Disclaimer: I'm not that representative as a MMO player, and in fact I'll take a good SP RPG instead any day.
Still, on a scale of "pretty cool at least at low levels" to "its _only_ merit is the franchise name", WoW would be at the first end, SWG seemed _the_ poster child for the latter.
SWG, after all this time at it, has pretty much any problem you can imagine.
E.g., design problems, such as classes whose only source of income is hoping that someone would drop by and give them a tip. (Try making any money as a male entertainer, then tell me how it feels.)
E.g., underhanded custommer support, such as banning everyone who's been tipped with duped money. (Never mind that they can't even refuse a tip or know it's been with duped money.)
E.g., technical problems (a.k.a., bugs), such as seemingly having _massive_ lag even on a 50ms connection. Sometimes enemies you've just killed would hang around and seemingly talk to each other for another ten seconds or more. Sometimes they'd rise from the dead and melee you, then fall over dead again. Sometimes a whole herd of low level animals you've killed and already skinned when farming for resources, would remember "oh, wait, we were supposed to fight back" and give you literally a death by a thousand cuts. (Never underestimate the damage a tattooine chicken can do if 5 minutes worth of a whole herd is applied in a 1 second burst, not leaving you any time to heal or run or whatever.)
Etc. That's just scratching the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
And yes, changes which swing between bad, worse and horrible. And let's make up for it by giving some free in-game money to stimulate people to buy the latest expansion pack. (You get a free vehicle which happens to be the best vehicle in the game, and sells for over three million credits without even trying too hard.) Says a lot when an expansion pack's main merit is that it's a veiled and more socially acceptable way to buy gold.
In fact, the only game that sucked more, and even then at launch, was AO. You can read the AO review on Something Awful and rest assured it's entirely accurate. I can personally testify that all the problems described there were true, plus a bunch of others.
So does anyone still give a fuck about SWG, other than purely for franchise sake? If you took away its Star Wars license, it would shrivel and die like the piece of junk it is. So does anyone really give a damn if they move the timeline forwards, backwards or sideways? I'd assume that even out of the minority of desperate SW nerds who stay there just because it lets them dress like a jedi, the majority would be just as happy in any timeline as long as it has lightsabers and skimpy cantina-dancer outfits.
(I mean, obviously, other than Raph Koster, who uses the glory of having majorly fucked-up design for _two_ MMOs as an excuse to give interviews about good game design all over the place.)
1. Because if you just need some masturbation material, games offer piss-poor value for the money. For the price of one game, you could get a month's membership at a premium sex site, and the site will have more... ahem... "replay value". And that's already assuming that you're desperate enough to pay for that. There are plenty of sites that can fill your need for porn for no more than your ISP bill. I'd even give you a few links, but I'm sure you can google on your own.
Let me say that I'm not even anti-pornography or anything. But I wouldn't waste my money on a porn game anyway. Unless you're talking the small niche of hentai- or furry-fetishists, there's just nothing in a crude 3D model that doesn't look better on a real woman. And again, you can stare at a photo or movie of the latter for a lot less money, or no money at all.
So, seriously, the mind boggles when I see yet another idiot publisher betting it all on sex appeal, sometimes even at the risk of alienating their core market demographic. WTF is the rationale there? "You know, old chap, I bet noone knows how to find porn on the internet. I bet they're just starving to pay 50$ to see the heroine's pixelated polygonal ass in a thong, because otherwise they wouldn't find any." Stupid.
2. Because you're targetting the wrong demographic. If you want to sell smut to teenagers, you're gonna have to slip it past their parents. Plus, past the government and youth protection organizations and whatever, who _will_ slap it with an Adult Only rating and require some ID.
And past those teenagers themselves who might figure out that smuggling a porn magazine into their room is safer than playing "Mario's Anal Adventures: Peach Takes A Reaming" on the family TV in the living room. Or that quickly going to a web site while mom is out shopping, is safer than having to find a good answer to "oh, you're back from the game shop. Did you buy anything interesting?" or "uh, what's this Bukkake Fantasy 7 entry in the Start menu?"
So it's going for the entirely wrong age segment. The age where they're dumb enough and think with their gonads is the age where they don't also have all that freedom. And later some get a life, and some start at least being able to do the maths I've described at point 1, because it's their money they're blowing for a change.
3. Because appealing to a minority is no longer enough to cover a major game's development. You may still be able to pay for a cheap 2D hentai game out of it, but not for Quake 4.
There's a reason why you keep hearing about trying to appeal to female gamers and casual gamers and even retired senior-citizen gamers nowadays. Because the industry increasingly needs their money to survive.
Back in the days of Pong it didn't really matter. If you sold 1000 copies of a game you've made in a month, you could proclaim it a huge success and had actually made a tidy profit. So an industry which started with a 50-50 gender distribution among gamers, and they knew it, could easily afford to discard half the market, and focus on making whatever the horny immature lonely programmers wanted to code. It turned into an industry by lonely nerds for lonely nerds, but there was no loss in that anyway, since you still easily got the 1000 or even 10,000 buyers you needed in that niche.
But nowadays with game development costs being what they are, that's no longer enough. That's why everyone from Microsoft to Sony to EA suddenly proclaims their undying love and dedication to female gamers and casual gamers. Because having a game like The Sims which sold to a helluva lot of women (and to a helluva lot of casual gamer dads too) is what makes a profit, while being pegged into the hole of games _only_ for horny 16 year olds might as well make you a loss. (Most games nowadays make a loss, and the publisher uses the games who sell well to basically subsidize those who didn't.)
Of course, after a whole generation of "chicks don't play games" mentality and focusing only on horny 16 year old males, noone really knows how to even start about making a game for anyone else. But that's another story for another time.
"EQ2's engine is far superior in terms of appearance, but unfortunately wasn't right for the time. Causual gamers aren't carrying around the spec necessary to run it efficiently."
You're talking to someone on an A64 4000+, GeForce 7800 GTX and 2 GB RAM, so I like to think I have the system to run EQ2 at pretty good graphics settings. It looks higher res and higher polygon count, but at the same time it looks disturbingly _wrong_. Actually, I've highlighted the wrong word. The keyword should have been "disturbingly".
EQ2's world is higher polycount, higher res, and pixel-shaded to ludicrious extents, yes. E.g., it uses pixel-shaders even instead of detail textures, apparently just for the sake of being the most idiotically inefficient engine. It pretty much guarantees that anyone with a lower end system will see it looking like crap, yes.
But at the same time, even with all details turned on, it still looks disturbingly wrong. Fish that float _above_ the water and chase you floating over the land, cats that don't even freaking look like a cat (check out the pets on their site), detailed hair-physics animations... that clip through my body and whip around in unnatural ways, weird and inconsistent world in which I can run up one nearly-vertical cliff face but I'm stopped by a gentle hill a bit further down the road, etc, etc, etc. All in all, I find it _much_ easier to suspend disbelief in WoW's cartoonish world than in EQ2's supposedly photorealistic one, which, in the end, means that WoW's graphics are better (at doing their job.)
Even nastier said: Sony tried to substitute polygon counts and pixel shaders for talent. A quick-and-dirty "let's make a cat out of some ellipsoids in 3DSMax" hack works ok when you do that in 300 polygons, and people know not to expect details there. But when you aim for photorealism, it just looks bad.
"It isn't a step forward from what has been produced, but it does seem that a polished version of the old is what the MMO noobs are looking for."
Which is what Blizzard quality always meant. Diablo wasn't a revolutionary game either, and since we're talking WoW, Warcraft didn't create a new genre either. But they did take what existed and polished it like a gem. They polished not only the quality in the sense of extremely few bugs, but also the balance, the learning curve, the difficulty curve, the interface, etc.
Among other things, yes, it made their games very friendly and intuitive to new players. Compared to other games where even I, after 20 years of hardcore gaming, need a month to figure it out, any Blizzard game was such that you could put your grandma in front of it and have it clicking like a pro in no time. That's quality design too. Other games needed a horribly complicated, convoluted and inconsistent interface to offer the exact same depth (or lack of it, depending on how you want to look at it.)
And the same thing happened in WoW. They polished every single aspect of the genre to an extent that Sony never even considered. (And again, that Sony thereafter rushed to copy WoW's design in wholesale, says they too think Blizzard's version was better.)
And frankly, that's the kind of quality I'd like to see more of. If that makes me a "noob", so be it.
What did EQ2 have by comparison... let's see, in no particular order:
Bad graphics _and_ system requirements, huge load times, bad balance, a broken economy, various inconsistent quirks, a load of bugs, exploits, etc. Add launching it with the typical Sony lack of concern for what the market wants: e.g., that as launched it was non-soloable when your friends/guild/whatever are not online or not the right level. Now also add a completely broken internationalization for the non-english markets. Now add some Sony-class talent for pissing off their customers. Etc, etc, etc.
So, dunno, I don't have to assume any "fad" or "noob" conspiracies to see why EQ2 fared worse than WoW. So a POS fared worse than a polished game. Now that's a big surprise.
It depends on whether it'll actually be a better game than WoW, or just another "we've got a great franchise, so we can release any crap" exercise.
WoW itself also faced bigger franchises and established market leaders and won by being the better designed game, at least at lower levels. Whatever (legitimate) gripes you might have with the end-game grind, if you took someone new and gave him a level 1 account to every single MMO, chances are he'd find WoW the most fun.
That's what put WoW ahead, not franchise name, not "but everyone already plays EQ, so why would they even try a new MMO?", not anything else. The better designed game won.
And it had plenty of established competition. E.g., _the_ MMO at the time was EQ. All your MMO playing friends played it, your guild was on EQ, etc. Why would you move to move to WoW.
And EQ2 was just being released. For all other fame it might have had among gamers, _the_ name in the MMO market was Sony. (Think by comparison of another market. For all the fame and market Microsoft or Sony have, if you're into, say, platform games, then you think "Nintendo". Between a release by Microsoft or Sony and one from Nintendo, the platform fan will instinctively be more interested in the Nintendo release. Now you might be more interested in MS or Sony for other genres, but for platformers Nintendo is _the_ big name in the market. The same held for Sony and MMOs.)
Yet WoW handily won. Why? Because it was the better game.
Again, I stress that it wasn't just Blizzard's name or the Warcraft franchise. Bigger franchises, backed by bigger names, went down the garbage bin of the MMO market. E.g.,
- The Sims Online was based on _the_ bestselling PC game of all time. You know, the one that outsold any of Id's or Epic's or Blizzard's games, or a few of them combined. (And that's without even counting the sales for the 7 expansion packs.) For every single die-hard Warcraft player, the Koreans included, there were several of us TS gamers just waiting to move our virtual lives online. Yet for all the franchise name, and EA's marketting, TSO peaked around 100,000 subscribers and stayed there.
- SWG. Now that game was based on probably _the_ biggest franchise in history. Every single SW fan had waited for it like it was the second coming of Obi-wa... err... of Christ. If you have the patience to dig through the archive at PvP Online, Scott has a strip in which he captures the very essence of that expectation: one in which a character says goodbye to his friends, and says that having been a SW die-hard for all this time, he expects to never leave the SWG world once it's launched. That's how every single SW maniac felt about it.
Yet we ended up going back to other games, or later to WoW. Go figure.
