... we already have that system. You may notice that stuff like getting a different sentence for pleading guilty or cooperating with justice aren't new to this case. That's how the RL system works, and is supposed to work.
There is no such thing as purely objective justice, where the sentence is just spat out based on a formula. (Just feed the crime in, have a computer churn a few seconds, spit out the exact number of days in jail.) It's not even supposed to work that way.
As for who picks the nitwits, that's the judge. There's a reason laws give him/her a very broad interval and let him/her decide where in that interval you fit.
The job of justice isn't just to dish out punishment, but to hopefully reduce crime. And not just from a theoretical humanitarian point of view. There just isn't place in prisons to give maximum sentence to everyone. It's a limited resource, and you have to decide how much of it is _needed_ to help keep crime down.
So a judge's job _is_ to decide, among other things, what the risks are of you doing it again if he/she let you go.
If you've spent _years_ doing the same kind of crime, and still maintain that it was within your rights to do so and it's the victim's fault if their front door lock could be lockpicked (or their network could be broken into)... you've just convinced him/her that if you were let go, you'd run do the same.
So, yes, the moral of the story is: if you're a twit with the judge, he _is_ entitled to have the last laugh. That guy/gal isn't the enemy, and may well even be looking for an excuse to give you community service or a fine instead. (Like he suggested in this case at one point.) But if you tell him basically "bah, they deserved having their house/network/whatever burglarized, and you guys are victimizing me by trying to keep me from doing it again", congrats, you've just shot yourself in the foot.
" If I had to go to jail for a cybercrime, I would at least want the other inmates to understand the charge."
The public at large may not be experts in some of the more sophisticated crimes, nor in the finer points of intellectual property (e.g., as applied to those database records), but stuff like spam is something you don't need a Ph.D. in CS to understand. If someone doesn't understand, someone else will explain it to them.
Spammer: "I sold 92 million AOL email addresses to spammers." Bubba: "Uh, wot's a spammer" Billy Joe: "Bubba, you know those 'enlarge your penis' and 'horny teens waiting for you' messages you told me your little daughter was getting on AOL? This guy told them where to send those."
Which way it goes from there, I wouldn't know. But from there Bubba understands exactly what the cybercrime was.
It was supposed to be "Single-player console RPG", but answering to something like "The RPG world has turned into the MMORPG world", you can probably see how a brain-fart like that would happen.
Though I suppose there is one game I'd call "Single-player console MMORPG". It's called "Morrowind", and is pretty much just that: a MMO game with the netcode disabled. It's built upon a MMO engine and, not necessarily meaning it in a bad way, the quests are just the kind you'd get in a MMO. At any rate, it's the closest you could get in SP to soloing in a MMO.
Seems to me like a legitimate concern. The fact is, computers aren't perfect, and the Internet is anything _but_ the perfect real time medium for something like this.
If I'm to look at just my experience with WoW, I got disconnected three times in half an hour at one point yesterday. All of a sudden there'd be no more packets coming, and about half a minute later the game would finally get the clue and disconnect me. Was someone playing with a router along the way? I wouldn't know.
Stuff like that happens on the Internet every single day. A router crashes. A cable breaks. A connection is DDOSed. Or it gets Slashdotted: what happens if on the same day the hospital's web page gets linked to by Slashdot or whatever? I'm going to guess that's gonna mean a lot less bandwidth and a lot more latency for that operation.
The internet is OK for non-critical stuff and stuff that doesn't need a guaranteed response time. For playing WoW or UT2004, meh, I can reconnect or find another server. For buying stuff online, meh, I can hit refresh. Etc. It's not important stuff.
But the thought that someone's life (or eyesight for an eye operation) would be _gambled_ on an internet connection... now that makes me cringe.
If the operation _has_ to be performed from a remote location, I'd want a direct dedicated connection, and a redundant one at that.
Well, I'm a fan of Japanese RPGs too, and there have been some very good games in other genres too. But just saying that you don't have to limit yourself to that. While USA and Japan indeed seem polarized around different extremes of the game spectrum (not a good-vs-bad games spectrum, just different games for different tastes), there are other countries which produce stuff close enough to either extreme you might prefer.
About the XBox itself, you raise a valid question. That's been my reason too to not buy one until Fable came around. Looking through their list of games just didn't inspire me. And even now, looking at the two bookshelves full of PS2 games I have, and by contrast at the 5 XBox games I have, and only 2 of those (Jade Empire and Fable) were anywhere near exclusive for it... heck yeah, I see your point all right.
Ah, that's too technical and too original. Now if it were about using it as an USB drive and running Doom 3 off it, that would have gotten first page in no time.
"Of course, MMO games don't appeal to me, because I'm an old man who doesn't feel like being hassled by a bunch of foul-mouthed barely literate 12 year olds any time I want to sit down to play a game. (Always a risk with MMO games)."
Actually, in MMOs, and assuming that you do stick to the non-PvP servers, that's practically a non-existent problem. The vast majority of people I've met online in a MMO was actually friendly, and tended to say "please" and "thanks".
Basically I'm not saying that you should play a MMO (I prefer a good SP game myself), but I _am_ saying that not everyone online is a Counter-Strike player, you know. (Now I know that not everyone is like that, but, for whatever reason, that game did attract a whole lot of immature twits.)
In-your-face "I 0wnz j00!" kinda people tend to gravitate towards games where they can actually "ownz j00". They want to prove that by competing _against_ you. They don't stay long on a game where they can't in fact go against you. The less they can do to you, the quicker they'll move to something more competitive.
Actually, I don't think they're following the most vocal buyers, and couldn't care less about how much time you have. It's more like following the mirage of money.
The thing which you probably realize is that copies sold and ROI are completely different things.
There were genres which had an increasing number of buyers, e.g., Adventures, yet for a while skirted with extinction. For half a decade everyone actually preferred to sell less copies of a FPS instead of making and Adventure.
Why? The ROI was higher for a FPS. A FPS for a while didn't have to have any story, scripting whatever. It was _very_ cheap to just license a graphics engine, throw together a few maps and skins, and call it a game. By contrast, scripting a complex adventure cost a lot more. So you could actually sell less copies of a FPS, yet actually make more money out of it.
The same applies here. The reason it feels sometimes like the publishers would love to ditch buyers like you and me completely, and everyone makes yet another MMO, is simple: MMOs are a money-printing machine.
On the average, people stay on a MMO for about 6 months. Some stay longer, some stay less, but on the average that's how long it takes before someone gets sick and tired of it. So if you sell the game to them for $30, give them a month "free", and charge $13 for the other 5 months, that's a nice $95 you got off a single person who bought your game. (And even more with expansion packs.) By contrast, with a SP game you only milked them of $30 once.
If you think 3x the revenue was already reason enough to go MMO, wait, it goes better. Out of those $30 for selling a game, a lot goes to the retailers. The rest usually goes just into covering the development costs. The average PC SP game doesn't actually make a profit: most in fact make a loss. MMOs, on the other hand, tend to actually make a profit.
But wait, it gets even better. Normal SP games tend to drop in price in a few months, maybe a year. Most money come from the initial couple of weeks, and after a year or so you're at most making money in homoeopathic ammounts out of it. If at all. On the other hand, MMO subscription costs don't tapper off. If someone's just picked a copy of, say, UO now, after a whole 8 years from its launch, they'd still pay the nominal monthly fee.
