It's certainly one thing to motivate some people, but not the only one by far. E.g., Bartle's famous paper dates from the days of MUDs and identifies 4 types of players:
1. Achievers (Diamonds): these are the kind you describe. They play to achieve something, be it a more epic sword, more money in the bank, a funky title, or a higher score.
2. Explorers (Spades): these are the kind of people who play to find out stuff. It can be some mountain pass that nobody else heard about, or how the game works, or try to find every single quest, etc. For example the kinds that put numbers in a spreadsheet to find out the exact numbers in COH's attack formulas were explorers. Essentially these guys play to reverse-engineer the game.
3. Socializers (Hearts): these guys basically treat the game as a chat room that incidentally has a video game attached. They're there to make friends, chat, organize some guild event, tutor newbies, etc. Even actually playing the game is only a tool towards interacting with people.
4. Killers (Clubs): these guys are not the PvP gang, but the people who live to harass, annoy, gank, and make life as miserable as possible for others. Their highest reward and achievement is getting someone to leave the game entirely, effectively perma-killing them in the game. Hence the "killers" name. The rest of us tend to call them "griefers" or simply "asshats".
Bearing in mind, though, that nobody is 100% in one category, but you can still classify people that way by their predominant interest and behaviour.
And that's actually just one of many classifications.
At any rate, the moral of the story is: please don't generalize. There's nothing wrong if you're an achiever, but do realize that other people play for very different reasons than you do.
For some it is. Just look at the chunk of the USA right wing that I like to call the Cult Of Psychopathy. The kind for whom everything is measured in money, is only motivated by money, justified by money (at least judging by the "but it makes money for the investors!!!" argument as trumping any other moral consideration and verily being the line that separates good from evil), etc. And for whom any kind of social arrangement that isn't defined by even sending each other a bill for calling the cops when you see the neighbour's home being broken in, is either some kind of oppressive statism, some godless nazi-communist-fascist threat (don't ask them to actually know what "nazi", "communism" or "fascism" actually are,) or both.
I'll bet that for some the thought of people doing _anything_ without sending someone a bill, is surprising as heck, scary as heck, or both.
Heh. You do realize, I hope, that the starter zone is just that. It's partially a tutorial (e.g., telling you how to use Immolate or Steady Shot or whatever on some dummies) and partially giving you some back-story for your race and helping get in-character, so to sleep.
It's basically the equivalent of, dunno, castle Cousland if you played Dragon Age as a human noble. Or that escaping-from-the-hospital-station level in Mass Effect 2, while being taught how to control the game. Or the tutorial town in Fallout New Vegas. Etc. You get the idea.
It's not like it's the end of the content or anything.
Honestly, I can't even imagine (A) why you'd actually want a tutorial longer than 22 minutes, and (B) seriously, why not go to another race's tutorial zone if you need to practice the start game some more?
There is no way to win the game. The only point is to get the best gear and achievements and then sit as 'King of the Hill' until someone else comes along and knocks you off, or you get bored and quit.
And, basically, who cares? Not all games are made to be won or lost. There is also no winning Elite, or Tetris, or Pac-Man.
What matters is whether you had fun playing it for X hours or not. Which fun can come from gear and achievements, but it also can come from doing quests, or exploration, or social interaction with other people, or just trying to be the biggest dick without getting banned, or really whatever floats your boat.
Essentially if the only point you can see is comparing dick size and complaining that the game doesn't give you an "OK, you won" popup, then I can see how maybe it's not the game for you. I'm sure there's a bunny-hopping and teabagging simulator... err... FPS out there more suited to your needs.
Seriously, who over the age of 25 has 5-10 hours a day to spend playing a video game?
So, you know, don't? I keep hearing that complaint, and it never ceases to amaze me in it's pencils-up-the-nose underpants-on-head idiocy.
Guess what? There is no paragraph in the TOS that says "Blizzard can ban your account and kill your dog if you play less than 5-10 hours a day." You can play just half an hour a week on weekends or take a month off, if you wish. The game was designed to be playable in whatever portions you wish.
Heck, even if you're in a fairly obsessive "raiding guild", we're no longer in the pre-BC age of 40-man raids that take all night. You can do some reasonable raiding in two hours a day, which still falls short of the 5-10 hours a day bullshit. Or you can find yourself a social guild and never have any schedule at all.
Frankly, it seems to me that the only ones who come up with that stupid objection are those who think they're basically playing to prove penis size. It can't be a coincidence that it almost always comes together with the "but you can't win!!!111eleventeen" objection and with the whining that all there is to do is collect the best gear and all achievements. They end up caught in some race to have all the penis size symbols, and have them yesterday if possible, and not even seeing any other way to play than grind 10 hours a day towards that coveted King Of The Hill Position.
In reality, it's a race that exists only in your own mind, and a prize that exists only in your own mind. In reality, almost nobody actually gives a flying fuck about your being King Of The Hill or not, nor about how fast you got there. If you don't want to put 5-10 hours a day in a race that exists only in your own mind, then don't. It's really that simple.
If you have a daughter, then you are used to this.
I don't. That's the problem. I resolved I must buy more manly games, you know, Sweaty Guys Wrestling and Full-Contact Cock-Punching Extreme Edition to change Amazon's opinion of my tastes. Granted, now it probably thinks I'm gay, but it's a start;)
Reminds me of a couple of months back when amazon.de, supposedly based on my previous purchases and pages visited, recommended me 3 new games for very little girls. And I mean really dress-up Barbie stuff. I'm still wondering exactly what has my alter-ego been looking at on Amazon.
Well, it being used by adult sites is the worst case scenario right there.
I mean, one day I could be doing my porn surfi^H^H^H^H^H research on some innocent topic like "anal bdsm gangbang" and next, BAM, a popup comes and says "Mr Moraelin, our mining your history has determined that you've been repeatedly on EA's The Sims 3 site, at least once on the registration site of Hello Kitty Online, in at least one thread named Barbie Horse Adventures Review, and have ordered an iPhone for Christmas. Other users who visited those sites, also visited our gay site, and our guide to coming out of the closet."
