay that much in order to accept a charge) I don't have that much difficulty believing there is another 5-6% that comes from the other incidentals that I mentioned. If your average player plays for 20 months that is another 5% right there (they only pay for 19 months since the first month is free).
I understand that you might feel that they are biased (though there is no reason for them to do so) and I have admitted their numbers may be flawed, but again I am giving you their numbers, which seem accurate even against your statement, and you have not given any in return.
Huh. Interesting, since Mulligan and Patrovsky estimate that most companies would lose half of your estimate simply on the credit card transfaction fees, credit card charge failures, expired cards, fraud, and free month. (Their estimate is 10% of what is being charged never reaches the company.)
You can look this up on pages 26-27 of Developing Online Games.
Then of course you have bandwith charges, utility bills, server amortorization, rent, and of course the salaries that are paid to customer service and the technical support staff.
This doesn't neccessarily mean they are right of course. Even experts make errors, however given that they are pretty much showing their math and basing it off of practical experience unless you wish to publish your numbers I would have to suspect theirs are more accurate.
Good grief. Everyone is trying to argue how it's possible to make a water cooled system that cools the CPU down to lower than room temperature and they are missing the obvious.
An air/fan solution isn't going to cool the CPU down to room temperature. Just for starters it is physically impossible since the fan and radiator are both within the case. This means that the best the system can do is cool the CPU to the temperature within the case, something that is probably 5-10 degrees Farenheit above room temperature depending upon the case due to all the other things in there generating heat. Secondly, you won't even get the CPU down to that temperature unless you have a windmachine for a fan and a huge heatsink. There are efficency issues involved. For reference information my CPU, which is air cooled, is running at around 108 degrees. Needless to say that is not room temperature.
A water cooled system on the other hand can actually carry the heat outside the case and transfer that heat energy into the air with a much larger radiating surface since the radiator no longer has to fit into the case.
Does this mean you can't have a poorly designed water cooling system that doesn't do as well (or does even worse) than an air cooled system? Of course not. I could easily design a bad system that would do a terrible job cooling the chip if I keep all the liquid inside the case and insulate the liquid at all points but the heatsink. The liquid will cool the CPU at first but will eventually warm until it is preventing the venting of heat from the CPU.
However the notion that a water cooled system is worthless because it can't lower the temperature of the CPU any lower than room temperature is clearly fallacious.
Dr Wilkins drew up plans for what he called a flying chariot powered by clockwork and springs, a set of flapping wings coated with feathers and a few gunpowder boosters to help send it on its way...
...and though his design never did lead to manned space flight the principles that he envisioned took root in the scientific community of the day leading to the eventual, perhaps even inevitable, creation of the Wile E. Coyote/Road Runner cartoon.
I think he's startled by the claims because Hitler was elected chancellor of Germany in 1933 and commited suicide in 1945. Assuming he immediately started this campaign of training children to torture animals then there might have been a few years at the very end where some of these children were becoming old enough to be SS officers, but in all likelihood they timeline really doesn't support this claim.
If he were to say that there were SS officers who tortured animals as children I don't think people would be surprised, but to claim that there was a systematic program to train SS officers through this method is a lot harder to believe without some for of corroborative evidence.
By no means am I trying to say that Nazi atrocities did not occur. I am simply saying that the evidence seems to be against this particular fact
Actually, this is a great example of a translation error. The entrance is called either 'the needle' or 'the eye of the needle', I have forgotten which.
The translation error is created by the miniscule error of altering 'pass through the eye of the needle' to 'pass through the eye of a needle'. It is the alteration of a seemingly insignificant (the the translator who had no idea there was a gate called 'the needle') word that radically changes the meaning of what was written.
Thank you both Tmortn and Zhirem for your comments (as well as *Weasel without whom this discussion never would have started)
I don't think the sports game idea would really work well with an MMO. Sports players tend to be different from MMO players, favoring consoles over PCs and the real world (watching sporting events for instance) over the fictional (watching movies).
This is of course a huge generalization and there is cross over with sports players who like movies and suck. There is even a fair amount of overlap with players who do both, but I think that trying to build an MMO using design techniques gleaned from sports games is a very risky proposition.
MMOs, at least to my perception, are about storytelling at the core and in any story a character needs some form of progression. In most cases this is usually towards a clearly defined objective (get the girl, avenge the father) but even in cases where the story is 'without goal' such as Kurosawa's Ikiru there is growth of the character. In fact in such stories where there is no simply goal the growth of the character is paramount and so is usually much better explored.
