I predict that 90% of the comments will be against this article. And come from teen thru 20s males. People who are still children themselves and have not seen the principle of cause and effect at work with their offspring.
I am going to suggest something really strange and weird. How about parents taking responsability and get this, sit down with their kids and talk to them and explain to them why violent games are not real, or even why they shouldn't play violent games. Or better, don't buy them violent games until they reach an age they can easily realize that themselves.
Most parents are lazy fucks who want the state to enforce something they could easily do. Typical "But won't anyone think of the children!?" attitude.
The question is, on equal footing, even with an engine as strong as google, will people switch to MS ?
It's very hard to compete against a dictionnary word. I was shocked the other day when talking to my sister (110% computer illiterate) and she told me that she was going to "google" something on the net. When average Joe is googling and is happy with Google, it's very hard to make them change. Average users abhor change, they are very happy using something that has proven to work. When I offered my family google mail accounts, I even hyped it, their answer: Hotmail works fine, I don't want to change.
Gameplay wise the first weakness it that of course you can't be the hero. Nor can you alone affect the world....(snip)...
WoW has shown the world that a huge pile of cash is waiting for he that creates an MMO that is playable at launch. Now all that remains is for someone to make a real MMORPG.
In single player RPGs you can be a hero. In MMOGs no. Well that's not all true. Guilds have their "heroes", the decked out main tank, the badass DPS rogue, the awesome healer. But, it's nothing skill related.
No matter what style of gameplay you try you cannot be the hero in single player RPG sense. The most crucial skill in any MMOGs is: time. Take every single MMOG, and the most powerful avatars in these games are played by people who have a metric fuckton of time on their hands. It doesn't mean you can't enjoy these games because you have no time. It means that the "heroes" are only defined by one skill: time. The High Warlord in WoW (highest PvP rank) is nothing more than a player with a lot of time on his hands.
As to the real MMOG comment, many have tried before. UO was probably the only "real" MMOG. It also had HUGE glaring flaws: PKing, macroing, and in the end all this got very controlled and changed. It's all good and nice of wanting a "real" MMOG but they all failed or were revamped later (UO no PvP shard, instances in EQ and so on).
I'll bite but parent should be modded flame bait/troll.
Here is my week's WoW Schedule:
Sunday 5pm clear MC, duration about 5 hours. Monday 7:30pm kill Onyxia, duration about 20-30 minutes. Wednesday 7:30pm learning/killing in BWL, duration about 3 hours.
If I really feel like, I can hop on a AQ20 raid or a ZG raid. Depending if I have the time. Lately I don't have the time. My guild is a guild made of casual players with jobs, families and there are 2-3 raids max a week, not to mention Onyxia isn't even a raid. More like a 30 minute get toghether.
Total play time: about 12 hours a week, sometimes a bit more, sometimes a bit less. Do we have full time jobs at 12 hours a week? If yes, please let me know, I want to sign up.
Still best of luck to them, quite a crowded market.
Crowded market? Everyone said that before WoW was released. Boy did WoW proved them wrong. IMO it's not crowded, if a company can make an innovative game it can get a good share of the MMOG pie.
I think WoW proved that a few gameplay styles/mechanics sell if done well: - Fast Avatar advacement, people don't want a game to become a job. - Fast gameplay, button mashing is fun for many. - Accessible raid content, raiding can be fun if not difficult or if doesn't require an army. - PvP.
So they're making a cheap knockoff of City of Heroes, banking on the DC name to sell it? No thanks.
This is made by the company who was too incompetent to capitalize on the Star Wars franchise. With EQ2 SOE has proved that it has lost contact with gamers. When EQ2 came out, it had many glaring gameplay issues and retarded rules like party member death penalty is shared by group. So if you had a dumbass in your group, you all paid the price. Not to mention it was a grind fest and you were forced to group. Star Wars Galaxies... well... it's pretty much dead. EQ is dying. EQ2 is stalling, no new growth. Matrix Online (they picked it up) is pretty much dead too.
Why would any franchise holder trust this company is something I don't understand.
I am willing to beleive one of Gate's prediction: Disc based content distribution is dying. I think that in the not so distant future we'll see a lot of content producers distribute content without discs. Microsoft of course wants in on this deal so they are hoping that the Blue Ray vs HD DVD format war will make consumers not to adapt either and instead opt for digital downloads. Typical divide and conquer strategy. It might hurt PS3 sales as well that could provide a bonus for MS.
Microsoft controls the desktop, the next logical step is to control the living room, and only way it can achieve that if it can distribute content as well.
To be fair, Kerafyrm in Sleeper's Tomb was never meant to be defeated.
