I've always maintained that blame is not a zero sum game. It seems to me like:
1. the admins are still guilty of being careless and incompetent.
2. that guy is still guilty of the computer equivalent of breaking an entering.
And I think neither diminishes the other. Those guys being careless and incompetent should not excuse the perp, nor be some kind of mitigating circumstance in his sentencing. But, yes, I'll also agree with your point, that having been hacked does not diminish _their_ own blame. Quite wholeheartedly too.
You know, the whole "victims are to blame if they didn't make the crime impossible" meme is starting to rub me the wrong way.
No doubt, some people should have secured their computers better. But, no, that doesn't automatically give anyone right to do something just because they can.
There are millions of homes out there that just about anyone who isn't a quadriplegic _can_ break in. If nothing else, an axe takes care of most doors and a simple brick can defeat most windows. Talk about gaping security holes when securing one's home, eh? We should start excusing the criminals because the homeowners didn't make their house as secure as a bunker, eh? Well, no, it doesn't work that way.
There are millions of bycicles out there that one can steal quite easily for a quick joyride. Most of the older locks can be "bumped" by a 10 year old. But no, we don't excuse someone just because the bike wasn't impossible to steal.
Etc.
In no other domain do we think, "well, the victim failed to make the crime impossible, so the criminal has a good excuse there." Being able to do something isn't and never was an automatic right to do it.
So, really, exactly why should #3 even be a factor at all when it comes to computers? Just because to some nerds the harm _they_ can do should be legal, while harm done to them (e.g., bullying in school) should be a hanging offence? Do some people have delusions of being royalty, or what?
Granted, it's not the best analogy out there by a wide margin, but there is a limited number of things out there that are easily recognizable as basically "sounds great on paper, but it would need a different kind of people for that." Ones that don't invite dissecting one or the other (e.g., does it even sound that good on paper) _and_ don't have any possible negative connotations _and_ doesn't trip someone's pet dogma, are even more scarce. If you can think of one, I'm all ears, because I'm drawing blanks.
I mean, seriously, what would you use there? Anarchy? Libertarianism? Now those would be a porcupine that causes even more problems. Daikatana?
... but only in the aspect explicitly mentioned there. The news is... what? That you don't know how an analogy works? Sorry to spoil your BS trolling, but sharing one aspect doesn't mean "as bad as", nor "equivalent", nor any other delusion you may have. Sorry.
Explicitly does not mean what you think it means. At no point did you explicitly state the limitations on your comparison. You implied a lot of different things by using communism as an example, and by not explicitly stating the limitations of your comparison. It's a cheeseball tactic to try and add weight to an argument, where there is no actual strength to it -- let's take something I dislike, and compare it so socialism/communism/nazism/sexism/racism -- that way it's impossible for anyone to disagree with me, because anyone who disagrees is a socialist/communist/paedophile/donkey.
Explicitly means exactly what I think it means. The part that goes "It's a great idea on paper and at worst harmless on paper, but really it would need a different kind of people to work that way" tells you _exactly_ which part is similar. That's what "explicitly" means, lemming. The scope of that analogy and what was meant by it, was in the same paragraph and spelled out loud and clear.
But generally, here's some news for you: analogies aren't supposed to be 100% accurate and cover all aspects. The only thing that's 100% like achievements is... achievements. Nothing else will be a perfect analogy. I _know_ that, and so does virtually everyone else who's not trying to sound smart by picking on words out of context. That's how analogies work in the first place. They're supposed to illustrate just one aspect, and in this case it even told you exactly which.
To give another example, saying "running without backups is like screwing the boss's daughter, you do it at your own risk" also only illustrates the latent risk part. It doesn't actually say you're doing actual sex with the server, nor the possibility of pregnancy, nor get people thinking "mmm, sex is good, so backups are bad," nor anything else. Similes that only illustrate one aspect, not all of them, are not only anything but unusual, they're the majority of them.
Or saying, "managing programmers is like herding cats" only illustrates a supposed problem with following orders. It does not mean you should get the programmers catnip or let them sleep half the time or anything else. Again, an analogy that isn't 100% equivalent in all aspects is actually the normal kind of analogy.
Same here: yes, you've correctly noticed that there are lots of other aspects in which achievements are _not_ like communism. Congrats. You're just discovering how a normal analogy works. If you didn't know that already and needed to make a big fuss just about that, then, well, consider yourself educated now. But then it's your problem, not a problem with the analogy itself.
As for the rest of your strawmen, I'm not responsible for gross misunderstandings that exist only in your mind. That you can invent some weird kind of intimidation attempt if you only fill in the non-existent blanks with your own bull, is not my failure.
Let me give you another example where the is something implied: "The school principal has a great plan for getting things back on track. It kind of reminds me of Mussolini or Stalin. They kept the trains running on time, too." Sure... I explicitly stated that it's just about the trains running on time, right? But I also implied a hell of a lot of other things, too.