Sporting games on the other hand are based around the idea of competition. No one watching a football game really expects the players to emerge as changed individuals and better human beings for their experiences in the game.
Again, this isn't to say there aren't elements of crossover between the two. Certainly many stories are told with the background of competition (such as Rocky) and certainly there are many people in MMOs who turn character development into a competition, seeing who can level faster, however despite the points that the two may share in common the have very separate roots, at least to my perceptions.
With an MMO some form of character advancement is almost guaranteed. Even if skills never were to advance you would have an inevitable increase in ability as better items are looted from fallen enemies. While it is possible to make an MMO that has no loot, or nearly no loot (such as City of Heroes) I think that people would quickly loose any feeling of accomplishment if they started with the best weapon they would ever have an they never got a better one. Additionally without an increase in skills or the promise of loot there would be little motivation for to fight a group of orcs. Even City of Heroes, which emphasizes skill gains over loot, has forms of loot, both in terms of tradable items as well as coinage, and it is a genre in which the looting of a fallen enemy does not typically occur (I've never seen Batman decide to loot some criminal that he smacked down).
In sports games of course this is not an issue. Equipment is regulated and a rookie player possesses the exact same quality of equipment as the most elite veteran. Additional the looting of people such as a sacked quarterback is strongly discouraged.
On to player created content:
I am an old dyed in the wool RPGer. I started with D&D nearly 25 years ago and some of the best games I have ever played in were player motivated games. Those were the games in which characters had goals and pursued them (I want to build a castle and become a baron, for instance). Rather than just being presented with the dungeon of the week and moving through it the players would typically decide what it was that they wanted to do and would inform the GM of their choices. The GM would then prepare the appropriate stories based on those choices (the King isn't crazy about your idea of establishing yourself as a baron and sends down a contingent of 100 knights to kick your butt) and then the players would choose new courses of action, such as raising troops or sending an envoy to the King and offer him a third of the taxes raised for the next 20 years as well as a dozen heads of cattle a year.
I got so heavily into this mode of play that when I joined a new group I was shocked to remember that not everyone used this style of play. In fact it was a minority of people w
Economic models are like any other theoretical model and are right until someone can show where they are wrong.:)
I tried to point out that I'm not saying they are right and no one else can be, but they do have good information and a lot of what they have (such as their costs to develop a game) are based on real world projects. While I can respect your position dealling with turnkey network software and I can see how you would think that gives you a good track on the costs to build an MMO, their estimates are actually based on real MMOs, past and in developement, so it may include things you are overlooking (such as the fact that you have a substantial art and design team that you do not have with network software design).
If you are interested in getting the full context the book is Developing Online Games: An Insider's Guide. It is written by Jessica Mulligan and Bridgette Patrovsky and has an ISBN of 1-5927-3000-0. It's published by New Riders and can be picked up from Amazon for around $50 I think.
And in all seriousness, if you have disputing sources I would like to know. I'm not comfortable with only a single source of information since the authors are human and prone to error just like any of us.
I think overall you and I probably agree more than we disagree (which is what makes this dialogue interesting to me). Your basic precept, at least in my opinion, is that leveling was bad and an unneeded and an unnecessary arbitrary constraint and that 'pure content' should replace it.
When I said a pure content game couldn't succeed you were right, I should have chosen my phrasing more carefully. In my opinion a pure content game can't succeed, at least not on the level of EQ. Even CoH isn't pure content. You get missions to go out and beat up 15 thugs. When you move through a warehouse there is a certain degree of staggering out the enemies to create a 'grind' before you get to the boss. The thin is that CoH handles this a lot better than EQ. There is little 'random' (keep killing orcs until I finally get the sword I want) or 'unmotivated' (just charging around beating on gnolls until I level) grinding that occurs.
Because pure content games naturally constrict your progression I think they will appeal to fewer people. They are also far harder to make, in my opinion. This doesn't mean they can't succeed, simply that they will become the 'art house movies' of the MMO world. People will talk about them but they will have a smaller audience and generate lower revenues.
No, I do not assume that EQ got everything right and that anyone not following it is doomed to obscurity. In fact I feel there are many things wrong. Over focusing on leveling is one. I think there should be more social support. I'm just saying that as a general rule I don't think pure content is a way to go. Content rich? Sure, but there needs to be something extra to help draw out the life of that content.
If you look Everquest has around 420,000 subscribers. DAOC has about 250,000.
I will admit that I was wrong in two things; first it does not have roughly twice the subscribers. It has about 1.7x and while I could claim rounding I'm a big enough man to admit the gap is significant enough. Secondly, I forgot that DAOC is the runner up for American MMOs in terms of subscriptions. That belongs to Starwars Galaxies, another SOE game.