In a nutshell, that's the mirage that makes all publishers rush to make another MMO. They don't care if you're vocal or have time. They just care about how much money they can make off you. With MMOs even out of a smaller market, they tend to make more money. That's all.
Again, just because that's what _you_ like, doesn't mean that's what everyone else plays. At the moment _far_ more people play SP games than all online games combined.
There's a lot more to gaming than fps, rts and mmo, you know. And not everyone plays for a challenge. In fact, your average "casual gamer" just wants to have a relaxing evening, not compete head on with immature 12 year olds and be told that he's "owned" or whatever. And they're an increasingly large part of the market.
Some of us, for example, play for a good (semi)interactive story, which is something that MMOs and online fps/rts are _awful_ at. I won't even try to be diplomatic about it: they do a piss-poor job of telling any kind of story to start with, and adding other players in the mix only makes it worse. It's hard to actually suspend disbelief in a medieval story, when people around you talk about the Spice Girls or whatever other stuff.
The thing about internet play being the future, and SP going the way of the dodo, is being waved around for about a decade now, and still shows no sign of becoming more than wishful thinking.
Which it is. It's the publishers wishing everyone started paying $15 a month, instead of just a one-time $30. (That is, if they don't wait and get it from the bargain bin for $10.) The whole talk isn't because everyone wants to play a MMO, but because publishers want you to pay for a MMO.
When EQ hit 400,000 subscribers paying a total of $4,000,000 a month, everyone started wanting that kind of a money printing license too. It's not that it ever was more than a _minority_ of gamers, it's that it's a very profitable minority. They keep giving you money every month.
MMOs vs the regular game market, is like owning a goose that lays golden eggs vs having 100 regular geese. With the latter you still sell more eggs (game copies), with the former you have higher profits. So everyone and their grandma wants to get a slice of that market. That's all.
"He's predicting something that's pretty much already happened."
False. It's something that keeps getting predicted, but never actually happened. It's been almost a decade of hearing that bullshit about how MMOs and online play are the wave of the future, but in practice it never happened.
"The RPG world has turned into the MMORPG world."
False. Single-player console MMORPGs routinely outsell any MMO, WOW included.
The MMO market is now at 10 million users world-wide. There still are more people playing on the GameCube alone, which never had _any_ kind of internet connection, than that.
Now also add PS2s, GameBoys, PSPs and everything else that _is_ a gaming platform and used offline. Simply put, the number of people playing SP games on those simply _dwarfs_ the MMO and online FPS markets combined.
So nope, sorry to burst your bubble, the vast majority of gaming still happens off-line.
Yes, l33t CS clansmen and the like are an awfully loud (and sometimes obnoxious) minority, and like to pretend that the whole world revolves around them. But the keyword is: minority. Just because someone makes an awful lot of noise, doesn't make them the majority or anything.
So basically just because _you_ don't give a damn about SP games any more, please don't pretend that the rest of the world does the same. The numbers still are on the SP side.
I won't contest what you've said about games made in the USA, because at least a _some_ of them do fit that bill. (But then again, not all.)
But you've also got to realize that the game-producing world doesn't consist only of USA and Japan. Ever heard for example of Bioware? You know, of KOTOR and Jade Empire fame? They're Canadian actually. Lionhead Studios, makers of Fable? They're in the UK. Etc.
So the XBox has plenty of games which aren't made in the USA. (And the PC even more of them.)
The USA actually produces relatively few games. It's not just that the EU produces more games than the USA. The UK alone makes more games and sells more copies than the USA.
Now seriously, at times it seems like any crap gets the/. front page if it mentions an iPod. I remember for example the front page story (I'm too lazy to search and post the link though) about using a lot of iPods as USB hard drives to haul around movie footage.
And just like in this case, an overpriced USB HDD at that, if used for only that purpose. For all its merits as an MP3 player, if you're going to use it _only_ as an external HDD, there are much cheaper HDD's around.
I don't know, there seems to be a segment of the population (and apparently at least one is a/. editor) for whom the mere mention of an iPod makes something newsworthy. Because whoa, it's an iPod! Any example of someone using it, in no matter how trivial and normal a way, is automatically soo cool.
I'm guessing that if I posted a blog about me backing up my downloaded WoW patches on an iPod, or saving mom's digital photos on an iPod, I could get front page on Slashdot too. Heck, probably even using it as an MP3 player could get front page, if for example I hoooked it to my speakers and used it for music for a dance party.
But, yeah, unless you fall into that population segment, there's absolutely no reason to think anything other than "big deal".
Well, look at the bigger picture
on
Games As The New Pub
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· Score: 1, Interesting
You never "got" games, in your own words, but you're here posting on Slashdot, which is a kind of socializing in itself. I also personally know pretty social people (in fact, "chatterboxes" would also be a way to describe some of them) which do supplement their face-to-face chatting with a variety of online means. Game are just a slice of that.
If you're looking at online communication in general, there is a very signifficant number of people who use email or VOIP on a daily basis to communicate with old friends far away, instead of going out and making new friends to get their fill of chatting. Mom for example spends literally hours emailing everyone she knows, and now is in another town or some of them in another country.
That's the kind of "exodus" that is happening. Some time ago, if you needed to talk to someone, you pretty much _had_ to go do just that. Go find someone, anyone, in your near proximity to talk to face-to-face. You wouldn't log into Slashdot or some game board to see who answered your messages, you'd go to the pub or whatever.
There are however problems with that model, that you probably realize. Phisical proximity being the deciding factor, other stuff like common interests was mostly a hit-and-miss affair. Mostly miss, in fact.
Let's be frank, many a conversation I've had were boring as hell. And many a conversation I've been basically in what I call "Eliza mode", after the program ELIZA. You can talk to people for _years_ by just paraphrasing the things they've said right back at them later. (Keyword being: later. If you do it right in the next sentence they tend to notice it.)
Conversely, there also is a conformity pressure involved in getting that kind of thing going at all. E.g., let's be honest, a lot of people are into football or listen the same music as everyone else in their school, just to have some common topic with the people in that small pool of people available based on proximity.
The mirage of the internet is basically that it eliminates this very problem. You can talk to the people _you_ want to talk to (old friends, or random people who hopefully have the same interests because they're in a chat room or on a board dedicated to that topic, or in a game you play) rather than whatever happens to be available.
And arguably even telephone was already the beginning of that effect. When your kid would rather spend half the evening on the phone with his/her school mates, instead of having those 19'th century family evenings where you have to talk to each other merely by virtue of that being the only choice available, that's just it. The available pool of people to talk to is now larger than what physical proximity used to dictate.
Internet just enlarged the pool even more.
The effects are more subtle than noticing an outright "exodus" where everyone just stops talking face-to-face at all, but they are there.
And it has to be said that some people did, in fact, do just that: mostly stopped talking face to face. They're not a majority or anything, but they exist. Some of those apparently "non-social" people are in fact social people all right. They just switched to talking over a medium instead of tolerating any self-centred bore to get any communication at all.
Your distinction between session cookies and persistent cookies is insightful and well taken. McAffee's "privacy" component, however, had a _major_ problem with non-permanent session cookies too. It terminally screwed half the sites where I logged on.
Now I'm not saying that it's what _all_ anti-virus programs do. It's probably just McAffee being POS. (They even screwed up one update and left two versions of itself automatically started at the same time. One of which couldn't be even uninstalled any more without manually editing the registry. So I'm really talking utter POS.)
