I actually think you might have something. Warhammer online was a bit like you describe. You basically just queue up to bgs and level that way. But it felt too much like TF2 or CS to me...but I had to pay for it, and I like TF2 and CS better. So I stopped playing. Though WoW still holds my interest.
I had the opposite experience. In honors/harder classes, there was the expectation that you were smart. In normal classes, they expected you to be stupid. So the worst grade you could really get in an honors class was a C and you had to try to do that bad. The worst you could do in a non-honors class is an F. So it was really easy not to try and get A's and B's in honor classes. The normal classes actually graded you harder.
I think you missed his point. He was just saying that the correlation/causation conclusion decided to favor non-Facebook users when it could have been interpreted differently.
In any case, all the stuff you listed isn't really having friends. You are doing activities with people that might hate you. But you were able to boast about yourself and get a +5 insightful, so kudos to you.
You are retarded. It would be like if we were playing WoW and I told you I would give you a flying mount. Then you get pissed off that I only gave you a flying mount in the game and not in real life. It was implicit that I was giving you a flying mount in the game, but you understood it wrong because you are stupid. You don't care that I don't have the power to produce a real flying mount. You are just going to complain how awful I am because I broke a promise in your mind when any reasonable person would be able to figure things out by context.
Yeah, if they really wanted a realistic game they would kill you if your character died. That way you would truly know the fear and danger of the battlefield. But that, obviously, is stupid. Shifting consciousness is no different than a respawn. Once everyone is dead, you would just have to start over. It is still a game and will still not going to even come close to letting us civies know what war is truly like.
Yet ironically, MMO's are more popular and profitable than the games you make. Isn't part of your target market bored teenagers? Maybe you shouldn't be so disdainful of them.
Gold farmers are going to exist no matter how exciting a game is. There are always people who will want to pay real money to get an edge in the game. Particularly the type of person with more money than time or the full-on competitive addicts. So using gold farmers as a metric on whether or not a game is good or a grind isn't accurate. If your games were subscription based with a persistent world that (at least attempts) to prevent cheating/hacking...it wouldn't matter how "fun" you made it, there would be some form of gold farming in it.
That's not strictly true. There are many items you can buy from auction that are fairly powerful. The best wrist armor in the game is bought with tokens, but are "bind on equip" so they can be sold. Also, the best enchants are fairly expensive. With unlimited gold, you could probably put together a character that was decent enough to raid with. But any time you got a new better item, you always need the gold to gem it and enchant it.
But the economy seems healthy and not dominated by gold farmers...and that is what is important. FFXI was dominate by gold farmers making it less fun for everyone. The bind on pickup is probably one of the best things Blizzard implemented to counteract gold farming.
In any game, there are unfun moments. It's unfun to die in FPS's and wait for respawn and not have access to good weapons instantly. It's unfun to have to build up your tech tree in RTS's. You could argue that the ration of fun to unfun might be worse in an MMO, but I enjoy the combat system enough that I really enjoy questing and raiding (with the limited time I have). Yeah, I don't find grinding for gold all that enjoyable. But at least there are a lot of different ways to do it. And I can't really imagine a better system. To some people the economy is the game, so to remove it would kill of the fun for a lot of people.
I guess that's the point. We all find different things fun. MMO's try to balance it out so that it is fun for the most number of people. So there are going to be parts of the game that one person loves and another finds tedious.
Um, duh, we all know the government bailing out companies isn't capitalism. Capitalism is selling homes to everyone regardless of their ability to pay. Then taking those sub-prime mortgages, making them in to little pieces, mixing them up with good loans, give them a high rating, and insuring them. With everyone buying houses, prices sky-rocket, so that even if the people can't afford the house, you reclaim it and sell it for even more money.
Oh wait, that's what got us in this mess. Capitalism has a lot of wonderful qualities. But it needs to be regulated. Not too much, not too little...but simply screaming capitalism and how it is the solution to everything is naive at best...complete and utterly stupid given the current situation at worst.
Except Clinton told Bush that bin Laden was someone to watch out for and Bush ignored it because the only threat in his eyes was Iraq. The largest terrorist attack in U.S. history happened on his watch. If you can not lay a lot of the blame at his feet, then you get your information from highly biased sites and news sources.
