As I've been saying before, it's not just that they're insecure too, it's that it's a pain even when working as intended. In fact, it's often worse not just than Windows's being vulnerable, but actually worse than being virused.
They're slow for a start. At work we've tried copying the same large directory full of many small source files to a file server, once with Norton Antivirus running on the workstation and once without. Without it takes tens of seconds. With it, it takes slightly over 40 minutes.
And we're talking pretty good workstations. I hate to think of the poor bugger running it at home on some Cyrix 300+ box. (Yes, there are quite a few of those still in use.) I believe being virused and spywared six ways to sunday wouldn't slow their machine as much.
But wait, it goes downhill from there.
At one point I wanted to install Windows 2000 on a new machine. As fate would have it, I didn't have a firewall on a CD, and didn't know yet about the IPSec filtering built into Windows itself. (Yeah, noob.) So I decide to make a sacrificial install, let it get virused (took 10 seconds flat) while I download a firewall, then format and reinstall.
But then I get curious, and after blocking the ports, I try to play with the virus. The saddest part? Installing Norton didn't even recognize it. The almost as sad part? It slowed down the machine more than the virus did.
And then it goes even more downhill, e.g., McAffee. Ooer. Now that was a festering piece of crap.
1. Probably the "least" of problems: the ActiveX updater requires IE to run, but it's too stupid to actually launch IE. It launches whatever default browser is currently configured, e.g., Mozilla or Opera, and then can't update. So basically if you installed Mozilla or Opera on someone's computer to protect them from IE exploits, they won't be able to update McAffee. Stupid.
2. At one point, after an update, I ended up with _two_ versions of it running at the same time. Presumably because the original installation was on the "D:" drive, while the stupid updater installed the new version to the default directory on "C:". So then I had both running at the same time (and slowing down the machine accordingly.)
It's just sad, folks. You know that a piece of software is written by retarded monkeys when it can't even remember a simple setting like the install directory.
3. Their "privacy" part, and the fashionable rushing to proclaim _any_ cookies as "spyware", basically made it impossible to use any web site that requires login.
4. When uninstalling it, point 2 struck again. It only uninstalled one of the versions, and left the other running. With no obvious uninstaller entry, or any other recourse than to manually edit the registry and manually delete files. (Did I mention "coded by clueless monkeys" yet?)
And so on.
And then there's the occasional over-reacting oddball, like G-Data, which (among other nuissances) quarantined all versions of MIRC I had downloaded or installed, for no reason than IRC being in their opinion a security risk. Not a discovered vulnerability in it, not a virus, just an opinion that IRC is bad. Right. So does that mean they'll quarantine IE and Outlook Express soon too, or? Disable the TCP/IP stack because that's where viruses come from? Or?
Or, G-Data again, which still can't keep their code and data segments separated, so it won't run with the NX (no execute) bit protection in XP. Riiight. So a security product can't deal with the Windows security option that prevents buffer overflow attacks. I'm impressed.
I dunno, it's an industry that I find outright sad. Now I can understand a corporate intranet blog site, or something else that doesn't really matter, being coded by cheap monkeys off the street and designed by marketroids purely for buzzwords' sake. ("Oooh, let's _pretend_ we save them from spyware too.") But from an industry whose self-proclaimed goal is to make Windows secure, they have no excuse for doing such a half-arsed job.
"Essentially, people want everything to be well above average, which is illogical, but nobody ever said people are logical."
No, it's actually completely logical to expect an evolution. I.e., to expect people to learn from mistake, and from what worked.
It happened every single market or industry. After cars with, say, windshields have been produced, you wouldn't want one without a windshield any more, would you? After 16, 12 and now 8ms TFTs are available, you wouldn't want an 120ms TFT from the 90's, do you? After color TVs and remotes have been invented, would you willingly buy a black-and-white one without a remote?
Or in the game industry, once such elements as full mouse-look (pioneered by Bethesda) have been invented, would you actually buy a FPS that doesn't have it? Once unit grouping in a RTS has been invented, would you like an "old school" Dune-2-style "hardcore" RTS where it's missing?
Is that illogical? Not at all. We expect an evolution, not regression.
And it does appliy to games and gameplay. It's a young industry and it has yet to discover what works and what doesn't work well. But we do expect it to learn and evolve.
They did a dud or two, ok, they thought something would work and it didn't, ok. But they already got freakin' told by all reviews what didn't work, and why. I'd expect someone to actually learn from that, not see yet anoter company (or worse: the same company) repeat the same mistakes, or even go downhill.
But what happens instead is that it's an industry dominated by inflated egos, artistic types who get insulted by the mere mention of a scientiffic approach (e.g., to usability or to class balancing), people who don't even understand what they're doing (see the hundreds of clones where they missed every single element that made it sell well, because they don't even understand what they're cloning or actually play that genre), and basing whole designs or business models on ideas pulled out of the ass instead of any attempt to understand reality.
E.g., here's a factor every publisher seems to pretend doesn't even exist: if you look back at what sold well within the same genre, quality seems to sell. Games which were well balanced, had a good interface, and shipped with very very few bugs, actually outsold others by a wide margin.
See Blizzard's whole lineup of titles for an example. Diablo appeared out of nowhere, and didn't need some franchise name or other existing brand awareness to succeed big time. What was really different? Quality, that's what. It was thoroughly tested and debugged, and by "debugged" I also mean the design and balance, which are as important as (or more important than) the implementation in a game.
Yet PC game publishers insist on a business model which pretends that games and gamers exist in a vaccuum, never talk to each other, and, eh, you can shove any crap out the door and the idiots will buy it just the same. And by "crap" I don't even mean just the implementation bugs, but also that stuff like balance is given less thought than the screenshots to flood sites with.
Actually, UO had some advantages, some (most?) directly or indirectly because it was 2D.
1. Easy, intuitive view. By comparison the 3D behind-the-shoulder view and full 3D maps... just isn't as usable.
E.g., in COH it's often a pain to see which areas of the map you haven't explored, if there are enemies on some platform above or behind some crates, where-the-heck did your team mates go, etc. I found that the game became much more usable when I started running around with the map open all the time, basically going back to a top view. It actually works better.
However, having my map open all the time limits my visibility of the enemies. It _still_ is better than without it, but it sorta makes me wonder: would it have been that bad to have the game happen in that UO-style top-down view instead?
2. An easy intuitive interface.
To compare it again to COH, in UO I could just tell my melee char to attack an enemy, and he would keep swinging his weapon at it. COH makes me click on some icon (or press the key) for every single attack. It becomes a whole maths and planning game just to string a good sequence of attacks.
Why is this even important? Because:
3. The other MMOs seem to have forgotten what the second M stands for: Multiplayer.
In UO it was very easy to communicate with other players. Partially because it was possible to let your character hack at an enemy anyway, and partially because everything else was done with the mouse. So if you could type at all with your left hand, you could chat even while performing the most complicated actions.
I was chatting with other players all the time, even in the middle of raiding a dungeon or whatever. _All_ the time.
By comparison, every single other MMO I've tried, doesn't come even close. Try chatting while also needing the keyboard to move, and/or to keep activating different attacks, and you'll see what I mean. See how far you get typing a message to your pal, while also needing the arrow keys to chase enemies around, and needing to keep clicking the attack icons.
Trust me: not far. I pretty much gave up after watching a couple of team members die while I was typing away. Or I ended up taking powers like Fly instead of Super-Speed, because I could chat while letting Fly on auto-pilot.
4. Treadmill feeling: UO was basically a more relaxed, casual-gamer-friendly game.
In UO as long as you could physically swing a sword at something, you'd stand a chance to improve your skills. In COH (or any other MMO) you're forced into some level pigeonhole, where 4 levels higher you can't even hit, and 4 levels lower you don't get any XP or money any more. You can't really play at your own pace, because the game already decided for you which enemies you must go against, and in what zones.
5. And often it basically decided that, nope, you can't really play with your old friends any more. Simply because you wouldn't get any XP in their areas, if your friends advanced slower, and conversely they'd get insta-killed if they came to your new hunting grounds. And they wouldn't get any XP if they grouped with you anyway, because you're too high level for their group.
(Yes, I know that for example COH has Sidekicks and Exemplars, but it's still too much of a pain in the butt. I can't really ask someone to be my Exemplar, or not for long, when they won't get any xp as long as they do that. Or conversely I've tried bringing low level characters as Sidekicks into higher level areas and they _instantly_ died the moment they got out of the Sidekick radius.)
UO basically didn't take it's _game_ aspects that seriously, and was a _lot_ more flexible about where you can go and with whom you can group.
And precisely because of all these points above:
6. UO (well, the non-PK facet anyway) was a far more social experience, and was populated with far nicer and friendlier people than any other MMO I've been on.
Now don't take it as an insult if you play another game,
When he says "killer app" that makes you buy new hardware, don't necessarily think "the game is too slow, gotta upgrade the PC".
Think Gran Turismo or Final Fantasy 7 for which some of us went and bought a Playstation. It's not that the game was non-optimized or anything. In fact, it ran at a clean 60 FPS if I remember right. It was just that good that it worth buying a whole console just to play one game.
Well, any MMO conceivable sorta scales by just adding more servers. MMOs are not really _one_ world, but several copies of one world. (In UO lingo, "shards".) Your character basically exists on such copy of the world.
This doesn't just help with scaling issues for software (how many characters per second can the software handle), but also with the finite size of the world itself. By spreading the load between more servers you basically keep the world from becoming overcrowded.
Additionally any server is usually divided into zones, handled by different physical servers. E.g., to use another game I'm familiar with as an example, if I started a new level character in COH and were to happily hunt Hellions in Atlas Park, while you're a mid-level char doing the respec trial in Terra Volta, we're very separated from each other. A character in Terra Volta can't do much to or with a character in Atlas Park, other than send tells.
That kind of thing helps spread the load between servers and greatly helps with scaling issues. Any synchronization issues or such, can be split into distinct chunks for each zone.
Additionally, most games nowadays support instanced dungeons or missions. You can get a mission which takes place in a special separated zone created just for you and your team.
E.g., dunno about WoW, but in COH I can tell you first hand that most action happens in such instanced missions. At any given time more than half the players will be in such temporary zones of their own, which can be spread among the clustered physical servers as needed.
So basically rest assured that there are plenty of ways to scale any MMO as much as you need or want to. I don't play WoW either, but basically I'm sure Blizzard isn't stupid. If their servers scaled enough to accomodate 2 million subscribers (as was said, about 5 times more than EQ at its peak), I'm sure they already know how to write software that scales.
Believe me, if you can say with a straight face "Yeah, but this game gets laggy too" when comparing _any_ game with Anarchy Online, then you've never actually played Anarchy Online. Just the mention of the launch of AO made me cringe there.
Go read the Anarchy Online review on Something Awful and I can personally attest that that's 100% accurate, and that's what the game was like _after_ the devs had "fixed" it and claimed it was 110% stable and working as designed. Before that, it was far far worse.
I can personally attest to problems, again after the devs said it was 110% fixed, like:
- graphics glitches. Chances were 50-50 that an _open_ door would become a swirl of smeared colours that you can't actually see through.
- collision detection glitches. You'd run on flat ground and then suddenly you'd be falling to your death from stratosphere. Or you'd fall through the floor and start _swimming_ (yep, swimming animation) in the ground, or under the ground. Or you'd have enemies going through solid walls.
- instanced dungeon generation glitches. You could walk through one of those swirly doors and fall 4m deep into a hole you can't get out of.
- massive design problems. E.g., a fist had the same range as a snipe rifle. Yes, no kidding. If you picked a ranged combat class for the "ranged" part, e.g., trading the superior damage of melee for the safety of range, you'd basically get neither. Someone could punch you or stab you from 1000 ft away.
- massive balance problems. Not just class balance, but the three factions were so utterly unbalanced that one of them didn't even have shops above the newbie level. And the class balance was a sick joke too.
- massive AI problems. It wouldn't be uncommon to be attacked through walls and closed doors, because the AI couldn't tell it can't reach you. And various other AI problem.