But I'd also take a wild uninformed guess and say that they're _probably_ not the only ones who are clueless about it. Everyone and their grandma makes firewalls and "anti-spyware" nowadays, and I wouldn't be surprised if half of them didn't even know what they're doing.
Well, I'm not refering to an honest PvP player, and in fact it's not even really related to PvP. There are plenty of griefers that don't even use combat to harrass someone. (E.g., on that UO griefers' board I've mentioned, about half the exploits they had compiled were not about killing someone. They were about scamming someone, impersonating someone to ruin their reputation, etc.)
And again, you'd be surprised to what extents some people would go to make an ass of themselves, for no actual rewards whatsoever. Do not assume that just because someone doesn't get xp or honour points out of you, they will necessarily leave you alone. Most will, indeed. But some won't. There are people who'll even abuse bugs or otherwise risk getting banned in their quest to be the perfect jackass.
Well, that's what I assumed when I joined a non-PvP server, yes. But then having been ganked twice on a non-PvP server, I was honestly not sure what to believe any more.
Since one of the characters was a hunter and one was warrior, I'm fairly sure that I hadn't cast healing or anything else on anyone. You know, what with not having the spell at all.
Let's put it like this: when you have someone whose very revenue depends on "detecting wolves", they'll cry "wolf!" All the time. They'll cry "wolf" at the neighbour's "alsacian wolf" dog even.
I'm talking about anti-spyware and other "security" companies.
Do they delete cookies? Well, I briefly had McAffee installed, and among other problems (such as being a piss-poorly programmed POS) it did exactly that. It tried to protect me from all those supposedly dangerous cookies, storing such "personal details" as the session ID on some site. I'm not kidding. Using half the sites that required logon (such as Gamespy's Fileplanet) was suddenly impossible.
So based on that I'd say the concern is genuine.
But it's probably not the users going through the menus to delete cookies. Joe Average probably wouldn't even know or care what a cookie is. But Joe Average likely has some POS security software installed that deletes the cookies for him
Effective solutions can be found easier than you'd think, if anyone cared.
E.g., I've been on MUDs who nicely solved the issue of AOE and non-PK characters that you described. Letting rip an AOE just wouldn't hurt the players that weren't valid PK targets.
So if Blizzard really wanted to stop ganking, they can do the same things. Forget dishonour, just not let you attack a much lower character at all. I.e., forget deterrence, make it just physically impossible.
So let's take your scenario:
"so a group of 60ies dukes it out, fare and square. Some asshole in the horde team (sorry, alliance here) logs out and back into his lvl 10 priest. Comes to the area and so neutralizes any AOE capability. Obvious solution? I think not."
Well, I can tell you first hand what would happen there with the solution I've just described: you let go an AOE anyway, the level 10 priest just isn't hit by it. And if they start attacking you or healing someone involved in a PvP fight, they get flagged, they start being valid target for the next hour.
So obvious solutions not only do exist, they were already tested on MUDs. It just takes the willingness to implement them. That's really what's missing at Blizzard.
The idea of letting people sort it out for themselves has already been tried on several MUDs _and_ on UO, and it never worked.
The problem with "IC justice" is that there's _nothing_ you can do in character to someone who doesn't care about their character to start with. There are people who have nothing against throwing away whole characters or even accounts. Ganking right back has exactly zero deterrence effect there.
I've once accidentally landed on an UO griefer board by accident, when googling for something else about UO. It was... an education. People were actually planning to buy a new account, go on a griefing spree and get banned, effectively losing the money too.
So ok, most people aren't that cavalier about throwing some money out the window to grief, but there are a lot which just don't care about their character at all. There are characters out there which just aren't supposed to be anything but ganking tools, to be used and discarded as needed. Refusing to group or to trade with them (especially when they can get everything at the AH anyway) just won't even start to be a bother.
Then there's the OOC aspect involved. The player at the keyboard is likely a troll, basically. (And I don't mean the in-game race.) They do that just to get some attention.
And as the board wisdom goes: "don't feed the trolls". It actually makes them come back for more.
Forming an in-game posse to deal with them is just that: feeding the troll. It doesn't matter whether he won or lost. It matters that he got a whole bunch of you to drop all else and hunt him. You gave him the attention he wanted to start with.
Now add taking down their names like in your solution. So not only he gets momentary attention, he gets people to remember his name? Whop-de-do. That's the ultimate reward a troll can possibly hope for. It's like being raised to God status and put on a pedestal.
So to cut a long story short, it sadly doesn't work that way. You either stop them through code, or you stop them by banning accounts, or whatever. But letting players sort it out for themselves _never_ worked.
The corolary, of course, is that a dishonour system wouldn't work either. As I've said, we're talking people who just don't care about IC stuff happening to their character. Just getting a lower number on their character won't even start to deterr anyone. You either make it impossible (in code, by bans, whatever), or it just won't make a difference anyway.
Someone at Blizzard, no idea who, obviously loves "killers". (As per the Bartle definition of a "killer": someone who gets their jollies out of making the game non-fun for everyone else, and whose greatest reward is driving someone completely off the game. Basically "killing" them off the game world completely. It's what on MMOs we call a "griefer", basically.)
Diablo and Diablo 2, never did much to curb griefing either. Other than leaving the server if anyone wanted to gank you -- even if it was your server -- there was not much you could do.
So, in all honesty, I'm not sure what you expected from Blizzard or why. A bandaid beancounter solution that does everything _except_ address ganking, is, in fact, exactly what I'd historically expect from Blizzard. Frankly, I'm surprised they even did something about the rooftops thing.
This isn't flaming them or anything. They're more than free to make the game as they see fit, and we're more than free to decide whether to play it or not. So I'm not flaming them. I'm just saying that it's something which simply doesn't fit their historical vision of a game, so it's rather unlikely to see it implemented. It's like expecting Id Software to stop making FPS games: unlikely that it will happen.
Personally I haven't found the ganking situation to be annoying enough for me yet. Been ganked only twice, and in newbie areas on a non-PvP server to boot, but, eh, only twice. Plus, it just gave me a chuckle. If someone had to go through all that grind and effort just to finally feel confident enough to gank a newbie, heh, they have my compassion.
But still, _if_ it got annoying, I'd just move to another game rather than expect Blizzard to fix it.
It's not like there aren't enough games that are strictly non-PvP or have strictly non-PvP servers. EQ2 or COH come to mind. Or PSO, which goes above and beyond the call of duty to make it impossible to harm others: you can't attack them, you can't block their retreat, you can't train monsters to them, etc. And everything happens in an instance in PSO (or about 75% or so happens in an instance in COH), so you don't have to deal with yahoos screwing your team's quest either.
So, I dunno... why bother waiting for Blizzard to fix that?
"What in the hell is the point of being stronger if you can't attack the weaker freely... if you choose to do so? [...] Someone earned that level 60, and there must be a reason, right?
You mean your _only_ reason to grind all the way to level 60 was so you can finally muster the balls to attack a newbie? That's way sad. You have my pity, dude. No, seriously.
Geeze, I know some people were born without balls, so they _have_ to pick on someone 20+ levels lower. I also know that some people have to troll/gank/whatever, because annoying others is the only attention they can get. I suppose some people just need the "woo, I managed to kill someone" (a newbie 20+ levels lower) or "woo, I finally got some attention" (by making an ass of oneself in public) ego-boost in their pathetic worthless lives.