It seems to me that the old men are the ones complaining most about lack of innovation. They are the ones that remember all the crazy games that came out when computer/console gaming first came out. It was easy to innovate because nothing had ever been done before. Now the art has matured to the point where the are genres. There is nothing wrong with sticking to a genre and making good games. And it is amazing if you can come up with something that is innovative and create a new genre. But innovation != good games like a lot of people want to believe on here. And that's the basic point, innovation for the sake of innovation can lead to a lot of bad things.
That really isn't a solution, it just makes CCP more money. There are still people using bots to grind mining or other ways to get ISK. You can still go online and buy ISK. It just keeps the amount gold farmers can charge for ISK at a certain level. Actually, they remove the supply part of the supply side so that if demand was high enough, ISK is actually more expensive in real dollars than it would be from the gold farmers.
If you had that much in your account, you probably wouldn't be investing all of it on that day. But most people don't have that much money, and a lot of people logged in that day an invested the money they did not have. So I don't think we are all assuming a billionaire might not notice a million. The problem is that you are assuming that only people who have accounts have enough in there that they wouldn't notice, which is obviously not the case.
You are assuming that people are all getting the same service from our government. This isn't the case. It seems to me, the more money you have, the more protection/benefits you have from the government. I think you look at the progressive tax rate and don't actually figure in what the actually effective tax rate is. There are many billionaires that pay a lower effective tax rate than the rest of us because they can work the system. Why does the system work that way? Well, those with money can lobby congress to do that. So, your comments are ignoring reality.
People don't realize how much work it is to be that good at a game. First, not everyone even has the physical ability (twitch skills) to be even able to compete. Beyond that it is learning every map, every angle, every cheap place to play. It is mastering every scenario, figuring out the timing of every item (if the game has it), etc. It requires a lot of time, patience, and practice just like any other sport. It really is no different. You just don't have to spend time in the gym.
We pay actors and actresses to pretend to be other people. We can all pretend. But we pay the ones who are best at it a lot of money. Everyone cooks, but we pay top chefs tons of money. Everyone can sing, but we pay the best singers tons of money. No difference here other than there is still a negative bias towards video games.
I think the pattern is obvious. We like to see people who are really good at stuff we are interested in. Thus they get paid well.
Game companies should buy back their games at a price slightly higher than the used game stores and sell them used at a slightly lower price off their web site. This would increase their revenue and drive the brick and mortar used shops out of business. Then once the stores are all destroyed, simply stop doing it so everyone has to buy them new again. If the used game stores come back, then start up business again. Evil and profitable.
Of course, that is just using the current model. Really, just sell your games on steam and the problem is essentially solved. Let's all just be glad that Valve came up with this and not by EA.
Yes, you did misquote him. You did not include the whole middle part of this quote which changes the meaning of his statement. You then go on to refute your statement rather than his.
How does not owning any of the next gen consoles prove that you aren't a fanboy? This site is obviously biased towards certain companies. His post seemed neutral, yours seemed to be biased.
I am similar to you in that I enjoy to point out flaws in people's posts (particularly those that are modded up only because they agree with the Slashdot groupthink instead of being true). I take hits in my karma sometimes because I refuse to just go along with everyone else's opinion when I don't think it is well reasoned or true. Unfortunately, people don't understand modding someone down because you don't agree with them isn't actually how this is supposed to work, but meh...there are still enough level headed people out there to mod you up if you make a good point even if it isn't a pro-Nintendo/Apple/Linux post.
Your upset because Palin can't answer what newspapers and magazines she read? Give me a break. She was asked questions that any reasonable politician should have been able to answer (hell, I could have answered them) but she failed miserably because she isn't very smart and was a huge judgment mistake my McCain.
The other poster already commented on the journalist thing...but when your news station has a "non-journalist" covering Obama's major speeches, how do you expect rational, logical people to take you seriously? How is it fair and balanced? Really, please try to watch Fox News from a point of view of trying to find facts instead of trying to find viewpoints you agree with. They edit to change meaning, they blow out of proportion non-issues if they are against liberals, they change the little R next to congress members names to Ds when they have sexual relations with their male interns. And people just sit by and act if it is ok. It isn't. This isn't an entertainment show like Rush Limbaugh. It is billed as a news channel, and it fails at that on almost every level.