Before I get started, I can relate to what you're saying and, for what it's worth, you have my compassion. There is no shortage of asshat bosses around, if you're a programmer.
But for the scope of strictly "I have a genius idea, now I just need an X to make it work", I still say that X can have more values than "programmer". You're seeing the ones where X is a programmer more, just because you're one.
But for example, I dabbled a bit in modding 3D games and read a few such boards. You routinely see people who thought they have a great idea and "just need a 3d artist to implement it." If you look around those boards enough, you're pretty much guaranteed to eventually see someone who had some idea that is so great that you should immediately implement it and give him credit for it. Even if that idea actually boils down to thousands of hours of editing meshes and textures and maps, hey, he's done the hard work of coming up with the idea, you should get right to the boring manual-labor job of actually implementing it.
Well, he had made the graphics for a couple of small games you've probably never heard of. So I guess you could call him some kind of artist, at least. The only problem was that basically he never got out of the mentality that he's designing games. Effectively, he didn't as much design a web site or a navigation menu, he made it effectively a minigame by any other name.
Other than that, well, I see no point in going No True Scottsman about it. He's a guy who used to make graphics for games, and suddenly he was the one who should decide what a web-site should look like. Was he a _real_ graphics guy? Maybe. Maybe not. The ones who had any power to say "yes" or "no" to his crazy ideas sure thought he was one. In the end, that was everything that mattered.
That said, from your example and mine, I'm starting to get the idea that it's not just programmers these people need. Before even needing that, they could use a few more experts, starting with interface designers and usability experts. And maybe someone who understands the business side of that idea too.
Honestly, the more I think about it, I don't even think it's just programmers they miss. People spew all sorts of half baked ideas, and thanks to the Dunning-Kruger effect, the more unqualified they are to judge that, the more that half-baked idea sounds like a stroke of pure genius. I've had to sign NDA's for ideas boiling down to "we'll make a portal site and have an IPO and people will give us lots and lots of money", and those people seemed to genuinely be convinced that someone would be just itching to steal _that_ pure genius idea.
Heck, it's not even about programs. People have "genius" ideas about business, games, mods, etc. Now someone just has to do the boring trivial stuff like balancing the gameplay or making that business idea work. They did their part and had the idea, and should get the credit, right?
Lived through it? I programmed something like that
on
'I Just Need a Programmer'
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Suddenly all the fans scream to life, desperately trying to keep the Comet Cursor that suddenly is hanging a fricking pocket watch off your arrow like a swing ball of snot from blowing your CPU, your modems strain under a bazillion animated GIFs, while you are blinded by a neon purple background with snot green text in the always evil "OMG Ponies!" style, complete with little stardust shit dripping off their "brilliant" prose, when SLAM the overload of total lameness kills Win98 and you are staring at a BSOD, which sadly is kinda comforting at that moment because at least it ain't fricking purple or swinging snot clocks. So don't joke about Geocities pal, those of us that lived through it will end up having nightmares! That is like joking about Bonzi Buddy to PC repairman, you just DON'T, okay?
Lived through it? Dude, I actually had to program something like that in 1999. The other folks in the team were calling the graphics designer turned app designer The Antichrist, because his ideas made everyone cringe.
Green text on purple background? You kids don't know how good you have it. Oh, what we wouldn't have given for something as readable as green on bright purple. See, the Antichrist's idea was orange-ish yellow text on yellowish orange background, or in some parts the other way around. Even telling him that medically a lot of people will be unable to read that poor contrast did nothing to move him.
He had an idea for navigation that thankfully got dropped because he made the mistake of showing it to some investors and nobody could understand how they'd use it to get from page A to page B. Even that was better than the idea he had for some other site, where you literally had to find a scrap of paper with the action you wanted to do in a heap of newspaper cuts. I don't even mean newspaper style scraps arranged in a neat menu, but literally finding the one you want in a heap.
And yes, 1 MB+ of graphics per page.
Remember that this was the age of dot-coms, when they sold such craps to investors based on the idea that browsing some site should be an "experience". You don't go to some news portal site to read news, you go to have a unique experience, see?;)
Before I start, yes, your basic premise is correct. Recent studies show that religion does correlate with a higher fear of death. The more religious some people are, the more they'll demand any medical procedure, any woowoo, any bullshit homeopathic pills, to keep them alive, long after being told that it won't help any more. The same people preaching that X is with Jesus now, and praying to Jesus will help Y, and so on, all their lives, are scared shitless of meeting Jesus when their time is almost up.
BUT, IMHO, the explanation seems to actually be simpler. False hope seems to actually be a source of stress, because it introduces an uncertainty and delays just accepting reality. In another study, people who hoped that something will be cured sooner or later with a transplant, were actually more miserable than people who had accepted their condition as it is. Granted, the condition wasn't death, but same general idea. The ones who just accepted that they have some condition and they better get used to it, just moved on with their lives and learned to live with that condition. The ones hoping to reverse it, were keeping thinking about it and being insecure about when or if they'll be cured.
Seems to me like the same could apply to mortality. The sooner you accept that yes, it will happen, and even your cells are pre-programmed to eventually let you die (see, telomeres), the sooner you stop keeping thinking about it, and the insecurity of whether the comforting fairy tale is actually true, and everything.
Basically my take is that you could make a religion without any hell whatsoever. (See the ancient Egyptian religions, for example.) Promise people just a heaven. And IMHO it will still just serve to get people more stressed about death, via the simple insecurity and doubt about that fairy tale.
Plus, really, when I look at religion and at least some religious people, it seems to me like a recipe to keep thinking about death all the time and stressing oneself with it. For some people, before they even fully realize what death is, as children, they start having to do some "if I die before I wake" prayer before bed. Every effing day. Go to church, hear some more about death. Talk to some fundie neighbours, hear some more about death. Hear about some preacher's latest idiocy, chances are, death will be in there somehow. Etc.