So to make my statement correct, EQ has about 170% of the subscriptions of its closest American competitor. Does that work better for you?
The fact is that the intent of BlueCup's statement is correct. You can twist it about and suggest he's wrong since America has 'seen' Lineage and FF XI but you should know his intent was to say that it's the largest in America. Trying to twist words because you're being proven wrong is no way to try to win an argument.
Or you could just keep contradicting people. Whatever floats your boat, as you say.
Really? Watch nearly any network television series. Assuming they even have an overall story arc that continues through the season you will still have a variety of 'filler' shows that have nothing to do with advancement of the character or promotion of the storyline.
Are you honestly suggesting that the non-big-conspiracy-plot episodes of X-Files are equivalent to camping a static spawn in Everquest?
A tangential episode may not progress the overall story arc - but it has a story and progression of its own. Mulder isn't just spawn camping El Chupacabra until the Smoking Man is ready to kick off the next step of a sinister plot.
He's presented with a smaller, perhaps self-contained or mini-arc mystery that he has to work through. People watch week-to-week. If a series actually employed 'filler' on par with EQ, it'd fail in a heartbeat. If 'filler' episodes of ER weren't engaging, no-one would care who is HIV positive, or has a brain tumor.
Yes, I am suggesting they are equivalent, at least in the aspect that the filler episode is something done to slow down your consumption of the true 'content' of the series.
Obviously they need to be well done and obviously you feel they aren't in EQ. I am not debating that. All I am debating is your idea that there should be no roadblocks to the consumption of content.
The lack of a central story arc is also fine -- provided that each episode is entertaining and the dramatic context is existent.
Agreed, just as I feel that non-storyline related material that consumes time can be good for a game like EQ. It is under the proviso that it's done well.
Online games likewise need to keep people playing in order to survive
Absolutely true. The incorrect assumption there, is that they need to keep the same people playing without any further development cost - and that if a hardcore subset 'finishes' before the next content expansion is available, everyone will quit.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'the same people'. If you sell 200,000 units then you aren't going to somehow get more people playing the game than that, so yes, you have to figure on your income coming from that base of people.
As far as assuming everyone will quit because some people finish it first that is not my assumption at all. If you build a game with 100 hours of content (which is a lot)then even your most casual gamers will have consumed it all within 5 months. Since the first month is free you will only have 4 months of billable time and this only for very casual players. Most of your players will exit long before then. Even the casual players need something to slow down their consumption of content for the game to survive.
I also don't buy into your pessimistic view of the profit margins of a persistent world game.
My view isn't based on mere pessimism. It is supported by Developing Online Games by Mulligan and Patrovsky. While I will admit that even experts are not always correct unless you can provide something more than your opinion to disprove their statements then it is more in truth to say that it is your view that is overly optimistic. (This isn't a flame, just saying that they have done research and are respected in their field. Unless you can provide your own evidence to refute them I don't see how your view of MMO profit margins can be anything other than optimism)
they need methods to make players continue to remain in the game
The content should do that. Providing them a string of slightly larger foozles to whack with slightly larger sticks unnecessarily limits your audience. It's more counterproductive than offering an achievable 'end'.
Unfortunately that content has to be created. That takes more money, pushing the end price of the game up. As I pointed out above if you have 100 hours of content and you rely on
(Bah. Accidentally posted this in reply to my original post instead of in reply to this post. Just ignore the first one and pay no attention to the man behind the curtain)
I think it's optimistic to call the storyline of Everquest 'non-linear'. I think 'non-existent' would be more fair.
Yeah, but it's also inflammatory and does nothing to progress a dialogue. Certainly you can complain about the amount of content but my point wasn't that EQ was content rich. It was that your statements that a game could be pure content without leveling (at least in some form) is false. EQ is non-linear. Overall you are not forced to go from Zone A to Zone B to Zone C. There may be some instances such as when you enter the zone containing a dungeon then move into the dungeon, but the overall design is that characters can go whichever direction they please.
I think equating the position within a storyline or set of levels of SMB, to a set of numbers associated with an EQ character is a mistake.
Certainly the two are not identical, but I think they are analogous. You can't take on the big Turtle Boss until you first defeat the big Goomba Boss. One could even make a claim that the areas that you have to transverse where there is either no puzzle to solve or else the puzzles are of a type the player has solved previously constitute 'grinding' and are simply there to pad out the game. I would not make such an argument however and would point out that just like any story has to have peaks and valleys a game has to have easier areas to help bring you back down a bit before the next big thing.