But actually going through a 2-3 month grind to finally feel safe enough to attack a newbie, that's one perspective I hadn't thought of before. It's just _unbelievably_ sad. It starts with something that was pathetic already, and takes it to a whole new level of pathetic.
"I mean, maybe there should be a spider solitaire game within WoW so that players can escape that unpleasant reality for a few hours."
If you end up needing to escape the _unpleasant_ reality of a _game_, like your message spells it out, then that game is doing something awfully wrong to start with. Games are supposed to be fun. They're supposed to be the more pleasant reality to escape _to_, not to end up an unpleasant stress to escape _from_.
If a small number of idiots who can only get human interaction by trolling, harrassing and ganking actually manage to turn the game for everyone else into an unpleasant reality to escape from, then that game has failed miserable to catter to its players.
Bullshit rethoric as to why that is the "right" way is good and fine, it's missing the whole point. There is no absolute "right" and "wrong" in a matter of personal taste. What matters is whether a game matches someone's expectations or not. That's all. If you've made the game non-fun for someone, it doesn't matter how many bullshit arguments can you string to justify it. The only thing that matters, for them, is that it's no longer fun.
That's not just about ganking. It's just the way it goes in matters of entertainment and personal taste. If, say, I liked SF but hated romance flicks, if someone turned Star Treck into mostly a romance soap-opera, I'd have just stopped watching it. That's it. You can argue as much as you want that the change is for the greater good, what matters for me is whether the result still matches my tastes.
So there you have it: if a minority manages to make the game an "unpleasant reality to escape from" for the majority, then in effect the average perceived quality of the game has went down. It's time to take some kind of measures to fix that.
It's not even just for balance or fairness sake: as a publisher, that kind of thing hits you directly in the income. You have all the incentive in the world to address the problem before it goes out of hand.
If not, people tend to find something more fun to do instead. E.g., UO ignored the players' complaints (ganking included) for so long, it quickly lost most of the players as soon as EQ got published. EQ and AC pretty much made it their _main_ message that they're the place which address those UO grievances (e.g., being ganked on sight), and won. EQ ended up with twice as many player as UO... in a genre that UO invented.
Thankfully, WoW is not yet at that stage. It is still very much possible to be left alone on the non-PvP servers. But _if_ a group actually managed to make the game an unpleasant stressful reality for the others, then WoW too can see the same effect.
Heck, flag them for an hour, if they were stupid enough to pick on someone higher level. If someone thought they have a chance in that fight, by all means, let them have their chance at it.
For starters, I was just going for a +1 Funny, but alas it seems I've just managed to be cryptic instead.
Second, if I'm to actually think seriously about it, whether the robot is pleasured is pretty much the last thing that comes to mind. Think of it as simply a feedback loop.
Think of it in terms of game design. You could just put the NPCs standing there and not bother with issues like AI or realistic reactions. They're just NPCs, right? Thy're there to be slaughtered. They're no better than cardboard targets, right? WTF do you care if they even try to defend themselves, or their team mates? It's not like they really have feelings or any real team spirit or anything, right?
Well, it turns out that nevertheless, people like it more when they see some believable reaction to their _own_ actions. If you gave someone a choice between two FPS games, (A) one where everyone sits around like cardboard targets, and (B) one where you can see reactions ranging from teamwork (suppression fire, flanking, etc), to panic, to whatever else, as a result of your actions, chances are they'll prefer B any time.
Or if we're talking robots, take some fine creations as the Aibo or various others. Some people buy an Aibo instead of just a statue of a dog. The point is precisely that you expect it to react to the environment or your actions, rather than just sit there looking like a dog.
So _if_ I were to manufacture a robot companion, I'd want it to act and react as much as possible as the owner's expectations of a real person.
The keyword there being "expectations", rather than being actually indistinguishable from a real person. E.g., someone looking for companionship that way probably expects something more along the lines of "co-dependent" than a realistic woman impersonation like "wtf, you never have time for me. If all that matters to you is World Of Warcraft, then I'm packing my bags and leaving." Again, not unlike game design and AI design: you have to match what the player expects, rather than create a perfect simulation or AI.
And _if_ that robot is also usable for sex, that would include sensory input and reactions for that. Ranging from moaning at the right time to pressure sensors to enforce some limits of what it's doing. (E.g., if it's giving the owner a hand-job, you don't want the robot to yank the guy's tool clean off.)
So there you go. Does that satisfy your curiosity?
"Unlike many of the players who lament the need to find groups to complete most of the in-game content past level 30, I really enjoy finding other people to form up with in order to meet the challenges presented by all of the games zones and instances. Working with other people lets you use your class to its fullest effect, something I really enjoy."
Well, I used to think the same, and I was known to post along the lines of "why the heck play a Massively MULTIPLAYER Online game while avoiding other players? It's not called Massively SINGLEPLAYER."
Then I've been in entirely too many groups which, to put it bluntly, just suck.
1. You get people who just can't function in a group. Period. From having to whine and beg at them to get any healing or buffs (and then they're fresh out of mana from blasting anyway), to aggroing the wrong mobs, to not drawing aggro as a tank, to whatever else. I've been in WoW groups where someone else had to heal the priest (or the Defender in COH). How sad is that?
2. Worse yet, you have people who just don't know even how to solo. They somehow got to a mid or even high level without knowing even the bare basics of how the game works.
E.g., for a really sad example, take COH, which actually has two bonus classes that are unlocked by reaching the maximum level. So when you see someone playing that you know that they also have a level 50 character. Not exactly newbie, right?
Yet they absolutely lack even the most elementary clue, like drawing or tanking. You see one of them _insisting_ that he's the one to start fights with an area attack against a large group of higher level enemies. Everyone else just heal him quickly, ok? I mean, wtf?
I don't know, did these people get power-levelled, or bought their characters on ebay, or what?
So between these two archetypes, it's probably good to have missions that require no more than three buttons. That's already two buttons too many for some people.
3. The greedy misanthrope.
The kind of person (bonus if it's the group leader) for whom everyone else is there just to get him the maximum xp. And he won't hesitate to get everyone wiped out repeatedly, because anything less than insane odds isn't getting him TEH L33T XP. (Even more bonus points if it's a game with xp debt for death, so he isn't even getting xp faster on the whole.)
4. You get the "perfect group" nazi.
I don't mean people who expect you to function in a group, which is a reasonable expectation. I mean people who have one single idealized version of a perfect group, and aren't gonna be flexible about it. In their book, warriors and paladins _only_ take hits, priests _only_ heal (and in fact are the only ones that heal), and mages and rogues are the _only_ ones supposed to do any damage.
And god forbid that anything or anyone deviates from that perfect ideal. Which also translates in unholy amounts of time spent to assemble something resembling that perfect ideal, instead of making do with what's available and works.
Etc.
I'm even skipping the more "minor" annoyances like groups that dismember as soon as the leader finished his quest, downtime as half the time someone is afk in a large group, someone rushing to mine as the rest of the party is ambushed by a patrol, etc.
I don't know... enough playing MMOs just gave me the answer to "why would anyone want to solo when there are thousands of other players around?" Turns out the answer was "that's exactly why."