What this huge rant is getting to is: the same applies to any other game. If DDO will be the better game, it _will_ unseat WoW, just like WoW has unseated the established names and franchises before it. If it will be the more traditional kind of "let's release some crap now and worry about balance or bugs later" MMO, it won't.
And I don't think this kind of Darwinism hurts the industry at all. The net result is that the good games and design elements survive (just look how much EQ2 rushed to copy from WoW for example), and the crap shrivels and dies. On the whole, we gamers are better off for it.
And maybe, just maybe, it will also force the industry to realize that quality _does_ sell. It's good and fine to have better screenshots (EQ2 has much better ones), or franchise names (SWG), or be the sequel to the best selling game (TSO), but at the end of the day, the higher quality game is the one that gets more of the market. And in the end that was the upper hand that Blizzard had all the time, even with their previous games.
No, I think you'll find that there actually are more scams.
I don't know if there are more scammers, though I wouldn't be surprised. See Penny Arcade's "Greater Fuckwad Theory". IIRC it went like, Normal Person + Anonymity + Captive Audience = Fuckwad. I'm guessing even psychopaths, which is what most of these scammers and spammers are, would be a lot more discrete in dealing with their RL neighbours than when they're hidden behind the Internet identity of "Mrs Ouije Ngbendu, the widdow of the former Nigerian minister of finances" or in this case "John Doe, world-class photography expert, reviewer of digital cameras." Or they'd find themselves ostracized very very quickly.
This anonymity lends itself to all sorts of scams, including web-fronts pretending to be a different company, when in fact they aren't, or reviewing your own products under a different name. Having a different disposable identity has become very very cheap for a change. While before you _could_ buy the local newspaper to ensure they always recommend your stuff and publish your own reviews under a pseudonym, or even start your own newspaper, now you only need a colocated server and a domain name.
Being able to have 1000 different identities also adds even more possibilities there, and I don't just mean being the widdow of 1000 different former Nigerian ministers. It creates opportunities like being a one-man astroturf operation (see the JBoss fuckwits back in that astro-turfing affair, where seemingly 100 different persons from all over the world rose to denigrate or shout down anyone who dared mention any problem) or write 1000 different glowing reviews of your own products on 100 "independent" sites, all owned by yourself. I remember at least one case where the fuckwit didn't even bother changing the theme or anything: it was literally the same site under at least 20 different names, all linking to each other, to drive the Google rank way up. (At least back then, it worked.)
It's not just a problem of quantity as such, as in being able to do the same scam 1000 times over, it becomes a problem of quality: one person can create enough noise to drown all useful signal. Think about it. IRL you could try nagging someone to buy model X instead of model Y, but in their mind it will still register as 1 person's opinion. If 10 other people tell them otherwise, it's 10 opinions against 1. Here it's possible to appear like 1000 independent consumers like you recommending product X, shifting the opinion ration to 1000 to 10. While technically it's not a new scam, as companies have been known before to hire a lot of people to spread glowing testimonials, now it's cheaper and more efficient than ever.
So I'd be really surprised if these opportunities haven't attracted more scammers than before.
But, yes, the second half of the equation is that now it's possible to scam thousands of people at the same time. While a stereotypical wild-west snakeoil peddler could sell that crap to maybe half a dozen, or let's say a dozen, people before cautiously skipping town, now you can peddle H3RB4L V14GR4 to 100,000,000 people in one spam run. If only 1 in 1000 fall for it, you've scammed more people in one night than a wild-west snake-oil peddler could have in a _lifetime_. And if you manage to get a fake review site to be popular enough, you may even strike gold in a bigger way than with spam.
That total insensitivity and lack of remorse is actually the _key_ factor there, not a case of "bah, that's just insensitivity, not being a psychopath." I'll argue that every single symptom described in the three-factor model of psychopathy is just a manifestation of the complete insensitivity.
Pretty much what that three-factor model boils down to is: someomeone for whom everyone else is just an NPC. They're the only important person in a world of NPCs they can't relate or get emotionally attached to, and which generally don't matter in any form or shape. Same as you neither feel any remorse for doing bad stuff to an NPC (be it manipulating them, or just outright killing them for your own entertainment), nor really think that helping an NPC is your good deed for the day, so it is with psychopaths and people. Once you have that, the whole rest, such as manipulating/deceiving/tormenting people for fun, just comes naturally: those people just don't matter.
Being manipulative is just one of the possible symptoms used to diagnose it, not the crux of the problem, so to speak. Even if I were to take your word that a corporation can't have that symptom, most would still be left with all the other symptoms anyway.
See for example in MS's case the blatant breaking the law, the complete inability to see itself responsible for anything, the exaggerated sense of self-worth (e.g., illustrated by trying to bully the government into silence, ranging from astroturfing to the threats to move to another country: they genuinely thought that the US economy would be crippled without them), the shallow/hollow relationships it had with any other entity... until they could backstab them, the compulsive liar behaviour, and so on, and so forth. I mean, really, every single symptom on the list is there. And it's not just about MS. Most of that is how we _expect_ a corporation to behave.
But let's get back to the manipulation games, since that's the lone symptom we were disaggreeing on. Can't a corporation be compulsively manipulative? Really? I think it can. A corporation can't mesmerize as many people, yes, but it can play the same kinds of games anyway. Ranging from playing with their own employees, to befriend-and-backstab games with other companies, to screwing with the investors, to lying to the customers.
MS for example has become pretty much a synonim with FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) for example. That's one way to manipulate people. (And again, it's not a MS-only activity. The term originally was used about IBM.) Or it has pretty much made mainstream the phenomenon of vapourware: hyping a supposedly perfect and revolutionary future product for years as if it'll be released in no time, to keep you from buying the competitor's products that are available right here and now. Yep, that's another manipulation game. The astro-turfing campaign during the DOJ trial? Yep, another manipulation game. Etc.
They can and _do_ manipulate people and each-other all the time. So, dunno, it seems to me like they do have that symptom too. Maybe in somewhat different forms, and maybe to a somewhat different extent, but they do have it.
"And how many of those players want to pay $25/hr for a GM? Frankly, if you can make that kind of money off a player you can afford to set up a few thousand terminals in India and train that many GMs."
1. So basically, you're proposing... what? That anyone who can pay $25 can officially get not just an advantage in the game, but they get someone to customize and tailor it especially for them.
You know what? No, thanks. It's bad enough to have people with rare super-powerful items bought on eBay. Having the game company itself sell customized "swords of Paladin slaying" to every PK idiot with a credit card... no, thanks. I like achievements in the game to at least pretend to reflect some personal skill or effort. A whole game built on achievements being how much RL cash you're willing to pay, wth is the point and achievement in that? How insecure _does_ someone have to be to measure their achievements that way?
2. You're still proposing that a bunch of people be trusted with creating and putting content in the game on short notice, completely bypassing any QA or testing. You may notice that even stuff that senior designers and programmers made, and still after an extensive internal- and beta-testing, still needs to be tweaked and balanced against everything else in the game.
Would I trust some half-trained tech-support guy's 5-minute hack to actually be anywhere near balanced? Does that guy even know everything in the game that the item needs to be balanced against?
It's not even whether it's in India or not, it's just that _noone_ can have the whole game in the head, and know the balancing factors and decisions that went into everything. (E.g., that yeah, item X is also that powerful, but it's something that's the big reward for a whole story arc, spanning several instanced missions.)
Do I even trust that not to break the game? E.g., if the player wants a potion of teleporting through walls for the next instance, how do you know they won't use it to get into an unfinished area still in development? E.g., if the player wants a wand that creates a deadly plague to finish off some NPCs, how do you know they won't use it to start a plague in the capital city or in the newbie area, for grief's sake?
Both cases above, getting into restricted areas _and_ a world-wide plague, are stuff that actually happened in WoW. Again, stuff designed by professional designers, with code/scripts made by professional coders, and after an extensive internal- and beta-testing. And shit still happened. Do you trust 1000 monkeys with keyboards, bypassing QA and testing completely, not to create that problem 1000 times a day?
How do you trust them _all_ to not be _bribed_ to explicitly code something against the rules? There are some people with a _lot_ of disposable income. (I've been in a game where someone had paid literally over 20,000 USD for in-game advantages.) And there are countries where those cheap GM's would end up recruited from, where salaries are really low. It's very easy for a westerner to pony-up a bribe that's ludicriously high for that country.
E.g., I don't know about India, but in China an average wage is about 1000$ per year. If I knew my GM is from China, I already know that for a 1000$ bribe, the guy will roll repeatedly against will-power to refuse it. Even if he gets fired for taking it, it's a year's salary in one go. People have stabbed each other there for a $800 virtual item. "Hey, buddy, I'm sick and tired of running away from all these murlocks. Make me a pair of 100D6 damage daggers for my rogue, and you get 1000$ by PayPal right now." Are you sure he won't take it?
As I was saying, EQ2 already has voice-acting for every single NPC. So it's not like a different universe is even needed. It exists in this one already.
Additionally, if you want to make a character interact with a GM-controlled NPC, voice-chat might be the easiest way out anyway. A GM taking over the "Enchantrix" NPC and role-playing that interaction by voice-chat might just be a lot less effort than requiring the GMs to be competent enough to script a new NPC and a dialog tree, and be confident enough that it will just work in the game without going through QA and testing first.
"On the topic of PvP, I think the article is right in broad terms about the demographic involved, but perhaps goes a little too far and risks being a bit unfair in the stereotype it builds up. It's true that in the days before FFXI had any PvP at all, the vast majority of the players who were demanding it were immature 14 year olds who wanted to get revenge on somebody who'd annoyed them a week before. Once limited PvP appeared, in the form of ballista, and people realised that PvP works both ways and that immature grief-kiddies tend to have far smaller social networks to call on for backup than the more rounded players, most of the clamour vanished overnight. Ballista these days tends to be played by people who are pretty dedicated and specialised. It's not my thing and I doubt I'll ever be any good at it, but kudos to those who are."
That all is based on the assumption that everyone cares equally about their character. E.g., that the socializers who got ganked in the newbie area, and the "immature grief-kiddies" who made a bunch of people chase them and then logged off, are equally saddened that you killed their character.
In practice, it just doesn't work that way. There are people who just don't care about their character. At all. It's just a disposable tool, to be used as needed and discarded when no longer needed. They don't need any backup, unless it's for a grander scale scam or ganking run. If you ended up calling on a whole social network to chase him, you haven't "punished" him, you haven't taught him a lesson, you've "fed a troll" in internet lingo. You gave that kiddie the attention he wanted. Lots of it.
The real reason why they tend to disappear off pure fullt-time PK worlds was already explained by Bartle in the days of MUDs. It's not that they learn a valuable lesson, it's just the same reason why wolves die off too when the population of rabbits goes way down: they run out of prey. What a griefer ("killer" in Bartle's terms) needs is victims. Unwilling victims. The moment they end up on a server where everyone else doesn't give a damn about their character and about anything happening to that character, they lose interest and leave.
Really, you should read Bartle's studies. It's fascinating, and might turn your assumptions right on their head. For example, it's not that those kiddies have some vengeance for some grief they suffered earlier, it's that actually their favourite victim is a socializer who never did them any wrong. The aim is simply to cause grief. Nothing more, nothing less. And the best target for that is someone who was trying to make friends and tends to take offense at being received with all-out hostility. Other griefers (i.e., the ones you'd have a reason to want to exact vengeance on) are actually their _least_ favourite prey.