But Bush/Cheny told believed they knew better than the American people about the war on Iraq. They refused to read newspapers and had all their information fed through their own channels. They thought they knew better and they were wrong. That's the whole problem of labeling liberals elitist. You have just as many conservative elitists telling us what to believe about abortion, stem cells, marriage, etc.
If conservatives believe you should reap the consequences of decisions, why isn't Bush and Cheny up for war crimes? Why aren't people being held accountable for torture? Why did Bush shrug of any responsibility for the mess we are in?
Your post sounds pretty, but facts don't even come close to back it up. This is the trick it seems that conservatives like to play. Write or say something and sound well-educated on the subject matter, and just hope people don't use their brains to actually think about if it is true or not. Conservatives try to "protect" us from seeing boobs, from reading about witchcraft, from doing things their religion doesn't agree with. Conservatives believe in golden parachutes for companies that fail.
Really, all politicians think they know better than us. You think you, as a conservative, knows what is better for us. I guess that makes you elite? It is just a dumb argument, I'm sorry.
If they implement an achievement for being a paid member, I bet subscription numbers will go way up. I am serious. People are that crazy about achievements.
I never got the whole elitist thing. So Obama is an elitist because he went to a good school and got good grades? I'd love to be an elitist then. How was McCain not an elite with his war hero background and millions of dollars? Do we want sub-elite people running the country? I don't really think the conservatives thought this insult through very well.
Maybe because time and time again Fox News proves to not have any journalistic integrity. They are the station that have whack jobs like Jack Thompson on all the time since he is an "expert" on video game violence. They only present one side. I mean, Obama addressed the nation and you had Bill O'Reily critiquing it. He isn't a journalist at all, just someone pushing his agenda (somewhat hypocritically). CNN had a team of people discussing what Obama talked about on both sides of the aisle. But then again, CNN has conservative air heads like Campbell Brown on. They also used to have commentaries from Glenn Beck. If you think Fox News is anything but a tool to push an agenda, then you really aren't paying attention. It is not news and I wish there was some way to sue them so they have to take that out of their name until they actually meet some basic journalistic standards.
Slashdot Mirror
That's one way to drive subscription numbers down.
I actually think you might have something. Warhammer online was a bit like you describe. You basically just queue up to bgs and level that way. But it felt too much like TF2 or CS to me...but I had to pay for it, and I like TF2 and CS better. So I stopped playing. Though WoW still holds my interest.
I really can't imagine people on MySpace or Twitter being smarter.
I had the opposite experience. In honors/harder classes, there was the expectation that you were smart. In normal classes, they expected you to be stupid. So the worst grade you could really get in an honors class was a C and you had to try to do that bad. The worst you could do in a non-honors class is an F. So it was really easy not to try and get A's and B's in honor classes. The normal classes actually graded you harder.
I think you missed his point. He was just saying that the correlation/causation conclusion decided to favor non-Facebook users when it could have been interpreted differently.
In any case, all the stuff you listed isn't really having friends. You are doing activities with people that might hate you. But you were able to boast about yourself and get a +5 insightful, so kudos to you.
Then maybe game companies should get in to the used game market. Offer to buy back their games and sell them used from an online site.
You are retarded. It would be like if we were playing WoW and I told you I would give you a flying mount. Then you get pissed off that I only gave you a flying mount in the game and not in real life. It was implicit that I was giving you a flying mount in the game, but you understood it wrong because you are stupid. You don't care that I don't have the power to produce a real flying mount. You are just going to complain how awful I am because I broke a promise in your mind when any reasonable person would be able to figure things out by context.
Yeah, if they really wanted a realistic game they would kill you if your character died. That way you would truly know the fear and danger of the battlefield. But that, obviously, is stupid. Shifting consciousness is no different than a respawn. Once everyone is dead, you would just have to start over. It is still a game and will still not going to even come close to letting us civies know what war is truly like.
Yet ironically, MMO's are more popular and profitable than the games you make. Isn't part of your target market bored teenagers? Maybe you shouldn't be so disdainful of them.
Gold farmers are going to exist no matter how exciting a game is. There are always people who will want to pay real money to get an edge in the game. Particularly the type of person with more money than time or the full-on competitive addicts. So using gold farmers as a metric on whether or not a game is good or a grind isn't accurate. If your games were subscription based with a persistent world that (at least attempts) to prevent cheating/hacking...it wouldn't matter how "fun" you made it, there would be some form of gold farming in it.