I wasn't reffering at all at Kerafyrm, when Fires of Heaven first entered Sleeper's Tomb and killed the first few bosses, all loot they got was cloth caps.
You chumps didn't even bill for EQ for the first month after "release", it was so fucked up.
That's only the tip of the iceberg.
The first loot out of Sleeper's Tomb was... cloth cap, for non EQ players it's beyond an insult, it's a worthless level 1 item out of the hardest (at that time) zone. Why is an endgame zone loot that takes an entire well coordinated raid to beat a level one worthless item? Zone is incomplete. In the next expansion, Vex Thal, the endzone of Shadows of Luclin expansion was incomplete (shocker!). The next major expansion, Planes of Power had it's endzone blocked by SOE for months by an unkillable encounter. 190 well coordinated people failed the Avatar of Earth encounter because well, SOE didn't want anyone in the Plane of Time because... you guessed, it was incomplete! This encounter should have been trivial with that many people and after SOE "fixed it" it was done by far smaller numbers. Fast forward to the clusterfuck that was the Gates of Discord expansion, another line of incomplete zones, buggy content and al. But at least this time, people got fed up and left. EQ started hemmoraging.
Smedley lies. Period. He often lied about many things ingame being fine and working yet they were not. Nothing new for EQ/SWG veterans. He is only on the defensive now because it's not some guild website telling people SOE games suck, but instead a CBS, a reputable news source.
Don't have the plethora of horrible boring time sinks (gotta fish for 20 more hours to bump my skill level from 5 to 6!) that cause people to say "screw this" and cancel the account.
You never played WoW right? You wanna tell me that reaching High Warlord is not one of the most brutal time sinks ever in any game? Not to mention the plethora of other timesinks for raising various factions. Did you ever raise Argent Dawn faction to exalted? How do you like killing the same goddamn undead in Western/Eastern Plaguelands for some faction tokens?
To give credit for WoW, the designers pretty much hid the retarded time sinks (except PvP ranks), and casual players don't really see it because they have still items to get from high end dungeons. Once a player caps out on "stuff to do", meaning he has pretty much all items he needs from level 60 dungeons, he can turn to raids or pvp. Both of those elements are bad timesinks, PvP ranks is a massive grind so is getting items like Sulfuras.
This shouldn't be funny. It's pretty accurate. People playing MMOGs are far less likely to buy other games because: (1) MMOGs are addictive, (2) They need a lot of time investment to achieve "success" (or to "win" the game) and (3) MMOG game experience for many far surpasses boring single player experiences. This has been known for years now.
Wired will have a more interesting Vapourware top ten list in 2006! Now if DNF comes out/gets canned, we'll have a great list this year because Vista will be out.
On the other hand, no more vapourware jokes about Phantom.:(
Many massively multiplayer games require that you kill endless armies of the same boring enemies to level up. You can do this in WoW, too, but the quest system is so robust and rewarding that you don't actually need to.
Of course you don't need to kill a metric fuckton of mobs in WoW to level up. However, you need to do a metric fuckton of boring repetitive quests for faction if you want to progress in the game after level 60. TB faction, city factions, Argent Dawn, Silithus (whatever the faction is called there), etc. It's nothing more than massive grind in disguise. Oh and good luck trying to get that High Warlord PvP title. Quit your job, divorce and give up kids. Then think about it.
When WoW characters group to tackle quests and dungeons, every class contributes different talents -- and every player has something fun to do. As a GM, you should design every adventure to include multiple opportunities for each PC to shine.
So what does a priest do in raids? Chaincast flash heal. Sometimes a group buff here or there. Awesome variety, zero fun. What does a warlock do? Summon others to raid then go AFK until called upon. I played both of these classes on raids, I can tell you, they are beyond boring. DPS warriors have fun because one encounter they are asked to tank and another to DPS, not to mention the warrior is hardest class to play. Rest of the classes are pretty much pigeonholed into one specific role: heal, damage or be on the borderline of useless (warlock).
Botnets exist for two reasons, lousy software and the people that use it.
I wouldn't blame it to "lousy" software. The Windows NT family OS has a good security architecture. Problem is not software, but the way people use it. Microsoft is to blame here big time because for ages they pretty much left everyone and their dogs use the PC with root privileges AND they have a boatload of useless services turned on by default.
IMO the botnet plague is entirely a human issue: - Microsoft encourages people to use their PCs as administrators. - Microsoft doesn't warn users of the dangers of using PCs as administrators. - Microsoft lets many powerful services run by default (Remote Registry anyone?). - Lazy n00b programmers write code that only works as administrator. - Stupid people clicking on "OMG YUR PC IS TOO SLOW!!!222!!~!oneone!" flashing adds, or smiley emoticons! Not to mention they open every possible attachment they receive. Even if it's from strangers.