It is precisely EQ's lack of context given to its gameplay that is the problem. It isn't 'levelling' per se, it's that true progression in EQ requires takes place outside of any sort of story context.
In a single player RPG, character progression and story progression are fairly neck-and-neck. You level as a matter of course while experiencing the world. You dont experience some story, then go camp gnolls until you're ready for the next bit.
Actually I have played plenty of stand alone games where you are sometimes forced to go out and beat up on the random monsters just to level up a bit so you can undertake the next challenge. It is usually not to the degree that it's done in EQ however, so I think it is more an issue of balance than in having it occur at all.
In treadmill games, the context to progression is nonexistant, or too far behind character progression. Everquest requires repetition outside of the progressive context of the story, in order to unlock the next chapter.
The treadmill accusation isn't an indictment of levelling overall - because one could easily run into the same problems in a skill-based system. But rather a charge against levelling for the sake of levelling -- power gain for the sake of power gain.
Again, I think we are really somewhat on the same page here. It equates to balance. You would not be against the fact that leveling occurs or is even occasionally required. Your objection is that with weak storylines the main goal is to level and the storyline is only an afterthought.
The idea that a tangible reward at the end of play is required is another point of departure between us. My contention is that if the journey is good, the total enjoyment is enough of a reward. A player doesn't have to be given a pile of fake money or a bigger sword to validate the adventure of killing the dragon. He needs something to ensure that he's capable of meeting the next challenge - but the desire should be to meet the new challenge - not to get a widget that makes the current challenge easier.
Yes, if the journey is good then it is the reward in and of itself. However, this is notoriously tricky to do and rarely draws the same audience as a more traditional 'winning the prize' storyline. Look at the movies and see ho
Slashdot Mirror
Aardman Animations has announced the limited run sale of 1200 kiln fired Wallace and Grommit figurines.
The problem is that he went to the ISP and said that they should kick out Atriks because they are spammers. Suddenly the situation changes.
To go back to your example if you tell your landlord to kick your neighbor out and he does so you're golden. However, if you tell your neighbor to kick your neighbor out because he is running a prostitution ring out of his apartment and he does so then your neighbor can sue you for slander because you have made a (possibly) false statement about him.
Now IANAL but if memory serves in order for a statement to be slander the person telling it has to knowingly be making a false statement and the statement has to cause harm to the person it is pertaining to. If Atriks can prove that his statement was false and that he knew it was false he can be found guilty of slander.
The reason this may proceed into court is for two reasons. The first is that as a civil tort Atriks does not have to prove reasonable doubt. They only need preponderance of evidence, which is a much lower standard. The second reason it may make it into court is because a judge is only suppose to throw out a case if it is completely without merit, so if a judge thinks there is any possibilty that Atriks could be innocent of spamming (by the legal definition) he has to let the case proceed.
Is it a screwed up system? In some ways but it is neccessary. If Atriks does not have the right to take the case to court then you might not have the right to take your case to court if someone points a finger at you and calls you a pimp, costing you your apartment and job.
And just for the record I am not Pro-Atriks. My gut feeling from all of this is that they are abusing the system and trying to shaft the person who pointed them out as spammers. All I am really saying is that this is why they are allowed to act this way. The laws that they use also protects you and it is a very difficult to take away that protection from them without giving it up for yourself.
Sorry. As smart as this guy may be this is terribly fallacious logic. Some problems only become apparent as other problems are solved.
Also, he does seem to take a bit of a 'if I don't like it then it's bad for long term' approach. An example of this is his permadeath arguement. It can easily be argued and even shown through games like EQ that a lack of permadeath allows people to build attachments to their characters and those attachments cause them to play longer. Yet because he doesn't like permadeath he argues that it is bad for long term design.
Why am I left with image of slaves without numbers toiling to build enormous pyramids to their kitty supreme overseers before offering dark sacrifices upon the altars at the top?
I for one would like to welcome our kitty overlords.
So using that logic the most successful long term game would be one in which you are given a brand new character with every log on so you don't have any chance of becoming attached? There's nothing wrong with attachment to a character and in fact attachment to their character has probably kept many EQ players playing for far longer than they would have if they did not have that attachment.
Which is not to say that permadeath can't be good as well. Permadeath is simply a game mechanic and is only good or bad in the context of the entire game. Assuming anything else is formulaic and is comprable to saying that since a well written death scene in a story can be very good every story should be written so that the main character dies.