Slashdot Mirror
... we already have that system. You may notice that stuff like getting a different sentence for pleading guilty or cooperating with justice aren't new to this case. That's how the RL system works, and is supposed to work.
There is no such thing as purely objective justice, where the sentence is just spat out based on a formula. (Just feed the crime in, have a computer churn a few seconds, spit out the exact number of days in jail.) It's not even supposed to work that way.
As for who picks the nitwits, that's the judge. There's a reason laws give him/her a very broad interval and let him/her decide where in that interval you fit.
The job of justice isn't just to dish out punishment, but to hopefully reduce crime. And not just from a theoretical humanitarian point of view. There just isn't place in prisons to give maximum sentence to everyone. It's a limited resource, and you have to decide how much of it is _needed_ to help keep crime down.
So a judge's job _is_ to decide, among other things, what the risks are of you doing it again if he/she let you go.
If you've spent _years_ doing the same kind of crime, and still maintain that it was within your rights to do so and it's the victim's fault if their front door lock could be lockpicked (or their network could be broken into)... you've just convinced him/her that if you were let go, you'd run do the same.
So, yes, the moral of the story is: if you're a twit with the judge, he _is_ entitled to have the last laugh. That guy/gal isn't the enemy, and may well even be looking for an excuse to give you community service or a fine instead. (Like he suggested in this case at one point.) But if you tell him basically "bah, they deserved having their house/network/whatever burglarized, and you guys are victimizing me by trying to keep me from doing it again", congrats, you've just shot yourself in the foot.
" If I had to go to jail for a cybercrime, I would at least want the other inmates to understand the charge."
The public at large may not be experts in some of the more sophisticated crimes, nor in the finer points of intellectual property (e.g., as applied to those database records), but stuff like spam is something you don't need a Ph.D. in CS to understand. If someone doesn't understand, someone else will explain it to them.
Spammer: "I sold 92 million AOL email addresses to spammers."
Bubba: "Uh, wot's a spammer"
Billy Joe: "Bubba, you know those 'enlarge your penis' and 'horny teens waiting for you' messages you told me your little daughter was getting on AOL? This guy told them where to send those."
Which way it goes from there, I wouldn't know. But from there Bubba understands exactly what the cybercrime was.
It was supposed to be "Single-player console RPG", but answering to something like "The RPG world has turned into the MMORPG world", you can probably see how a brain-fart like that would happen.
Though I suppose there is one game I'd call "Single-player console MMORPG". It's called "Morrowind", and is pretty much just that: a MMO game with the netcode disabled. It's built upon a MMO engine and, not necessarily meaning it in a bad way, the quests are just the kind you'd get in a MMO. At any rate, it's the closest you could get in SP to soloing in a MMO.
Seems to me like a legitimate concern. The fact is, computers aren't perfect, and the Internet is anything _but_ the perfect real time medium for something like this.
If I'm to look at just my experience with WoW, I got disconnected three times in half an hour at one point yesterday. All of a sudden there'd be no more packets coming, and about half a minute later the game would finally get the clue and disconnect me. Was someone playing with a router along the way? I wouldn't know.
Stuff like that happens on the Internet every single day. A router crashes. A cable breaks. A connection is DDOSed. Or it gets Slashdotted: what happens if on the same day the hospital's web page gets linked to by Slashdot or whatever? I'm going to guess that's gonna mean a lot less bandwidth and a lot more latency for that operation.
The internet is OK for non-critical stuff and stuff that doesn't need a guaranteed response time. For playing WoW or UT2004, meh, I can reconnect or find another server. For buying stuff online, meh, I can hit refresh. Etc. It's not important stuff.
But the thought that someone's life (or eyesight for an eye operation) would be _gambled_ on an internet connection... now that makes me cringe.
If the operation _has_ to be performed from a remote location, I'd want a direct dedicated connection, and a redundant one at that.
Well, I'm a fan of Japanese RPGs too, and there have been some very good games in other genres too. But just saying that you don't have to limit yourself to that. While USA and Japan indeed seem polarized around different extremes of the game spectrum (not a good-vs-bad games spectrum, just different games for different tastes), there are other countries which produce stuff close enough to either extreme you might prefer.
About the XBox itself, you raise a valid question. That's been my reason too to not buy one until Fable came around. Looking through their list of games just didn't inspire me. And even now, looking at the two bookshelves full of PS2 games I have, and by contrast at the 5 XBox games I have, and only 2 of those (Jade Empire and Fable) were anywhere near exclusive for it... heck yeah, I see your point all right.
Ah, that's too technical and too original. Now if it were about using it as an USB drive and running Doom 3 off it, that would have gotten first page in no time.
"Of course, MMO games don't appeal to me, because I'm an old man who doesn't feel like being hassled by a bunch of foul-mouthed barely literate 12 year olds any time I want to sit down to play a game. (Always a risk with MMO games)."
Actually, in MMOs, and assuming that you do stick to the non-PvP servers, that's practically a non-existent problem. The vast majority of people I've met online in a MMO was actually friendly, and tended to say "please" and "thanks".
Basically I'm not saying that you should play a MMO (I prefer a good SP game myself), but I _am_ saying that not everyone online is a Counter-Strike player, you know. (Now I know that not everyone is like that, but, for whatever reason, that game did attract a whole lot of immature twits.)
In-your-face "I 0wnz j00!" kinda people tend to gravitate towards games where they can actually "ownz j00". They want to prove that by competing _against_ you. They don't stay long on a game where they can't in fact go against you. The less they can do to you, the quicker they'll move to something more competitive.
Actually, I don't think they're following the most vocal buyers, and couldn't care less about how much time you have. It's more like following the mirage of money.
The thing which you probably realize is that copies sold and ROI are completely different things.
There were genres which had an increasing number of buyers, e.g., Adventures, yet for a while skirted with extinction. For half a decade everyone actually preferred to sell less copies of a FPS instead of making and Adventure.
Why? The ROI was higher for a FPS. A FPS for a while didn't have to have any story, scripting whatever. It was _very_ cheap to just license a graphics engine, throw together a few maps and skins, and call it a game. By contrast, scripting a complex adventure cost a lot more. So you could actually sell less copies of a FPS, yet actually make more money out of it.
The same applies here. The reason it feels sometimes like the publishers would love to ditch buyers like you and me completely, and everyone makes yet another MMO, is simple: MMOs are a money-printing machine.
On the average, people stay on a MMO for about 6 months. Some stay longer, some stay less, but on the average that's how long it takes before someone gets sick and tired of it. So if you sell the game to them for $30, give them a month "free", and charge $13 for the other 5 months, that's a nice $95 you got off a single person who bought your game. (And even more with expansion packs.) By contrast, with a SP game you only milked them of $30 once.
If you think 3x the revenue was already reason enough to go MMO, wait, it goes better. Out of those $30 for selling a game, a lot goes to the retailers. The rest usually goes just into covering the development costs. The average PC SP game doesn't actually make a profit: most in fact make a loss. MMOs, on the other hand, tend to actually make a profit.
But wait, it gets even better. Normal SP games tend to drop in price in a few months, maybe a year. Most money come from the initial couple of weeks, and after a year or so you're at most making money in homoeopathic ammounts out of it. If at all. On the other hand, MMO subscription costs don't tapper off. If someone's just picked a copy of, say, UO now, after a whole 8 years from its launch, they'd still pay the nominal monthly fee.