That's not strictly true. There are many items you can buy from auction that are fairly powerful. The best wrist armor in the game is bought with tokens, but are "bind on equip" so they can be sold. Also, the best enchants are fairly expensive. With unlimited gold, you could probably put together a character that was decent enough to raid with. But any time you got a new better item, you always need the gold to gem it and enchant it.
But the economy seems healthy and not dominated by gold farmers...and that is what is important. FFXI was dominate by gold farmers making it less fun for everyone. The bind on pickup is probably one of the best things Blizzard implemented to counteract gold farming.
In any game, there are unfun moments. It's unfun to die in FPS's and wait for respawn and not have access to good weapons instantly. It's unfun to have to build up your tech tree in RTS's. You could argue that the ration of fun to unfun might be worse in an MMO, but I enjoy the combat system enough that I really enjoy questing and raiding (with the limited time I have). Yeah, I don't find grinding for gold all that enjoyable. But at least there are a lot of different ways to do it. And I can't really imagine a better system. To some people the economy is the game, so to remove it would kill of the fun for a lot of people.
I guess that's the point. We all find different things fun. MMO's try to balance it out so that it is fun for the most number of people. So there are going to be parts of the game that one person loves and another finds tedious.
Um, duh, we all know the government bailing out companies isn't capitalism. Capitalism is selling homes to everyone regardless of their ability to pay. Then taking those sub-prime mortgages, making them in to little pieces, mixing them up with good loans, give them a high rating, and insuring them. With everyone buying houses, prices sky-rocket, so that even if the people can't afford the house, you reclaim it and sell it for even more money.
Oh wait, that's what got us in this mess. Capitalism has a lot of wonderful qualities. But it needs to be regulated. Not too much, not too little...but simply screaming capitalism and how it is the solution to everything is naive at best...complete and utterly stupid given the current situation at worst.
Except Clinton told Bush that bin Laden was someone to watch out for and Bush ignored it because the only threat in his eyes was Iraq. The largest terrorist attack in U.S. history happened on his watch. If you can not lay a lot of the blame at his feet, then you get your information from highly biased sites and news sources.
It seems to me that the old men are the ones complaining most about lack of innovation. They are the ones that remember all the crazy games that came out when computer/console gaming first came out. It was easy to innovate because nothing had ever been done before. Now the art has matured to the point where the are genres. There is nothing wrong with sticking to a genre and making good games. And it is amazing if you can come up with something that is innovative and create a new genre. But innovation != good games like a lot of people want to believe on here. And that's the basic point, innovation for the sake of innovation can lead to a lot of bad things.
That really isn't a solution, it just makes CCP more money. There are still people using bots to grind mining or other ways to get ISK. You can still go online and buy ISK. It just keeps the amount gold farmers can charge for ISK at a certain level. Actually, they remove the supply part of the supply side so that if demand was high enough, ISK is actually more expensive in real dollars than it would be from the gold farmers.
If you had that much in your account, you probably wouldn't be investing all of it on that day. But most people don't have that much money, and a lot of people logged in that day an invested the money they did not have. So I don't think we are all assuming a billionaire might not notice a million. The problem is that you are assuming that only people who have accounts have enough in there that they wouldn't notice, which is obviously not the case.
You are assuming that people are all getting the same service from our government. This isn't the case. It seems to me, the more money you have, the more protection/benefits you have from the government. I think you look at the progressive tax rate and don't actually figure in what the actually effective tax rate is. There are many billionaires that pay a lower effective tax rate than the rest of us because they can work the system. Why does the system work that way? Well, those with money can lobby congress to do that. So, your comments are ignoring reality.
People don't realize how much work it is to be that good at a game. First, not everyone even has the physical ability (twitch skills) to be even able to compete. Beyond that it is learning every map, every angle, every cheap place to play. It is mastering every scenario, figuring out the timing of every item (if the game has it), etc. It requires a lot of time, patience, and practice just like any other sport. It really is no different. You just don't have to spend time in the gym.
We pay actors and actresses to pretend to be other people. We can all pretend. But we pay the ones who are best at it a lot of money. Everyone cooks, but we pay top chefs tons of money. Everyone can sing, but we pay the best singers tons of money. No difference here other than there is still a negative bias towards video games.