I run XP atm, no firewall turned on (well router is), no anti-virus and no anti-spyware. I've been running with this setup on Windowns 2000, XP and 20003 family computers for ages, I never got infected with anything. Windows is not to blame for poor computer security, the geniuses at MS for letting people run as root are.
Unless of course the password / passphrase that you enter in is still held in the pagefile in some obtainable manner. Anyone want to take a guess as to whether Windows Vista keeps your passphrase in the pagefile? Anyone want to further bet that the Fed already knows this? D.
You can configure Windows to zero your pagefile upon system shutdown. I doubt MS would be stupid enough to put a password in a page file that can be examined by a boot CD. Not to mention once you zero it, you can make sure it is really zeroed by rebooting with a bootable CD and examining the page file.
Not saying MS can't store password elsewhere obtainable by a backdoor but I doubt it's in the pagefile.
If there is indeed a back door, the gov't will go to significant lengths to keep the backdoor secret. So they might be able to read your hard drive, but they won't use that evidence in a criminal trial, because doing so would divulge the existence of the backdoor.
How many GITMO prisoners have had a fair and just criminal trial?
Given Google don't make any money from Picasa, the Linux client is a loss-leader
They don't make money for sure but they get exposure. People will recognize the brand "Google", use their search engines more, click on adds supplied by Google and $PROFIT$! My mother, a total computer illiterate, uses Google above anything else. For her Google is the internet. And IMO that is what google is doing by giving away free software. It's a PR move, pure and simple, to promote the brand, Google.
Companies don't give out free software out of the goodness of their hearts. They do it because they have a plan behind it. This plan usually involves green pieces of paper with dead presidents on them.
Slashdot Mirror
I predict that 90% of the comments will be against this article. And come from teen thru 20s males. People who are still children themselves and have not seen the principle of cause and effect at work with their offspring.
I am going to suggest something really strange and weird. How about parents taking responsability and get this, sit down with their kids and talk to them and explain to them why violent games are not real, or even why they shouldn't play violent games. Or better, don't buy them violent games until they reach an age they can easily realize that themselves.
Most parents are lazy fucks who want the state to enforce something they could easily do. Typical "But won't anyone think of the children!?" attitude.
The question is, on equal footing, even with an engine as strong as google, will people switch to MS ?
It's very hard to compete against a dictionnary word. I was shocked the other day when talking to my sister (110% computer illiterate) and she told me that she was going to "google" something on the net. When average Joe is googling and is happy with Google, it's very hard to make them change. Average users abhor change, they are very happy using something that has proven to work. When I offered my family google mail accounts, I even hyped it, their answer: Hotmail works fine, I don't want to change.
Gameplay wise the first weakness it that of course you can't be the hero. Nor can you alone affect the world. ...(snip)...
WoW has shown the world that a huge pile of cash is waiting for he that creates an MMO that is playable at launch. Now all that remains is for someone to make a real MMORPG.
In single player RPGs you can be a hero. In MMOGs no. Well that's not all true. Guilds have their "heroes", the decked out main tank, the badass DPS rogue, the awesome healer. But, it's nothing skill related.
No matter what style of gameplay you try you cannot be the hero in single player RPG sense. The most crucial skill in any MMOGs is: time. Take every single MMOG, and the most powerful avatars in these games are played by people who have a metric fuckton of time on their hands. It doesn't mean you can't enjoy these games because you have no time. It means that the "heroes" are only defined by one skill: time. The High Warlord in WoW (highest PvP rank) is nothing more than a player with a lot of time on his hands.
As to the real MMOG comment, many have tried before. UO was probably the only "real" MMOG. It also had HUGE glaring flaws: PKing, macroing, and in the end all this got very controlled and changed. It's all good and nice of wanting a "real" MMOG but they all failed or were revamped later (UO no PvP shard, instances in EQ and so on).
I'll bite but parent should be modded flame bait/troll.
Here is my week's WoW Schedule:
Sunday 5pm clear MC, duration about 5 hours.
Monday 7:30pm kill Onyxia, duration about 20-30 minutes.
Wednesday 7:30pm learning/killing in BWL, duration about 3 hours.
If I really feel like, I can hop on a AQ20 raid or a ZG raid. Depending if I have the time. Lately I don't have the time. My guild is a guild made of casual players with jobs, families and there are 2-3 raids max a week, not to mention Onyxia isn't even a raid. More like a 30 minute get toghether.