That said, I also don't think he's some sort of omniscient God who is never wrong. Bartle is a human, just like all of us, with his own perspectives, prejudices, and agendas. He's as fallible as any and as likely to over simplify and draw false conclusions, which I believe is what is happening in this case.
Bartle bases his assumptions around a four point argument:
Point #1: Virtual worlds live or die by their ability to attract newbies
Point #2: Newbies won't play a virtual world that has a major feature they don't like.
Point #3: Players judge all virtual worlds as a reflection of the one they first got into.
Point #4: Many players will think some poor design choices are good.
All of these points are, at least to some extent, true. However, I can easily paraphrase those points and apply them to the television industry (as well.
Point #1: TV shows live or die by their ability to attract new viewers.
Point #2: New viewers won't watch a TV show that has a major element they don't like.
Point #3: Viewers judge all television shows as a reflection of their favorites.
Point #4: Many viewers will think some poor writing choices are good.
All of these arguments are roughly as valid as the arguments that Bartle makes. I'm a little to lazy at the moment to defend these arguments point by point as Bartle did but I think most of you are smart enough to see the truth to these statements. Following the same logic chain television is doomed to failure because for a new show to succeed it has to have the same features that caused previous shows to fail.
Obviously this is not the case. Television is a very alive and thriving industry and it doesn't really look to anyone like it is going to disappear any time soon. Certainly there is a lot of junk on TV and the industry encourages formulaic pap, but no one can really argue that the industry is in any danger of collapse.
I use this counter example because games, just like television, are a form of entertainment. They aren't an art form. They aren't a neccessity (though some EQ players might disagree if you were to try to unplug them). People play them because they enjoy doing so.
There are, of course, major differences between online games and television. Differences are things such as interactivity with the story, the ability to interact with other people enjoying the same entertainment, and the real time nature of games (you can't videotape the Nagafen raid that you are unable to attend so that you can run it later).
However, I think one of the biggest differences is simply age. Television has been evolving for over fifty years. In the beginning there were a handful of channels with a dozen shows a piece. Most youngsters probably never experienced it but it use to be that even the big networks would sign off at the end of the night and not broadcast anything until the morning because they simply didn't have enough content to show stuff 24 hours a day. Now there are hundreds of channels that run for 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Likewise there's only a handful of games out there right now, but the industry is growing. As it grows it evolves. Some of the evolution is bad. 'Bad genes' get passed from game to game because players demand it. As it begins to cost more and more money to make a game investors become less and less likely to invest in games that lack 'proven' features and that try to do something new and innovative, but these are the same obstacles that face TV programming right now. Shows cost far more to make than they use to. Producers are less likely to give money to shows that don't follow the typical 'formulas' because they would rather invest in something safer.
But new shows do get made. Innovative shows get made. Sure, most of television is a vast wasteland o
Because the think it will be cool to abbreviate megabytes as MiBs? :)
Endorphin works by taking either a clip, pose, or preprogrammed behavior and making a virtual actor attempt to complete that action. In attempting to do so it generates a new animation sequence.
One example that is shown is a virtual actor running along (getting most of its animation from a looped running animation, I believe). A second virtual actor comes up from behind and at a certain frame is instructed to leap and tackle the first actor. The sequennce of animation from that point (actor 2's leap and grab of actor 1, how the two actors fall, etc.) is then generated almost completely by Endorphin. If actor 2 is too far away when he is told to tackle he will completely miss actor 1 and fall on his virtual face. If he is a bit closer he will grab actor 1 about the lower legs to bring him down, if he is closer he will grab him about the waist. If he strikes from a different angle the animations will likewise be changed.
In short Endorphin creates whole new animations from the events it is given.
Massive on the other hand is actually quite a different beast. Massive will take a group of virtual actors and decide that at this moment they will attack or dodge or parry or run away or any one of a number of choices. It will then make each of those actors play the appropriate clips. As a quick example Orc A and Orc B are close together and in combat. Massive decides through its mechanisms that Orc A will attack Orc B with a forehand swing and will hit and kill Orc B. Massive then tells Orc A to begin playing its forehand attack animation and Orc B to play its failed dodge animation. At a certain part Orc A plays the animation for a forehand hit and Orc B will begin to play its killed by forehand attack animation.
Massive never really generates any new animations but instead will use the clips that it has already been given.
So essentially Endorphin will make a new clip but has to be told what the event is. Massive on the other hand will decide what the event is but uses pregenerated clips. Hope that helps.