- stupid mission design. E.g., you'd get a stealth mission, and be told it's a stealth mission, yet... you wouldn't get the token unless you killed everyone in that building.
- stupid design that actively discouraged grouping for missions
Etc. And yes, lag too. For some events people were told to look at the ground to avoid their machine crashing or getting disconnected. Yeah, that soo makes sense... you surely went to some big event to look at a patch of ground instead of at what's happening there.
So, well, trust me: AO at launch was in a class of suckiness of its own. Removing spyware off a machine was more fun than playing AO.
You can probably tell I'm half-asleep when I click the wrong "Reply To This" link. I meant to answer to the "would it still be big if it didn't have the Blizzard name?" thread, one position below.
If you think having a brand name is everything, there are _plenty_ of counter-examples to prove that wrong.
E.g., "The Sims Online" was banking on the brand name of _the_ most sold PC game ever, by a wide margin. If you think Warcraft was a brand name to bank on, The Sims outsold that by a ludicrious margin. And Maxis itself is as big a brand name as Blizzard.
Yet TSO flopped. EA didn't even bother releasing it in Europe after seeing the abysmal sales in the USA, and that an alarming majority of the people were cancelling their
E.g., "Ultima Online" was banking on the brand name of the Ultima series. It was one of the biggest brand names at the moment. A lot of us had grown up on Ultima and then Ultima Underworld, and generally were Origin-a-holics.
UO invented the genre too, something which put other companies safely at the top of the pyramid.
Yet UO, well, didn't actually "flop", but lost players hand over fist by ignoring the players' wishes and complaints. It launched massively unbalanced too. (E.g., could you even do anything but traps as a Tinker? And were they even useful for anything but killing defenseless newbies?)
So UO ended up way behind EQ and AC... in the genre it invented. Both EQ and AC didn't have the brand name that UO had. They were completely unheard of titles that noone had heard about. But they stole the majority of UO players anyway.
E.g., EQ2 was banking on the name of the very successful EQ, and WoW still ended up ahead.
Etc.
Basically brand names help, yes, but they're not the alpha or the omega. Brand or marketting can make people join your game in the beginning, but if the game sucks, those people won't stay for long. And after a short while people start hearing from each other "this game sucks, avoid it" or "woohoo, this game rules, and playing my Shaman/Warrior/whatever is the most fun I've had with my pants on." And very quickly the sales start to reflect that instead of the launch hype and brand name.
See what happened with TSO for a textbook illustration of that. A couple hundred people bought the game right at launch, because of the brand name. Then most of them quit before even that first month was over, and the population settled at a lower value. And sales tappered too, reflecting a very quick decline in people relying on brand name and hype to make an uninformed decision.
I'm not saying that they should stop being creative. God forbid. I did say it's those types who make the game interesting after all. So, yes, by all means, do let the creative people do the design.
What I _am_ saying though is that they should employ _both_. Make them work together. Let the creative people do the design, yes, but then also get an accountant to run those numbers through a spreadsheet.
And if that maths guy says that the new spork-wielding class can dish out 1.5 times the damage-per-second of any other class, it won't mean must take away that spork and deprive that players of creative content. It means they must give that class a slightly less sharp spork or slightly increase the animation times or other such tweaks. It can still be creative and interesting even if it's been rigorously balanced.
Your slot machines example is a very good example: because there they use both. They do let the creative people hide it between flashy lights and designs, yes. But they also calculate and simulate the heck out of the underlying probabilities before putting it in a casino. Noone will just let a designer at it from the beginning to end, and only discover in the casino that it pays more than 100% or conversely it pays only 10% and noone wants to play it... like the computer game industry does.
That's the step that IMHO is missing there. Don't just get a bunch of playtesters and rely on sheer luck to discover the problems. Get a math-head to look for the problems before the first tester even sees the game.
And, no, that idea doesn't contrast with my journal entry. I'm just ignoring the majority of grey shades in between creative and maths for the scope of this argument, because they don't really get into that conflict. Someone who's not very creative won't get to be a good game designer, and someone who's not very much a number-cruncher won't start calculating and publishing damage-per-second charts. Those grey shades exist and do make up the majority, yes, but they mostly sit and watch the (almost-)extremes yell at each other.
Look, I'm not encouraging piracy, and I never said CAD/CAM programs wasn't worth the money for a company or freelancer actually making money with it.
I'm just saying that the BSA numbers are BS. They're counting as losses:
A) stuff which never would have been sold anyway
A professional, yes, benefits from CAD/CAM software. A kid making a mod doesn't get a single cent out of it, so no way he/she will convince the parents to fork over 4 years salary for that.
B) stuff which would have been more likely replaced by something different
There's no way a Chinese or Russian family would have bought MS Office, for example, because they can't afford it. If piracy didn't exist, they'd get Open Office or some shareware program instead.
C) stuff which isn't even pirated, but is just pulled out of the ass from some bogus statistics of what you _should_ have bought
E.g., if you ever installed Gentoo Linux on a computer or use freeware programs, according to BSA you're a pirate. Their statistics say you should have bought Windows and X pieces of software, and if you didn't, you're a pirate.
E.g., I don't have any pirated software on my computers. I even did go and buy two different Windows licenses for the two computers. But I do use Open Office and Gimp, because they do the job just nicely for me. For BSA I probably count towards their X% piracy for my country anyway, because I don't show up in the sales of MS Office and Paintshop/Photoshop.
Basically, I'm against piracy, yes, and I've been known to argue on/. that it hurts local economies. But I also am against outright lies and statistics based on blatantly flawed premises.
1. Yes, I'm an electrical engineer too, and I have a full time job as a programmer. Won't stop me from calling a bug just that: a bug. If that makes me a teenager with too much time on my hands, so be it.
2. If it wasn't a bug, it wouldn't be "fixed" by the developpers about twice a month. I do believe that if the class balance in those games were that slanted by design, and working as designed, noone would invest man-hours in fixing it. So basically, sorry, if it's broken enough for the devs to consider it a problem worth fixing, I do believe it's broken enough for me to call it a bug.
Because in any other piece of software that's what you call a problem in need of a fix: a bug.
3. No, I didn't call it "completely broken", I called it basically "buggy". I'm pretty sure the world isn't divided neatly into "perfect" and "completely broken". I'm also pretty sure there is no rule that says I can't mention problems in a product unless it's _completely_ broken.
4. The problem isn't whether the game is designed in my favour or not. If I just wanted the game to be slanted in my favour, I'd play the currently over-powered class and be done with it.
Which basically seems to be the "research" you propose. Find the ludicriously over-powered class, play that, don't criticize the developpers for creating something that unbalanced to start with.
What I expect from a game is good design and balance, not "yay, I too can exploit the design bugs". I expect that all classes have a fair chance at soloing, and all classes bring something useful to a group. Not all in the same way, of course, but nevertheless.
It's been done before, so I'm not asking the impossible. Diablo and Diablo 2 I've already mentioned. AD&D, and the computer games based on it, are another example. You can solo any class in it, and you can be a good member of a group with any class.
But it gets better: most MUDs (which don't even have a budget to hire celebrity game designers) have nevertheless made a better job of it than most MMOs. You can solo any class, and you can do well in a group as any class. I don't remember _any_ MUD where I was supposed to switch classes to join a group.
5. The comparison with Linux, heh, it will only hold water if you show me a distro which claims it can play games. Then, yes, I _will_ call it broken if it doesn't.
Or conversely, I will stop picking on a MMO if it makes clear up front which classes are second class citizens and should be taken only by masochists seeking a challenge. _If_ the class balance is off the hook by design, then put that information right on the character selection screen, and stick to it.
Now I'll aggree with you that some people _do_ take it all to ridiculous obsessive extremes, but balance _is_ a problem for everyone else too. You don't have to be an 3l337 kiddie, obsessed with xp and levels, to nevertheless find it a tad harder to just play a concept character for purely ideological/personality/style reason.
If you think that you can just play your concept character, whatever that may be and no matter how weak, just for creativity sake... you must be thinking single player games. Because in a MMO you'll get booted from 90% of the groups if you deviate too much from the norm.
E.g., try making a character with only the "Brawl" attack in COH. Quite the nice "normal human" concept, right? Well, yes, and some people will even congratulate you... right until you try joining their group. Then it's "WTH! We need some real firepower!" time, and you get booted out of the group.
E.g., try making a (D&D) "paladin" concept character in CoH. Give up some of your attacks to take pool powers such as healing. Aid Other makes a nice Lay On Hands substitute, right? Take the Leadership pool too for a nice "Protection From Evil 10' Radius" substitute too. Take some taunt power from the Presence instead of an attack too, while you're at it, because a noble champion would challenge opponents to one-on one fight, plus it opens the path towards Fear later, which lets you RP "Turn Undead". Nice, well fleshed, concept. Right?
Now try joining a group with that build. I can tell you first hand what happens, because I was in a group with someone with that kind of build. It also was an insanely difficult task force mission.
(Which incidentally is the crux of the problem: any game with instanced missions raises their difficulty with the number of people in the team. So letting sub-optimal characters join your group leads to repeated group-wipes. Which leads to anger, and anger leads to the dark side.;)
Anyway, what happened were complaints from the other group members, starting with "Why the heck is that scrapper healing instead of attacking?" and quickly escalating into "Screw this, call me when you get a real fighter." At which point almost everyone left the group, making it impossible to finish the task-force for those of us that remained. (The D&D Paladin build included.)
That's the whole problem: it's not easy to stick to ideologies and moral high grounds when you're compared to other people every day, and kicked out of teams because you don't measure up to them. Or when even the people who don't discriminate against you, still can't really play with you any more, because you're still level 20 while they got to level 40 in half the time and with half the effort.
What do you do then? Get them to power-level you to their level? Now there goes your self respect out the window, and any respect you had got from other players too. Ask them to come hang out with you in areas where they're not getting any xp? Yeah, they will for a while, but it's not exactly morale-raising.
So after a while people kiss their noble ideals goodbye, bury their lovingly fleshed-out concept builds 6 ft deep, and go roll a Flavor Of The Month uber-character like everyone else. Can you really blame them?
"Is having all the classes balanced really that essential?"
If it were a single player game, or if you only solo, no, it's not essential. The moment you _are_ compared to other players, when every move you make, every breath you take, has is judged as "we should have taken a Class X in the group instead of you", yes, it starts to get pretty damn essential.
"having one or two classes that are "weaker" isn't such a bad thing. I personally like a challenge of playing a slightly weaker class. When you beat an opponent with the weaker class, there is a greater since of accomplishment."
For most people it isn't an accomplishment, it's a chore. Not many people want to be still level 20 when all their friends are level 50. Not many people want to see the group break up _again_ because it didn't have the perfect min-maxed mix of perfectly min-maxed characters. Or worse yet to be kicked out of a group _again_ because their class/build is one of the weak ones.
There's something rather humiliating in being kicked of a group because your character sucks. And it _will_ happen. Happens in CoH daily. "Whaat? You made a Fire tank and didn't take Ice as a secondary? Screw you, I'm outta here." (For those not familiar with CoH, Fire/Ice is the current Flavour Of The Month, because Ice lets you immobilize enemies inside the burn patches/auras/whatever of your Fire primaries.)
"I'll agree that playing against the overpowered class can be frustrating, but it just forces me to do something out of the ordinary to win."
Which is a problem in an by itself. Why should I have to do stuff out of the ordinary to survive where other classes just plough through?
"Granted, in a duel, I'll only win about 35% of the time, but those wins sure do feel good."
I.e., you're asking people to find fun in losing most of the time. You're also asking them to get wiped out whenever they join a team, because the other members don't want to go only against -2 level enemies that you have a chance against. Maybe you find that fun, but most people don't.
"These three classes are very passive/solo classes. Yet people wonder why they don't do well in group settings. This is because the class is meant to be more solo friendly."
Which is a major design failure. No, sorry, there is no need to mince words there: having a sharp distinction between soloer classes/builds and group classes/builds is piss-poor design.