"I've played World of Warcraft and while I think it's vastly inferior to FFXI in most respects, I do like the way it's managed to integrate PvP into the game-world without turning it over to the griefers. Having the two major game factions in a de facto state of war, with their own towns and territory, is great for encouraging people to blend the social/organisational challenges of traditional PvE combat with the more tightly defined skillset of PvP. I think that's definitely the model that future MMORPGs (hopefully ones with a bit more depth and challenge than WoW) should be looking to imitate and build upon."
As someone who <bleep>ing hates PvP, I should hope they don't. Putting some funky back-story explaining why it's there, still doesn't change the fact that I don't want it. If it's an activity I dislike, it's an activity I dislike, and that's that. I don't care what convoluted excuse the designers came up with, as to why should I take part in that.
WoW still sorta does the right thing in that it has separate PvP and non-PvP servers. That's ok by me. I'm not opposed to the PvP people getting their jollies too, as long as I'm not dragged into it. Even then, what I'd like is the choice of a server which is "strictly non-PvP", but ok, I can also live with Blizzard's solution.
But of a game really tried any harder to integrate PvP into it, well, that's one game which wouldn't see my money.
Well, you are right there, but what I'm trying to say is that it goes a bit deeper than that for corporations.
When people change their point of view IRL, whether they realize it or not, some other principles or personal values are usually involved. E.g., they might realize that something is morally "wrong". (Or conversely see why/when it might not be "wrong" after all.) Or stop saying something the moment they're no longer convinced it's the "truth".
You might argue for either open standards or for proprietary stuff, because you think it's in some way "right", or good for the society, or whatever. And you might change your opinion when you come to the conclusion that something else is "more right", or better for society, or whatever. There's some personal scale of values involved.
Corporations are supposed to be basically psychopaths, in the medical sense of the world. And most of the successful ones aren't just supposed, but actually act that way. (Though it should also be said that it's not established if you can apply the term literally to such an entity. They do show all the symptoms, though, so for the sake of this discussion it will have to do.)
They don't have, or aren't supposed/expected to have, any such things as "right", "wrong", "truth" or "lie", and most certainly no empathy. They're _supposed_ to follow only their own interests, not care about any colateral damage done, lie if it fits their interests, and bend or break any rules they can get away with or find a loophole in.
And maybe that's even a good thing, seein' as that's how capitalism worked so far.
All I'm saying is that you can't expect that when they preach "X is good" (X can be open standards, the latest buzzword they're selling, or whatever), they actually believe in X. See the many messages just in this thread which, basically, expect MS to honestly believe (if only at the moment) that either "proprietary stuff is good for the consumer" or "open standards are good for the consumer".
Which, just as when dealing with human psychopaths, is a fundamentally flawed premise. It's not that a corporation found out that a certain point of view is "right" or "wrong" and changed its mind accordingly. It's that it never gave a damn about what is "right" or "wrong". Anything they tell you doesn't have to serve any other purpose than to further their own interests. E.g., by making them look good in the media, or gaining them some allies (which are still fair game for backstabbing later), or whatever.
"This sort of complaint would sound silly in another context. Imagine writing to a medical magazine about how "neurosurgery is too complicated" and they should make it easier to understand. Or rocket science? "They should make the 10 most common kinds of rockets easier to design"."
Ok, if you want to make that analogy, let's take it all the way, shall we?
Imagine a world where people sell you stuff like an iSurgeon kit for home use, or a "RocketMaker Pro 5" for home use. In fact, they'd even throw in a free trepanation drill (you know, for drilling holes in a skull) with other products, as a teaser to make you buy the full version, same as image editing software is bundled with cameras. Imagine furthermore that you're bombarded with ads telling you "Surgery is easy! It's fun! No previous expertise needed! Why, even your old grandma could strap someone on an iSurgeon table and give them a lobotomy, like a pro!"
Would you still think it's silly to expect those products to live up to those marketting claims? Why?
Let's say I sold you, say, a watch, under the explicit claim that it just does its job (e.g., stays accurate) and you don't need any expertise at all to use it. Then you discover that not only it doesn't do that, but you need take it apart and rearrange its cogs even for such a conceptually easy task as setting the alarm. Would you consider that scam normal too, or would you consider it just that: a scam?
That's the whole problem. It's not just that some software is hard, it's that it's sold as something it isn't. If it was sold as some complex tool only for experienced professionals, like surgery equipment is, then noone would have a problem with it. But the user is bombarded with ads telling him/her "Buy our iSnakeOil (TM)! It's easy! It's made for non-technical people like you! You don't need any knowledge or expertise to use it! You can do everything, no matter how complicated in 2-3 clicks, without even knowing what you're doing!"
And then when said user has problems, we turn around and tell him/her "well, duh, of course it's complicated. What did you expect?" I.e., in other words, "well, duh, you should have known we lied to you."
And when it's not that, it's what you yourself describe here:
"Ironically, some of the programs that are aimed at newbies are very difficult to use because they're inflexible and patronisingly assume the user is a dolt."
I don't even find it ironic, but yes, that is a major problem. That's one main problem I've always had with the "users are idiots" arrogance that's rampant in the software industry. Instead of trying to _understand_ the user, and exactly what is difficult for that user and why, we end up with products that are just dysfunctional crap.
The point is, software and hardware today are hard to use. The even more important part is: they're sold under the explicit _lie_ that they're oh-so-easy, and even your grandma could just plug one in and do everything right away.
If I step out of the nerd "well, duh, of course it's complicated, and anyway you're an idiot if you can't write your own program to do that instead of bothering me" mentality, and try to use them myself, as a simple user... the fact is, most of these programs are a right pain in the butt.
The user just has some seemingly simple concept, like "I want to remove the red eye" or "I want to recolor this red dress (e.g., a texture for The Sims 2) to blue, but FFS, leave the gold necklace alone. I don't want that turning purple." (I'm using that as an example, because that's one thing that _I_ got frustrated with in The Gimp. Anything short of manually tracing the outline myself, pixel-accurate, just didn't work right. The fuzzy select tool for example, just loved to go nuts and select the shoes too when I only wanted to change the dress, or and/or select random pixels from other parts of the texture.)
From a non-technical person's point of view, as in, every-day casual conversation, it's as simple a request as it can be: "I want that dress in blue." If you went to a clothing store with your GF and asked the store assistant "is that one available in blue too?", the store assistant would understand _exactly_ what you mean. You wouldn't have to go through all the hoops that these programs make you go through.
Tha problem is, yes, that it ends up, in your own words, "something that is fundamentally complex". And that's not what marketting told the user when they took his/her money. If they told the user "see, we have this fundamentally complex tool, and you need a college degree to use it", only then we'd really have the right to tell the user "well, duh, what did you expect?" At the moment he/she's led to expect the exact opposite.
And, to answer your question, what the average user expects is just that a product he's bought actually fulfills those promises that marketroids made. No more. If they said photo editing would be easy and intuitive, he expects it to be easy and intuitive, not something fundamentally complex.
And it's not an unreasonable expectation anyway. If I sold you any other product under explicit claims as to what it does and doesn't, you'd expect it to meet those claims.
E.g., if I sold someone a bicycle under the claim that it's such a new and improved model that even someone completely untrained can use it, they'd have all the right in the world to expect just that: that if they put their untrained kid on it, that kid won't fall over. Asking then "well, duh, what did you expect? a miracle? AI?" is missing the whole point. It's not their business to know how a bycicle would stay up with someone untrained on it. It could involve gyroscopes, or a computer, or whatever. It's not their job to know that. They bought a product under an explicit claim, they expect it to live up to that claim. That's all.
Just for the sake of repeating what I've been saying all along, this is nothing new. No, I don't mean MS was ever sincerely for open standards, but then they never were sincerely all against them. Corporations do not have ideologies and crusades, they just want to make money, and are _supposed_ to be inconsistent (and arguably even sociopaths) in that pursuit. If what's good for business today or just in a different market segment is different from what was good for business yesterday, a corporation won't stick to an ideology and Right Way like a nerd would. They will do an about face and argue the exact opposite as if it always said that.
And I don't mean only MS. Everyone. We even had sad cases like Sun which flipped between arguing opposites (e.g., between "we love Linux and open standards dearly" and "Proprietary Solaris is teh rule! Linux is teh suck! Die! Die! Die!") within the same day.
And to that end:
- when you're in the lead, you want closed proprietary (and preferrably patented) stuff to keep your customers locked in. You want a penned market segment that you can shear as you see fit. See patented connectors, the unix fragmentation, etc.
- when you're the one fighting uphill, you want open standards and anything that'll let you have a go at everyone else's penned customers
And MS in the console market is finding itself fighting uphill against Sony. (Which, as the conspiracy theory goes, was always MS's target. Nintendo was more like collateral damage.) Guess what they'll want? Right. Open standards and interfaces.
It's not that MS wouldn't like you to be locked in the XBox camp. It's that the priority now is: they don't want you locked in Sony's camp. That's all.
Not all games are GW or even WoW in that aspect. There are games that were launched completely without PvP.
E.g., PSO was the most extreme case. It wasn't just that you couldn't attack another player, it's that you just couldn't do _anything_ to them. You couldn't leave aggressive NPCs to someone, you couldn't block their retreat, etc. Heck, you couldn't even kill-steal. So people who wanted to play it like a FPS deathmatch just soon left.
That however also contains the "problem". It's entirely too easy for a publisher to see it as "whaa? you mean we're losing players for lack of PvP? well, then let's add PvP to the game!" And from there the balance that was finely tuned for PvE goes down the drain, as the boards get swamped with "my <insert support class> should deal as much direct damage as the mages and take as much damage as the tanks in a duel" whine. Powers and classes which were useful in more subtle ways than 1-on-1 damage, e.g., even AOE attacks or aggro-management, get proclaimed useless because they're not an alpha-strike in 1-on-1 PvP.
"Second, no one's putting little tiny satellites on the Shuttle. You've got Pegasus, Minotaur, Athena, and soon Falcon boosters for small payloads, for example."
Which is the whole point I was trying to make: it ended up too expensive for those, so, yes, noone sane even thinks of using it for those. And that's the whole broken promise and failure. The original promise of the Shuttle was that it'll be a dirt-cheap one-size-fits-all way to put just about everything in orbit. And did I meantion dirt-cheap? It was supposed to be _the_ vehicle that makes conventional rockets obsolete. The fact that anything less than huge is still launched with the old-style boosters you mention, well, just shows just what I've said: that one-size-fits-all solution ended up too expensive for those.
"After the Challenger disaster in '86, the Air Force was left without a booster for those heavy, polar-orbiting satellites and had to upgrade the Titan boosters to fill in."
I.e., both after and before the Challenger disaster, it had the Titan rockets to put those satellites in orbit. Without needing a manned crew to escort them there.
"But keep in mind that the heavy payload launched last week (undoubtedly a very expensive spy satellite) is DISPOSABLE, because we have no capability to get to it and upgrade or repair even the smallest thing on it. In theory, manned access to those orbits could have given the military more bang for the buck."