As for the notion that Sony can get the credit card companies to give them a rate that is less than half the rate you can get I will have to remain skeptical on that without better information. The reason for this is because I to have been a store owner and I know that we paid roughly 50% of the list price to our distributors for the items taht we sold (books). I also know that they paid roughly 50% of what they charged us to the publishers. In general the markup for any item is roughly 100%, and yes, this is a gross generalization and I am sure there are specific incidents where it is not the case but it is extensive enough for my use. There are always cases of luxury goods and new services where the rate will be higher until new competition causes the market to adjust but credit cards are so prevalent in society that I doubt they fall into either of those camps.
If we assume that the credit card companies have a 150% markup on the 2.5% that they charge you, which is a very good rate, we find that the credit card companies need about 1% of the finance charges just for survival. Giving Sony half your rate means that the profit margin for the credit card company has just dropped from 150% to 25%, so rather than only half the applicable profits the credit card companies are making one sixth the applicable profits.
Will a credit card company slash its profits this badly for a company with around half a million customers? Probably not, because those really aren't big numbers for them. While most companies do not post the number of customers they have we can make some quick Fermi calculations based on quarterly earnings.
Walmart, which I admit is a big company, reported sales of about $75 billion in the first quarter of 2004. If we assume that the average sale is $50 then we end up with a total of nearly half a billion sales per month, 3 orders of magnitude higher than SOE. Now in a case like that you might get the credit card companies willing to cut their profits that severely but I doubt they would regard a company like SOE as big enough to do something like that.
Not that Ultima Online isn't a great game and brought the online community up to a new level, but it was about as ground breaking as EQ.
CCAvenue
The rates given there vary between a little over 5.5% and 7%, so it would seem there is at least some basis for Patrovsky and Mulligan's numbers. However I will also go on to say that researching other sites shows those numbers to be high.
Doing a bit more research I was able to find a rate as low as 1.59% plus $.20 which would render a charge of 2.88% by the time the charge is actually completed. Naturally I agree that SOE with its corporate muscle could push the rate down a bit more but I find it very hard to believe they would be able to get the actual rate down to less than 1%
So from my standpoint I think it is probably no more fair to say that Mulligan and Patrovsky are lying in their statement of 5% then it is to say that you are lying in your statement of less than 1%. Both parties have reasons for believing their numbers to be good, both of them are probably a bit off the mark, and in fact probably by close to the same multiple (around 2.5). I have noticed other numbers they have thrown out that I consider somewhat suspect but they are not so far off as to render their entire estimates invalid. This is why I have encouraged you to post your own numbers. They seem to provide a good Fermi approximation that equates to around a cost of $9 per customer per month to keep the game running, 3 times your estimate.
My suspicion is that the truth lies somewhere in between the two numbers, most likely in the range of $6-7 a month per customer. I believe that Mulligan and Patrovsky are using large numbers for credit card rates, salaries, rent, and equipment, shortening the lifespan of the equipment, and otherwise making their estimates high in a sort of 'worst case' scenario. You on the other hand are probably glossing over minor charges such as bandwidth and health care benefits that add up faster than you think and are coming up with a low estimate in a sort of 'best case' scenario.
I understand that you might feel that they are biased (though there is no reason for them to do so) and I have admitted their numbers may be flawed, but again I am giving you their numbers, which seem accurate even against your statement, and you have not given any in return.
You can look this up on pages 26-27 of Developing Online Games.
Then of course you have bandwith charges, utility bills, server amortorization, rent, and of course the salaries that are paid to customer service and the technical support staff.
This doesn't neccessarily mean they are right of course. Even experts make errors, however given that they are pretty much showing their math and basing it off of practical experience unless you wish to publish your numbers I would have to suspect theirs are more accurate.
A water cooled system on the other hand can actually carry the heat outside the case and transfer that heat energy into the air with a much larger radiating surface since the radiator no longer has to fit into the case.
Does this mean you can't have a poorly designed water cooling system that doesn't do as well (or does even worse) than an air cooled system? Of course not. I could easily design a bad system that would do a terrible job cooling the chip if I keep all the liquid inside the case and insulate the liquid at all points but the heatsink. The liquid will cool the CPU at first but will eventually warm until it is preventing the venting of heat from the CPU.
However the notion that a water cooled system is worthless because it can't lower the temperature of the CPU any lower than room temperature is clearly fallacious.
These are the same people who forgot to convert between metric and 'standard'.