Noone wants to solo 100% of the time, and noone wants to group 100% of the time. E.g., I mostly group, but there are times when I'd rather solo quickly. E.g., if I play for half an hour before going to work, I don't want to spend 20 minutes gathering a team and then leave it after 10 minutes.
And conversely I find it annoying when people join my group and leave after 10 minutes, right at a point when we need them. They should bloody solo, if 10 minutes is all the time they have. But no, some stupid game designer saddled them with a class which _can't_ solo.
Is that distinction even needed? Well, nope. Both Diablo 1 and 2 did a superb job of having classes which were well balanced, diverse enough, and equally enjoyable both to solo and in a group. So why do people still insist in giving players basically a sentence that says "you'll never be able to join a group" or "but you can't ever solo"? Why can't a character do both?
"It's the players fault for not doing a little research on a class before putting tons of time into it."
That's funny, I thought it was the vendor who's to blame for bugs, not the buyers.
Because that's what it is: a fault in some software I bought. A design rather than an implementation bug, yes, but a bug nevertheless.
So basically that point of view is like saying "Windows buffer overflows are your fault, not Microsoft's. Microsoft shouldn't have to fix them. You should do your own research and find out what ports to block, and what workarounds to do."
Which, no offense, is getting it all wrong. Yes, I can do my own research to work around bugs and problems, but that does not excuse the ones shoving buggy poorly-tested software out the door. Including, yes, balance bugs.
How do you think the _players_ found those uber-clases/builds/whatever? No, seriously.
Ever looked on the forums for some character building advice? What did you see? Some dps (damage per second) calculations. "Take class X, turn on power Y, chain the attacks A, B, C, D and B again. It causes 75.13 damage per second, 15.39 damage per endurance/mana/whatever point, and leaves you with 0.35 seconds before A recharges again."
Which leads to advice like "take katana instead of broadsword because it does x% higher dps" or "don't bother taking power Z, because stacking X and Y and these enhancements/armours/whatever already puts you at the damage reduction cap." That's all just maths, nothing horribly surprising or utterly unforeseen.
So what's keeping the designers from running the same kind of maths? I can write a program in less than half an hour that calculates all possible attack chains, and their outcome. Why can't the devs ask a team member to do that?
Other stuff it's so bloody obvious you don't even need a program to see it coming. E.g., if turning on powers X, Y and Z gives a tank in COH a whole 90% damage reduction and 95% avoidance, how do you balance that against classes who get 0% in either?
If the tank has, say, 1000 HP and 90% damage reduction, to do a measly 50 HP damage to the tank (i.e., a bare scratch that will heal in 1 second), an enemy would have to have 500 HP attacks. If it even hits at all. Oops, some of the other classes have less than 500 HP at that level, and get 0% damage resistance. They'll get killed in one shot by that enemy.
You don't need a complex simulation to see it coming. But you do need to apply some elementary arithmetic and calculate that, oops, those powers stack all the way up to the 90% damage cap. That's what's missing.
And once you found that out, the sane way would be to address the problem, instead of bungling randomly through addressing symptoms. But what happens more often in practice is precisely never stopping to see the big problem, and do the maths. No, they'll just sweep a few _symptoms_ under the carpet in this fix. E.g., you can bet that what someone will _really_ see as a "fix" is "I know, let's actually increase the damage from those enemies to 1000 HP per hit, that'll give those tanks _some_ damage." Oops, now it really one-shots _everyone_ else, whereas previously it only one-shot blasters and controllers.
Cue an endless stream of half-arsed quick-and-dirty "fixes" that try to address individual _symptoms_, including those of previous "fixes", instead of even trying to see (and simulate) the big picture.
Every single game I've been in, has basically bungled horribly through class balance, making seemingly random changes and then waiting to see the result. COH, yes, too. Horrible balance issues and swings. And if you hate the changes to your character so far, you'll probably hate Issue 5, already known affectionately as The Nerf.
The problem IMHO is the strong dichotomy between creative types and some of us "accountant types", for lack of a better name.
The creative guys are able to come up with _interesting_ ideas like "I know, let's have a hero that fights with a bent spork and catches bullets with his toes". That's what makes a comic book or a game _interesting_. It's what gives you unique characters, missions, story arcs, etc.
Us accountant types however, then just come, put all those "Spork Thrust", "Spork Slash" and "Toe Wiggle" powers in a big spreadsheet and run a min-max simulation through them. We calculate _exact_ damage-per-second, damage-per-endurance and such, and invariably it turns out that the game is utterly unbalanced and there's some utterly ludicrious winning combination.
The problem is that the two groups are distinct groups. In fact they're pretty much natural enemies. The creative types usually throw a fit and call you a "numberchaser" or such if you even mention soiling their grand vision with such profane maths. (Try even mentioning numbers on some MUDs and you'll see what I mean.) And conversely us maths types treat those designers as the antichrist when they do those broad-sweeping random balance changes, and cause everyone's characters to bounce randomly between uber-slayer-of-everything-in-god-mode and utter-total-wimp.
That dichotomy is what's really the problem. Most balance issues could be foreseen and corrected before release, by simply running the same simulations and maths. The _massive_ kinds of balance problems some games have shouldn't have even made it into testing, much less be there after a year of being live.
There is nothing utterly unforeseeable about most of those min-maxed combination. It's not like "but you can't know what arcane non-obvious thing the players will abuse." You can. Maths is where it's at, because that's what the players will use to find those uber-combos. And the devs could do the exact same maths before the game is released.
But, alas, it would need some of the creative types to put down the crack pipe, get over the ego trip, and let their grand vision be run through a spreadsheet. Not that I expect it to happen any time soon.
The BSA (and a few others) are basically arguing that if some Chinese kid got a copy of AutoCAD or 3DSMax, that's a lost sale and it litterally means some $6000 lost. Can they possibly present a coherent business plan where it's even possible to enlarge that market there, at those prices, if piracy didn't exist?
Hello? An average Chinese family's yearly income, last I've checked, is around the $1500 mark. That is, before, food, clothes, rent, etc.
Take your current yearly salary, multiply it by 4, and ask yourself if you would _ever_ pay that much for a piece of software you don't even really need. Would you?
Some of that software waved around by the BSA as big losses even I wouldn't buy on a western european salary, and I could afford it easily. E.g., would I pay some thousands of dollars on 3DS Max just to mod a $40 game like "X2 - The Threat"? Because that's the kind of use those pirate kids see out of that software. Heh. Would you? Right. That's what I thought too.
I see a lot of people assuming that we're still in the 90's, the hardware does everything, and the software does nothing more than output the commands to the right ports. E.g., how Glide worked on 3dfx cards.
Then again, even in the 90's there were things like software modems. So the technique to offload as much work to the CPU as possible to keep the silicon small and simple, existed already.
What's happening is that usually:
1. The _whole_ functionality is in the software. E.g., if you buy a Promise IDE-RAID card (and they cost a pretty premium over similar cards from others), they're really software RAID like everyone else. The silicon is just an (obfuscated) ATA/SATA chip, arguably nothing better than a Silicon Image one or a Via that costs 1/10 of the price.
2. The whole difference between their differently priced models is in the drivers. E.g., Promise again: the difference between a RAID and a non-RAID card is purely whether the BIOS and drivers activate the RAID functionality.
3. Or, indeed, at the other end of the spectrum are graphics cards, which nowadays are basically more and more like a CPU. And the drivers are becoming more and more like a compiler and optimizer for it.
So someone like ATI genuinely has a lot of edge to lose if they showed the world at large, including their competitors, how they do that. I'm sure not only Nvidia (which already has a lot of their own people on the problem), but also minor players like SiS, Via/S3, Trident and Matrox would love to be just given a way to squeeze more performance out of the silicon they produce. Complete with source code.
Even if those small players can't out-compete ATI in the higher end, the real money is at the lower end of the market. For every X800 XT Platinum or 6800 Ultra sold, there are something like 100 sales in the class of 9200 SE. So showing Trident how to outperform those on cheap silicon is not something you really want to do.
The fact is, I've seen with my own eyes people being ripped off by a clerk, once that clerk got wind that the customer is clueless.
E.g., there was this older guy in front of me a few years back, who just wanted a simple machine to send emails and surf the web. He explicitly said he never plays any games. It was pretty much an experience watching the clerk talk him into buying a rig that was more powerful than my gaming rig (and I'm a gamer and a compulsive upgrader!), had twice the RAM I had, and had the latest top-of-the-line Nvidia graphics card too. (Apparently you need a very powerful graphics card to see your grandson's photo, don't you know? Well, I certainly didn't.)
Would that guy buy from that shop again, after his son (who gave him the original pointers as to what to buy) finds out what the guys at the shop talked him into buying? Probably not. But then with computers being bought for 3-4 years or more (there still are people on Cyrix 300+ machines), does it even matter?
Or there've been stories like the older lady who got sold a sound card upgrade, and they just loaded some different drivers on her machine... which didn't actually work with the old card. Turns out after the "upgrade" not only she had the same model of sound card as before, it had the same serial number sticker too once someone opened the box. Now that's a funny coincidence;)
I don't think it's necessarily sexist as such, though. Some people are basically sharks. If they smell new blood in the water, they'll be all over it, regardless of whose blood it is. If you look like you have no clue, you'll get royally scammed, regardless of gender, race, age or religion.
Women just run into the stereotype of being clueless about cars or computers, and I might add that some are _happy_ to perpetuate that stereotype. For some it's like it's a thing of pride to know nothing about that nerdy stuff. Makes them more socially acceptable or something.
So anyway, once you're stereotyped in that category, you get scammed. You get car mechanics charging you twice the price, you get sold a PS One as the newest game console, you get talked into buying a Quadro professional OpenGL card for your web surfing computer, or in really extreme cases you get your old sound card back as an upgrade.
"I don't think you sound immature just because you play video games."
Yet these are your words from the two levels above: "I really can't stand being around some of my peers and having to put up with their fascination with X-Box. I mean holy shit, spending 4 hours a day playing video games is something a high-schooler does."
So which of them is it?
And even then, a blatant falsehood, since actual studies show the average gamer age these days to be in the mid-20s. And have you heard of a company called Sony? They stole a helluva lot of market share from some guys called Nintendo, precisely by offering lots of games for adults too. It happened in the mid-90s, so I guess people were just immature back then as they are now. Not much of a decline, huh?
"I don't know what makes something mature or not."
Yet, see above, you just did precisely that: judged a bunch of people as immature, just because their hobby doesn't fall fashionably in your pre-conceived age roles. Sad.
Would it be better if they played chess instead? Or are you trying to tell me that all the senior citizens playing chess are immature too? (Thus defeating the whole argument that people are somehow becoming less mature nowadays.)
Well, here's the scoop: chess is a wargame, designed to be a wargame. (A 4 player wargame initially, but it was a bitch to find 4 players at the same time without internet, so each side took two armies and one King became Grand Vizier. It's the piece that nowadays you call a Queen.) It's modelled after the armies of that era (the bishop was a war elephant, pawns were foot soldiers, etc).
So basically for more than a millenium people have playing no more and no less than the board game equivalent of Command and Conquer. Does that make them immature?
Ah, but maybe one is mature if it happens on a wooden board, the other is immature for happening on a screen? Well, what if I play Battletech or Warhammer 40,000? That's mature enough for you, right?
Escaping reality has many faces, grasshopper. Some people watch soap operas or football on TV. Some people drive around like maniacs on weekends to pass the time. (Dad, for example, thinks driving a few hundred miles to some god forgotten place, just to almost immediately start driving back, counts as tourism or at least the apex of entertainment.) Some play a board game. Some play cards. Some watch the news for hours. Some just flip through the channels for hours on end. Some play elaborate thinly-veiled social "games" with their peers, e.g., the "game" of gossip and manipulating people. Etc. And some play computer games.
But they all ultimately do the same thing: get to spend their time in a more pleasant (for them) way than staring at a wall.
And judging some people as immature just because their hobbies don't neatly match your age-role prejudices is... rather narrow minded.