Manned access for repairs is one thing, and I won't argue against that. But the problem remains that:
1. For the original lifting stuff there, which, again, was a very explicit promise of the shuttle program, you can just launch it with a Titan. You don't need to pack it in something even heavier just to get it up there.
2. For most repairs or adjustments, a smaller and cheaper shuttle (e.g., the originally planned one) would serve the purpose just as well.
3. If you do need to carry more stuff for those repairs, well, see the solution right in TFA: you can put that stuff in orbit with a separate rocket.
I'm sure you know all this already, but just to put things in a historical perspective for those who don't:
The original shuttle design was, basically, a car. It cheap, reusable, and could carry buggerall cargo. And only in some orbits.
Then NASA wanted the Army's space budget. The Army was launching some bloody huge spy satellites (the solar panels alone are pretty darn big) in a polar orbit. And they already had the rockets to launch those. If they were gonna give NASA their budget, NASA had to be guarantee they'd put those huge spy satellites up there. What the Army wanted, basically, was a truck.
So the shuttle got inflated to being big enough a truck to haul up anything that the Army could possibly want hauled up.
So here we are with a one-size-fits-all solution that makes as much sense as saying that a 10-wheeler truck is the one-size-fits-all automobile. You can drive it for anything from cargo transports to groceries to driving your kids to school, right? It has to be the perfect family vehicle, right?
In practice, that one size still didn't fit all.
For starters, now for anything smaller (e.g., a 1-2 ton satellite), packing it in a bloody huge and heavy shuttle makes as much sense as packing a half a pound Walkman in a 100 pound steel safe when shipping it by UPS. Yeah, so the safe is reusable, but you still pay entirely too much for shipping.
As a more insidious thing, it just created the problem of crew safety in a lot of situations where a crew just wasn't needed to start with. (Which, as we know, just jacked prices up even more, and made it even less attractive to use the shuttle for a lot of things. Other than as a national Our-Penis-Is-Bigger-Than-Yours status symbol.)
E.g., the army was already lifting and positioning those satellites in orbit without a crew. A computer is perfectly capable of positioning a satellite in orbit on its own. You don't need a crew of cosmonauts for that.
Using cosmonauts for that just means you have the extra worry of bringing them down in one piece, and bad PR when you don't. An unmanned rocket with a satellite exploding is something we all don't get too emotional about. E.g., you can joke about the Arianne incident and how it shows the risks of reusability, and noone will take it as insensitivity. Or about the Mars lander metric/imperial screw-up. But toast 5 cosmonauts and people get this weird thing called empathy.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far away... erm, back in the day of MUDs, Bartle described four types of players, based on what their primary goal and source of entertainment is in a game. Bear in mind though, that noone falls squarely in one category, but may have one which is dominant and one or more which they barely do, if at all. And this applies to MMOs too, because MMOs are a glorified MUD with graphics.
- Socializers. These are the people who come there to socialize, make friends, organize a guild, an in-game dance party, an out-of-game meeting at a pub, etc. A 100% pure socializer (but again, noone is 100% in one category) would basically treat the game like a glorified IRC channel, and if they're ever dragged on a mission, it's just to be with their friends.
- Explorers. These are people who just have to _know_ what's in the game, how it works, what the stats on each item are, where each door leads to, etc. This doesn't only mean exploring the world. These people just have to know the exact numbers involved in combat, the exact formula that determines the to-hit ratio, the exact number of HP a boss has, etc. You can think of them as not "playing" the game, but really "reverse-engineering" it.
- Achievers. These are the people who set out to achieve something, to have a high score if you will. They have to have the biggest bank account, the most rare armour set, the biggest castle in UO, the fastest vehicle in other games (e.g., SWG), etc. (It should also be noted that for most achievers the keyword is on personally _achieving_ those results, by their own work, be it farming the game or social engineering, or whatever other personal effort. Cheaters actually annoy most achievers, because getting that stuff by a hack diminishes the signifficance of getting that stuff by hard work and skill.)
- Killers. This category is perhaps mis-named, because it doesn't actually mean "PvP" players. It means what the rest of us call "griefers". These people actually live to annoy, harrass, and victimize. The greatest achievement is, yes, "killing" someone completely out of a game, as in, making them cancel their account and stop playing.
Again, don't confuse this with mere PvP, as the two are unconnected things. A killer doesn't want to fight you (unless you're much weaker or AFK), a killer wants to annoy, harrass, humiliate you, and generally make you feel unwelcome in the game. (That's why for example socializers are their favourite prey: people coming looking for friends tend to feel hurt if they're received with outright hostility.) By whatever means necessary. If it takes cheating or scamming to achieve the same result, it's all fair game.
So, yes, when you say "other users have no recourse against cheaters except to stop playing the games in question. i did. and i'm not coming back till cheaters go away or armageddon, whichever one comes first.".. Well, far from appealing to a "killer's" humanity and empathy, you've just told him he's doing great. It's the ultimate compliment.
The problem with that is that you need both sides of the mirror to be _perfectly_ parallel, or you'll aim slightly at the wrong angle. Give it a bit of variance, as in, not all mirrors are identically imperfect, and you have each soldier aiming at the completely different spot.
To put things in perspective, as late as the renaissance making something even reasonably flat was a major challenge. E.g., since we're talking mirrors, the room padded with mirrors (of a reasonable quality to not distort the king's image) at Louvre is one thing most people don't fully understand. It looks like "meh, so they just put a bunch of mirrors on the walls. Big deal." For that age, it was more expensive than plating those walls with solid gold plates.
Expecting some ancient greek smiths to hammer perfectly flat mirrors with perfectly parallel faces, is really a laughable concept.
You know, there's a disturbing trend I'm noticing among a lot of nerds, and your post, complete with name calling ("Dorks like roleplaying") and armchair shrink trolling ("the sooner they stop the self-denial and start becoming adults, the better") is just a prime example of that: the "I'm Mr Perfect, you're all idiots, losers and in denial to boot" kinda mentality. In fact, I'll postulate that that should be _the_ definition of a "nerd" or "dork", and might well be the reason for social ineptness.
I know society as a whole is judgmental, relatively self-centred and "us vs them", but (like many other activities and social rituals they don't understand) nerds take this to an extreme it was never supposed to be taken to. It's like noticing that people use salt and vinegar in their soup, and deciding to make your soup out of _only_ salt and vinegar.
The social "us vs them" theme is supposed to find some common ground for the "us" part in that gossip. It's real purpose, conscious or not, is to find some common grounds to backpat each other in that "us" group. E.g., yeah, we might have other differences of opinion, but we're both fans of the same football club, so we're great. Not to become an "Me vs the rest of you losers" extreme.
Basically you know you're a nerd when your world is made of one Mr Perfect prototype, yourself, and sad losers who fail to measure up to that. And every single tiny difference of interests or difference of opinion is put on a pedestal, as definitive proof that everyone else is an idiot. And hey, it was said by Mr Perfect himself, so it _must_ be true.
Basically you know you're a nerd when you find yourself passing such broad sweeping judgments, like:
- did you study, say, law or medicine while I was learning to optimize assembly? Bah, what a sad loser. I bet you can't even code your own kernel drivers. Is that sad or what?
- ok, so you studied CS too, but do you use the same OS, language or editor that I do? You use another one, huh? (E.g., so we're both on Linux, but you code in C++ while I do Java, or viceversa, and use vi instead of emacs, or viceversa. Or worse yet, you use an IDE.) Ah-ha! I knew it. Idiot. It's people like you who are what's wrong with the world today.
- and how long is your uptime anyway? Only two weeks? Hah. Loser.
- what hobbies do you have anyway? Is it books or movies while I prefer gaming, or viceversa? What a sad loser you are, then. You're in denial. Grow up, get a life, get the One True Hobby.
- Ok, so if it's the same hobby, what flavour of it is it? E.g., do you prefer SF/fantasy books movies while I prefer murder mysteries, or viceversa? Haha, I knew it, it sucks to be you. You only read those because you don't have a life and are in denial. Or if it's games, do you like story-driven games while I like Mario-style jump puzzles, or viceversa? You guessed, you're a loser again for failing to measure up to my perfection.
Etc, etc, etc.
It's a sort of a sieve that really doesn't let anything through. There is no "us" in a nerd's "us vs them", it's one big case of Mr Perfect vs 7 billion sad losers who fail to measure up.
"After all, geeks are the people who control telecommunications, energy distribution, "your computer," transportation, and most of the data in the world."
All that and... most have close to zero communication skills when it comes to making their point to a non-geek. Or even to a geek who's not already a zealot on the same crusade. So for the most part, they're safe to ignore.
" hope you're not suggesting that this is a *bad* thing (and I say that as a non-native English speaker)..."
I'm saying that having to go to the dictionary to figure out an obscure archaic meaning of "tilt", that I haven't seen or used before, and likely won't need again in the next 20 years, is... well, maybe not necessarily "bad", but I could have done without that just to understand the title of an article about game consoles.
I don't know about staying bitter, but yeah, I can just see even a moderately intelligent kid gaming the game, and using some loophole to achieve an utterly non-historical result.
E.g., I've seen a pretty surrealistic AAR (After-Action Report) on Paradox's boards about playing Japan in Victoria and ending up a liberal democracy long before the Meiji Restoration. The tactic used things that just wouldn't have worked in Japan's feudal society:
- e.g., taxing the land-owners 100% to impoverish and thus elliminate that class. There were civil wars for a lot less than that, and not just in Japan. The American Independence War was over a lot less of a tax levy. "All your income are belong to us", i.e., basically turning state-owned by decree, is something that _will_ cause a civil war anywhere.
- E.g., accepting to become vassals of the Dutch, to get access to the Dutch technology and know-how, such as railroads. Sorry, I just can't see 19'th century Japan simply accepting that. They had a bit of a civil war just for opening up to the outside world. Accepting another country as masters just like that? That would have every single samurai and noble in the land up in arms.
And it culminated with using a loophole where you could force a whole country to the opposite ideology of your government, so basically the whole of Japan flipped to ultra-liberal in a very short time. And then he let them revolt and overthrow the government, turning the country into a liberal democracy, which also got him out of being a vassal.
Don't get me wrong, I admire the skill and inventivity involved in abusing the game like that. _Awesomely_ played.
But if they use games to teach history, I just can see a smart kid coming up with something like that in history class. Ooer. Now that would give the teacher a heart attack.
"And are you seriously suggesting that some entrepreneurial African is going to spend a year or so not working to feed his family, but instead programming inside someone else's internet cafe, to develop his own Office suite?"
I'm seriously suggesting that it's a stupid and racist notion to think that every single person in Africa is dirt-poor and just working to feed his family from one day to the next. The message that started this whole thread mentioned _banks_ for example. You know, big financial institutions, with employees and computers and all. It might also come as a surprise, but those countries also have _factories_.
So I'm guessing that if a country, or some of its citizens, can afford a factory with thousands of employees, then someone there could also afford a team of, say, a dozen programmers, _if_ there was a market for the product.
And they could also afford some cheap computers for those to work on. They wouldn't need to take the employees to the nearest Internet cafe. If anything, if you're telling me some people can afford a dozen computers for an Internet cafe, then I see no reason why someone can't afford the same number for a software company.
Slashdot Mirror
Disclaimer: I'm not that representative as a MMO player, and in fact I'll take a good SP RPG instead any day.