Except it's not the same kind of analogy at all. Analogy is illustrating an aspect of the problem matter by transferring that which is known in another context. Your example isn't even an analogy at all, it's simple guilt by association fallacy. If you said for example, "but just like Mussolini's famous keeping the train on time, the plan only worked in press releases so far", then you'd have an actual analogy: it is a way to illustrate (even if in a non-nice way) a certain aspect of it, in this case its not working. Whereas yours is merely using that plan to make a fallacious connection between the principal and 'Il Duce' or Stalin.
I have a question for you: are you fucking serious? Achievements seem like communism to you? The complete redistribution of wealth and the elimination of individual incentives -- not to mention all of the other extremely negative connotations associated with communism -- seems similar to video game achievements?
So, you only need to quote something so badly out of context, that you only quote about 20% of the sentence, to have a reason to sound smart?
I know this is Slashdot where losers try to sound smart without actually having anything of value to contribute, but something basically boiling down to "I'm so smart that I can't even follow a whole sentence" is kinda stupid.
The comparison to communism was a light hearted one, and even explicitly said in which way, namely needing better people. It had explicitly nothing to do with redistribution of wealth, elimination of incentives, or any other of your strawmen there. Of course, you'd know that if you weren't too stupid to actually read to the end of the sentence before trying to sound smart about it.
I have to say the first two arguments are not against achievements but against idiots. Idiots will always be idiots redgardless, hardly a reason to blame achievements.
Considering that I've even said twice it's a human failure... yes.
But, see, the same could be said for anarchy or communism or whatever. There's no shortage of people who'll tell you at great length about how communism as envisioned by Marx (or Lenin or Che Guevara or whoever) was totally ok, and the only problem was idiots doing it wrong. In fact, somewhere some student wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt is probably arguing that right as we speak.
1. Maybe not you personally, but I do know people first hand (as in, IRL) for whom getting all achievements _is_ a major driving factor.
E.g., someone who actually did the same dungeon well over 100 times until a mount dropped, _and_ then forked over real money for the buyable mount, so he can get the 100 mounts achievement in WoW. Roll that around in your head. He didn't just put countless hours into a repetitive grind where even any other rewards than that elusive drop weren't worth anything, but actually paid RL money. I mean, geesh.
E.g., I've heard it from two different people I know IRL that they normally wouldn't have even considered teabagging someone in a multiplayer game, but they just had to have all achievements, including that one.
I would assume that a major difference is that you're talking about single-player games, while these were multiplayer. The idea that everyone on the same server can see (and in some people's imagination even envy) your having the highest achievement score or are riding the vanity mount unlocked by some such grind, seems to be a powerful motivation.
2. I don't think I'd even blame it on just OCD, as in, the condition described in the DSM as opposed to a cheap reuse as a pejorative term.
There are games where you can get actual bonuses for doing the right set of achievements. E.g., in COH/COV, you can get stuff as powerful as +10% health, or +5% health _and_ endurance (mana) regen, or even extra powers (spells), for doing the right set of achievements. The problem is that the COH/COV achievements can be as arbitrary as needing to take 1 million points of damage (so now you have the healer charging in melee because otherwise he'll never get that stuff) or spending a total 100 hours mezzed/stunned/etc (so now you see tanks turning off their mez protection toggle for that) or dying 1000 times, or clicking the right plaques out of the hundreds scattered all over the place, or killing 10000 rikti monkeys, or selling 1000 recipes at the auction house, and so on.
And if the numbers sound like BS hyperbole, they aren't. COH actually has an exponential scale for achievements and the numbers can get insane fast. There are achievements for literally 10,000 hours doing something or another. Do the maths. And yes, before it got toned down, it literally required one to kill that many monkeys for one achievement.
And, really, I'll side with the GP there. Dangling a carrot in front of the players to make them do something for that long is stupid. At best it's something they would do anyway (e.g., the tank taking damage), but at worse it's something they should actually be avoiding (e.g., the healer getting enough aggro to take that much damage), and at worst it's something they hate but will grind through for an insane number of hours just for that reward.
Well, hey, it's news for us who thought the achievements were made by Oompa-Loompas. Oh wait, that was game devs. They gave up on Oompa-Loompas when they realized humans work cheaper and longer hours for the privilege of being in game development;)
Well, I can think of several ways that achievements irritated me before. Well, not achievements as such, but the potential to be use as what they aren't, and the propensity of the clueless puppies to do so.