Ah, how refreshing. A whole message based on fallacies pulled out of the ass. Starting with something which could be a good case of "affirming the consequent" with just a subtle touch of "appeal to popularity".
No, sorry, that implication goes the other way around: _if_ you want to be judged by that appearance, _then_ you'll spend time adjusting it to what you wish to be judged like. What you do is turning that implication around and building a whole poor-man's psychanalyst troll out of it. Which might make for an interesting read, but it's still a fallacy.
No matter how you slice it, "p => q" does _not_ convert in any form or shape to "q => p".
Combined with a whole non-sequitur that somehow it actually show's something about someone's character, and isn't just a mask they put on to game the system.
No, get this, the mask you wear says _nothing_ about who you _are_. Wearing a Jedi costume doesn't make you a Jedi. Wearing a Superman spandex outfit doesn't make you Superman. Wearing a leather jacket with a huge Harley-Davidson logo on the back doesn't mean you can actually ride a motorcycle or actually own a Harley-Davidson. And where I'm getting at: sure as heck wearing a business suit doesn't make you a business professional.
In practice, precisely because implications can't be turned around that easily, it says _nothing_. Maybe someone just genuinely likes a suit. Maybe they're just wearing it as a "pls hire me, I'm that desperate" sign. (Yep, I can see how an employer would love _that_ message.) Or maybe they think you're stupid enough to judge them by their costume instead of their ability. Etc.
Also, I dunno about your company, but in most other places on Earth, something wonderful was invented: work specialization. Only a few thousand years ago too.
The idea is that one person doesn't have to do everything, from mining the ore, to making a bronze plough, to ploughing the field with it, to baking their own bricks and pottery. Society as a whole is more efficient if each person does one job and does it well.
That's why commerce and eventually the currency have appeared.
That's also why a normal company, or at least the non-IT part of it, works in a specialized fashion. If it's a construction company, it has some very clear job separation between the people laying the bricks, the people qualified to operate a crane, the people doing the accounting, and the people selling the contract to a customer. That's what management is about: figuring out what mix of _different_ roles are needed for the job. Noone sane would say "nah, we'll get a bunch of people who can do _all_ the jobs, from brick laying to interior decoration to accounting to doing lunch with prospective customers."
Noone except an IT manager, that is. Here it's ok to be too too incompetent to figure out how many people one needs need for coding, how many for design, and how many to "do lunch" with the customers. Let's hire everyone as if it were a marketting position, and hope they can work interchangeably as a programmer too.
Does _every_ single IT guy in that company need to personally deal with the clients? Because that's the cornerstone of all this "noo, hire only people in suits, 'cause the others would put off the clients" bullshit argument. Do you need 100% of the hired personnel doing lunch with the clients at any given time? Then who the heck is writing the code or managing the servers?
Dunno about him, but personally I don't mind that. I have no piercings or tattoos, but I still do tell my employer that no, I don't ever want a promotion to management. Been there, done that, decided that management is not something I like to do.
Yes, I can occasionally talk to a customer, or draw a flowchart on a whiteboard in front of an audience. But the keyword is: occasionally. I'd very much sit at a computer than spend every day in meetings, corporate power games, or trying to make Wally finally actually do _some_ work, _any_ work. I very much like it when he's not really my problem.
Or to put it otherwise: if I wanted to do either management or marketting, I'd have went to a business college. I chose computers for a reason: that's what I like to do.
So other people will get promoted instead. Good. That I like.
So I've had people I've recruited end up my boss. I'm ok with that. They probably deserved it too, with the amount of show-business they put up for the boss instead of actually working or actually learning programming. But anyway, it still means that I do the job I like.
Some people seem to assume an uni-dimensional rat race and that money is the only thing that matters. They'd do _anything_ for money, or for some stupid social acceptance goal like "promotions are good". They just have to chase some stupid goal that will actually make their life _worse_, much like dogs chase a car: never stopping to think what they'd do if they actually caught one.
At one point it's not even a promotion any more, it's just really switching carreer tracks to a completely new line of work. A new work which doesn't even resemble the old one, and you're not even prepared for, and you're probably incompetent for or don't have the right personality type for. (E.g., an introvert won't really enjoy a life where 8 hours a day are spent talking to everyone, from making sure what the team is doing, to meetings with clients, to meetings with higher level management, etc.)
It's called "Peter's Principle".
Is it worth it? Is it what you _really_ want to do with your life? Would you switch jobs to _anything_, including driving a garbage truck or shovelling manure, if it paid better and was fashionably disguised as a promotion?
Well, if you can honestly answer "yes" to that, yeah, you're in the right rat race. Keep up, brown nose, backstab, and don't let the Joneses get a promotion before you do.
If not, well, then you understand why some of us have "quality of life" as the _goal_, and money and promotions are just _means_ to that end. If the trade-off involved in getting those means actually move you farther from the goal, is actually a bad trade-off. One to be avoided.
(Just as examples of such trade-offs: you get more money but at the expense of getting a stress-related ulcer, or doing so much overtime that you don't actually have the time to enjoy that money, or whatever. Was it worth it? Did it really improve your life?)
Brainstorming doesn't happen in a vaccuum, and throwing crap ideas around isn't _ever_ the whole process. The process is all about then taking those ideas, evaluating them, and fixing them into something that works. That's the _crucial_ step of that process. Without that, it's just talking out of the ass.
_Everyone_ has crazy ideas every day. That doesn't make them an expert. The expert is the one who can also do the second part of the job.
Taking credit for any such unfinished, incompletely thought out idea is easy. And then pretending to be a visionary when it happens for completely other causes. E.g., hey, then I'm a prophet too. Among other things I "predicted" there's stuff like:
- I predicted IBM's new Hurricane chipset back in 2000, and the post on Hardware Central still exists to prove it. (Ok, so it just was something like "yeah, but someone could give each Intel CPUs a separate bus too". I didn't actually predict _what_ that chipset would do, or that it would be a third party that did it, or that it would take 100 million dollars to do that. But hey, we're at taking credit for incomplete crazy ideas thrown around, right?)
- I predicted the XBox some 15 years ago. (Well, ok, so it was just a crazy "Hey, I know, someone could take an IBM PC, put a slot for a ROM cartridge on it, and call it a console." Didn't actually do the maths or any thinking exactly _what_ that would imply, the costs or the risks. Ask Microsoft how much it cost them to actually force that into the market, and you'll see why noone else did that and why my idea maybe wasn't _that_ great. But hey, let's call me a visionary anyway.)
- I predicted the palmtop or portable console in '84, some 5 years before the Atari Lynx and Nintendo Gameboy, and even longer before the Apple Newton. (Again, a completely unfinished idea, more or less just extrapolating "well, mainframes, minis, micros, home-computers... computers keep getting smaller or smaller. I'm sure someone can make small a ZX Spectrum with batteries and a LED screen." Of course, let's skip over facts like not even considering the power draw of LEDs there, or the economics, or anything else. I'm still a visionary, right?)
Etc. There's no limit how big a visionary one can be if _any_ unfinished idea counts, failures are ignored, _and_ there is no time limit on them eventually becoming possible.
"Intel has poured billions of dollars down the tube in all sorts of software and hardware ventures that have led absolutely nowhere (at one point they were supposed to destroy nvidia and ATI. We see where that went)"
Yes, let's look where that actually went. Dig this: Intel currently supplies more than 40% of the graphics chipsets in PCs. By comparison, ATI is 27.6% and Nvidia supplies some 18%. Oops, maybe Intel did win that market after all. E.g., see here: X-Bit Labs.
That's the difference between market reality and fanboy/Cringely talking out of the ass. While the fanboy sees some irrelevant detail, like who's got TEH L33T 3DMARK SCOREZ, the business world is more about other numbers.
Intel is all about making a profit and keeping the profit margins. It's making _great_ money dominating the integrated graphics market. It doesn't need to have TEH L33T 3DMARK SCOREZ, it needs to make money. And it does anyway.
"Intel has poured billions of dollars down the tube"? I don't think so. Those dollars brought it to the position of market leader, starting from zero. Seems to me like anything _but_ poured down the tube.
Dude, I hope you realize that if you do enough of a shotgun approach to making predictions, some will happen even if by sheer chance. Or something similar enough will happen to be able to say with a straight face "I told you so."
"You know, the same sort of speculation like that Apple would move to Intel chips -- how absolutely absurd and impossible that was presented by the status quo contrarians."
Noone presented it as "impossible", and it's been an idea that was floating around for a decade. We all knew already that it _could_ happen, with or without Cringely. What a lot of people argued -- and some still argue (e.g., have a read on The Register) -- is that it might be a _stupid_ move.
Such a move could -- and provably did -- negate a decade of "RISC is inherently better" advertising, alienate customers, create the Osbourne effect, etc. They're things that are very very real, not just out of the imagination of "status quo contrarians." E.g., Apple sees the "Osbourne effect" dip in sales right now.
_That_ is what was argued. Whether it's likely that Apple would take the very real business risks associated with such a move. "Probability" rather than "possibility", if you will. Which is what a _real_ business analysis is all about, as opposed to just talking out of the ass, Cringely-style.
"Cringely has the ability to actually think outside of the box of "more of the same""
The ability to do... what? Ignore the real issues (see above), pull wild predictions out of the ass, and be hailed as some prophet if 1 out of 10 come true? Yeah, that's got to be an easy job. You don't lose anything if you're wrong 90% of the time, or if you publically base predictions on utter ignorance ("unspecified CPU" my ass"), but you get to be a visionary if something does come true.
No, really, I want a job like that.
Briefly, there is a difference between "thinking outside the box" and "talking out the ass".
"and often he'll be wrong, but sometimes he'll be right."
In any other profession, this would be called "talking out of the ass". If a stock analyst was wrong far more often than he's sorta almost right, everyone would call him a joke. If an accountant gave you more often wrong numbers than right, or a lawyer was more likely to give you the wrong interpretation of the law, he _and_ you might face a lawsuit.
There is a limit in any profession, business analyst included, to how many facts and factors one can blatantly disregard or pull out of the hat before one loses all credibility.
Any profession except "tech pundit", apparently. Here the more one talks out of the ass, the greater a visionary he is and the more it counts as "thinking outside the box". See Dvorak for an even worse troll than Cringely, apparently still counting as a big expert, in spite of being blatantly wrong 99% of the time.
Sorry, the "working like a charm of their own" is definitely _not_ what remember about the last time I installed Gentoo on a new machine. (Admittedly, it was about an year ago, so things might have changed by now. Hopefully.)
Au contraire, I was supposed to follow a script via reading a web page in a text mode browser, and the type the commands listed there. It apparently never dawned upon the Gentoo folks that the rest of the world, when/if it needs to run an exact sequence of instructions, would just use a script instead.
I was supposed to make some choices (e.g., which cron daemon to install) via "if you want this one, enter these commands, if you want that other one, enter those commands". Again, the rest of the world, having already exitted the stone age, would have used such advanced stuff as "radio buttons" and "if-then-else blocks" instead. (Or, if they're _really_ advanced, switch statements.)
At the end of the ordeal, I had to configure some stuff (e.g., the DSL connection) _again_, because obviously Gentoo never got taught the arcane art of _saving_ those options the first time.
Oh yeah, and I love "emerge".
Have you tried emerging, say, Open Office on a 64 bit system? No? It just spits out a cryptic message that it was disabled by some other option. Doesn't even try to do a half-way civilized or user-friendly thing, like, dunno, offering to build or download the 32 bit version instead.
If you happen to be a "normal" user -- and I mean Joe Average kinda normal, not Alpha-Geek kinda normal -- you're left scratching your head as to WTH next. Does that mean I can't run OOo at all? Draw a pentagram around the computer and sacrifice a black chicken to the elder gods at midnight to get it? Or what?
So, no, I don't think they "will start working like a charm on their own once you call them." That's not how it went for me, at least. The "here's an axe, saw and hammer, and there are some nice sized trees, now build your own house" has got to be _the_ most apt metaphor I've seen for Gentoo yet.