I mean, seriously, if someone devoted the same amount of thinking and talking and bargaining with imaginary entities about the possibility of getting laid off or some other misfortune, you can probably see how it wouldn't do much to improve their mood. And how it would just serve as a feedback loop to make them even more worried about a possible layoff. It's like a constant reminder to worry about that some more.
I can't see why it would be any different for death: if someone dedicates their life to regularly worrying about it, yep, I would very much expect them to be more worried about it.
And this is news? No, really. When you even have guys from those review sites occasionally joking things like "we wanted to move to a zero to five star rating system, but EA demanded 95% or more rating for their latest game, so we moved to a 95% to 100% system and gave them 95%", or when you occasionally see a review totally hating everything about a game (e.g., see the old Black And White review on Firing Squad which even went the extra mile to say that you might like it if it's your first game and can't compare it to a good game, but otherwise stay off) and then give it a 87% score... tell me anyone actually is gullible to base their buying decisions on that.
Even the relatively 2000's trend of some site to pick on some 20 year old freeware game to trash and valiantly give a 5% rating, or make a list of "top 10 worst games ever" that nobody ever heard of, isn't really enough to make anyone with half a brain notice that you still don't see them giving less than 90% to anything new from a major publisher, or that they fail to mention major problems for major publishers.
Well, I suppose it's good to have it officially. Maybe it'll sink in this time. Nah, who am I kidding.
Well, yes, if you use the offline meaning of friend, circa 1990 or earlier. In the meantime, "social networks" and online games devalued it to meaning basically "one of the 2000 people on a list of names of people not only I don't know personally, but I wouldn't even remember their name without that list" (check out the Dunbar number for humans: it's not 2000) or just "random stranger I met in some online game, who was healing well and I might look up in the next raid if our secondary healer is late again."
Either way, to be on someone's friend list on some online service, and doubly so in a game or game network, it doesn't mean the same thing as the kind of friend you've been knowing for years and going bowling with. It often just means some guy who's just one step above perfect stranger, but short of what you'd even call "acquaintance" IRL and very very much short of what would pass for a "RL" friend. You've played together once or twice, have seen his character, maybe know that he had awesome damage per second or maybe can't remember even that about him. But other than that, for a lot of them you don't really know much. He could be the nicest guy, or he could be a psychotic dude who has voices in his head telling to do weird things.
So basically let's not do the equivocation fallacy. Just because some things would be expected for the old RL meaning of "friend", doesn't mean they're equally expected or even sane for the watered down online meaning of "friend".
yes that's right, perpetuate those negative male stereotypes like a good feminist.
Except for the fact that nobody said it's a stereotypes about all males. Just that such people do exist.
Frankly, out of the population at large, about 10% are retarded. (So, if you thought there must be a million retards running around on WoW, you were probably actually right.) About 1 in 30 are sociopaths. About 1.5% are schizophrenic. Etc.
You don't even need to do more than stand in Stormwind or Orgrimar or Dalaran to come in contact with several of each of the above. And it's those that most people would rather avoid.
The sample around you on any given server will include everyone from nice-guy to deranged stalker, and from level headed guy to the one who foams at the mouth and spews death threats if you as much as rolled need on the dagger he wanted. And you don't know which is which. Yeah, you're probably going to tell me _you_ aren't the kind anyone should be affraid of, but then so would the guy who sends death threats to the girl who doesn't want to meet him IRL. And you don't know who is who. And most importantly Blizzard didn't propose to vet everyone who'd see those real names first: it's not just you who'd see them, it's also every psychotic and stalker and whatever out there.
But otherwise, yeah, thanks for being the kind of cretin who takes any possible criticism of any particular male or male subset as, verily, a personal attack on males everywhere, and the work of those evil feminists.
Blizzard too wanted to do just that. They backed down on RealID only because of the massive negative reaction -- and the cynics would say probably temporarily, until they manage to find some better excuse.
The original idea for RealID was precisely that it will be on for everyone. Including, yes, that Death Knight who you think has teh hots for you because she boosted you once in the Deadmines, and that healer who must be all over your junk 'cause she was healing you more, and that hunter who probably wants your child because she agreed with you twice on the boards, and whatnot. And everyone who ever posted on the boards, including to ask for some tech support. Why do you think there was that much outrage and some women were scared shitless of stalkers and rapists when that idea came out?
So let's not pretend that Blizzard was so much smarter or better people. Blizzard wanted to rape your privacy twice as hard as Apple for a quick buck, they just had to back down when their idea turned out as popular as free kicks in the crotch for everyone.
Actually, BS. While the trolls were the first excuse Blizzard thought of, they also gave interviews in which they explicitly stated that they want to get more users out of it. They were hoping you'd basically advertise their cash cow for them, either directly or via the human tendency for mindless conformism. Think, "ooh, Jack and Jill from work and 10 of their facebook 'friends' are playing WoW, let's join them."
Heck, they even tried to spin it as a positive thing that they want your "friends of friends" (read, and anyone from the list of 2000 names someone can't even remember without the list, of someone you added just because there was no other global friend option) to keep messaging you they want you to return and tank for their preciousss epics. That's their #1 way to retain players long past the point where they've seen all quests and got bored with the repetitive raid grind. There must be a million people just in Blizzard's player base who are there just because of some delusion that if they quit a game they got bored with, or even if they skip one raid, they'll be somehow failing their guild and their "friends" who need them. Blizard just wanted to take that to the next level: let those people know who you are, where you are and what are they doing, and basically just help create more peer pressure to keep paying.
Heck, for their own BattleNet the above _still_ is listed as an advantage. That you can see if someone is playing Diablo or StarCraft instead of coming help get your epics, and you can message them to come back.
Basically I doubt that trolls were even a factor there, except as a more palatable excuse.
And in that aspect, I don't think Apple's move is any different. They too hope to use people's names to get more business, and probably give just as little about your privacy if it helps make a quick buck.