I think he's startled by the claims because Hitler was elected chancellor of Germany in 1933 and commited suicide in 1945. Assuming he immediately started this campaign of training children to torture animals then there might have been a few years at the very end where some of these children were becoming old enough to be SS officers, but in all likelihood they timeline really doesn't support this claim. If he were to say that there were SS officers who tortured animals as children I don't think people would be surprised, but to claim that there was a systematic program to train SS officers through this method is a lot harder to believe without some for of corroborative evidence. By no means am I trying to say that Nazi atrocities did not occur. I am simply saying that the evidence seems to be against this particular fact
The translation error is created by the miniscule error of altering 'pass through the eye of the needle' to 'pass through the eye of a needle'. It is the alteration of a seemingly insignificant (the the translator who had no idea there was a gate called 'the needle') word that radically changes the meaning of what was written.
I don't think the sports game idea would really work well with an MMO. Sports players tend to be different from MMO players, favoring consoles over PCs and the real world (watching sporting events for instance) over the fictional (watching movies).
This is of course a huge generalization and there is cross over with sports players who like movies and suck. There is even a fair amount of overlap with players who do both, but I think that trying to build an MMO using design techniques gleaned from sports games is a very risky proposition.
MMOs, at least to my perception, are about storytelling at the core and in any story a character needs some form of progression. In most cases this is usually towards a clearly defined objective (get the girl, avenge the father) but even in cases where the story is 'without goal' such as Kurosawa's Ikiru there is growth of the character. In fact in such stories where there is no simply goal the growth of the character is paramount and so is usually much better explored.
Sporting games on the other hand are based around the idea of competition. No one watching a football game really expects the players to emerge as changed individuals and better human beings for their experiences in the game.
Again, this isn't to say there aren't elements of crossover between the two. Certainly many stories are told with the background of competition (such as Rocky) and certainly there are many people in MMOs who turn character development into a competition, seeing who can level faster, however despite the points that the two may share in common the have very separate roots, at least to my perceptions.
With an MMO some form of character advancement is almost guaranteed. Even if skills never were to advance you would have an inevitable increase in ability as better items are looted from fallen enemies. While it is possible to make an MMO that has no loot, or nearly no loot (such as City of Heroes) I think that people would quickly loose any feeling of accomplishment if they started with the best weapon they would ever have an they never got a better one. Additionally without an increase in skills or the promise of loot there would be little motivation for to fight a group of orcs. Even City of Heroes, which emphasizes skill gains over loot, has forms of loot, both in terms of tradable items as well as coinage, and it is a genre in which the looting of a fallen enemy does not typically occur (I've never seen Batman decide to loot some criminal that he smacked down).
In sports games of course this is not an issue. Equipment is regulated and a rookie player possesses the exact same quality of equipment as the most elite veteran. Additional the looting of people such as a sacked quarterback is strongly discouraged.
On to player created content:
I am an old dyed in the wool RPGer. I started with D&D nearly 25 years ago and some of the best games I have ever played in were player motivated games. Those were the games in which characters had goals and pursued them (I want to build a castle and become a baron, for instance). Rather than just being presented with the dungeon of the week and moving through it the players would typically decide what it was that they wanted to do and would inform the GM of their choices. The GM would then prepare the appropriate stories based on those choices (the King isn't crazy about your idea of establishing yourself as a baron and sends down a contingent of 100 knights to kick your butt) and then the players would choose new courses of action, such as raising troops or sending an envoy to the King and offer him a third of the taxes raised for the next 20 years as well as a dozen heads of cattle a year.
I got so heavily into this mode of play that when I joined a new group I was shocked to remember that not everyone used this style of play. In fact it was a minority of people w
I tried to point out that I'm not saying they are right and no one else can be, but they do have good information and a lot of what they have (such as their costs to develop a game) are based on real world projects. While I can respect your position dealling with turnkey network software and I can see how you would think that gives you a good track on the costs to build an MMO, their estimates are actually based on real MMOs, past and in developement, so it may include things you are overlooking (such as the fact that you have a substantial art and design team that you do not have with network software design).
If you are interested in getting the full context the book is Developing Online Games: An Insider's Guide. It is written by Jessica Mulligan and Bridgette Patrovsky and has an ISBN of 1-5927-3000-0. It's published by New Riders and can be picked up from Amazon for around $50 I think.
And in all seriousness, if you have disputing sources I would like to know. I'm not comfortable with only a single source of information since the authors are human and prone to error just like any of us.
When I said a pure content game couldn't succeed you were right, I should have chosen my phrasing more carefully. In my opinion a pure content game can't succeed, at least not on the level of EQ. Even CoH isn't pure content. You get missions to go out and beat up 15 thugs. When you move through a warehouse there is a certain degree of staggering out the enemies to create a 'grind' before you get to the boss. The thin is that CoH handles this a lot better than EQ. There is little 'random' (keep killing orcs until I finally get the sword I want) or 'unmotivated' (just charging around beating on gnolls until I level) grinding that occurs.