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As I've been saying before, it's not just that they're insecure too, it's that it's a pain even when working as intended. In fact, it's often worse not just than Windows's being vulnerable, but actually worse than being virused.
They're slow for a start. At work we've tried copying the same large directory full of many small source files to a file server, once with Norton Antivirus running on the workstation and once without. Without it takes tens of seconds. With it, it takes slightly over 40 minutes.
And we're talking pretty good workstations. I hate to think of the poor bugger running it at home on some Cyrix 300+ box. (Yes, there are quite a few of those still in use.) I believe being virused and spywared six ways to sunday wouldn't slow their machine as much.
But wait, it goes downhill from there.
At one point I wanted to install Windows 2000 on a new machine. As fate would have it, I didn't have a firewall on a CD, and didn't know yet about the IPSec filtering built into Windows itself. (Yeah, noob.) So I decide to make a sacrificial install, let it get virused (took 10 seconds flat) while I download a firewall, then format and reinstall.
But then I get curious, and after blocking the ports, I try to play with the virus. The saddest part? Installing Norton didn't even recognize it. The almost as sad part? It slowed down the machine more than the virus did.
And then it goes even more downhill, e.g., McAffee. Ooer. Now that was a festering piece of crap.
1. Probably the "least" of problems: the ActiveX updater requires IE to run, but it's too stupid to actually launch IE. It launches whatever default browser is currently configured, e.g., Mozilla or Opera, and then can't update. So basically if you installed Mozilla or Opera on someone's computer to protect them from IE exploits, they won't be able to update McAffee. Stupid.
2. At one point, after an update, I ended up with _two_ versions of it running at the same time. Presumably because the original installation was on the "D:" drive, while the stupid updater installed the new version to the default directory on "C:". So then I had both running at the same time (and slowing down the machine accordingly.)
It's just sad, folks. You know that a piece of software is written by retarded monkeys when it can't even remember a simple setting like the install directory.
3. Their "privacy" part, and the fashionable rushing to proclaim _any_ cookies as "spyware", basically made it impossible to use any web site that requires login.
4. When uninstalling it, point 2 struck again. It only uninstalled one of the versions, and left the other running. With no obvious uninstaller entry, or any other recourse than to manually edit the registry and manually delete files. (Did I mention "coded by clueless monkeys" yet?)
And so on.
And then there's the occasional over-reacting oddball, like G-Data, which (among other nuissances) quarantined all versions of MIRC I had downloaded or installed, for no reason than IRC being in their opinion a security risk. Not a discovered vulnerability in it, not a virus, just an opinion that IRC is bad. Right. So does that mean they'll quarantine IE and Outlook Express soon too, or? Disable the TCP/IP stack because that's where viruses come from? Or?
Or, G-Data again, which still can't keep their code and data segments separated, so it won't run with the NX (no execute) bit protection in XP. Riiight. So a security product can't deal with the Windows security option that prevents buffer overflow attacks. I'm impressed.
I dunno, it's an industry that I find outright sad. Now I can understand a corporate intranet blog site, or something else that doesn't really matter, being coded by cheap monkeys off the street and designed by marketroids purely for buzzwords' sake. ("Oooh, let's _pretend_ we save them from spyware too.") But from an industry whose self-proclaimed goal is to make Windows secure, they have no excuse for doing such a half-arsed job.
"Essentially, people want everything to be well above average, which is illogical, but nobody ever said people are logical."
No, it's actually completely logical to expect an evolution. I.e., to expect people to learn from mistake, and from what worked.
It happened every single market or industry. After cars with, say, windshields have been produced, you wouldn't want one without a windshield any more, would you? After 16, 12 and now 8ms TFTs are available, you wouldn't want an 120ms TFT from the 90's, do you? After color TVs and remotes have been invented, would you willingly buy a black-and-white one without a remote?
Or in the game industry, once such elements as full mouse-look (pioneered by Bethesda) have been invented, would you actually buy a FPS that doesn't have it? Once unit grouping in a RTS has been invented, would you like an "old school" Dune-2-style "hardcore" RTS where it's missing?
Is that illogical? Not at all. We expect an evolution, not regression.
And it does appliy to games and gameplay. It's a young industry and it has yet to discover what works and what doesn't work well. But we do expect it to learn and evolve.
They did a dud or two, ok, they thought something would work and it didn't, ok. But they already got freakin' told by all reviews what didn't work, and why. I'd expect someone to actually learn from that, not see yet anoter company (or worse: the same company) repeat the same mistakes, or even go downhill.
But what happens instead is that it's an industry dominated by inflated egos, artistic types who get insulted by the mere mention of a scientiffic approach (e.g., to usability or to class balancing), people who don't even understand what they're doing (see the hundreds of clones where they missed every single element that made it sell well, because they don't even understand what they're cloning or actually play that genre), and basing whole designs or business models on ideas pulled out of the ass instead of any attempt to understand reality.
E.g., here's a factor every publisher seems to pretend doesn't even exist: if you look back at what sold well within the same genre, quality seems to sell. Games which were well balanced, had a good interface, and shipped with very very few bugs, actually outsold others by a wide margin.
See Blizzard's whole lineup of titles for an example. Diablo appeared out of nowhere, and didn't need some franchise name or other existing brand awareness to succeed big time. What was really different? Quality, that's what. It was thoroughly tested and debugged, and by "debugged" I also mean the design and balance, which are as important as (or more important than) the implementation in a game.
Yet PC game publishers insist on a business model which pretends that games and gamers exist in a vaccuum, never talk to each other, and, eh, you can shove any crap out the door and the idiots will buy it just the same. And by "crap" I don't even mean just the implementation bugs, but also that stuff like balance is given less thought than the screenshots to flood sites with.
Actually, UO had some advantages, some (most?) directly or indirectly because it was 2D.
1. Easy, intuitive view. By comparison the 3D behind-the-shoulder view and full 3D maps... just isn't as usable.
E.g., in COH it's often a pain to see which areas of the map you haven't explored, if there are enemies on some platform above or behind some crates, where-the-heck did your team mates go, etc. I found that the game became much more usable when I started running around with the map open all the time, basically going back to a top view. It actually works better.
However, having my map open all the time limits my visibility of the enemies. It _still_ is better than without it, but it sorta makes me wonder: would it have been that bad to have the game happen in that UO-style top-down view instead?
2. An easy intuitive interface.
To compare it again to COH, in UO I could just tell my melee char to attack an enemy, and he would keep swinging his weapon at it. COH makes me click on some icon (or press the key) for every single attack. It becomes a whole maths and planning game just to string a good sequence of attacks.
Why is this even important? Because:
3. The other MMOs seem to have forgotten what the second M stands for: Multiplayer.
In UO it was very easy to communicate with other players. Partially because it was possible to let your character hack at an enemy anyway, and partially because everything else was done with the mouse. So if you could type at all with your left hand, you could chat even while performing the most complicated actions.
I was chatting with other players all the time, even in the middle of raiding a dungeon or whatever. _All_ the time.
By comparison, every single other MMO I've tried, doesn't come even close. Try chatting while also needing the keyboard to move, and/or to keep activating different attacks, and you'll see what I mean. See how far you get typing a message to your pal, while also needing the arrow keys to chase enemies around, and needing to keep clicking the attack icons.
Trust me: not far. I pretty much gave up after watching a couple of team members die while I was typing away. Or I ended up taking powers like Fly instead of Super-Speed, because I could chat while letting Fly on auto-pilot.
4. Treadmill feeling: UO was basically a more relaxed, casual-gamer-friendly game.
In UO as long as you could physically swing a sword at something, you'd stand a chance to improve your skills. In COH (or any other MMO) you're forced into some level pigeonhole, where 4 levels higher you can't even hit, and 4 levels lower you don't get any XP or money any more. You can't really play at your own pace, because the game already decided for you which enemies you must go against, and in what zones.
5. And often it basically decided that, nope, you can't really play with your old friends any more. Simply because you wouldn't get any XP in their areas, if your friends advanced slower, and conversely they'd get insta-killed if they came to your new hunting grounds. And they wouldn't get any XP if they grouped with you anyway, because you're too high level for their group.
(Yes, I know that for example COH has Sidekicks and Exemplars, but it's still too much of a pain in the butt. I can't really ask someone to be my Exemplar, or not for long, when they won't get any xp as long as they do that. Or conversely I've tried bringing low level characters as Sidekicks into higher level areas and they _instantly_ died the moment they got out of the Sidekick radius.)
UO basically didn't take it's _game_ aspects that seriously, and was a _lot_ more flexible about where you can go and with whom you can group.
And precisely because of all these points above:
6. UO (well, the non-PK facet anyway) was a far more social experience, and was populated with far nicer and friendlier people than any other MMO I've been on.
Now don't take it as an insult if you play another game,
When he says "killer app" that makes you buy new hardware, don't necessarily think "the game is too slow, gotta upgrade the PC".
Think Gran Turismo or Final Fantasy 7 for which some of us went and bought a Playstation. It's not that the game was non-optimized or anything. In fact, it ran at a clean 60 FPS if I remember right. It was just that good that it worth buying a whole console just to play one game.
Well, any MMO conceivable sorta scales by just adding more servers. MMOs are not really _one_ world, but several copies of one world. (In UO lingo, "shards".) Your character basically exists on such copy of the world.
This doesn't just help with scaling issues for software (how many characters per second can the software handle), but also with the finite size of the world itself. By spreading the load between more servers you basically keep the world from becoming overcrowded.
Additionally any server is usually divided into zones, handled by different physical servers. E.g., to use another game I'm familiar with as an example, if I started a new level character in COH and were to happily hunt Hellions in Atlas Park, while you're a mid-level char doing the respec trial in Terra Volta, we're very separated from each other. A character in Terra Volta can't do much to or with a character in Atlas Park, other than send tells.
That kind of thing helps spread the load between servers and greatly helps with scaling issues. Any synchronization issues or such, can be split into distinct chunks for each zone.
Additionally, most games nowadays support instanced dungeons or missions. You can get a mission which takes place in a special separated zone created just for you and your team.
E.g., dunno about WoW, but in COH I can tell you first hand that most action happens in such instanced missions. At any given time more than half the players will be in such temporary zones of their own, which can be spread among the clustered physical servers as needed.
So basically rest assured that there are plenty of ways to scale any MMO as much as you need or want to. I don't play WoW either, but basically I'm sure Blizzard isn't stupid. If their servers scaled enough to accomodate 2 million subscribers (as was said, about 5 times more than EQ at its peak), I'm sure they already know how to write software that scales.
Believe me, if you can say with a straight face "Yeah, but this game gets laggy too" when comparing _any_ game with Anarchy Online, then you've never actually played Anarchy Online. Just the mention of the launch of AO made me cringe there.
Go read the Anarchy Online review on Something Awful and I can personally attest that that's 100% accurate, and that's what the game was like _after_ the devs had "fixed" it and claimed it was 110% stable and working as designed. Before that, it was far far worse.
I can personally attest to problems, again after the devs said it was 110% fixed, like:
- graphics glitches. Chances were 50-50 that an _open_ door would become a swirl of smeared colours that you can't actually see through.
- collision detection glitches. You'd run on flat ground and then suddenly you'd be falling to your death from stratosphere. Or you'd fall through the floor and start _swimming_ (yep, swimming animation) in the ground, or under the ground. Or you'd have enemies going through solid walls.
- instanced dungeon generation glitches. You could walk through one of those swirly doors and fall 4m deep into a hole you can't get out of.
- massive design problems. E.g., a fist had the same range as a snipe rifle. Yes, no kidding. If you picked a ranged combat class for the "ranged" part, e.g., trading the superior damage of melee for the safety of range, you'd basically get neither. Someone could punch you or stab you from 1000 ft away.
- massive balance problems. Not just class balance, but the three factions were so utterly unbalanced that one of them didn't even have shops above the newbie level. And the class balance was a sick joke too.
- massive AI problems. It wouldn't be uncommon to be attacked through walls and closed doors, because the AI couldn't tell it can't reach you. And various other AI problem.