And frankly, how is it different from spam anyway? Anyone who knows me well enough to be called a friend, already knows how to contact me and ask me if I want to join in anything. Like, you know, send an email first, or give a call, or even an SMS, or whatever. If an invitation comes out of the blue actually needs something -- name or otherwise -- to convince me it's not random spam, then it _is_ spam. The only difference is that instead of being a batch run, it gives idiots a button to spam all their contacts for Apple's benefit.
And really, how's plastering someone's name on it going to help anyway? If I see my buddy's John Doe' name on an unsolicited email trying to sell me Viagra or wanting me to open a "taxes.xls.exe" file, I will think "Joe Job", not "ooh, it must be genuine". Why would I think if it's an other kind unsolicited ad, and John never bothered telling me about it before, it's any better? And yes, there will be smacktards who fall for it anyway, but then you could give most of those an email from "login.scam@i-pwn-u.ru" and they'd follow it anyway.
Well, the examples they used do have multiplayer, while Angband doesn't. And they do talk about training your filtering _relevant_ information.
And if it's one thing that my days of counter-strike and other multiplayer FPS-es taught me, the only relevant information, the only thing that another player needs to know on a given map is (A) his mother's weight, (B) her sexual exploits, and (C) his real sexuality. At least that's what everyone was telling me, anyway. I came in expecting stuff like, you know, strategies to use, or who must lay suppression fire for whom and when, but got quickly disabused of the notion that such thing matter. The only thing I was left afterwards was a horribly complicated graph of who fucked whose mom, and how many hundreds of pounds did she weigh;)
Also, that buying a sniper rifle equals coming out of the closet. And your mom suddenly doubles in weight and becomes more sexually active, or something;)
Also that older fat women are uber-sexy, the way everyone was calling someone else's mom fat _and_ bragging about fucking her. I think we should get the fashion industry to play FPS, because they're doing something wrong using only thin models;)
So, anyway, until such time as Angband gets a mod to stimulate your ability to filter such relevant information, I'm affraid it doesn't count;)
Which is exactly the kind of mindset I called OCPD. If it's not perfect, it's crap. A.k.a., the Nirvana Fallacy.
And I find it just as annoying both ways. Both when someone has to pretend that even having a crash on a bad day is the end of the world, and fanboys who have to pretend that no flaw exists at all, lest their beloved game is crap.
In reality it's a complex thing with many factors and variables. There are the good parts in column A and the annoyances in column B. If the difference between A and B is still a fun experience on the whole, that's that.
Yes, the bugs are an annoyance, make no mistake. They go definitely in the minus column. But the question is: was the game between them fun enough to make up for that. For some people, it was. I guess for others less so.
The whole pretense that the bugs are the only thing that matters or should be the only thing to discuss about a game, is plain old silly.
And speaking of which, you know what I find even sillier? People who haven't even played the damned game at all, making the biggest fuss, either that it's the greatest ever or that it's unplayable crap. Apparently just out of some sheep mentality that they must fit with the herd bleating this way or the other. Do you actually have any first hand experience to share? Yes, anecdotes aren't data, but second hand hearsay and wild confabulations are even less material to base judgments and pronouncements on.
I don't think you need technical people, as in, programmers or IT people, as testers. The tester's job isn't to also diagnose a loose pointer. They just have to find what doesn't work and how to reproduce it by in-game actions. Or even better, provide a savegame where the bug happens, and maybe from right before doing whatever causes the bug.
But obviously you still need intelligent people, and who can understand such ideas as "state" or "combination". But I think a lot of people do, without having had a CS education.
Well, as I was saying, I guess I got lucky, because for me it didn't crash anywhere near that often, and most certainly not clustered. I guess I can see how it would be annoying to be hit by a cluster of them, though.
A dozen crashes in a single 35 hour playthrough, post-patch?
Which boils down to an average of one crash every 3 hours or so... hmm, well, I guess your mileage may vary, I think I didn't get as many myself.
But either way, unless you disabled the autosave, it's not the end of the world.
Missions that can't be completed?
Personally I haven't encountered any, but I guess the other fellow must have taken a different way through the game, so it's possible. I can see how I'd be annoyed if that happened to me, but, as I was saying, luckily enough it didn't.
Poor graphics performance on a popular brand of video card?
Well, correction: piss-poor graphics performance on both major brands of video cards:p On ATI it just happens that someone released a.dll which causes it to think the card can't support the animations that cause it. It can be fixed, though. There is a console command to disable the facial animations that cause that slowdown.
A few glitches would be acceptable, but this is extreme.
I guess you're really not into MMOs, are you? Because I can tell you that getting disconnected after a few hours or hitting some heavy lag happens on every one of them, by simple virtue of having a public network in between.
Not that it excuses Bethesda, they should have still tested it and fixed it. But from a player point of view, this pretense that it's the end of the world if that happens... dunno, why isn't it the end of the world on WoW then?
Bashing the game for these bugs isn't obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, as you put it.
Bashing the game is ok. Pretending that only one aspect alone should determine what I buy, is on the other hand OCPD material.
Look, if you want to not buy the game, don't buy it. I couldn't give a crap. But reading a whole thread of basically pretending that the whole "vote" is just about buggy vs non-buggy games, is surrealistic.
There are other RPGs to play.
Yes, I play them too. I'm ploughing my way through Gothic 4 these days, whenever I'm not making funny swords for Fallout.
There's no way I would reward a developer for putting out such a shoddy product.
Your choice. I would reward them for making something this complex.
There's no way I would even want to play a game with so many problems. It would totally detract from the enjoyment
Again, so I trust you never played more than the trial of any MMO either? Because the same problems will be there too, and that time inherently.
unless you think random crashes add to the excitement.
Or unless I can see enough shades of grey to balance 3 hours of fun vs 5 minutes of restarting the program.
Would you accept a television that switched itself off 12 times in 35 hours?