Because pure content games naturally constrict your progression I think they will appeal to fewer people. They are also far harder to make, in my opinion. This doesn't mean they can't succeed, simply that they will become the 'art house movies' of the MMO world. People will talk about them but they will have a smaller audience and generate lower revenues.
No, I do not assume that EQ got everything right and that anyone not following it is doomed to obscurity. In fact I feel there are many things wrong. Over focusing on leveling is one. I think there should be more social support. I'm just saying that as a general rule I don't think pure content is a way to go. Content rich? Sure, but there needs to be something extra to help draw out the life of that content.
http://pw1.netcom.com/~sirbruce/Subscriptio ns.html
If you look Everquest has around 420,000 subscribers. DAOC has about 250,000.
I will admit that I was wrong in two things; first it does not have roughly twice the subscribers. It has about 1.7x and while I could claim rounding I'm a big enough man to admit the gap is significant enough. Secondly, I forgot that DAOC is the runner up for American MMOs in terms of subscriptions. That belongs to Starwars Galaxies, another SOE game.
So to make my statement correct, EQ has about 170% of the subscriptions of its closest American competitor. Does that work better for you?
The fact is that the intent of BlueCup's statement is correct. You can twist it about and suggest he's wrong since America has 'seen' Lineage and FF XI but you should know his intent was to say that it's the largest in America. Trying to twist words because you're being proven wrong is no way to try to win an argument.
Or you could just keep contradicting people. Whatever floats your boat, as you say.
Yes, I am suggesting they are equivalent, at least in the aspect that the filler episode is something done to slow down your consumption of the true 'content' of the series.
Obviously they need to be well done and obviously you feel they aren't in EQ. I am not debating that. All I am debating is your idea that there should be no roadblocks to the consumption of content.
Agreed, just as I feel that non-storyline related material that consumes time can be good for a game like EQ. It is under the proviso that it's done well.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'the same people'. If you sell 200,000 units then you aren't going to somehow get more people playing the game than that, so yes, you have to figure on your income coming from that base of people.
As far as assuming everyone will quit because some people finish it first that is not my assumption at all. If you build a game with 100 hours of content (which is a lot)then even your most casual gamers will have consumed it all within 5 months. Since the first month is free you will only have 4 months of billable time and this only for very casual players. Most of your players will exit long before then. Even the casual players need something to slow down their consumption of content for the game to survive.
My view isn't based on mere pessimism. It is supported by Developing Online Games by Mulligan and Patrovsky. While I will admit that even experts are not always correct unless you can provide something more than your opinion to disprove their statements then it is more in truth to say that it is your view that is overly optimistic. (This isn't a flame, just saying that they have done research and are respected in their field. Unless you can provide your own evidence to refute them I don't see how your view of MMO profit margins can be anything other than optimism)
Unfortunately that content has to be created. That takes more money, pushing the end price of the game up. As I pointed out above if you have 100 hours of content and you rely on
Yeah, but it's also inflammatory and does nothing to progress a dialogue. Certainly you can complain about the amount of content but my point wasn't that EQ was content rich. It was that your statements that a game could be pure content without leveling (at least in some form) is false. EQ is non-linear. Overall you are not forced to go from Zone A to Zone B to Zone C. There may be some instances such as when you enter the zone containing a dungeon then move into the dungeon, but the overall design is that characters can go whichever direction they please.
Certainly the two are not identical, but I think they are analogous. You can't take on the big Turtle Boss until you first defeat the big Goomba Boss. One could even make a claim that the areas that you have to transverse where there is either no puzzle to solve or else the puzzles are of a type the player has solved previously constitute 'grinding' and are simply there to pad out the game. I would not make such an argument however and would point out that just like any story has to have peaks and valleys a game has to have easier areas to help bring you back down a bit before the next big thing.
Actually I have played plenty of stand alone games where you are sometimes forced to go out and beat up on the random monsters just to level up a bit so you can undertake the next challenge. It is usually not to the degree that it's done in EQ however, so I think it is more an issue of balance than in having it occur at all.
Again, I think we are really somewhat on the same page here. It equates to balance. You would not be against the fact that leveling occurs or is even occasionally required. Your objection is that with weak storylines the main goal is to level and the storyline is only an afterthought.
Yes, if the journey is good then it is the reward in and of itself. However, this is notoriously tricky to do and rarely draws the same audience as a more traditional 'winning the prize' storyline. Look at the movies and see ho