Still, on a scale of "pretty cool at least at low levels" to "its _only_ merit is the franchise name", WoW would be at the first end, SWG seemed _the_ poster child for the latter.
SWG, after all this time at it, has pretty much any problem you can imagine.
E.g., design problems, such as classes whose only source of income is hoping that someone would drop by and give them a tip. (Try making any money as a male entertainer, then tell me how it feels.)
E.g., underhanded custommer support, such as banning everyone who's been tipped with duped money. (Never mind that they can't even refuse a tip or know it's been with duped money.)
E.g., technical problems (a.k.a., bugs), such as seemingly having _massive_ lag even on a 50ms connection. Sometimes enemies you've just killed would hang around and seemingly talk to each other for another ten seconds or more. Sometimes they'd rise from the dead and melee you, then fall over dead again. Sometimes a whole herd of low level animals you've killed and already skinned when farming for resources, would remember "oh, wait, we were supposed to fight back" and give you literally a death by a thousand cuts. (Never underestimate the damage a tattooine chicken can do if 5 minutes worth of a whole herd is applied in a 1 second burst, not leaving you any time to heal or run or whatever.)
Etc. That's just scratching the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
And yes, changes which swing between bad, worse and horrible. And let's make up for it by giving some free in-game money to stimulate people to buy the latest expansion pack. (You get a free vehicle which happens to be the best vehicle in the game, and sells for over three million credits without even trying too hard.) Says a lot when an expansion pack's main merit is that it's a veiled and more socially acceptable way to buy gold.
In fact, the only game that sucked more, and even then at launch, was AO. You can read the AO review on Something Awful and rest assured it's entirely accurate. I can personally testify that all the problems described there were true, plus a bunch of others.
So does anyone still give a fuck about SWG, other than purely for franchise sake? If you took away its Star Wars license, it would shrivel and die like the piece of junk it is. So does anyone really give a damn if they move the timeline forwards, backwards or sideways? I'd assume that even out of the minority of desperate SW nerds who stay there just because it lets them dress like a jedi, the majority would be just as happy in any timeline as long as it has lightsabers and skimpy cantina-dancer outfits.
(I mean, obviously, other than Raph Koster, who uses the glory of having majorly fucked-up design for _two_ MMOs as an excuse to give interviews about good game design all over the place.)
1. Because if you just need some masturbation material, games offer piss-poor value for the money. For the price of one game, you could get a month's membership at a premium sex site, and the site will have more... ahem... "replay value". And that's already assuming that you're desperate enough to pay for that. There are plenty of sites that can fill your need for porn for no more than your ISP bill. I'd even give you a few links, but I'm sure you can google on your own.
Let me say that I'm not even anti-pornography or anything. But I wouldn't waste my money on a porn game anyway. Unless you're talking the small niche of hentai- or furry-fetishists, there's just nothing in a crude 3D model that doesn't look better on a real woman. And again, you can stare at a photo or movie of the latter for a lot less money, or no money at all.
So, seriously, the mind boggles when I see yet another idiot publisher betting it all on sex appeal, sometimes even at the risk of alienating their core market demographic. WTF is the rationale there? "You know, old chap, I bet noone knows how to find porn on the internet. I bet they're just starving to pay 50$ to see the heroine's pixelated polygonal ass in a thong, because otherwise they wouldn't find any." Stupid.
2. Because you're targetting the wrong demographic. If you want to sell smut to teenagers, you're gonna have to slip it past their parents. Plus, past the government and youth protection organizations and whatever, who _will_ slap it with an Adult Only rating and require some ID.
And past those teenagers themselves who might figure out that smuggling a porn magazine into their room is safer than playing "Mario's Anal Adventures: Peach Takes A Reaming" on the family TV in the living room. Or that quickly going to a web site while mom is out shopping, is safer than having to find a good answer to "oh, you're back from the game shop. Did you buy anything interesting?" or "uh, what's this Bukkake Fantasy 7 entry in the Start menu?"
So it's going for the entirely wrong age segment. The age where they're dumb enough and think with their gonads is the age where they don't also have all that freedom. And later some get a life, and some start at least being able to do the maths I've described at point 1, because it's their money they're blowing for a change.
3. Because appealing to a minority is no longer enough to cover a major game's development. You may still be able to pay for a cheap 2D hentai game out of it, but not for Quake 4.
There's a reason why you keep hearing about trying to appeal to female gamers and casual gamers and even retired senior-citizen gamers nowadays. Because the industry increasingly needs their money to survive.
Back in the days of Pong it didn't really matter. If you sold 1000 copies of a game you've made in a month, you could proclaim it a huge success and had actually made a tidy profit. So an industry which started with a 50-50 gender distribution among gamers, and they knew it, could easily afford to discard half the market, and focus on making whatever the horny immature lonely programmers wanted to code. It turned into an industry by lonely nerds for lonely nerds, but there was no loss in that anyway, since you still easily got the 1000 or even 10,000 buyers you needed in that niche.
But nowadays with game development costs being what they are, that's no longer enough. That's why everyone from Microsoft to Sony to EA suddenly proclaims their undying love and dedication to female gamers and casual gamers. Because having a game like The Sims which sold to a helluva lot of women (and to a helluva lot of casual gamer dads too) is what makes a profit, while being pegged into the hole of games _only_ for horny 16 year olds might as well make you a loss. (Most games nowadays make a loss, and the publisher uses the games who sell well to basically subsidize those who didn't.)
Of course, after a whole generation of "chicks don't play games" mentality and focusing only on horny 16 year old males, noone really knows how to even start about making a game for anyone else. But that's another story for another time.
"EQ2's engine is far superior in terms of appearance, but unfortunately wasn't right for the time. Causual gamers aren't carrying around the spec necessary to run it efficiently."
You're talking to someone on an A64 4000+, GeForce 7800 GTX and 2 GB RAM, so I like to think I have the system to run EQ2 at pretty good graphics settings. It looks higher res and higher polygon count, but at the same time it looks disturbingly _wrong_. Actually, I've highlighted the wrong word. The keyword should have been "disturbingly".
EQ2's world is higher polycount, higher res, and pixel-shaded to ludicrious extents, yes. E.g., it uses pixel-shaders even instead of detail textures, apparently just for the sake of being the most idiotically inefficient engine. It pretty much guarantees that anyone with a lower end system will see it looking like crap, yes.
But at the same time, even with all details turned on, it still looks disturbingly wrong. Fish that float _above_ the water and chase you floating over the land, cats that don't even freaking look like a cat (check out the pets on their site), detailed hair-physics animations... that clip through my body and whip around in unnatural ways, weird and inconsistent world in which I can run up one nearly-vertical cliff face but I'm stopped by a gentle hill a bit further down the road, etc, etc, etc. All in all, I find it _much_ easier to suspend disbelief in WoW's cartoonish world than in EQ2's supposedly photorealistic one, which, in the end, means that WoW's graphics are better (at doing their job.)
Even nastier said: Sony tried to substitute polygon counts and pixel shaders for talent. A quick-and-dirty "let's make a cat out of some ellipsoids in 3DSMax" hack works ok when you do that in 300 polygons, and people know not to expect details there. But when you aim for photorealism, it just looks bad.
"It isn't a step forward from what has been produced, but it does seem that a polished version of the old is what the MMO noobs are looking for."
Which is what Blizzard quality always meant. Diablo wasn't a revolutionary game either, and since we're talking WoW, Warcraft didn't create a new genre either. But they did take what existed and polished it like a gem. They polished not only the quality in the sense of extremely few bugs, but also the balance, the learning curve, the difficulty curve, the interface, etc.
Among other things, yes, it made their games very friendly and intuitive to new players. Compared to other games where even I, after 20 years of hardcore gaming, need a month to figure it out, any Blizzard game was such that you could put your grandma in front of it and have it clicking like a pro in no time. That's quality design too. Other games needed a horribly complicated, convoluted and inconsistent interface to offer the exact same depth (or lack of it, depending on how you want to look at it.)
And the same thing happened in WoW. They polished every single aspect of the genre to an extent that Sony never even considered. (And again, that Sony thereafter rushed to copy WoW's design in wholesale, says they too think Blizzard's version was better.)
And frankly, that's the kind of quality I'd like to see more of. If that makes me a "noob", so be it.
What did EQ2 have by comparison... let's see, in no particular order:
Bad graphics _and_ system requirements, huge load times, bad balance, a broken economy, various inconsistent quirks, a load of bugs, exploits, etc. Add launching it with the typical Sony lack of concern for what the market wants: e.g., that as launched it was non-soloable when your friends/guild/whatever are not online or not the right level. Now also add a completely broken internationalization for the non-english markets. Now add some Sony-class talent for pissing off their customers. Etc, etc, etc.
So, dunno, I don't have to assume any "fad" or "noob" conspiracies to see why EQ2 fared worse than WoW. So a POS fared worse than a polished game. Now that's a big surprise.
It depends on whether it'll actually be a better game than WoW, or just another "we've got a great franchise, so we can release any crap" exercise.
WoW itself also faced bigger franchises and established market leaders and won by being the better designed game, at least at lower levels. Whatever (legitimate) gripes you might have with the end-game grind, if you took someone new and gave him a level 1 account to every single MMO, chances are he'd find WoW the most fun.
That's what put WoW ahead, not franchise name, not "but everyone already plays EQ, so why would they even try a new MMO?", not anything else. The better designed game won.
And it had plenty of established competition. E.g., _the_ MMO at the time was EQ. All your MMO playing friends played it, your guild was on EQ, etc. Why would you move to move to WoW.
And EQ2 was just being released. For all other fame it might have had among gamers, _the_ name in the MMO market was Sony. (Think by comparison of another market. For all the fame and market Microsoft or Sony have, if you're into, say, platform games, then you think "Nintendo". Between a release by Microsoft or Sony and one from Nintendo, the platform fan will instinctively be more interested in the Nintendo release. Now you might be more interested in MS or Sony for other genres, but for platformers Nintendo is _the_ big name in the market. The same held for Sony and MMOs.)
Yet WoW handily won. Why? Because it was the better game.
Again, I stress that it wasn't just Blizzard's name or the Warcraft franchise. Bigger franchises, backed by bigger names, went down the garbage bin of the MMO market. E.g.,
- The Sims Online was based on _the_ bestselling PC game of all time. You know, the one that outsold any of Id's or Epic's or Blizzard's games, or a few of them combined. (And that's without even counting the sales for the 7 expansion packs.) For every single die-hard Warcraft player, the Koreans included, there were several of us TS gamers just waiting to move our virtual lives online. Yet for all the franchise name, and EA's marketting, TSO peaked around 100,000 subscribers and stayed there.
- SWG. Now that game was based on probably _the_ biggest franchise in history. Every single SW fan had waited for it like it was the second coming of Obi-wa... err... of Christ. If you have the patience to dig through the archive at PvP Online, Scott has a strip in which he captures the very essence of that expectation: one in which a character says goodbye to his friends, and says that having been a SW die-hard for all this time, he expects to never leave the SWG world once it's launched. That's how every single SW maniac felt about it.
Yet we ended up going back to other games, or later to WoW. Go figure.
What this huge rant is getting to is: the same applies to any other game. If DDO will be the better game, it _will_ unseat WoW, just like WoW has unseated the established names and franchises before it. If it will be the more traditional kind of "let's release some crap now and worry about balance or bugs later" MMO, it won't.