Depends on what other differences there are between that and the other TVs I can buy. E.g., if for the same price I can buy a plasma TV which turns itself off every 2-3 hours, or a normal TV which doesn't, you can bet your ass that I'll buy the first one. (What, doesn't anyone else bring along a burro so they can wager on it?;)
IOW, for games the choice is more complex than that one variable.
Would you accept a CD player that switched itself off 12 times in 35 hours?
Yup. See above.
Would you accept a car that has an engine that cuts out 12 times in 35 hours?
When a game crash becomes able to cause a pileup on the highway and kill several innocents, I'll see the point in that analogy. Otherwise, it's at best misleading, and I see no point in addressing it.
Would you accept a light fitting that switched the light off 12 times in 35 hours?
Oh, yes. Please. Now if it turned the lights randomly ON in mom's basement^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H my lair, that would be a fatal bug. But turning them off? That should be a feature;)
Slashdot Mirror
It's certainly one thing to motivate some people, but not the only one by far. E.g., Bartle's famous paper dates from the days of MUDs and identifies 4 types of players:
1. Achievers (Diamonds): these are the kind you describe. They play to achieve something, be it a more epic sword, more money in the bank, a funky title, or a higher score.
2. Explorers (Spades): these are the kind of people who play to find out stuff. It can be some mountain pass that nobody else heard about, or how the game works, or try to find every single quest, etc. For example the kinds that put numbers in a spreadsheet to find out the exact numbers in COH's attack formulas were explorers. Essentially these guys play to reverse-engineer the game.
3. Socializers (Hearts): these guys basically treat the game as a chat room that incidentally has a video game attached. They're there to make friends, chat, organize some guild event, tutor newbies, etc. Even actually playing the game is only a tool towards interacting with people.
4. Killers (Clubs): these guys are not the PvP gang, but the people who live to harass, annoy, gank, and make life as miserable as possible for others. Their highest reward and achievement is getting someone to leave the game entirely, effectively perma-killing them in the game. Hence the "killers" name. The rest of us tend to call them "griefers" or simply "asshats".
Bearing in mind, though, that nobody is 100% in one category, but you can still classify people that way by their predominant interest and behaviour.
And that's actually just one of many classifications.
At any rate, the moral of the story is: please don't generalize. There's nothing wrong if you're an achiever, but do realize that other people play for very different reasons than you do.
For some it is. Just look at the chunk of the USA right wing that I like to call the Cult Of Psychopathy. The kind for whom everything is measured in money, is only motivated by money, justified by money (at least judging by the "but it makes money for the investors!!!" argument as trumping any other moral consideration and verily being the line that separates good from evil), etc. And for whom any kind of social arrangement that isn't defined by even sending each other a bill for calling the cops when you see the neighbour's home being broken in, is either some kind of oppressive statism, some godless nazi-communist-fascist threat (don't ask them to actually know what "nazi", "communism" or "fascism" actually are,) or both.
I'll bet that for some the thought of people doing _anything_ without sending someone a bill, is surprising as heck, scary as heck, or both.
Heh. You do realize, I hope, that the starter zone is just that. It's partially a tutorial (e.g., telling you how to use Immolate or Steady Shot or whatever on some dummies) and partially giving you some back-story for your race and helping get in-character, so to sleep.
It's basically the equivalent of, dunno, castle Cousland if you played Dragon Age as a human noble. Or that escaping-from-the-hospital-station level in Mass Effect 2, while being taught how to control the game. Or the tutorial town in Fallout New Vegas. Etc. You get the idea.
It's not like it's the end of the content or anything.
Honestly, I can't even imagine (A) why you'd actually want a tutorial longer than 22 minutes, and (B) seriously, why not go to another race's tutorial zone if you need to practice the start game some more?
And, basically, who cares? Not all games are made to be won or lost. There is also no winning Elite, or Tetris, or Pac-Man.
What matters is whether you had fun playing it for X hours or not. Which fun can come from gear and achievements, but it also can come from doing quests, or exploration, or social interaction with other people, or just trying to be the biggest dick without getting banned, or really whatever floats your boat.
Essentially if the only point you can see is comparing dick size and complaining that the game doesn't give you an "OK, you won" popup, then I can see how maybe it's not the game for you. I'm sure there's a bunny-hopping and teabagging simulator... err... FPS out there more suited to your needs.
So, you know, don't? I keep hearing that complaint, and it never ceases to amaze me in it's pencils-up-the-nose underpants-on-head idiocy.
Guess what? There is no paragraph in the TOS that says "Blizzard can ban your account and kill your dog if you play less than 5-10 hours a day." You can play just half an hour a week on weekends or take a month off, if you wish. The game was designed to be playable in whatever portions you wish.
Heck, even if you're in a fairly obsessive "raiding guild", we're no longer in the pre-BC age of 40-man raids that take all night. You can do some reasonable raiding in two hours a day, which still falls short of the 5-10 hours a day bullshit. Or you can find yourself a social guild and never have any schedule at all.
Frankly, it seems to me that the only ones who come up with that stupid objection are those who think they're basically playing to prove penis size. It can't be a coincidence that it almost always comes together with the "but you can't win!!!111eleventeen" objection and with the whining that all there is to do is collect the best gear and all achievements. They end up caught in some race to have all the penis size symbols, and have them yesterday if possible, and not even seeing any other way to play than grind 10 hours a day towards that coveted King Of The Hill Position.
In reality, it's a race that exists only in your own mind, and a prize that exists only in your own mind. In reality, almost nobody actually gives a flying fuck about your being King Of The Hill or not, nor about how fast you got there. If you don't want to put 5-10 hours a day in a race that exists only in your own mind, then don't. It's really that simple.
Of course, you may have to find yourself
I don't. That's the problem. I resolved I must buy more manly games, you know, Sweaty Guys Wrestling and Full-Contact Cock-Punching Extreme Edition to change Amazon's opinion of my tastes. Granted, now it probably thinks I'm gay, but it's a start ;)
Reminds me of a couple of months back when amazon.de, supposedly based on my previous purchases and pages visited, recommended me 3 new games for very little girls. And I mean really dress-up Barbie stuff. I'm still wondering exactly what has my alter-ego been looking at on Amazon.