In a nutshell, that's the mirage that makes all publishers rush to make another MMO. They don't care if you're vocal or have time. They just care about how much money they can make off you. With MMOs even out of a smaller market, they tend to make more money. That's all.
"Go ahead, mod me down for not conforming."
Actually, since most of the world's gaming still happens offline in single-player, I'd say you're very much conforming to the norm.
Again, just because that's what _you_ like, doesn't mean that's what everyone else plays. At the moment _far_ more people play SP games than all online games combined.
There's a lot more to gaming than fps, rts and mmo, you know. And not everyone plays for a challenge. In fact, your average "casual gamer" just wants to have a relaxing evening, not compete head on with immature 12 year olds and be told that he's "owned" or whatever. And they're an increasingly large part of the market.
Some of us, for example, play for a good (semi)interactive story, which is something that MMOs and online fps/rts are _awful_ at. I won't even try to be diplomatic about it: they do a piss-poor job of telling any kind of story to start with, and adding other players in the mix only makes it worse. It's hard to actually suspend disbelief in a medieval story, when people around you talk about the Spice Girls or whatever other stuff.
The thing about internet play being the future, and SP going the way of the dodo, is being waved around for about a decade now, and still shows no sign of becoming more than wishful thinking.
Which it is. It's the publishers wishing everyone started paying $15 a month, instead of just a one-time $30. (That is, if they don't wait and get it from the bargain bin for $10.) The whole talk isn't because everyone wants to play a MMO, but because publishers want you to pay for a MMO.
When EQ hit 400,000 subscribers paying a total of $4,000,000 a month, everyone started wanting that kind of a money printing license too. It's not that it ever was more than a _minority_ of gamers, it's that it's a very profitable minority. They keep giving you money every month.
MMOs vs the regular game market, is like owning a goose that lays golden eggs vs having 100 regular geese. With the latter you still sell more eggs (game copies), with the former you have higher profits. So everyone and their grandma wants to get a slice of that market. That's all.
"He's predicting something that's pretty much already happened."
False. It's something that keeps getting predicted, but never actually happened. It's been almost a decade of hearing that bullshit about how MMOs and online play are the wave of the future, but in practice it never happened.
"The RPG world has turned into the MMORPG world."
False. Single-player console MMORPGs routinely outsell any MMO, WOW included.
The MMO market is now at 10 million users world-wide. There still are more people playing on the GameCube alone, which never had _any_ kind of internet connection, than that.
Now also add PS2s, GameBoys, PSPs and everything else that _is_ a gaming platform and used offline. Simply put, the number of people playing SP games on those simply _dwarfs_ the MMO and online FPS markets combined.
So nope, sorry to burst your bubble, the vast majority of gaming still happens off-line.
Yes, l33t CS clansmen and the like are an awfully loud (and sometimes obnoxious) minority, and like to pretend that the whole world revolves around them. But the keyword is: minority. Just because someone makes an awful lot of noise, doesn't make them the majority or anything.
So basically just because _you_ don't give a damn about SP games any more, please don't pretend that the rest of the world does the same. The numbers still are on the SP side.
I won't contest what you've said about games made in the USA, because at least a _some_ of them do fit that bill. (But then again, not all.)
But you've also got to realize that the game-producing world doesn't consist only of USA and Japan. Ever heard for example of Bioware? You know, of KOTOR and Jade Empire fame? They're Canadian actually. Lionhead Studios, makers of Fable? They're in the UK. Etc.
So the XBox has plenty of games which aren't made in the USA. (And the PC even more of them.)
The USA actually produces relatively few games. It's not just that the EU produces more games than the USA. The UK alone makes more games and sells more copies than the USA.
Now seriously, at times it seems like any crap gets the /. front page if it mentions an iPod. I remember for example the front page story (I'm too lazy to search and post the link though) about using a lot of iPods as USB hard drives to haul around movie footage.
/. editor) for whom the mere mention of an iPod makes something newsworthy. Because whoa, it's an iPod! Any example of someone using it, in no matter how trivial and normal a way, is automatically soo cool.
And just like in this case, an overpriced USB HDD at that, if used for only that purpose. For all its merits as an MP3 player, if you're going to use it _only_ as an external HDD, there are much cheaper HDD's around.
I don't know, there seems to be a segment of the population (and apparently at least one is a
I'm guessing that if I posted a blog about me backing up my downloaded WoW patches on an iPod, or saving mom's digital photos on an iPod, I could get front page on Slashdot too. Heck, probably even using it as an MP3 player could get front page, if for example I hoooked it to my speakers and used it for music for a dance party.
But, yeah, unless you fall into that population segment, there's absolutely no reason to think anything other than "big deal".
You never "got" games, in your own words, but you're here posting on Slashdot, which is a kind of socializing in itself. I also personally know pretty social people (in fact, "chatterboxes" would also be a way to describe some of them) which do supplement their face-to-face chatting with a variety of online means. Game are just a slice of that.
If you're looking at online communication in general, there is a very signifficant number of people who use email or VOIP on a daily basis to communicate with old friends far away, instead of going out and making new friends to get their fill of chatting. Mom for example spends literally hours emailing everyone she knows, and now is in another town or some of them in another country.
That's the kind of "exodus" that is happening. Some time ago, if you needed to talk to someone, you pretty much _had_ to go do just that. Go find someone, anyone, in your near proximity to talk to face-to-face. You wouldn't log into Slashdot or some game board to see who answered your messages, you'd go to the pub or whatever.
There are however problems with that model, that you probably realize. Phisical proximity being the deciding factor, other stuff like common interests was mostly a hit-and-miss affair. Mostly miss, in fact.
Let's be frank, many a conversation I've had were boring as hell. And many a conversation I've been basically in what I call "Eliza mode", after the program ELIZA. You can talk to people for _years_ by just paraphrasing the things they've said right back at them later. (Keyword being: later. If you do it right in the next sentence they tend to notice it.)
Conversely, there also is a conformity pressure involved in getting that kind of thing going at all. E.g., let's be honest, a lot of people are into football or listen the same music as everyone else in their school, just to have some common topic with the people in that small pool of people available based on proximity.
The mirage of the internet is basically that it eliminates this very problem. You can talk to the people _you_ want to talk to (old friends, or random people who hopefully have the same interests because they're in a chat room or on a board dedicated to that topic, or in a game you play) rather than whatever happens to be available.
And arguably even telephone was already the beginning of that effect. When your kid would rather spend half the evening on the phone with his/her school mates, instead of having those 19'th century family evenings where you have to talk to each other merely by virtue of that being the only choice available, that's just it. The available pool of people to talk to is now larger than what physical proximity used to dictate.
Internet just enlarged the pool even more.
The effects are more subtle than noticing an outright "exodus" where everyone just stops talking face-to-face at all, but they are there.
And it has to be said that some people did, in fact, do just that: mostly stopped talking face to face. They're not a majority or anything, but they exist. Some of those apparently "non-social" people are in fact social people all right. They just switched to talking over a medium instead of tolerating any self-centred bore to get any communication at all.
Your distinction between session cookies and persistent cookies is insightful and well taken. McAffee's "privacy" component, however, had a _major_ problem with non-permanent session cookies too. It terminally screwed half the sites where I logged on.