- stupid mission design. E.g., you'd get a stealth mission, and be told it's a stealth mission, yet... you wouldn't get the token unless you killed everyone in that building.
- stupid design that actively discouraged grouping for missions
Etc. And yes, lag too. For some events people were told to look at the ground to avoid their machine crashing or getting disconnected. Yeah, that soo makes sense... you surely went to some big event to look at a patch of ground instead of at what's happening there.
So, well, trust me: AO at launch was in a class of suckiness of its own. Removing spyware off a machine was more fun than playing AO.
You can probably tell I'm half-asleep when I click the wrong "Reply To This" link. I meant to answer to the "would it still be big if it didn't have the Blizzard name?" thread, one position below.
If you think having a brand name is everything, there are _plenty_ of counter-examples to prove that wrong.
E.g., "The Sims Online" was banking on the brand name of _the_ most sold PC game ever, by a wide margin. If you think Warcraft was a brand name to bank on, The Sims outsold that by a ludicrious margin. And Maxis itself is as big a brand name as Blizzard.
Yet TSO flopped. EA didn't even bother releasing it in Europe after seeing the abysmal sales in the USA, and that an alarming majority of the people were cancelling their
E.g., "Ultima Online" was banking on the brand name of the Ultima series. It was one of the biggest brand names at the moment. A lot of us had grown up on Ultima and then Ultima Underworld, and generally were Origin-a-holics.
UO invented the genre too, something which put other companies safely at the top of the pyramid.
Yet UO, well, didn't actually "flop", but lost players hand over fist by ignoring the players' wishes and complaints. It launched massively unbalanced too. (E.g., could you even do anything but traps as a Tinker? And were they even useful for anything but killing defenseless newbies?)
So UO ended up way behind EQ and AC... in the genre it invented. Both EQ and AC didn't have the brand name that UO had. They were completely unheard of titles that noone had heard about. But they stole the majority of UO players anyway.
E.g., EQ2 was banking on the name of the very successful EQ, and WoW still ended up ahead.
Etc.
Basically brand names help, yes, but they're not the alpha or the omega. Brand or marketting can make people join your game in the beginning, but if the game sucks, those people won't stay for long. And after a short while people start hearing from each other "this game sucks, avoid it" or "woohoo, this game rules, and playing my Shaman/Warrior/whatever is the most fun I've had with my pants on." And very quickly the sales start to reflect that instead of the launch hype and brand name.
See what happened with TSO for a textbook illustration of that. A couple hundred people bought the game right at launch, because of the brand name. Then most of them quit before even that first month was over, and the population settled at a lower value. And sales tappered too, reflecting a very quick decline in people relying on brand name and hype to make an uninformed decision.
I'm not saying that they should stop being creative. God forbid. I did say it's those types who make the game interesting after all. So, yes, by all means, do let the creative people do the design.
What I _am_ saying though is that they should employ _both_. Make them work together. Let the creative people do the design, yes, but then also get an accountant to run those numbers through a spreadsheet.
And if that maths guy says that the new spork-wielding class can dish out 1.5 times the damage-per-second of any other class, it won't mean must take away that spork and deprive that players of creative content. It means they must give that class a slightly less sharp spork or slightly increase the animation times or other such tweaks. It can still be creative and interesting even if it's been rigorously balanced.
Your slot machines example is a very good example: because there they use both. They do let the creative people hide it between flashy lights and designs, yes. But they also calculate and simulate the heck out of the underlying probabilities before putting it in a casino. Noone will just let a designer at it from the beginning to end, and only discover in the casino that it pays more than 100% or conversely it pays only 10% and noone wants to play it... like the computer game industry does.
That's the step that IMHO is missing there. Don't just get a bunch of playtesters and rely on sheer luck to discover the problems. Get a math-head to look for the problems before the first tester even sees the game.
And, no, that idea doesn't contrast with my journal entry. I'm just ignoring the majority of grey shades in between creative and maths for the scope of this argument, because they don't really get into that conflict. Someone who's not very creative won't get to be a good game designer, and someone who's not very much a number-cruncher won't start calculating and publishing damage-per-second charts. Those grey shades exist and do make up the majority, yes, but they mostly sit and watch the (almost-)extremes yell at each other.
Look, I'm not encouraging piracy, and I never said CAD/CAM programs wasn't worth the money for a company or freelancer actually making money with it.
/. that it hurts local economies. But I also am against outright lies and statistics based on blatantly flawed premises.
I'm just saying that the BSA numbers are BS. They're counting as losses:
A) stuff which never would have been sold anyway
A professional, yes, benefits from CAD/CAM software. A kid making a mod doesn't get a single cent out of it, so no way he/she will convince the parents to fork over 4 years salary for that.
B) stuff which would have been more likely replaced by something different
There's no way a Chinese or Russian family would have bought MS Office, for example, because they can't afford it. If piracy didn't exist, they'd get Open Office or some shareware program instead.
C) stuff which isn't even pirated, but is just pulled out of the ass from some bogus statistics of what you _should_ have bought
E.g., if you ever installed Gentoo Linux on a computer or use freeware programs, according to BSA you're a pirate. Their statistics say you should have bought Windows and X pieces of software, and if you didn't, you're a pirate.
E.g., I don't have any pirated software on my computers. I even did go and buy two different Windows licenses for the two computers. But I do use Open Office and Gimp, because they do the job just nicely for me. For BSA I probably count towards their X% piracy for my country anyway, because I don't show up in the sales of MS Office and Paintshop/Photoshop.
Basically, I'm against piracy, yes, and I've been known to argue on
Wow. Where shall I even start.
1. Yes, I'm an electrical engineer too, and I have a full time job as a programmer. Won't stop me from calling a bug just that: a bug. If that makes me a teenager with too much time on my hands, so be it.
2. If it wasn't a bug, it wouldn't be "fixed" by the developpers about twice a month. I do believe that if the class balance in those games were that slanted by design, and working as designed, noone would invest man-hours in fixing it. So basically, sorry, if it's broken enough for the devs to consider it a problem worth fixing, I do believe it's broken enough for me to call it a bug.
Because in any other piece of software that's what you call a problem in need of a fix: a bug.
3. No, I didn't call it "completely broken", I called it basically "buggy". I'm pretty sure the world isn't divided neatly into "perfect" and "completely broken". I'm also pretty sure there is no rule that says I can't mention problems in a product unless it's _completely_ broken.
4. The problem isn't whether the game is designed in my favour or not. If I just wanted the game to be slanted in my favour, I'd play the currently over-powered class and be done with it.
Which basically seems to be the "research" you propose. Find the ludicriously over-powered class, play that, don't criticize the developpers for creating something that unbalanced to start with.
What I expect from a game is good design and balance, not "yay, I too can exploit the design bugs". I expect that all classes have a fair chance at soloing, and all classes bring something useful to a group. Not all in the same way, of course, but nevertheless.
It's been done before, so I'm not asking the impossible. Diablo and Diablo 2 I've already mentioned. AD&D, and the computer games based on it, are another example. You can solo any class in it, and you can be a good member of a group with any class.
But it gets better: most MUDs (which don't even have a budget to hire celebrity game designers) have nevertheless made a better job of it than most MMOs. You can solo any class, and you can do well in a group as any class. I don't remember _any_ MUD where I was supposed to switch classes to join a group.
5. The comparison with Linux, heh, it will only hold water if you show me a distro which claims it can play games. Then, yes, I _will_ call it broken if it doesn't.
Or conversely, I will stop picking on a MMO if it makes clear up front which classes are second class citizens and should be taken only by masochists seeking a challenge. _If_ the class balance is off the hook by design, then put that information right on the character selection screen, and stick to it.
Now I'll aggree with you that some people _do_ take it all to ridiculous obsessive extremes, but balance _is_ a problem for everyone else too. You don't have to be an 3l337 kiddie, obsessed with xp and levels, to nevertheless find it a tad harder to just play a concept character for purely ideological/personality/style reason.
If you think that you can just play your concept character, whatever that may be and no matter how weak, just for creativity sake... you must be thinking single player games. Because in a MMO you'll get booted from 90% of the groups if you deviate too much from the norm.
E.g., try making a character with only the "Brawl" attack in COH. Quite the nice "normal human" concept, right? Well, yes, and some people will even congratulate you... right until you try joining their group. Then it's "WTH! We need some real firepower!" time, and you get booted out of the group.
E.g., try making a (D&D) "paladin" concept character in CoH. Give up some of your attacks to take pool powers such as healing. Aid Other makes a nice Lay On Hands substitute, right? Take the Leadership pool too for a nice "Protection From Evil 10' Radius" substitute too. Take some taunt power from the Presence instead of an attack too, while you're at it, because a noble champion would challenge opponents to one-on one fight, plus it opens the path towards Fear later, which lets you RP "Turn Undead". Nice, well fleshed, concept. Right?
Now try joining a group with that build. I can tell you first hand what happens, because I was in a group with someone with that kind of build. It also was an insanely difficult task force mission.
(Which incidentally is the crux of the problem: any game with instanced missions raises their difficulty with the number of people in the team. So letting sub-optimal characters join your group leads to repeated group-wipes. Which leads to anger, and anger leads to the dark side.;)
Anyway, what happened were complaints from the other group members, starting with "Why the heck is that scrapper healing instead of attacking?" and quickly escalating into "Screw this, call me when you get a real fighter." At which point almost everyone left the group, making it impossible to finish the task-force for those of us that remained. (The D&D Paladin build included.)
That's the whole problem: it's not easy to stick to ideologies and moral high grounds when you're compared to other people every day, and kicked out of teams because you don't measure up to them. Or when even the people who don't discriminate against you, still can't really play with you any more, because you're still level 20 while they got to level 40 in half the time and with half the effort.
What do you do then? Get them to power-level you to their level? Now there goes your self respect out the window, and any respect you had got from other players too. Ask them to come hang out with you in areas where they're not getting any xp? Yeah, they will for a while, but it's not exactly morale-raising.
So after a while people kiss their noble ideals goodbye, bury their lovingly fleshed-out concept builds 6 ft deep, and go roll a Flavor Of The Month uber-character like everyone else. Can you really blame them?
"Is having all the classes balanced really that essential?"
If it were a single player game, or if you only solo, no, it's not essential. The moment you _are_ compared to other players, when every move you make, every breath you take, has is judged as "we should have taken a Class X in the group instead of you", yes, it starts to get pretty damn essential.
"having one or two classes that are "weaker" isn't such a bad thing. I personally like a challenge of playing a slightly weaker class. When you beat an opponent with the weaker class, there is a greater since of accomplishment."
For most people it isn't an accomplishment, it's a chore. Not many people want to be still level 20 when all their friends are level 50. Not many people want to see the group break up _again_ because it didn't have the perfect min-maxed mix of perfectly min-maxed characters. Or worse yet to be kicked out of a group _again_ because their class/build is one of the weak ones.
There's something rather humiliating in being kicked of a group because your character sucks. And it _will_ happen. Happens in CoH daily. "Whaat? You made a Fire tank and didn't take Ice as a secondary? Screw you, I'm outta here." (For those not familiar with CoH, Fire/Ice is the current Flavour Of The Month, because Ice lets you immobilize enemies inside the burn patches/auras/whatever of your Fire primaries.)
"I'll agree that playing against the overpowered class can be frustrating, but it just forces me to do something out of the ordinary to win."
Which is a problem in an by itself. Why should I have to do stuff out of the ordinary to survive where other classes just plough through?
"Granted, in a duel, I'll only win about 35% of the time, but those wins sure do feel good."
I.e., you're asking people to find fun in losing most of the time. You're also asking them to get wiped out whenever they join a team, because the other members don't want to go only against -2 level enemies that you have a chance against. Maybe you find that fun, but most people don't.
"These three classes are very passive/solo classes. Yet people wonder why they don't do well in group settings. This is because the class is meant to be more solo friendly."
Which is a major design failure. No, sorry, there is no need to mince words there: having a sharp distinction between soloer classes/builds and group classes/builds is piss-poor design.