Well, it being used by adult sites is the worst case scenario right there.
I mean, one day I could be doing my porn surfi^H^H^H^H^H research on some innocent topic like "anal bdsm gangbang" and next, BAM, a popup comes and says "Mr Moraelin, our mining your history has determined that you've been repeatedly on EA's The Sims 3 site, at least once on the registration site of Hello Kitty Online, in at least one thread named Barbie Horse Adventures Review, and have ordered an iPhone for Christmas. Other users who visited those sites, also visited our gay site, and our guide to coming out of the closet."
Before I get started, I can relate to what you're saying and, for what it's worth, you have my compassion. There is no shortage of asshat bosses around, if you're a programmer.
But for the scope of strictly "I have a genius idea, now I just need an X to make it work", I still say that X can have more values than "programmer". You're seeing the ones where X is a programmer more, just because you're one.
But for example, I dabbled a bit in modding 3D games and read a few such boards. You routinely see people who thought they have a great idea and "just need a 3d artist to implement it." If you look around those boards enough, you're pretty much guaranteed to eventually see someone who had some idea that is so great that you should immediately implement it and give him credit for it. Even if that idea actually boils down to thousands of hours of editing meshes and textures and maps, hey, he's done the hard work of coming up with the idea, you should get right to the boring manual-labor job of actually implementing it.
Well, he had made the graphics for a couple of small games you've probably never heard of. So I guess you could call him some kind of artist, at least. The only problem was that basically he never got out of the mentality that he's designing games. Effectively, he didn't as much design a web site or a navigation menu, he made it effectively a minigame by any other name.
Other than that, well, I see no point in going No True Scottsman about it. He's a guy who used to make graphics for games, and suddenly he was the one who should decide what a web-site should look like. Was he a _real_ graphics guy? Maybe. Maybe not. The ones who had any power to say "yes" or "no" to his crazy ideas sure thought he was one. In the end, that was everything that mattered.
That said, from your example and mine, I'm starting to get the idea that it's not just programmers these people need. Before even needing that, they could use a few more experts, starting with interface designers and usability experts. And maybe someone who understands the business side of that idea too.
Honestly, the more I think about it, I don't even think it's just programmers they miss. People spew all sorts of half baked ideas, and thanks to the Dunning-Kruger effect, the more unqualified they are to judge that, the more that half-baked idea sounds like a stroke of pure genius. I've had to sign NDA's for ideas boiling down to "we'll make a portal site and have an IPO and people will give us lots and lots of money", and those people seemed to genuinely be convinced that someone would be just itching to steal _that_ pure genius idea.
Heck, it's not even about programs. People have "genius" ideas about business, games, mods, etc. Now someone just has to do the boring trivial stuff like balancing the gameplay or making that business idea work. They did their part and had the idea, and should get the credit, right?
Lived through it? Dude, I actually had to program something like that in 1999. The other folks in the team were calling the graphics designer turned app designer The Antichrist, because his ideas made everyone cringe.
Green text on purple background? You kids don't know how good you have it. Oh, what we wouldn't have given for something as readable as green on bright purple. See, the Antichrist's idea was orange-ish yellow text on yellowish orange background, or in some parts the other way around. Even telling him that medically a lot of people will be unable to read that poor contrast did nothing to move him.
He had an idea for navigation that thankfully got dropped because he made the mistake of showing it to some investors and nobody could understand how they'd use it to get from page A to page B. Even that was better than the idea he had for some other site, where you literally had to find a scrap of paper with the action you wanted to do in a heap of newspaper cuts. I don't even mean newspaper style scraps arranged in a neat menu, but literally finding the one you want in a heap.
And yes, 1 MB+ of graphics per page.
Remember that this was the age of dot-coms, when they sold such craps to investors based on the idea that browsing some site should be an "experience". You don't go to some news portal site to read news, you go to have a unique experience, see? ;)
Before I start, yes, your basic premise is correct. Recent studies show that religion does correlate with a higher fear of death. The more religious some people are, the more they'll demand any medical procedure, any woowoo, any bullshit homeopathic pills, to keep them alive, long after being told that it won't help any more. The same people preaching that X is with Jesus now, and praying to Jesus will help Y, and so on, all their lives, are scared shitless of meeting Jesus when their time is almost up.
BUT, IMHO, the explanation seems to actually be simpler. False hope seems to actually be a source of stress, because it introduces an uncertainty and delays just accepting reality. In another study, people who hoped that something will be cured sooner or later with a transplant, were actually more miserable than people who had accepted their condition as it is. Granted, the condition wasn't death, but same general idea. The ones who just accepted that they have some condition and they better get used to it, just moved on with their lives and learned to live with that condition. The ones hoping to reverse it, were keeping thinking about it and being insecure about when or if they'll be cured.
Seems to me like the same could apply to mortality. The sooner you accept that yes, it will happen, and even your cells are pre-programmed to eventually let you die (see, telomeres), the sooner you stop keeping thinking about it, and the insecurity of whether the comforting fairy tale is actually true, and everything.
Basically my take is that you could make a religion without any hell whatsoever. (See the ancient Egyptian religions, for example.) Promise people just a heaven. And IMHO it will still just serve to get people more stressed about death, via the simple insecurity and doubt about that fairy tale.
Plus, really, when I look at religion and at least some religious people, it seems to me like a recipe to keep thinking about death all the time and stressing oneself with it. For some people, before they even fully realize what death is, as children, they start having to do some "if I die before I wake" prayer before bed. Every effing day. Go to church, hear some more about death. Talk to some fundie neighbours, hear some more about death. Hear about some preacher's latest idiocy, chances are, death will be in there somehow. Etc.