Now I'm not saying that it's what _all_ anti-virus programs do. It's probably just McAffee being POS. (They even screwed up one update and left two versions of itself automatically started at the same time. One of which couldn't be even uninstalled any more without manually editing the registry. So I'm really talking utter POS.)
But I'd also take a wild uninformed guess and say that they're _probably_ not the only ones who are clueless about it. Everyone and their grandma makes firewalls and "anti-spyware" nowadays, and I wouldn't be surprised if half of them didn't even know what they're doing.
Well, I'm not refering to an honest PvP player, and in fact it's not even really related to PvP. There are plenty of griefers that don't even use combat to harrass someone. (E.g., on that UO griefers' board I've mentioned, about half the exploits they had compiled were not about killing someone. They were about scamming someone, impersonating someone to ruin their reputation, etc.)
And again, you'd be surprised to what extents some people would go to make an ass of themselves, for no actual rewards whatsoever. Do not assume that just because someone doesn't get xp or honour points out of you, they will necessarily leave you alone. Most will, indeed. But some won't. There are people who'll even abuse bugs or otherwise risk getting banned in their quest to be the perfect jackass.
Well, that's what I assumed when I joined a non-PvP server, yes. But then having been ganked twice on a non-PvP server, I was honestly not sure what to believe any more.
Since one of the characters was a hunter and one was warrior, I'm fairly sure that I hadn't cast healing or anything else on anyone. You know, what with not having the spell at all.
Let's put it like this: when you have someone whose very revenue depends on "detecting wolves", they'll cry "wolf!" All the time. They'll cry "wolf" at the neighbour's "alsacian wolf" dog even. I'm talking about anti-spyware and other "security" companies. Do they delete cookies? Well, I briefly had McAffee installed, and among other problems (such as being a piss-poorly programmed POS) it did exactly that. It tried to protect me from all those supposedly dangerous cookies, storing such "personal details" as the session ID on some site. I'm not kidding. Using half the sites that required logon (such as Gamespy's Fileplanet) was suddenly impossible. So based on that I'd say the concern is genuine. But it's probably not the users going through the menus to delete cookies. Joe Average probably wouldn't even know or care what a cookie is. But Joe Average likely has some POS security software installed that deletes the cookies for him
Effective solutions can be found easier than you'd think, if anyone cared.
E.g., I've been on MUDs who nicely solved the issue of AOE and non-PK characters that you described. Letting rip an AOE just wouldn't hurt the players that weren't valid PK targets.
So if Blizzard really wanted to stop ganking, they can do the same things. Forget dishonour, just not let you attack a much lower character at all. I.e., forget deterrence, make it just physically impossible.
So let's take your scenario:
"so a group of 60ies dukes it out, fare and square. Some asshole in the horde team (sorry, alliance here) logs out and back into his lvl 10 priest. Comes to the area and so neutralizes any AOE capability. Obvious solution? I think not."
Well, I can tell you first hand what would happen there with the solution I've just described: you let go an AOE anyway, the level 10 priest just isn't hit by it. And if they start attacking you or healing someone involved in a PvP fight, they get flagged, they start being valid target for the next hour.
So obvious solutions not only do exist, they were already tested on MUDs. It just takes the willingness to implement them. That's really what's missing at Blizzard.
The idea of letting people sort it out for themselves has already been tried on several MUDs _and_ on UO, and it never worked.
The problem with "IC justice" is that there's _nothing_ you can do in character to someone who doesn't care about their character to start with. There are people who have nothing against throwing away whole characters or even accounts. Ganking right back has exactly zero deterrence effect there.
I've once accidentally landed on an UO griefer board by accident, when googling for something else about UO. It was... an education. People were actually planning to buy a new account, go on a griefing spree and get banned, effectively losing the money too.
So ok, most people aren't that cavalier about throwing some money out the window to grief, but there are a lot which just don't care about their character at all. There are characters out there which just aren't supposed to be anything but ganking tools, to be used and discarded as needed. Refusing to group or to trade with them (especially when they can get everything at the AH anyway) just won't even start to be a bother.
Then there's the OOC aspect involved. The player at the keyboard is likely a troll, basically. (And I don't mean the in-game race.) They do that just to get some attention.
And as the board wisdom goes: "don't feed the trolls". It actually makes them come back for more.
Forming an in-game posse to deal with them is just that: feeding the troll. It doesn't matter whether he won or lost. It matters that he got a whole bunch of you to drop all else and hunt him. You gave him the attention he wanted to start with.
Now add taking down their names like in your solution. So not only he gets momentary attention, he gets people to remember his name? Whop-de-do. That's the ultimate reward a troll can possibly hope for. It's like being raised to God status and put on a pedestal.
So to cut a long story short, it sadly doesn't work that way. You either stop them through code, or you stop them by banning accounts, or whatever. But letting players sort it out for themselves _never_ worked.
The corolary, of course, is that a dishonour system wouldn't work either. As I've said, we're talking people who just don't care about IC stuff happening to their character. Just getting a lower number on their character won't even start to deterr anyone. You either make it impossible (in code, by bans, whatever), or it just won't make a difference anyway.
Someone at Blizzard, no idea who, obviously loves "killers". (As per the Bartle definition of a "killer": someone who gets their jollies out of making the game non-fun for everyone else, and whose greatest reward is driving someone completely off the game. Basically "killing" them off the game world completely. It's what on MMOs we call a "griefer", basically.)
Diablo and Diablo 2, never did much to curb griefing either. Other than leaving the server if anyone wanted to gank you -- even if it was your server -- there was not much you could do.
So, in all honesty, I'm not sure what you expected from Blizzard or why. A bandaid beancounter solution that does everything _except_ address ganking, is, in fact, exactly what I'd historically expect from Blizzard. Frankly, I'm surprised they even did something about the rooftops thing.
This isn't flaming them or anything. They're more than free to make the game as they see fit, and we're more than free to decide whether to play it or not. So I'm not flaming them. I'm just saying that it's something which simply doesn't fit their historical vision of a game, so it's rather unlikely to see it implemented. It's like expecting Id Software to stop making FPS games: unlikely that it will happen.
Personally I haven't found the ganking situation to be annoying enough for me yet. Been ganked only twice, and in newbie areas on a non-PvP server to boot, but, eh, only twice. Plus, it just gave me a chuckle. If someone had to go through all that grind and effort just to finally feel confident enough to gank a newbie, heh, they have my compassion.
But still, _if_ it got annoying, I'd just move to another game rather than expect Blizzard to fix it.
It's not like there aren't enough games that are strictly non-PvP or have strictly non-PvP servers. EQ2 or COH come to mind. Or PSO, which goes above and beyond the call of duty to make it impossible to harm others: you can't attack them, you can't block their retreat, you can't train monsters to them, etc. And everything happens in an instance in PSO (or about 75% or so happens in an instance in COH), so you don't have to deal with yahoos screwing your team's quest either.
So, I dunno... why bother waiting for Blizzard to fix that?
"What in the hell is the point of being stronger if you can't attack the weaker freely ... if you choose to do so? [...] Someone earned that level 60, and there must be a reason, right?
You mean your _only_ reason to grind all the way to level 60 was so you can finally muster the balls to attack a newbie? That's way sad. You have my pity, dude. No, seriously.