And I don't think this kind of Darwinism hurts the industry at all. The net result is that the good games and design elements survive (just look how much EQ2 rushed to copy from WoW for example), and the crap shrivels and dies. On the whole, we gamers are better off for it.
And maybe, just maybe, it will also force the industry to realize that quality _does_ sell. It's good and fine to have better screenshots (EQ2 has much better ones), or franchise names (SWG), or be the sequel to the best selling game (TSO), but at the end of the day, the higher quality game is the one that gets more of the market. And in the end that was the upper hand that Blizzard had all the time, even with their previous games.
No, I think you'll find that there actually are more scams.
I don't know if there are more scammers, though I wouldn't be surprised. See Penny Arcade's "Greater Fuckwad Theory". IIRC it went like, Normal Person + Anonymity + Captive Audience = Fuckwad. I'm guessing even psychopaths, which is what most of these scammers and spammers are, would be a lot more discrete in dealing with their RL neighbours than when they're hidden behind the Internet identity of "Mrs Ouije Ngbendu, the widdow of the former Nigerian minister of finances" or in this case "John Doe, world-class photography expert, reviewer of digital cameras." Or they'd find themselves ostracized very very quickly.
This anonymity lends itself to all sorts of scams, including web-fronts pretending to be a different company, when in fact they aren't, or reviewing your own products under a different name. Having a different disposable identity has become very very cheap for a change. While before you _could_ buy the local newspaper to ensure they always recommend your stuff and publish your own reviews under a pseudonym, or even start your own newspaper, now you only need a colocated server and a domain name.
Being able to have 1000 different identities also adds even more possibilities there, and I don't just mean being the widdow of 1000 different former Nigerian ministers. It creates opportunities like being a one-man astroturf operation (see the JBoss fuckwits back in that astro-turfing affair, where seemingly 100 different persons from all over the world rose to denigrate or shout down anyone who dared mention any problem) or write 1000 different glowing reviews of your own products on 100 "independent" sites, all owned by yourself. I remember at least one case where the fuckwit didn't even bother changing the theme or anything: it was literally the same site under at least 20 different names, all linking to each other, to drive the Google rank way up. (At least back then, it worked.)
It's not just a problem of quantity as such, as in being able to do the same scam 1000 times over, it becomes a problem of quality: one person can create enough noise to drown all useful signal. Think about it. IRL you could try nagging someone to buy model X instead of model Y, but in their mind it will still register as 1 person's opinion. If 10 other people tell them otherwise, it's 10 opinions against 1. Here it's possible to appear like 1000 independent consumers like you recommending product X, shifting the opinion ration to 1000 to 10. While technically it's not a new scam, as companies have been known before to hire a lot of people to spread glowing testimonials, now it's cheaper and more efficient than ever.
So I'd be really surprised if these opportunities haven't attracted more scammers than before.
But, yes, the second half of the equation is that now it's possible to scam thousands of people at the same time. While a stereotypical wild-west snakeoil peddler could sell that crap to maybe half a dozen, or let's say a dozen, people before cautiously skipping town, now you can peddle H3RB4L V14GR4 to 100,000,000 people in one spam run. If only 1 in 1000 fall for it, you've scammed more people in one night than a wild-west snake-oil peddler could have in a _lifetime_. And if you manage to get a fake review site to be popular enough, you may even strike gold in a bigger way than with spam.
The argument about accents wasn't mine. I'm just saying that MMOs where the NPCs "talk" already exist. Nothing more.
About the accents, personally I don't mind outlandish accents in a game. They can add a certain flavour if they're consistent.
That total insensitivity and lack of remorse is actually the _key_ factor there, not a case of "bah, that's just insensitivity, not being a psychopath." I'll argue that every single symptom described in the three-factor model of psychopathy is just a manifestation of the complete insensitivity.
Pretty much what that three-factor model boils down to is: someomeone for whom everyone else is just an NPC. They're the only important person in a world of NPCs they can't relate or get emotionally attached to, and which generally don't matter in any form or shape. Same as you neither feel any remorse for doing bad stuff to an NPC (be it manipulating them, or just outright killing them for your own entertainment), nor really think that helping an NPC is your good deed for the day, so it is with psychopaths and people. Once you have that, the whole rest, such as manipulating/deceiving/tormenting people for fun, just comes naturally: those people just don't matter.
Being manipulative is just one of the possible symptoms used to diagnose it, not the crux of the problem, so to speak. Even if I were to take your word that a corporation can't have that symptom, most would still be left with all the other symptoms anyway.
See for example in MS's case the blatant breaking the law, the complete inability to see itself responsible for anything, the exaggerated sense of self-worth (e.g., illustrated by trying to bully the government into silence, ranging from astroturfing to the threats to move to another country: they genuinely thought that the US economy would be crippled without them), the shallow/hollow relationships it had with any other entity... until they could backstab them, the compulsive liar behaviour, and so on, and so forth. I mean, really, every single symptom on the list is there. And it's not just about MS. Most of that is how we _expect_ a corporation to behave.
But let's get back to the manipulation games, since that's the lone symptom we were disaggreeing on. Can't a corporation be compulsively manipulative? Really? I think it can. A corporation can't mesmerize as many people, yes, but it can play the same kinds of games anyway. Ranging from playing with their own employees, to befriend-and-backstab games with other companies, to screwing with the investors, to lying to the customers.
MS for example has become pretty much a synonim with FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) for example. That's one way to manipulate people. (And again, it's not a MS-only activity. The term originally was used about IBM.) Or it has pretty much made mainstream the phenomenon of vapourware: hyping a supposedly perfect and revolutionary future product for years as if it'll be released in no time, to keep you from buying the competitor's products that are available right here and now. Yep, that's another manipulation game. The astro-turfing campaign during the DOJ trial? Yep, another manipulation game. Etc.
They can and _do_ manipulate people and each-other all the time. So, dunno, it seems to me like they do have that symptom too. Maybe in somewhat different forms, and maybe to a somewhat different extent, but they do have it.
"And how many of those players want to pay $25/hr for a GM? Frankly, if you can make that kind of money off a player you can afford to set up a few thousand terminals in India and train that many GMs."
1. So basically, you're proposing... what? That anyone who can pay $25 can officially get not just an advantage in the game, but they get someone to customize and tailor it especially for them.
You know what? No, thanks. It's bad enough to have people with rare super-powerful items bought on eBay. Having the game company itself sell customized "swords of Paladin slaying" to every PK idiot with a credit card... no, thanks. I like achievements in the game to at least pretend to reflect some personal skill or effort. A whole game built on achievements being how much RL cash you're willing to pay, wth is the point and achievement in that? How insecure _does_ someone have to be to measure their achievements that way?
2. You're still proposing that a bunch of people be trusted with creating and putting content in the game on short notice, completely bypassing any QA or testing. You may notice that even stuff that senior designers and programmers made, and still after an extensive internal- and beta-testing, still needs to be tweaked and balanced against everything else in the game.
Would I trust some half-trained tech-support guy's 5-minute hack to actually be anywhere near balanced? Does that guy even know everything in the game that the item needs to be balanced against?
It's not even whether it's in India or not, it's just that _noone_ can have the whole game in the head, and know the balancing factors and decisions that went into everything. (E.g., that yeah, item X is also that powerful, but it's something that's the big reward for a whole story arc, spanning several instanced missions.)
Do I even trust that not to break the game? E.g., if the player wants a potion of teleporting through walls for the next instance, how do you know they won't use it to get into an unfinished area still in development? E.g., if the player wants a wand that creates a deadly plague to finish off some NPCs, how do you know they won't use it to start a plague in the capital city or in the newbie area, for grief's sake?
Both cases above, getting into restricted areas _and_ a world-wide plague, are stuff that actually happened in WoW. Again, stuff designed by professional designers, with code/scripts made by professional coders, and after an extensive internal- and beta-testing. And shit still happened. Do you trust 1000 monkeys with keyboards, bypassing QA and testing completely, not to create that problem 1000 times a day?
How do you trust them _all_ to not be _bribed_ to explicitly code something against the rules? There are some people with a _lot_ of disposable income. (I've been in a game where someone had paid literally over 20,000 USD for in-game advantages.) And there are countries where those cheap GM's would end up recruited from, where salaries are really low. It's very easy for a westerner to pony-up a bribe that's ludicriously high for that country.
E.g., I don't know about India, but in China an average wage is about 1000$ per year. If I knew my GM is from China, I already know that for a 1000$ bribe, the guy will roll repeatedly against will-power to refuse it. Even if he gets fired for taking it, it's a year's salary in one go. People have stabbed each other there for a $800 virtual item. "Hey, buddy, I'm sick and tired of running away from all these murlocks. Make me a pair of 100D6 damage daggers for my rogue, and you get 1000$ by PayPal right now." Are you sure he won't take it?
As I was saying, EQ2 already has voice-acting for every single NPC. So it's not like a different universe is even needed. It exists in this one already.
Additionally, if you want to make a character interact with a GM-controlled NPC, voice-chat might be the easiest way out anyway. A GM taking over the "Enchantrix" NPC and role-playing that interaction by voice-chat might just be a lot less effort than requiring the GMs to be competent enough to script a new NPC and a dialog tree, and be confident enough that it will just work in the game without going through QA and testing first.
"On the topic of PvP, I think the article is right in broad terms about the demographic involved, but perhaps goes a little too far and risks being a bit unfair in the stereotype it builds up. It's true that in the days before FFXI had any PvP at all, the vast majority of the players who were demanding it were immature 14 year olds who wanted to get revenge on somebody who'd annoyed them a week before. Once limited PvP appeared, in the form of ballista, and people realised that PvP works both ways and that immature grief-kiddies tend to have far smaller social networks to call on for backup than the more rounded players, most of the clamour vanished overnight. Ballista these days tends to be played by people who are pretty dedicated and specialised. It's not my thing and I doubt I'll ever be any good at it, but kudos to those who are."
That all is based on the assumption that everyone cares equally about their character. E.g., that the socializers who got ganked in the newbie area, and the "immature grief-kiddies" who made a bunch of people chase them and then logged off, are equally saddened that you killed their character.
In practice, it just doesn't work that way. There are people who just don't care about their character. At all. It's just a disposable tool, to be used as needed and discarded when no longer needed. They don't need any backup, unless it's for a grander scale scam or ganking run. If you ended up calling on a whole social network to chase him, you haven't "punished" him, you haven't taught him a lesson, you've "fed a troll" in internet lingo. You gave that kiddie the attention he wanted. Lots of it.
The real reason why they tend to disappear off pure fullt-time PK worlds was already explained by Bartle in the days of MUDs. It's not that they learn a valuable lesson, it's just the same reason why wolves die off too when the population of rabbits goes way down: they run out of prey. What a griefer ("killer" in Bartle's terms) needs is victims. Unwilling victims. The moment they end up on a server where everyone else doesn't give a damn about their character and about anything happening to that character, they lose interest and leave.