I mean, seriously, if someone devoted the same amount of thinking and talking and bargaining with imaginary entities about the possibility of getting laid off or some other misfortune, you can probably see how it wouldn't do much to improve their mood. And how it would just serve as a feedback loop to make them even more worried about a possible layoff. It's like a constant reminder to worry about that some more.
I can't see why it would be any different for death: if someone dedicates their life to regularly worrying about it, yep, I would very much expect them to be more worried about it.
And this is news? No, really. When you even have guys from those review sites occasionally joking things like "we wanted to move to a zero to five star rating system, but EA demanded 95% or more rating for their latest game, so we moved to a 95% to 100% system and gave them 95%", or when you occasionally see a review totally hating everything about a game (e.g., see the old Black And White review on Firing Squad which even went the extra mile to say that you might like it if it's your first game and can't compare it to a good game, but otherwise stay off) and then give it a 87% score... tell me anyone actually is gullible to base their buying decisions on that.
Even the relatively 2000's trend of some site to pick on some 20 year old freeware game to trash and valiantly give a 5% rating, or make a list of "top 10 worst games ever" that nobody ever heard of, isn't really enough to make anyone with half a brain notice that you still don't see them giving less than 90% to anything new from a major publisher, or that they fail to mention major problems for major publishers.
Well, I suppose it's good to have it officially. Maybe it'll sink in this time. Nah, who am I kidding.
Well, yes, if you use the offline meaning of friend, circa 1990 or earlier. In the meantime, "social networks" and online games devalued it to meaning basically "one of the 2000 people on a list of names of people not only I don't know personally, but I wouldn't even remember their name without that list" (check out the Dunbar number for humans: it's not 2000) or just "random stranger I met in some online game, who was healing well and I might look up in the next raid if our secondary healer is late again."
Either way, to be on someone's friend list on some online service, and doubly so in a game or game network, it doesn't mean the same thing as the kind of friend you've been knowing for years and going bowling with. It often just means some guy who's just one step above perfect stranger, but short of what you'd even call "acquaintance" IRL and very very much short of what would pass for a "RL" friend. You've played together once or twice, have seen his character, maybe know that he had awesome damage per second or maybe can't remember even that about him. But other than that, for a lot of them you don't really know much. He could be the nicest guy, or he could be a psychotic dude who has voices in his head telling to do weird things.
So basically let's not do the equivocation fallacy. Just because some things would be expected for the old RL meaning of "friend", doesn't mean they're equally expected or even sane for the watered down online meaning of "friend".
Except for the fact that nobody said it's a stereotypes about all males. Just that such people do exist.
Frankly, out of the population at large, about 10% are retarded. (So, if you thought there must be a million retards running around on WoW, you were probably actually right.) About 1 in 30 are sociopaths. About 1.5% are schizophrenic. Etc.
You don't even need to do more than stand in Stormwind or Orgrimar or Dalaran to come in contact with several of each of the above. And it's those that most people would rather avoid.
The sample around you on any given server will include everyone from nice-guy to deranged stalker, and from level headed guy to the one who foams at the mouth and spews death threats if you as much as rolled need on the dagger he wanted. And you don't know which is which. Yeah, you're probably going to tell me _you_ aren't the kind anyone should be affraid of, but then so would the guy who sends death threats to the girl who doesn't want to meet him IRL. And you don't know who is who. And most importantly Blizzard didn't propose to vet everyone who'd see those real names first: it's not just you who'd see them, it's also every psychotic and stalker and whatever out there.
But otherwise, yeah, thanks for being the kind of cretin who takes any possible criticism of any particular male or male subset as, verily, a personal attack on males everywhere, and the work of those evil feminists.
Except nobody said that _that_ is the problem.
Blizzard too wanted to do just that. They backed down on RealID only because of the massive negative reaction -- and the cynics would say probably temporarily, until they manage to find some better excuse.
The original idea for RealID was precisely that it will be on for everyone. Including, yes, that Death Knight who you think has teh hots for you because she boosted you once in the Deadmines, and that healer who must be all over your junk 'cause she was healing you more, and that hunter who probably wants your child because she agreed with you twice on the boards, and whatnot. And everyone who ever posted on the boards, including to ask for some tech support. Why do you think there was that much outrage and some women were scared shitless of stalkers and rapists when that idea came out?
So let's not pretend that Blizzard was so much smarter or better people. Blizzard wanted to rape your privacy twice as hard as Apple for a quick buck, they just had to back down when their idea turned out as popular as free kicks in the crotch for everyone.
Actually, BS. While the trolls were the first excuse Blizzard thought of, they also gave interviews in which they explicitly stated that they want to get more users out of it. They were hoping you'd basically advertise their cash cow for them, either directly or via the human tendency for mindless conformism. Think, "ooh, Jack and Jill from work and 10 of their facebook 'friends' are playing WoW, let's join them."
Heck, they even tried to spin it as a positive thing that they want your "friends of friends" (read, and anyone from the list of 2000 names someone can't even remember without the list, of someone you added just because there was no other global friend option) to keep messaging you they want you to return and tank for their preciousss epics. That's their #1 way to retain players long past the point where they've seen all quests and got bored with the repetitive raid grind. There must be a million people just in Blizzard's player base who are there just because of some delusion that if they quit a game they got bored with, or even if they skip one raid, they'll be somehow failing their guild and their "friends" who need them. Blizard just wanted to take that to the next level: let those people know who you are, where you are and what are they doing, and basically just help create more peer pressure to keep paying.
Heck, for their own BattleNet the above _still_ is listed as an advantage. That you can see if someone is playing Diablo or StarCraft instead of coming help get your epics, and you can message them to come back.
Basically I doubt that trolls were even a factor there, except as a more palatable excuse.
And in that aspect, I don't think Apple's move is any different. They too hope to use people's names to get more business, and probably give just as little about your privacy if it helps make a quick buck.