Geeze, I know some people were born without balls, so they _have_ to pick on someone 20+ levels lower. I also know that some people have to troll/gank/whatever, because annoying others is the only attention they can get. I suppose some people just need the "woo, I managed to kill someone" (a newbie 20+ levels lower) or "woo, I finally got some attention" (by making an ass of oneself in public) ego-boost in their pathetic worthless lives.
But actually going through a 2-3 month grind to finally feel safe enough to attack a newbie, that's one perspective I hadn't thought of before. It's just _unbelievably_ sad. It starts with something that was pathetic already, and takes it to a whole new level of pathetic.
"I mean, maybe there should be a spider solitaire game within WoW so that players can escape that unpleasant reality for a few hours."
If you end up needing to escape the _unpleasant_ reality of a _game_, like your message spells it out, then that game is doing something awfully wrong to start with. Games are supposed to be fun. They're supposed to be the more pleasant reality to escape _to_, not to end up an unpleasant stress to escape _from_.
If a small number of idiots who can only get human interaction by trolling, harrassing and ganking actually manage to turn the game for everyone else into an unpleasant reality to escape from, then that game has failed miserable to catter to its players.
Bullshit rethoric as to why that is the "right" way is good and fine, it's missing the whole point. There is no absolute "right" and "wrong" in a matter of personal taste. What matters is whether a game matches someone's expectations or not. That's all. If you've made the game non-fun for someone, it doesn't matter how many bullshit arguments can you string to justify it. The only thing that matters, for them, is that it's no longer fun.
That's not just about ganking. It's just the way it goes in matters of entertainment and personal taste. If, say, I liked SF but hated romance flicks, if someone turned Star Treck into mostly a romance soap-opera, I'd have just stopped watching it. That's it. You can argue as much as you want that the change is for the greater good, what matters for me is whether the result still matches my tastes.
So there you have it: if a minority manages to make the game an "unpleasant reality to escape from" for the majority, then in effect the average perceived quality of the game has went down. It's time to take some kind of measures to fix that.
It's not even just for balance or fairness sake: as a publisher, that kind of thing hits you directly in the income. You have all the incentive in the world to address the problem before it goes out of hand.
If not, people tend to find something more fun to do instead. E.g., UO ignored the players' complaints (ganking included) for so long, it quickly lost most of the players as soon as EQ got published. EQ and AC pretty much made it their _main_ message that they're the place which address those UO grievances (e.g., being ganked on sight), and won. EQ ended up with twice as many player as UO... in a genre that UO invented.
Thankfully, WoW is not yet at that stage. It is still very much possible to be left alone on the non-PvP servers. But _if_ a group actually managed to make the game an unpleasant stressful reality for the others, then WoW too can see the same effect.
Heck, flag them for an hour, if they were stupid enough to pick on someone higher level. If someone thought they have a chance in that fight, by all means, let them have their chance at it.
For starters, I was just going for a +1 Funny, but alas it seems I've just managed to be cryptic instead.
Second, if I'm to actually think seriously about it, whether the robot is pleasured is pretty much the last thing that comes to mind. Think of it as simply a feedback loop.
Think of it in terms of game design. You could just put the NPCs standing there and not bother with issues like AI or realistic reactions. They're just NPCs, right? Thy're there to be slaughtered. They're no better than cardboard targets, right? WTF do you care if they even try to defend themselves, or their team mates? It's not like they really have feelings or any real team spirit or anything, right?
Well, it turns out that nevertheless, people like it more when they see some believable reaction to their _own_ actions. If you gave someone a choice between two FPS games, (A) one where everyone sits around like cardboard targets, and (B) one where you can see reactions ranging from teamwork (suppression fire, flanking, etc), to panic, to whatever else, as a result of your actions, chances are they'll prefer B any time.
Or if we're talking robots, take some fine creations as the Aibo or various others. Some people buy an Aibo instead of just a statue of a dog. The point is precisely that you expect it to react to the environment or your actions, rather than just sit there looking like a dog.
So _if_ I were to manufacture a robot companion, I'd want it to act and react as much as possible as the owner's expectations of a real person.
The keyword there being "expectations", rather than being actually indistinguishable from a real person. E.g., someone looking for companionship that way probably expects something more along the lines of "co-dependent" than a realistic woman impersonation like "wtf, you never have time for me. If all that matters to you is World Of Warcraft, then I'm packing my bags and leaving." Again, not unlike game design and AI design: you have to match what the player expects, rather than create a perfect simulation or AI.
And _if_ that robot is also usable for sex, that would include sensory input and reactions for that. Ranging from moaning at the right time to pressure sensors to enforce some limits of what it's doing. (E.g., if it's giving the owner a hand-job, you don't want the robot to yank the guy's tool clean off.)
So there you go. Does that satisfy your curiosity?
"Unlike many of the players who lament the need to find groups to complete most of the in-game content past level 30, I really enjoy finding other people to form up with in order to meet the challenges presented by all of the games zones and instances. Working with other people lets you use your class to its fullest effect, something I really enjoy."
Well, I used to think the same, and I was known to post along the lines of "why the heck play a Massively MULTIPLAYER Online game while avoiding other players? It's not called Massively SINGLEPLAYER."
Then I've been in entirely too many groups which, to put it bluntly, just suck.
1. You get people who just can't function in a group. Period. From having to whine and beg at them to get any healing or buffs (and then they're fresh out of mana from blasting anyway), to aggroing the wrong mobs, to not drawing aggro as a tank, to whatever else. I've been in WoW groups where someone else had to heal the priest (or the Defender in COH). How sad is that?
2. Worse yet, you have people who just don't know even how to solo. They somehow got to a mid or even high level without knowing even the bare basics of how the game works.
E.g., for a really sad example, take COH, which actually has two bonus classes that are unlocked by reaching the maximum level. So when you see someone playing that you know that they also have a level 50 character. Not exactly newbie, right?
Yet they absolutely lack even the most elementary clue, like drawing or tanking. You see one of them _insisting_ that he's the one to start fights with an area attack against a large group of higher level enemies. Everyone else just heal him quickly, ok? I mean, wtf?
I don't know, did these people get power-levelled, or bought their characters on ebay, or what?
So between these two archetypes, it's probably good to have missions that require no more than three buttons. That's already two buttons too many for some people.
3. The greedy misanthrope.
The kind of person (bonus if it's the group leader) for whom everyone else is there just to get him the maximum xp. And he won't hesitate to get everyone wiped out repeatedly, because anything less than insane odds isn't getting him TEH L33T XP. (Even more bonus points if it's a game with xp debt for death, so he isn't even getting xp faster on the whole.)
4. You get the "perfect group" nazi.
I don't mean people who expect you to function in a group, which is a reasonable expectation. I mean people who have one single idealized version of a perfect group, and aren't gonna be flexible about it. In their book, warriors and paladins _only_ take hits, priests _only_ heal (and in fact are the only ones that heal), and mages and rogues are the _only_ ones supposed to do any damage.
And god forbid that anything or anyone deviates from that perfect ideal. Which also translates in unholy amounts of time spent to assemble something resembling that perfect ideal, instead of making do with what's available and works.
Etc.
I'm even skipping the more "minor" annoyances like groups that dismember as soon as the leader finished his quest, downtime as half the time someone is afk in a large group, someone rushing to mine as the rest of the party is ambushed by a patrol, etc.
I don't know... enough playing MMOs just gave me the answer to "why would anyone want to solo when there are thousands of other players around?" Turns out the answer was "that's exactly why."