I think the pattern is obvious. We like to see people who are really good at stuff we are interested in. Thus they get paid well.
Game companies should buy back their games at a price slightly higher than the used game stores and sell them used at a slightly lower price off their web site. This would increase their revenue and drive the brick and mortar used shops out of business. Then once the stores are all destroyed, simply stop doing it so everyone has to buy them new again. If the used game stores come back, then start up business again. Evil and profitable.
Of course, that is just using the current model. Really, just sell your games on steam and the problem is essentially solved. Let's all just be glad that Valve came up with this and not by EA.
Yes, you did misquote him. You did not include the whole middle part of this quote which changes the meaning of his statement. You then go on to refute your statement rather than his.
How does not owning any of the next gen consoles prove that you aren't a fanboy? This site is obviously biased towards certain companies. His post seemed neutral, yours seemed to be biased.
I am similar to you in that I enjoy to point out flaws in people's posts (particularly those that are modded up only because they agree with the Slashdot groupthink instead of being true). I take hits in my karma sometimes because I refuse to just go along with everyone else's opinion when I don't think it is well reasoned or true. Unfortunately, people don't understand modding someone down because you don't agree with them isn't actually how this is supposed to work, but meh...there are still enough level headed people out there to mod you up if you make a good point even if it isn't a pro-Nintendo/Apple/Linux post.
Your upset because Palin can't answer what newspapers and magazines she read? Give me a break. She was asked questions that any reasonable politician should have been able to answer (hell, I could have answered them) but she failed miserably because she isn't very smart and was a huge judgment mistake my McCain.
The other poster already commented on the journalist thing...but when your news station has a "non-journalist" covering Obama's major speeches, how do you expect rational, logical people to take you seriously? How is it fair and balanced? Really, please try to watch Fox News from a point of view of trying to find facts instead of trying to find viewpoints you agree with. They edit to change meaning, they blow out of proportion non-issues if they are against liberals, they change the little R next to congress members names to Ds when they have sexual relations with their male interns. And people just sit by and act if it is ok. It isn't. This isn't an entertainment show like Rush Limbaugh. It is billed as a news channel, and it fails at that on almost every level.
But Bush/Cheny told believed they knew better than the American people about the war on Iraq. They refused to read newspapers and had all their information fed through their own channels. They thought they knew better and they were wrong. That's the whole problem of labeling liberals elitist. You have just as many conservative elitists telling us what to believe about abortion, stem cells, marriage, etc.
If conservatives believe you should reap the consequences of decisions, why isn't Bush and Cheny up for war crimes? Why aren't people being held accountable for torture? Why did Bush shrug of any responsibility for the mess we are in?
Your post sounds pretty, but facts don't even come close to back it up. This is the trick it seems that conservatives like to play. Write or say something and sound well-educated on the subject matter, and just hope people don't use their brains to actually think about if it is true or not. Conservatives try to "protect" us from seeing boobs, from reading about witchcraft, from doing things their religion doesn't agree with. Conservatives believe in golden parachutes for companies that fail.
Really, all politicians think they know better than us. You think you, as a conservative, knows what is better for us. I guess that makes you elite? It is just a dumb argument, I'm sorry.
+5 sad?
If they implement an achievement for being a paid member, I bet subscription numbers will go way up. I am serious. People are that crazy about achievements.
I never got the whole elitist thing. So Obama is an elitist because he went to a good school and got good grades? I'd love to be an elitist then. How was McCain not an elite with his war hero background and millions of dollars? Do we want sub-elite people running the country? I don't really think the conservatives thought this insult through very well.
Maybe because time and time again Fox News proves to not have any journalistic integrity. They are the station that have whack jobs like Jack Thompson on all the time since he is an "expert" on video game violence. They only present one side. I mean, Obama addressed the nation and you had Bill O'Reily critiquing it. He isn't a journalist at all, just someone pushing his agenda (somewhat hypocritically). CNN had a team of people discussing what Obama talked about on both sides of the aisle. But then again, CNN has conservative air heads like Campbell Brown on. They also used to have commentaries from Glenn Beck. If you think Fox News is anything but a tool to push an agenda, then you really aren't paying attention. It is not news and I wish there was some way to sue them so they have to take that out of their name until they actually meet some basic journalistic standards.