And frankly, how is it different from spam anyway? Anyone who knows me well enough to be called a friend, already knows how to contact me and ask me if I want to join in anything. Like, you know, send an email first, or give a call, or even an SMS, or whatever. If an invitation comes out of the blue actually needs something -- name or otherwise -- to convince me it's not random spam, then it _is_ spam. The only difference is that instead of being a batch run, it gives idiots a button to spam all their contacts for Apple's benefit.
And really, how's plastering someone's name on it going to help anyway? If I see my buddy's John Doe' name on an unsolicited email trying to sell me Viagra or wanting me to open a "taxes.xls.exe" file, I will think "Joe Job", not "ooh, it must be genuine". Why would I think if it's an other kind unsolicited ad, and John never bothered telling me about it before, it's any better? And yes, there will be smacktards who fall for it anyway, but then you could give most of those an email from "login.scam@i-pwn-u.ru" and they'd follow it anyway.
"They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." - Carl Sagan
Well, the examples they used do have multiplayer, while Angband doesn't. And they do talk about training your filtering _relevant_ information.
And if it's one thing that my days of counter-strike and other multiplayer FPS-es taught me, the only relevant information, the only thing that another player needs to know on a given map is (A) his mother's weight, (B) her sexual exploits, and (C) his real sexuality. At least that's what everyone was telling me, anyway. I came in expecting stuff like, you know, strategies to use, or who must lay suppression fire for whom and when, but got quickly disabused of the notion that such thing matter. The only thing I was left afterwards was a horribly complicated graph of who fucked whose mom, and how many hundreds of pounds did she weigh ;)
Also, that buying a sniper rifle equals coming out of the closet. And your mom suddenly doubles in weight and becomes more sexually active, or something ;)
Also that older fat women are uber-sexy, the way everyone was calling someone else's mom fat _and_ bragging about fucking her. I think we should get the fashion industry to play FPS, because they're doing something wrong using only thin models ;)
So, anyway, until such time as Angband gets a mod to stimulate your ability to filter such relevant information, I'm affraid it doesn't count ;)
Which is exactly the kind of mindset I called OCPD. If it's not perfect, it's crap. A.k.a., the Nirvana Fallacy.
And I find it just as annoying both ways. Both when someone has to pretend that even having a crash on a bad day is the end of the world, and fanboys who have to pretend that no flaw exists at all, lest their beloved game is crap.
In reality it's a complex thing with many factors and variables. There are the good parts in column A and the annoyances in column B. If the difference between A and B is still a fun experience on the whole, that's that.
Yes, the bugs are an annoyance, make no mistake. They go definitely in the minus column. But the question is: was the game between them fun enough to make up for that. For some people, it was. I guess for others less so.
The whole pretense that the bugs are the only thing that matters or should be the only thing to discuss about a game, is plain old silly.
And speaking of which, you know what I find even sillier? People who haven't even played the damned game at all, making the biggest fuss, either that it's the greatest ever or that it's unplayable crap. Apparently just out of some sheep mentality that they must fit with the herd bleating this way or the other. Do you actually have any first hand experience to share? Yes, anecdotes aren't data, but second hand hearsay and wild confabulations are even less material to base judgments and pronouncements on.
Well, maybe I should have qualified it better.
I don't think you need technical people, as in, programmers or IT people, as testers. The tester's job isn't to also diagnose a loose pointer. They just have to find what doesn't work and how to reproduce it by in-game actions. Or even better, provide a savegame where the bug happens, and maybe from right before doing whatever causes the bug.
But obviously you still need intelligent people, and who can understand such ideas as "state" or "combination". But I think a lot of people do, without having had a CS education.
Well, as I was saying, I guess I got lucky, because for me it didn't crash anywhere near that often, and most certainly not clustered. I guess I can see how it would be annoying to be hit by a cluster of them, though.
Which boils down to an average of one crash every 3 hours or so... hmm, well, I guess your mileage may vary, I think I didn't get as many myself.
But either way, unless you disabled the autosave, it's not the end of the world.
Personally I haven't encountered any, but I guess the other fellow must have taken a different way through the game, so it's possible. I can see how I'd be annoyed if that happened to me, but, as I was saying, luckily enough it didn't.
Well, correction: piss-poor graphics performance on both major brands of video cards :p On ATI it just happens that someone released a .dll which causes it to think the card can't support the animations that cause it. It can be fixed, though. There is a console command to disable the facial animations that cause that slowdown.
I guess you're really not into MMOs, are you? Because I can tell you that getting disconnected after a few hours or hitting some heavy lag happens on every one of them, by simple virtue of having a public network in between.
Not that it excuses Bethesda, they should have still tested it and fixed it. But from a player point of view, this pretense that it's the end of the world if that happens... dunno, why isn't it the end of the world on WoW then?
Bashing the game is ok. Pretending that only one aspect alone should determine what I buy, is on the other hand OCPD material.
Look, if you want to not buy the game, don't buy it. I couldn't give a crap. But reading a whole thread of basically pretending that the whole "vote" is just about buggy vs non-buggy games, is surrealistic.
Yes, I play them too. I'm ploughing my way through Gothic 4 these days, whenever I'm not making funny swords for Fallout.
Your choice. I would reward them for making something this complex.
Again, so I trust you never played more than the trial of any MMO either? Because the same problems will be there too, and that time inherently.
Or unless I can see enough shades of grey to balance 3 hours of fun vs 5 minutes of restarting the program.
Depends on what other differences there are between that and the other TVs I can buy. E.g., if for the same price I can buy a plasma TV which turns itself off every 2-3 hours, or a normal TV which doesn't, you can bet your ass that I'll buy the first one. (What, doesn't anyone else bring along a burro so they can wager on it?;)
IOW, for games the choice is more complex than that one variable.
Yup. See above.
When a game crash becomes able to cause a pileup on the highway and kill several innocents, I'll see the point in that analogy. Otherwise, it's at best misleading, and I see no point in addressing it.
Oh, yes. Please. Now if it turned the lights randomly ON in mom's basement^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H my lair, that would be a fatal bug. But turning them off? That should be a feature ;)