Really, you should read Bartle's studies. It's fascinating, and might turn your assumptions right on their head. For example, it's not that those kiddies have some vengeance for some grief they suffered earlier, it's that actually their favourite victim is a socializer who never did them any wrong. The aim is simply to cause grief. Nothing more, nothing less. And the best target for that is someone who was trying to make friends and tends to take offense at being received with all-out hostility. Other griefers (i.e., the ones you'd have a reason to want to exact vengeance on) are actually their _least_ favourite prey.
"I've played World of Warcraft and while I think it's vastly inferior to FFXI in most respects, I do like the way it's managed to integrate PvP into the game-world without turning it over to the griefers. Having the two major game factions in a de facto state of war, with their own towns and territory, is great for encouraging people to blend the social/organisational challenges of traditional PvE combat with the more tightly defined skillset of PvP. I think that's definitely the model that future MMORPGs (hopefully ones with a bit more depth and challenge than WoW) should be looking to imitate and build upon."
As someone who <bleep>ing hates PvP, I should hope they don't. Putting some funky back-story explaining why it's there, still doesn't change the fact that I don't want it. If it's an activity I dislike, it's an activity I dislike, and that's that. I don't care what convoluted excuse the designers came up with, as to why should I take part in that.
WoW still sorta does the right thing in that it has separate PvP and non-PvP servers. That's ok by me. I'm not opposed to the PvP people getting their jollies too, as long as I'm not dragged into it. Even then, what I'd like is the choice of a server which is "strictly non-PvP", but ok, I can also live with Blizzard's solution.
But of a game really tried any harder to integrate PvP into it, well, that's one game which wouldn't see my money.
Well, you are right there, but what I'm trying to say is that it goes a bit deeper than that for corporations.
When people change their point of view IRL, whether they realize it or not, some other principles or personal values are usually involved. E.g., they might realize that something is morally "wrong". (Or conversely see why/when it might not be "wrong" after all.) Or stop saying something the moment they're no longer convinced it's the "truth".
You might argue for either open standards or for proprietary stuff, because you think it's in some way "right", or good for the society, or whatever. And you might change your opinion when you come to the conclusion that something else is "more right", or better for society, or whatever. There's some personal scale of values involved.
Corporations are supposed to be basically psychopaths, in the medical sense of the world. And most of the successful ones aren't just supposed, but actually act that way. (Though it should also be said that it's not established if you can apply the term literally to such an entity. They do show all the symptoms, though, so for the sake of this discussion it will have to do.)
They don't have, or aren't supposed/expected to have, any such things as "right", "wrong", "truth" or "lie", and most certainly no empathy. They're _supposed_ to follow only their own interests, not care about any colateral damage done, lie if it fits their interests, and bend or break any rules they can get away with or find a loophole in.
And maybe that's even a good thing, seein' as that's how capitalism worked so far.
All I'm saying is that you can't expect that when they preach "X is good" (X can be open standards, the latest buzzword they're selling, or whatever), they actually believe in X. See the many messages just in this thread which, basically, expect MS to honestly believe (if only at the moment) that either "proprietary stuff is good for the consumer" or "open standards are good for the consumer".
Which, just as when dealing with human psychopaths, is a fundamentally flawed premise. It's not that a corporation found out that a certain point of view is "right" or "wrong" and changed its mind accordingly. It's that it never gave a damn about what is "right" or "wrong". Anything they tell you doesn't have to serve any other purpose than to further their own interests. E.g., by making them look good in the media, or gaining them some allies (which are still fair game for backstabbing later), or whatever.
"This sort of complaint would sound silly in another context. Imagine writing to a medical magazine about how "neurosurgery is too complicated" and they should make it easier to understand. Or rocket science? "They should make the 10 most common kinds of rockets easier to design"."
Ok, if you want to make that analogy, let's take it all the way, shall we?
Imagine a world where people sell you stuff like an iSurgeon kit for home use, or a "RocketMaker Pro 5" for home use. In fact, they'd even throw in a free trepanation drill (you know, for drilling holes in a skull) with other products, as a teaser to make you buy the full version, same as image editing software is bundled with cameras. Imagine furthermore that you're bombarded with ads telling you "Surgery is easy! It's fun! No previous expertise needed! Why, even your old grandma could strap someone on an iSurgeon table and give them a lobotomy, like a pro!"
Would you still think it's silly to expect those products to live up to those marketting claims? Why?
Let's say I sold you, say, a watch, under the explicit claim that it just does its job (e.g., stays accurate) and you don't need any expertise at all to use it. Then you discover that not only it doesn't do that, but you need take it apart and rearrange its cogs even for such a conceptually easy task as setting the alarm. Would you consider that scam normal too, or would you consider it just that: a scam?
That's the whole problem. It's not just that some software is hard, it's that it's sold as something it isn't. If it was sold as some complex tool only for experienced professionals, like surgery equipment is, then noone would have a problem with it. But the user is bombarded with ads telling him/her "Buy our iSnakeOil (TM)! It's easy! It's made for non-technical people like you! You don't need any knowledge or expertise to use it! You can do everything, no matter how complicated in 2-3 clicks, without even knowing what you're doing!"
And then when said user has problems, we turn around and tell him/her "well, duh, of course it's complicated. What did you expect?" I.e., in other words, "well, duh, you should have known we lied to you."
And when it's not that, it's what you yourself describe here:
"Ironically, some of the programs that are aimed at newbies are very difficult to use because they're inflexible and patronisingly assume the user is a dolt."
I don't even find it ironic, but yes, that is a major problem. That's one main problem I've always had with the "users are idiots" arrogance that's rampant in the software industry. Instead of trying to _understand_ the user, and exactly what is difficult for that user and why, we end up with products that are just dysfunctional crap.
The point is, software and hardware today are hard to use. The even more important part is: they're sold under the explicit _lie_ that they're oh-so-easy, and even your grandma could just plug one in and do everything right away.
If I step out of the nerd "well, duh, of course it's complicated, and anyway you're an idiot if you can't write your own program to do that instead of bothering me" mentality, and try to use them myself, as a simple user... the fact is, most of these programs are a right pain in the butt.
The user just has some seemingly simple concept, like "I want to remove the red eye" or "I want to recolor this red dress (e.g., a texture for The Sims 2) to blue, but FFS, leave the gold necklace alone. I don't want that turning purple." (I'm using that as an example, because that's one thing that _I_ got frustrated with in The Gimp. Anything short of manually tracing the outline myself, pixel-accurate, just didn't work right. The fuzzy select tool for example, just loved to go nuts and select the shoes too when I only wanted to change the dress, or and/or select random pixels from other parts of the texture.)
From a non-technical person's point of view, as in, every-day casual conversation, it's as simple a request as it can be: "I want that dress in blue." If you went to a clothing store with your GF and asked the store assistant "is that one available in blue too?", the store assistant would understand _exactly_ what you mean. You wouldn't have to go through all the hoops that these programs make you go through.
Tha problem is, yes, that it ends up, in your own words, "something that is fundamentally complex". And that's not what marketting told the user when they took his/her money. If they told the user "see, we have this fundamentally complex tool, and you need a college degree to use it", only then we'd really have the right to tell the user "well, duh, what did you expect?" At the moment he/she's led to expect the exact opposite.
And, to answer your question, what the average user expects is just that a product he's bought actually fulfills those promises that marketroids made. No more. If they said photo editing would be easy and intuitive, he expects it to be easy and intuitive, not something fundamentally complex.
And it's not an unreasonable expectation anyway. If I sold you any other product under explicit claims as to what it does and doesn't, you'd expect it to meet those claims.
E.g., if I sold someone a bicycle under the claim that it's such a new and improved model that even someone completely untrained can use it, they'd have all the right in the world to expect just that: that if they put their untrained kid on it, that kid won't fall over. Asking then "well, duh, what did you expect? a miracle? AI?" is missing the whole point. It's not their business to know how a bycicle would stay up with someone untrained on it. It could involve gyroscopes, or a computer, or whatever. It's not their job to know that. They bought a product under an explicit claim, they expect it to live up to that claim. That's all.
Just for the sake of repeating what I've been saying all along, this is nothing new. No, I don't mean MS was ever sincerely for open standards, but then they never were sincerely all against them. Corporations do not have ideologies and crusades, they just want to make money, and are _supposed_ to be inconsistent (and arguably even sociopaths) in that pursuit. If what's good for business today or just in a different market segment is different from what was good for business yesterday, a corporation won't stick to an ideology and Right Way like a nerd would. They will do an about face and argue the exact opposite as if it always said that.
And I don't mean only MS. Everyone. We even had sad cases like Sun which flipped between arguing opposites (e.g., between "we love Linux and open standards dearly" and "Proprietary Solaris is teh rule! Linux is teh suck! Die! Die! Die!") within the same day.
And to that end:
- when you're in the lead, you want closed proprietary (and preferrably patented) stuff to keep your customers locked in. You want a penned market segment that you can shear as you see fit. See patented connectors, the unix fragmentation, etc.
- when you're the one fighting uphill, you want open standards and anything that'll let you have a go at everyone else's penned customers
And MS in the console market is finding itself fighting uphill against Sony. (Which, as the conspiracy theory goes, was always MS's target. Nintendo was more like collateral damage.) Guess what they'll want? Right. Open standards and interfaces.
It's not that MS wouldn't like you to be locked in the XBox camp. It's that the priority now is: they don't want you locked in Sony's camp. That's all.
Not all games are GW or even WoW in that aspect. There are games that were launched completely without PvP.
E.g., PSO was the most extreme case. It wasn't just that you couldn't attack another player, it's that you just couldn't do _anything_ to them. You couldn't leave aggressive NPCs to someone, you couldn't block their retreat, etc. Heck, you couldn't even kill-steal. So people who wanted to play it like a FPS deathmatch just soon left.
That however also contains the "problem". It's entirely too easy for a publisher to see it as "whaa? you mean we're losing players for lack of PvP? well, then let's add PvP to the game!" And from there the balance that was finely tuned for PvE goes down the drain, as the boards get swamped with "my <insert support class> should deal as much direct damage as the mages and take as much damage as the tanks in a duel" whine. Powers and classes which were useful in more subtle ways than 1-on-1 damage, e.g., even AOE attacks or aggro-management, get proclaimed useless because they're not an alpha-strike in 1-on-1 PvP.
"Second, no one's putting little tiny satellites on the Shuttle. You've got Pegasus, Minotaur, Athena, and soon Falcon boosters for small payloads, for example."
Which is the whole point I was trying to make: it ended up too expensive for those, so, yes, noone sane even thinks of using it for those. And that's the whole broken promise and failure. The original promise of the Shuttle was that it'll be a dirt-cheap one-size-fits-all way to put just about everything in orbit. And did I meantion dirt-cheap? It was supposed to be _the_ vehicle that makes conventional rockets obsolete. The fact that anything less than huge is still launched with the old-style boosters you mention, well, just shows just what I've said: that one-size-fits-all solution ended up too expensive for those.
"After the Challenger disaster in '86, the Air Force was left without a booster for those heavy, polar-orbiting satellites and had to upgrade the Titan boosters to fill in."
I.e., both after and before the Challenger disaster, it had the Titan rockets to put those satellites in orbit. Without needing a manned crew to escort them there.
"But keep in mind that the heavy payload launched last week (undoubtedly a very expensive spy satellite) is DISPOSABLE, because we have no capability to get to it and upgrade or repair even the smallest thing on it. In theory, manned access to those orbits could have given the military more bang for the buck."