Noone wants to solo 100% of the time, and noone wants to group 100% of the time. E.g., I mostly group, but there are times when I'd rather solo quickly. E.g., if I play for half an hour before going to work, I don't want to spend 20 minutes gathering a team and then leave it after 10 minutes.
And conversely I find it annoying when people join my group and leave after 10 minutes, right at a point when we need them. They should bloody solo, if 10 minutes is all the time they have. But no, some stupid game designer saddled them with a class which _can't_ solo.
Is that distinction even needed? Well, nope. Both Diablo 1 and 2 did a superb job of having classes which were well balanced, diverse enough, and equally enjoyable both to solo and in a group. So why do people still insist in giving players basically a sentence that says "you'll never be able to join a group" or "but you can't ever solo"? Why can't a character do both?
"It's the players fault for not doing a little research on a class before putting tons of time into it."
That's funny, I thought it was the vendor who's to blame for bugs, not the buyers.
Because that's what it is: a fault in some software I bought. A design rather than an implementation bug, yes, but a bug nevertheless.
So basically that point of view is like saying "Windows buffer overflows are your fault, not Microsoft's. Microsoft shouldn't have to fix them. You should do your own research and find out what ports to block, and what workarounds to do."
Which, no offense, is getting it all wrong. Yes, I can do my own research to work around bugs and problems, but that does not excuse the ones shoving buggy poorly-tested software out the door. Including, yes, balance bugs.
How do you think the _players_ found those uber-clases/builds/whatever? No, seriously.
Ever looked on the forums for some character building advice? What did you see? Some dps (damage per second) calculations. "Take class X, turn on power Y, chain the attacks A, B, C, D and B again. It causes 75.13 damage per second, 15.39 damage per endurance/mana/whatever point, and leaves you with 0.35 seconds before A recharges again."
Which leads to advice like "take katana instead of broadsword because it does x% higher dps" or "don't bother taking power Z, because stacking X and Y and these enhancements/armours/whatever already puts you at the damage reduction cap." That's all just maths, nothing horribly surprising or utterly unforeseen.
So what's keeping the designers from running the same kind of maths? I can write a program in less than half an hour that calculates all possible attack chains, and their outcome. Why can't the devs ask a team member to do that?
Other stuff it's so bloody obvious you don't even need a program to see it coming. E.g., if turning on powers X, Y and Z gives a tank in COH a whole 90% damage reduction and 95% avoidance, how do you balance that against classes who get 0% in either?
If the tank has, say, 1000 HP and 90% damage reduction, to do a measly 50 HP damage to the tank (i.e., a bare scratch that will heal in 1 second), an enemy would have to have 500 HP attacks. If it even hits at all. Oops, some of the other classes have less than 500 HP at that level, and get 0% damage resistance. They'll get killed in one shot by that enemy.
You don't need a complex simulation to see it coming. But you do need to apply some elementary arithmetic and calculate that, oops, those powers stack all the way up to the 90% damage cap. That's what's missing.
And once you found that out, the sane way would be to address the problem, instead of bungling randomly through addressing symptoms. But what happens more often in practice is precisely never stopping to see the big problem, and do the maths. No, they'll just sweep a few _symptoms_ under the carpet in this fix. E.g., you can bet that what someone will _really_ see as a "fix" is "I know, let's actually increase the damage from those enemies to 1000 HP per hit, that'll give those tanks _some_ damage." Oops, now it really one-shots _everyone_ else, whereas previously it only one-shot blasters and controllers.
Cue an endless stream of half-arsed quick-and-dirty "fixes" that try to address individual _symptoms_, including those of previous "fixes", instead of even trying to see (and simulate) the big picture.
Every single game I've been in, has basically bungled horribly through class balance, making seemingly random changes and then waiting to see the result. COH, yes, too. Horrible balance issues and swings. And if you hate the changes to your character so far, you'll probably hate Issue 5, already known affectionately as The Nerf.
The problem IMHO is the strong dichotomy between creative types and some of us "accountant types", for lack of a better name.
The creative guys are able to come up with _interesting_ ideas like "I know, let's have a hero that fights with a bent spork and catches bullets with his toes". That's what makes a comic book or a game _interesting_. It's what gives you unique characters, missions, story arcs, etc.
Us accountant types however, then just come, put all those "Spork Thrust", "Spork Slash" and "Toe Wiggle" powers in a big spreadsheet and run a min-max simulation through them. We calculate _exact_ damage-per-second, damage-per-endurance and such, and invariably it turns out that the game is utterly unbalanced and there's some utterly ludicrious winning combination.
The problem is that the two groups are distinct groups. In fact they're pretty much natural enemies. The creative types usually throw a fit and call you a "numberchaser" or such if you even mention soiling their grand vision with such profane maths. (Try even mentioning numbers on some MUDs and you'll see what I mean.) And conversely us maths types treat those designers as the antichrist when they do those broad-sweeping random balance changes, and cause everyone's characters to bounce randomly between uber-slayer-of-everything-in-god-mode and utter-total-wimp.
That dichotomy is what's really the problem. Most balance issues could be foreseen and corrected before release, by simply running the same simulations and maths. The _massive_ kinds of balance problems some games have shouldn't have even made it into testing, much less be there after a year of being live.
There is nothing utterly unforeseeable about most of those min-maxed combination. It's not like "but you can't know what arcane non-obvious thing the players will abuse." You can. Maths is where it's at, because that's what the players will use to find those uber-combos. And the devs could do the exact same maths before the game is released.
But, alas, it would need some of the creative types to put down the crack pipe, get over the ego trip, and let their grand vision be run through a spreadsheet. Not that I expect it to happen any time soon.
The BSA (and a few others) are basically arguing that if some Chinese kid got a copy of AutoCAD or 3DSMax, that's a lost sale and it litterally means some $6000 lost. Can they possibly present a coherent business plan where it's even possible to enlarge that market there, at those prices, if piracy didn't exist?
Hello? An average Chinese family's yearly income, last I've checked, is around the $1500 mark. That is, before, food, clothes, rent, etc.
Take your current yearly salary, multiply it by 4, and ask yourself if you would _ever_ pay that much for a piece of software you don't even really need. Would you?
Some of that software waved around by the BSA as big losses even I wouldn't buy on a western european salary, and I could afford it easily. E.g., would I pay some thousands of dollars on 3DS Max just to mod a $40 game like "X2 - The Threat"? Because that's the kind of use those pirate kids see out of that software. Heh. Would you? Right. That's what I thought too.
Yep, you're right.
I see a lot of people assuming that we're still in the 90's, the hardware does everything, and the software does nothing more than output the commands to the right ports. E.g., how Glide worked on 3dfx cards.
Then again, even in the 90's there were things like software modems. So the technique to offload as much work to the CPU as possible to keep the silicon small and simple, existed already.
What's happening is that usually:
1. The _whole_ functionality is in the software. E.g., if you buy a Promise IDE-RAID card (and they cost a pretty premium over similar cards from others), they're really software RAID like everyone else. The silicon is just an (obfuscated) ATA/SATA chip, arguably nothing better than a Silicon Image one or a Via that costs 1/10 of the price.
2. The whole difference between their differently priced models is in the drivers. E.g., Promise again: the difference between a RAID and a non-RAID card is purely whether the BIOS and drivers activate the RAID functionality.
3. Or, indeed, at the other end of the spectrum are graphics cards, which nowadays are basically more and more like a CPU. And the drivers are becoming more and more like a compiler and optimizer for it.
So someone like ATI genuinely has a lot of edge to lose if they showed the world at large, including their competitors, how they do that. I'm sure not only Nvidia (which already has a lot of their own people on the problem), but also minor players like SiS, Via/S3, Trident and Matrox would love to be just given a way to squeeze more performance out of the silicon they produce. Complete with source code.
Even if those small players can't out-compete ATI in the higher end, the real money is at the lower end of the market. For every X800 XT Platinum or 6800 Ultra sold, there are something like 100 sales in the class of 9200 SE. So showing Trident how to outperform those on cheap silicon is not something you really want to do.
The fact is, I've seen with my own eyes people being ripped off by a clerk, once that clerk got wind that the customer is clueless.
;)
E.g., there was this older guy in front of me a few years back, who just wanted a simple machine to send emails and surf the web. He explicitly said he never plays any games. It was pretty much an experience watching the clerk talk him into buying a rig that was more powerful than my gaming rig (and I'm a gamer and a compulsive upgrader!), had twice the RAM I had, and had the latest top-of-the-line Nvidia graphics card too. (Apparently you need a very powerful graphics card to see your grandson's photo, don't you know? Well, I certainly didn't.)
Would that guy buy from that shop again, after his son (who gave him the original pointers as to what to buy) finds out what the guys at the shop talked him into buying? Probably not. But then with computers being bought for 3-4 years or more (there still are people on Cyrix 300+ machines), does it even matter?
Or there've been stories like the older lady who got sold a sound card upgrade, and they just loaded some different drivers on her machine... which didn't actually work with the old card. Turns out after the "upgrade" not only she had the same model of sound card as before, it had the same serial number sticker too once someone opened the box. Now that's a funny coincidence
I don't think it's necessarily sexist as such, though. Some people are basically sharks. If they smell new blood in the water, they'll be all over it, regardless of whose blood it is. If you look like you have no clue, you'll get royally scammed, regardless of gender, race, age or religion.
Women just run into the stereotype of being clueless about cars or computers, and I might add that some are _happy_ to perpetuate that stereotype. For some it's like it's a thing of pride to know nothing about that nerdy stuff. Makes them more socially acceptable or something.
So anyway, once you're stereotyped in that category, you get scammed. You get car mechanics charging you twice the price, you get sold a PS One as the newest game console, you get talked into buying a Quadro professional OpenGL card for your web surfing computer, or in really extreme cases you get your old sound card back as an upgrade.
"I don't think you sound immature just because you play video games."
Yet these are your words from the two levels above: "I really can't stand being around some of my peers and having to put up with their fascination with X-Box. I mean holy shit, spending 4 hours a day playing video games is something a high-schooler does."
So which of them is it?
And even then, a blatant falsehood, since actual studies show the average gamer age these days to be in the mid-20s. And have you heard of a company called Sony? They stole a helluva lot of market share from some guys called Nintendo, precisely by offering lots of games for adults too. It happened in the mid-90s, so I guess people were just immature back then as they are now. Not much of a decline, huh?
"I don't know what makes something mature or not."
Yet, see above, you just did precisely that: judged a bunch of people as immature, just because their hobby doesn't fall fashionably in your pre-conceived age roles. Sad.
Would it be better if they played chess instead? Or are you trying to tell me that all the senior citizens playing chess are immature too? (Thus defeating the whole argument that people are somehow becoming less mature nowadays.)
Well, here's the scoop: chess is a wargame, designed to be a wargame. (A 4 player wargame initially, but it was a bitch to find 4 players at the same time without internet, so each side took two armies and one King became Grand Vizier. It's the piece that nowadays you call a Queen.) It's modelled after the armies of that era (the bishop was a war elephant, pawns were foot soldiers, etc).
So basically for more than a millenium people have playing no more and no less than the board game equivalent of Command and Conquer. Does that make them immature?
Ah, but maybe one is mature if it happens on a wooden board, the other is immature for happening on a screen? Well, what if I play Battletech or Warhammer 40,000? That's mature enough for you, right?
Escaping reality has many faces, grasshopper. Some people watch soap operas or football on TV. Some people drive around like maniacs on weekends to pass the time. (Dad, for example, thinks driving a few hundred miles to some god forgotten place, just to almost immediately start driving back, counts as tourism or at least the apex of entertainment.) Some play a board game. Some play cards. Some watch the news for hours. Some just flip through the channels for hours on end. Some play elaborate thinly-veiled social "games" with their peers, e.g., the "game" of gossip and manipulating people. Etc. And some play computer games.
But they all ultimately do the same thing: get to spend their time in a more pleasant (for them) way than staring at a wall.
And judging some people as immature just because their hobbies don't neatly match your age-role prejudices is... rather narrow minded.