Total play time: about 12 hours a week, sometimes a bit more, sometimes a bit less. Do we have full time jobs at 12 hours a week? If yes, please let me know, I want to sign up.
Oh wait, it is worse. Let's hope it's not true.
Anything that can divert attention from the quagmire that is Iraq or the bajillion US deficit is a good thing.
Still best of luck to them, quite a crowded market.
Crowded market? Everyone said that before WoW was released. Boy did WoW proved them wrong. IMO it's not crowded, if a company can make an innovative game it can get a good share of the MMOG pie.
I think WoW proved that a few gameplay styles/mechanics sell if done well:
- Fast Avatar advacement, people don't want a game to become a job.
- Fast gameplay, button mashing is fun for many.
- Accessible raid content, raiding can be fun if not difficult or if doesn't require an army.
- PvP.
So they're making a cheap knockoff of City of Heroes, banking on the DC name to sell it? No thanks.
... well ... it's pretty much dead. EQ is dying. EQ2 is stalling, no new growth. Matrix Online (they picked it up) is pretty much dead too.
This is made by the company who was too incompetent to capitalize on the Star Wars franchise. With EQ2 SOE has proved that it has lost contact with gamers. When EQ2 came out, it had many glaring gameplay issues and retarded rules like party member death penalty is shared by group. So if you had a dumbass in your group, you all paid the price. Not to mention it was a grind fest and you were forced to group. Star Wars Galaxies
Why would any franchise holder trust this company is something I don't understand.
Why is Microsoft supporting hd-dvd?
I am willing to beleive one of Gate's prediction: Disc based content distribution is dying. I think that in the not so distant future we'll see a lot of content producers distribute content without discs. Microsoft of course wants in on this deal so they are hoping that the Blue Ray vs HD DVD format war will make consumers not to adapt either and instead opt for digital downloads. Typical divide and conquer strategy. It might hurt PS3 sales as well that could provide a bonus for MS.
Microsoft controls the desktop, the next logical step is to control the living room, and only way it can achieve that if it can distribute content as well.
I think I'll buy "C++ Programming for Dummies" and faxes a quick resume to Diebold
Butchering a good Farnsworth quote, "If by that you mean Visual Basic? Then yes!"
To be fair, Kerafyrm in Sleeper's Tomb was never meant to be defeated.
I wasn't reffering at all at Kerafyrm, when Fires of Heaven first entered Sleeper's Tomb and killed the first few bosses, all loot they got was cloth caps.
You chumps didn't even bill for EQ for the first month after "release", it was so fucked up.
... cloth cap, for non EQ players it's beyond an insult, it's a worthless level 1 item out of the hardest (at that time) zone. Why is an endgame zone loot that takes an entire well coordinated raid to beat a level one worthless item? Zone is incomplete. In the next expansion, Vex Thal, the endzone of Shadows of Luclin expansion was incomplete (shocker!). The next major expansion, Planes of Power had it's endzone blocked by SOE for months by an unkillable encounter. 190 well coordinated people failed the Avatar of Earth encounter because well, SOE didn't want anyone in the Plane of Time because ... you guessed, it was incomplete! This encounter should have been trivial with that many people and after SOE "fixed it" it was done by far smaller numbers. Fast forward to the clusterfuck that was the Gates of Discord expansion, another line of incomplete zones, buggy content and al. But at least this time, people got fed up and left. EQ started hemmoraging.
That's only the tip of the iceberg.
The first loot out of Sleeper's Tomb was
Smedley lies. Period. He often lied about many things ingame being fine and working yet they were not. Nothing new for EQ/SWG veterans. He is only on the defensive now because it's not some guild website telling people SOE games suck, but instead a CBS, a reputable news source.
Don't have the plethora of horrible boring time sinks (gotta fish for 20 more hours to bump my skill level from 5 to 6!) that cause people to say "screw this" and cancel the account.
You never played WoW right? You wanna tell me that reaching High Warlord is not one of the most brutal time sinks ever in any game? Not to mention the plethora of other timesinks for raising various factions. Did you ever raise Argent Dawn faction to exalted? How do you like killing the same goddamn undead in Western/Eastern Plaguelands for some faction tokens?
To give credit for WoW, the designers pretty much hid the retarded time sinks (except PvP ranks), and casual players don't really see it because they have still items to get from high end dungeons. Once a player caps out on "stuff to do", meaning he has pretty much all items he needs from level 60 dungeons, he can turn to raids or pvp. Both of those elements are bad timesinks, PvP ranks is a massive grind so is getting items like Sulfuras.