Manned access for repairs is one thing, and I won't argue against that. But the problem remains that:
1. For the original lifting stuff there, which, again, was a very explicit promise of the shuttle program, you can just launch it with a Titan. You don't need to pack it in something even heavier just to get it up there.
2. For most repairs or adjustments, a smaller and cheaper shuttle (e.g., the originally planned one) would serve the purpose just as well.
3. If you do need to carry more stuff for those repairs, well, see the solution right in TFA: you can put that stuff in orbit with a separate rocket.
I'm sure you know all this already, but just to put things in a historical perspective for those who don't:
The original shuttle design was, basically, a car. It cheap, reusable, and could carry buggerall cargo. And only in some orbits.
Then NASA wanted the Army's space budget. The Army was launching some bloody huge spy satellites (the solar panels alone are pretty darn big) in a polar orbit. And they already had the rockets to launch those. If they were gonna give NASA their budget, NASA had to be guarantee they'd put those huge spy satellites up there. What the Army wanted, basically, was a truck.
So the shuttle got inflated to being big enough a truck to haul up anything that the Army could possibly want hauled up.
So here we are with a one-size-fits-all solution that makes as much sense as saying that a 10-wheeler truck is the one-size-fits-all automobile. You can drive it for anything from cargo transports to groceries to driving your kids to school, right? It has to be the perfect family vehicle, right?
In practice, that one size still didn't fit all.
For starters, now for anything smaller (e.g., a 1-2 ton satellite), packing it in a bloody huge and heavy shuttle makes as much sense as packing a half a pound Walkman in a 100 pound steel safe when shipping it by UPS. Yeah, so the safe is reusable, but you still pay entirely too much for shipping.
As a more insidious thing, it just created the problem of crew safety in a lot of situations where a crew just wasn't needed to start with. (Which, as we know, just jacked prices up even more, and made it even less attractive to use the shuttle for a lot of things. Other than as a national Our-Penis-Is-Bigger-Than-Yours status symbol.)
E.g., the army was already lifting and positioning those satellites in orbit without a crew. A computer is perfectly capable of positioning a satellite in orbit on its own. You don't need a crew of cosmonauts for that.
Using cosmonauts for that just means you have the extra worry of bringing them down in one piece, and bad PR when you don't. An unmanned rocket with a satellite exploding is something we all don't get too emotional about. E.g., you can joke about the Arianne incident and how it shows the risks of reusability, and noone will take it as insensitivity. Or about the Mars lander metric/imperial screw-up. But toast 5 cosmonauts and people get this weird thing called empathy.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far away... erm, back in the day of MUDs, Bartle described four types of players, based on what their primary goal and source of entertainment is in a game. Bear in mind though, that noone falls squarely in one category, but may have one which is dominant and one or more which they barely do, if at all. And this applies to MMOs too, because MMOs are a glorified MUD with graphics.
- Socializers. These are the people who come there to socialize, make friends, organize a guild, an in-game dance party, an out-of-game meeting at a pub, etc. A 100% pure socializer (but again, noone is 100% in one category) would basically treat the game like a glorified IRC channel, and if they're ever dragged on a mission, it's just to be with their friends.
- Explorers. These are people who just have to _know_ what's in the game, how it works, what the stats on each item are, where each door leads to, etc. This doesn't only mean exploring the world. These people just have to know the exact numbers involved in combat, the exact formula that determines the to-hit ratio, the exact number of HP a boss has, etc. You can think of them as not "playing" the game, but really "reverse-engineering" it.
- Achievers. These are the people who set out to achieve something, to have a high score if you will. They have to have the biggest bank account, the most rare armour set, the biggest castle in UO, the fastest vehicle in other games (e.g., SWG), etc. (It should also be noted that for most achievers the keyword is on personally _achieving_ those results, by their own work, be it farming the game or social engineering, or whatever other personal effort. Cheaters actually annoy most achievers, because getting that stuff by a hack diminishes the signifficance of getting that stuff by hard work and skill.)
- Killers. This category is perhaps mis-named, because it doesn't actually mean "PvP" players. It means what the rest of us call "griefers". These people actually live to annoy, harrass, and victimize. The greatest achievement is, yes, "killing" someone completely out of a game, as in, making them cancel their account and stop playing.
Again, don't confuse this with mere PvP, as the two are unconnected things. A killer doesn't want to fight you (unless you're much weaker or AFK), a killer wants to annoy, harrass, humiliate you, and generally make you feel unwelcome in the game. (That's why for example socializers are their favourite prey: people coming looking for friends tend to feel hurt if they're received with outright hostility.) By whatever means necessary. If it takes cheating or scamming to achieve the same result, it's all fair game.
So, yes, when you say "other users have no recourse against cheaters except to stop playing the games in question. i did. and i'm not coming back till cheaters go away or armageddon, whichever one comes first.".. Well, far from appealing to a "killer's" humanity and empathy, you've just told him he's doing great. It's the ultimate compliment.
The problem with that is that you need both sides of the mirror to be _perfectly_ parallel, or you'll aim slightly at the wrong angle. Give it a bit of variance, as in, not all mirrors are identically imperfect, and you have each soldier aiming at the completely different spot.
To put things in perspective, as late as the renaissance making something even reasonably flat was a major challenge. E.g., since we're talking mirrors, the room padded with mirrors (of a reasonable quality to not distort the king's image) at Louvre is one thing most people don't fully understand. It looks like "meh, so they just put a bunch of mirrors on the walls. Big deal." For that age, it was more expensive than plating those walls with solid gold plates.
Expecting some ancient greek smiths to hammer perfectly flat mirrors with perfectly parallel faces, is really a laughable concept.
You know, there's a disturbing trend I'm noticing among a lot of nerds, and your post, complete with name calling (" Dorks like roleplaying") and armchair shrink trolling ("the sooner they stop the self-denial and start becoming adults, the better") is just a prime example of that: the "I'm Mr Perfect, you're all idiots, losers and in denial to boot" kinda mentality. In fact, I'll postulate that that should be _the_ definition of a "nerd" or "dork", and might well be the reason for social ineptness.
I know society as a whole is judgmental, relatively self-centred and "us vs them", but (like many other activities and social rituals they don't understand) nerds take this to an extreme it was never supposed to be taken to. It's like noticing that people use salt and vinegar in their soup, and deciding to make your soup out of _only_ salt and vinegar.
The social "us vs them" theme is supposed to find some common ground for the "us" part in that gossip. It's real purpose, conscious or not, is to find some common grounds to backpat each other in that "us" group. E.g., yeah, we might have other differences of opinion, but we're both fans of the same football club, so we're great. Not to become an "Me vs the rest of you losers" extreme.
Basically you know you're a nerd when your world is made of one Mr Perfect prototype, yourself, and sad losers who fail to measure up to that. And every single tiny difference of interests or difference of opinion is put on a pedestal, as definitive proof that everyone else is an idiot. And hey, it was said by Mr Perfect himself, so it _must_ be true.
Basically you know you're a nerd when you find yourself passing such broad sweeping judgments, like:
- did you study, say, law or medicine while I was learning to optimize assembly? Bah, what a sad loser. I bet you can't even code your own kernel drivers. Is that sad or what?
- ok, so you studied CS too, but do you use the same OS, language or editor that I do? You use another one, huh? (E.g., so we're both on Linux, but you code in C++ while I do Java, or viceversa, and use vi instead of emacs, or viceversa. Or worse yet, you use an IDE.) Ah-ha! I knew it. Idiot. It's people like you who are what's wrong with the world today.
- and how long is your uptime anyway? Only two weeks? Hah. Loser.
- what hobbies do you have anyway? Is it books or movies while I prefer gaming, or viceversa? What a sad loser you are, then. You're in denial. Grow up, get a life, get the One True Hobby.
- Ok, so if it's the same hobby, what flavour of it is it? E.g., do you prefer SF/fantasy books movies while I prefer murder mysteries, or viceversa? Haha, I knew it, it sucks to be you. You only read those because you don't have a life and are in denial. Or if it's games, do you like story-driven games while I like Mario-style jump puzzles, or viceversa? You guessed, you're a loser again for failing to measure up to my perfection.
Etc, etc, etc.
It's a sort of a sieve that really doesn't let anything through. There is no "us" in a nerd's "us vs them", it's one big case of Mr Perfect vs 7 billion sad losers who fail to measure up.
"After all, geeks are the people who control telecommunications, energy distribution, "your computer," transportation, and most of the data in the world."
... most have close to zero communication skills when it comes to making their point to a non-geek. Or even to a geek who's not already a zealot on the same crusade. So for the most part, they're safe to ignore.
All that and
" hope you're not suggesting that this is a *bad* thing (and I say that as a non-native English speaker)..."
I'm saying that having to go to the dictionary to figure out an obscure archaic meaning of "tilt", that I haven't seen or used before, and likely won't need again in the next 20 years, is... well, maybe not necessarily "bad", but I could have done without that just to understand the title of an article about game consoles.
See title. That's one game I'd like to see :P
I don't know about staying bitter, but yeah, I can just see even a moderately intelligent kid gaming the game, and using some loophole to achieve an utterly non-historical result.
E.g., I've seen a pretty surrealistic AAR (After-Action Report) on Paradox's boards about playing Japan in Victoria and ending up a liberal democracy long before the Meiji Restoration. The tactic used things that just wouldn't have worked in Japan's feudal society:
- e.g., taxing the land-owners 100% to impoverish and thus elliminate that class. There were civil wars for a lot less than that, and not just in Japan. The American Independence War was over a lot less of a tax levy. "All your income are belong to us", i.e., basically turning state-owned by decree, is something that _will_ cause a civil war anywhere.
- E.g., accepting to become vassals of the Dutch, to get access to the Dutch technology and know-how, such as railroads. Sorry, I just can't see 19'th century Japan simply accepting that. They had a bit of a civil war just for opening up to the outside world. Accepting another country as masters just like that? That would have every single samurai and noble in the land up in arms.
And it culminated with using a loophole where you could force a whole country to the opposite ideology of your government, so basically the whole of Japan flipped to ultra-liberal in a very short time. And then he let them revolt and overthrow the government, turning the country into a liberal democracy, which also got him out of being a vassal.
Don't get me wrong, I admire the skill and inventivity involved in abusing the game like that. _Awesomely_ played.
But if they use games to teach history, I just can see a smart kid coming up with something like that in history class. Ooer. Now that would give the teacher a heart attack.
"And are you seriously suggesting that some entrepreneurial African is going to spend a year or so not working to feed his family, but instead programming inside someone else's internet cafe, to develop his own Office suite?"
I'm seriously suggesting that it's a stupid and racist notion to think that every single person in Africa is dirt-poor and just working to feed his family from one day to the next. The message that started this whole thread mentioned _banks_ for example. You know, big financial institutions, with employees and computers and all. It might also come as a surprise, but those countries also have _factories_.
So I'm guessing that if a country, or some of its citizens, can afford a factory with thousands of employees, then someone there could also afford a team of, say, a dozen programmers, _if_ there was a market for the product.
And they could also afford some cheap computers for those to work on. They wouldn't need to take the employees to the nearest Internet cafe. If anything, if you're telling me some people can afford a dozen computers for an Internet cafe, then I see no reason why someone can't afford the same number for a software company.