Ah, how refreshing. A whole message based on fallacies pulled out of the ass. Starting with something which could be a good case of "affirming the consequent" with just a subtle touch of "appeal to popularity".
No, sorry, that implication goes the other way around: _if_ you want to be judged by that appearance, _then_ you'll spend time adjusting it to what you wish to be judged like. What you do is turning that implication around and building a whole poor-man's psychanalyst troll out of it. Which might make for an interesting read, but it's still a fallacy.
No matter how you slice it, "p => q" does _not_ convert in any form or shape to "q => p".
Combined with a whole non-sequitur that somehow it actually show's something about someone's character, and isn't just a mask they put on to game the system.
No, get this, the mask you wear says _nothing_ about who you _are_. Wearing a Jedi costume doesn't make you a Jedi. Wearing a Superman spandex outfit doesn't make you Superman. Wearing a leather jacket with a huge Harley-Davidson logo on the back doesn't mean you can actually ride a motorcycle or actually own a Harley-Davidson. And where I'm getting at: sure as heck wearing a business suit doesn't make you a business professional.
In practice, precisely because implications can't be turned around that easily, it says _nothing_. Maybe someone just genuinely likes a suit. Maybe they're just wearing it as a "pls hire me, I'm that desperate" sign. (Yep, I can see how an employer would love _that_ message.) Or maybe they think you're stupid enough to judge them by their costume instead of their ability. Etc.
Also, I dunno about your company, but in most other places on Earth, something wonderful was invented: work specialization. Only a few thousand years ago too.
The idea is that one person doesn't have to do everything, from mining the ore, to making a bronze plough, to ploughing the field with it, to baking their own bricks and pottery. Society as a whole is more efficient if each person does one job and does it well.
That's why commerce and eventually the currency have appeared.
That's also why a normal company, or at least the non-IT part of it, works in a specialized fashion. If it's a construction company, it has some very clear job separation between the people laying the bricks, the people qualified to operate a crane, the people doing the accounting, and the people selling the contract to a customer. That's what management is about: figuring out what mix of _different_ roles are needed for the job. Noone sane would say "nah, we'll get a bunch of people who can do _all_ the jobs, from brick laying to interior decoration to accounting to doing lunch with prospective customers."
Noone except an IT manager, that is. Here it's ok to be too too incompetent to figure out how many people one needs need for coding, how many for design, and how many to "do lunch" with the customers. Let's hire everyone as if it were a marketting position, and hope they can work interchangeably as a programmer too.
Does _every_ single IT guy in that company need to personally deal with the clients? Because that's the cornerstone of all this "noo, hire only people in suits, 'cause the others would put off the clients" bullshit argument. Do you need 100% of the hired personnel doing lunch with the clients at any given time? Then who the heck is writing the code or managing the servers?
Dunno about him, but personally I don't mind that. I have no piercings or tattoos, but I still do tell my employer that no, I don't ever want a promotion to management. Been there, done that, decided that management is not something I like to do.
Yes, I can occasionally talk to a customer, or draw a flowchart on a whiteboard in front of an audience. But the keyword is: occasionally. I'd very much sit at a computer than spend every day in meetings, corporate power games, or trying to make Wally finally actually do _some_ work, _any_ work. I very much like it when he's not really my problem.
Or to put it otherwise: if I wanted to do either management or marketting, I'd have went to a business college. I chose computers for a reason: that's what I like to do.
So other people will get promoted instead. Good. That I like.
So I've had people I've recruited end up my boss. I'm ok with that. They probably deserved it too, with the amount of show-business they put up for the boss instead of actually working or actually learning programming. But anyway, it still means that I do the job I like.
Some people seem to assume an uni-dimensional rat race and that money is the only thing that matters. They'd do _anything_ for money, or for some stupid social acceptance goal like "promotions are good". They just have to chase some stupid goal that will actually make their life _worse_, much like dogs chase a car: never stopping to think what they'd do if they actually caught one.
At one point it's not even a promotion any more, it's just really switching carreer tracks to a completely new line of work. A new work which doesn't even resemble the old one, and you're not even prepared for, and you're probably incompetent for or don't have the right personality type for. (E.g., an introvert won't really enjoy a life where 8 hours a day are spent talking to everyone, from making sure what the team is doing, to meetings with clients, to meetings with higher level management, etc.)
It's called "Peter's Principle".
Is it worth it? Is it what you _really_ want to do with your life? Would you switch jobs to _anything_, including driving a garbage truck or shovelling manure, if it paid better and was fashionably disguised as a promotion?
Well, if you can honestly answer "yes" to that, yeah, you're in the right rat race. Keep up, brown nose, backstab, and don't let the Joneses get a promotion before you do.
If not, well, then you understand why some of us have "quality of life" as the _goal_, and money and promotions are just _means_ to that end. If the trade-off involved in getting those means actually move you farther from the goal, is actually a bad trade-off. One to be avoided.
(Just as examples of such trade-offs: you get more money but at the expense of getting a stress-related ulcer, or doing so much overtime that you don't actually have the time to enjoy that money, or whatever. Was it worth it? Did it really improve your life?)
Brainstorming doesn't happen in a vaccuum, and throwing crap ideas around isn't _ever_ the whole process. The process is all about then taking those ideas, evaluating them, and fixing them into something that works. That's the _crucial_ step of that process. Without that, it's just talking out of the ass.
_Everyone_ has crazy ideas every day. That doesn't make them an expert. The expert is the one who can also do the second part of the job.
Taking credit for any such unfinished, incompletely thought out idea is easy. And then pretending to be a visionary when it happens for completely other causes. E.g., hey, then I'm a prophet too. Among other things I "predicted" there's stuff like:
- I predicted IBM's new Hurricane chipset back in 2000, and the post on Hardware Central still exists to prove it. (Ok, so it just was something like "yeah, but someone could give each Intel CPUs a separate bus too". I didn't actually predict _what_ that chipset would do, or that it would be a third party that did it, or that it would take 100 million dollars to do that. But hey, we're at taking credit for incomplete crazy ideas thrown around, right?)
- I predicted the XBox some 15 years ago. (Well, ok, so it was just a crazy "Hey, I know, someone could take an IBM PC, put a slot for a ROM cartridge on it, and call it a console." Didn't actually do the maths or any thinking exactly _what_ that would imply, the costs or the risks. Ask Microsoft how much it cost them to actually force that into the market, and you'll see why noone else did that and why my idea maybe wasn't _that_ great. But hey, let's call me a visionary anyway.)
- I predicted the palmtop or portable console in '84, some 5 years before the Atari Lynx and Nintendo Gameboy, and even longer before the Apple Newton. (Again, a completely unfinished idea, more or less just extrapolating "well, mainframes, minis, micros, home-computers... computers keep getting smaller or smaller. I'm sure someone can make small a ZX Spectrum with batteries and a LED screen." Of course, let's skip over facts like not even considering the power draw of LEDs there, or the economics, or anything else. I'm still a visionary, right?)
Etc. There's no limit how big a visionary one can be if _any_ unfinished idea counts, failures are ignored, _and_ there is no time limit on them eventually becoming possible.
"Intel has poured billions of dollars down the tube in all sorts of software and hardware ventures that have led absolutely nowhere (at one point they were supposed to destroy nvidia and ATI. We see where that went)"
Yes, let's look where that actually went. Dig this: Intel currently supplies more than 40% of the graphics chipsets in PCs. By comparison, ATI is 27.6% and Nvidia supplies some 18%. Oops, maybe Intel did win that market after all. E.g., see here: X-Bit Labs.
That's the difference between market reality and fanboy/Cringely talking out of the ass. While the fanboy sees some irrelevant detail, like who's got TEH L33T 3DMARK SCOREZ, the business world is more about other numbers.
Intel is all about making a profit and keeping the profit margins. It's making _great_ money dominating the integrated graphics market. It doesn't need to have TEH L33T 3DMARK SCOREZ, it needs to make money. And it does anyway.
"Intel has poured billions of dollars down the tube"? I don't think so. Those dollars brought it to the position of market leader, starting from zero. Seems to me like anything _but_ poured down the tube.
Dude, I hope you realize that if you do enough of a shotgun approach to making predictions, some will happen even if by sheer chance. Or something similar enough will happen to be able to say with a straight face "I told you so."
"You know, the same sort of speculation like that Apple would move to Intel chips -- how absolutely absurd and impossible that was presented by the status quo contrarians."
Noone presented it as "impossible", and it's been an idea that was floating around for a decade. We all knew already that it _could_ happen, with or without Cringely. What a lot of people argued -- and some still argue (e.g., have a read on The Register) -- is that it might be a _stupid_ move.
Such a move could -- and provably did -- negate a decade of "RISC is inherently better" advertising, alienate customers, create the Osbourne effect, etc. They're things that are very very real, not just out of the imagination of "status quo contrarians." E.g., Apple sees the "Osbourne effect" dip in sales right now.
_That_ is what was argued. Whether it's likely that Apple would take the very real business risks associated with such a move. "Probability" rather than "possibility", if you will. Which is what a _real_ business analysis is all about, as opposed to just talking out of the ass, Cringely-style.
"Cringely has the ability to actually think outside of the box of "more of the same""
The ability to do... what? Ignore the real issues (see above), pull wild predictions out of the ass, and be hailed as some prophet if 1 out of 10 come true? Yeah, that's got to be an easy job. You don't lose anything if you're wrong 90% of the time, or if you publically base predictions on utter ignorance ("unspecified CPU" my ass"), but you get to be a visionary if something does come true.
No, really, I want a job like that.
Briefly, there is a difference between "thinking outside the box" and "talking out the ass".
"and often he'll be wrong, but sometimes he'll be right."
In any other profession, this would be called "talking out of the ass". If a stock analyst was wrong far more often than he's sorta almost right, everyone would call him a joke. If an accountant gave you more often wrong numbers than right, or a lawyer was more likely to give you the wrong interpretation of the law, he _and_ you might face a lawsuit.
There is a limit in any profession, business analyst included, to how many facts and factors one can blatantly disregard or pull out of the hat before one loses all credibility.
Any profession except "tech pundit", apparently. Here the more one talks out of the ass, the greater a visionary he is and the more it counts as "thinking outside the box". See Dvorak for an even worse troll than Cringely, apparently still counting as a big expert, in spite of being blatantly wrong 99% of the time.
Sorry, the "working like a charm of their own" is definitely _not_ what remember about the last time I installed Gentoo on a new machine. (Admittedly, it was about an year ago, so things might have changed by now. Hopefully.)
Au contraire, I was supposed to follow a script via reading a web page in a text mode browser, and the type the commands listed there. It apparently never dawned upon the Gentoo folks that the rest of the world, when/if it needs to run an exact sequence of instructions, would just use a script instead.
I was supposed to make some choices (e.g., which cron daemon to install) via "if you want this one, enter these commands, if you want that other one, enter those commands". Again, the rest of the world, having already exitted the stone age, would have used such advanced stuff as "radio buttons" and "if-then-else blocks" instead. (Or, if they're _really_ advanced, switch statements.)
At the end of the ordeal, I had to configure some stuff (e.g., the DSL connection) _again_, because obviously Gentoo never got taught the arcane art of _saving_ those options the first time.
Oh yeah, and I love "emerge".
Have you tried emerging, say, Open Office on a 64 bit system? No? It just spits out a cryptic message that it was disabled by some other option. Doesn't even try to do a half-way civilized or user-friendly thing, like, dunno, offering to build or download the 32 bit version instead.
If you happen to be a "normal" user -- and I mean Joe Average kinda normal, not Alpha-Geek kinda normal -- you're left scratching your head as to WTH next. Does that mean I can't run OOo at all? Draw a pentagram around the computer and sacrifice a black chicken to the elder gods at midnight to get it? Or what?
So, no, I don't think they "will start working like a charm on their own once you call them." That's not how it went for me, at least. The "here's an axe, saw and hammer, and there are some nice sized trees, now build your own house" has got to be _the_ most apt metaphor I've seen for Gentoo yet.