This shouldn't be funny. It's pretty accurate. People playing MMOGs are far less likely to buy other games because: (1) MMOGs are addictive, (2) They need a lot of time investment to achieve "success" (or to "win" the game) and (3) MMOG game experience for many far surpasses boring single player experiences. This has been known for years now.
Just look at the massive amount of people playing these games.
I wish the Japanese would stop killing for fins. What gives them the right?
They have the right because it's for "scientific experiments". Just like whales.
Wired will have a more interesting Vapourware top ten list in 2006! Now if DNF comes out/gets canned, we'll have a great list this year because Vista will be out.
:(
On the other hand, no more vapourware jokes about Phantom.
The extend part is already in progress.
Many massively multiplayer games require that you kill endless armies of the same boring enemies to level up. You can do this in WoW, too, but the quest system is so robust and rewarding that you don't actually need to.
Of course you don't need to kill a metric fuckton of mobs in WoW to level up. However, you need to do a metric fuckton of boring repetitive quests for faction if you want to progress in the game after level 60. TB faction, city factions, Argent Dawn, Silithus (whatever the faction is called there), etc. It's nothing more than massive grind in disguise. Oh and good luck trying to get that High Warlord PvP title. Quit your job, divorce and give up kids. Then think about it.
When WoW characters group to tackle quests and dungeons, every class contributes different talents -- and every player has something fun to do. As a GM, you should design every adventure to include multiple opportunities for each PC to shine.
So what does a priest do in raids? Chaincast flash heal. Sometimes a group buff here or there. Awesome variety, zero fun. What does a warlock do? Summon others to raid then go AFK until called upon. I played both of these classes on raids, I can tell you, they are beyond boring. DPS warriors have fun because one encounter they are asked to tank and another to DPS, not to mention the warrior is hardest class to play. Rest of the classes are pretty much pigeonholed into one specific role: heal, damage or be on the borderline of useless (warlock).
IIRC, MS and Yahoo already caved in to the Kremlin^H^H^H^H^HWhite House.
Botnets exist for two reasons, lousy software and the people that use it.
I wouldn't blame it to "lousy" software. The Windows NT family OS has a good security architecture. Problem is not software, but the way people use it. Microsoft is to blame here big time because for ages they pretty much left everyone and their dogs use the PC with root privileges AND they have a boatload of useless services turned on by default.
IMO the botnet plague is entirely a human issue:
- Microsoft encourages people to use their PCs as administrators.
- Microsoft doesn't warn users of the dangers of using PCs as administrators.
- Microsoft lets many powerful services run by default (Remote Registry anyone?).
- Lazy n00b programmers write code that only works as administrator.
- Stupid people clicking on "OMG YUR PC IS TOO SLOW!!!222!!~!oneone!" flashing adds, or smiley emoticons! Not to mention they open every possible attachment they receive. Even if it's from strangers.
I run XP atm, no firewall turned on (well router is), no anti-virus and no anti-spyware. I've been running with this setup on Windowns 2000, XP and 20003 family computers for ages, I never got infected with anything. Windows is not to blame for poor computer security, the geniuses at MS for letting people run as root are.
"It's an artifact of intelligent design, not an evolutionary anomaly."
:)
Are you sure Windows was intelligently designed?
We comply with legally binding orders whether it's here in the U.S. or China.
Ironic how MS is doing everything not to have to comply with the EU's antitrust rulings.
Unless of course the password / passphrase that you enter in is still held in the pagefile in some obtainable manner. Anyone want to take a guess as to whether Windows Vista keeps your passphrase in the pagefile? Anyone want to further bet that the Fed already knows this?
D.
You can configure Windows to zero your pagefile upon system shutdown. I doubt MS would be stupid enough to put a password in a page file that can be examined by a boot CD. Not to mention once you zero it, you can make sure it is really zeroed by rebooting with a bootable CD and examining the page file.
Not saying MS can't store password elsewhere obtainable by a backdoor but I doubt it's in the pagefile.
If there is indeed a back door, the gov't will go to significant lengths to keep the backdoor secret. So they might be able to read your hard drive, but they won't use that evidence in a criminal trial, because doing so would divulge the existence of the backdoor.
How many GITMO prisoners have had a fair and just criminal trial?
Given Google don't make any money from Picasa, the Linux client is a loss-leader
They don't make money for sure but they get exposure. People will recognize the brand "Google", use their search engines more, click on adds supplied by Google and $PROFIT$! My mother, a total computer illiterate, uses Google above anything else. For her Google is the internet. And IMO that is what google is doing by giving away free software. It's a PR move, pure and simple, to promote the brand, Google.
Companies don't give out free software out of the goodness of their hearts. They do it because they have a plan behind it. This plan usually involves green pieces of paper with dead presidents on them.