1. The first one was waay back around the time Oblivion was launched. I remember reading on Slashdot some PHB expounding how he caught on that a tele-commuting worker wasn't actually working at home: he had 5 achievement points in Oblivion in one week! For whoever hasn't actually played Oblivion, getting your first 5 achievements was trivial. You just needed to complete the tutorial sewer for the first one, and after that even doing some trivial quests to join the guilds would give you more. Getting 5 points was something that could be done in an hour if you knew what you're doing, and in a couple of hours tops even by accident if you didn't actively avoid doing quests. In a whole week, as in 7 days, even half an hour of playing a day was something that would get you there and then some.
So in effect what that PHB was saying is that an employee totally was untrustworthy and a loafer because in a whole fucking week he actually had played a couple of hours too. At home, mind you. I guess ass opposed to putting in 7x16 hours for work, like a proper slave on the plantation should. Or is reserving 8 hours for sleep too much too? But more likely he was judging someone based on stuff he didn't understand at all, truly earning himself the achievement "clueless PHB".
2. For that matter the same kind of judging by raw numbers taken in the opposite direction: you're not l33t enough to be in our group if you don't have X achievement points.
3. Achievements which promote anti-social behaviour. E.g., the infamous teabagging achievements. Kiddies trying to outdo each other for acting like a complete asshole, and men at midlife crisis trying to outdo the kiddies to show they still got it, is already a problem in online games as it is. We really _don't_ need even more people doing some insulting thing to a new player, just for wanting the whole set of achievements.
I mean, geesh, what next? An achievement for calling the opposing team's sniper "gay"? An achievement for telling 5 people you fucked their mother _and_ that she's fat and ugly? (That combination always cracks me up. I think some people still don't get that it really says "I'm so desperate I go for old women that I find fat and ugly.";) Because that's what the corpse humping was really supposed to be in the first place: another insult to an opposing player by some insecure kiddie. If we give achievement points for that, why not for the others, once we get parsing natural language good enough to do it reliably?
4. Achievements which are by themselves something antisocial, e.g., by promoting over-farming some resource needed by other players (think for example: the turkey hunter one in WoW, while other people needed those turkeys for the quests,) or killing some quest NPCs, or going against group roles (e.g., yeah, I so want a tank in COH who turns off his protections to get the titles for numbers of hours stunned/held/sleeping/etc or number of deaths), or the like.
Etc.
Basically it seems to me like communism or late-19'th century French military doctrines based on "elan". It's a great idea on paper and at worst harmless on paper, but really it would need a different kind of people to work that way. Both for the players and for the devs and publishers, actually.
I think the point about being new to computers actually makes sense if you again think of it from the perspective of "It is important to be sure your customer is getting what he wants" and in a "cover your ass" kind of way, rather than simple ease of use or learning.
Someone new to computers basically has no idea yet what he actually wants to do with that computer, much less what they'll want to run in a year. Even if you pulled a Monty Python-eqsque Spanish Inquisition gig on them and made them tell you in great detail what pact they made with the Devi... err... what they plan to do with that computer, you'd get a very incomplete picture. Even skipping past the fact that non-analysts can be prone to leaving out all details (think of that 200 page spec you extracted from a client, only to learn afterwards that they forgot to tell you everything that spells a completely different program), they don't even know what they _can_ do with a computer or what will look good after they try it once.
E.g., most people will tell you that they only want to browse the web and send email to their kids. If you push hard, they may also mention that they want to store pictures from their digital camera. That's it. You could get a sworn affidavit that that's all they'll _ever_ _possibly_ do with a computer, so help them God, cross their hearts and hope to die... and it would still be false every single time.
You really don't know if they forgot to tell you that they also wanted to try this iTunes thing their kid's been talking about, or if a month from now they suddenly get curious about it. You don't really know if those digital photos will also go onto some site that absolutely needs IE and ActiveX to use, or if they'll try some cutesy online game that absolutely needs IE and ActiveX. (And some would not even think of it as gaming, really, if you asked them explicitly if they're gaming too on that computer.) You don't know if, heck, in a couple of months they decide to play WoW on it. There _is_ an increasing segment of retired seniors in MMOs, because it's relatively cheap and offers some social contact and it all around beats sitting alone and getting bored and depressed.
Yes, you could trick some of those with Wine, but it's not something I'd recommend to someone who is self-confessedly new to computers.
In the end even for them the OS is just a tool to run the programs they want. For someone who doesn't really know what they'll want, Windows _is_ the safest bet. Not because of the learning curve or ease of use of the OS itself, but because just about every task you might have in mind, is available and mostly just works. You may have to pay for it, or some GPL fans would probably say you have to sell your soul to the devil, but nevertheless there is a program out there that does whatever you want done and is more usable by the average newbie than the likes of GIMP.
Except for the facts that there's a reason you won't see most of those on a timeline of actual terror attacks. Perusing your links in no particular order, it turns out that:
- the Palo Verde incident is not actually believed to be an actual terror attack, and nobody ever heard of that "Sons Of Gestapo" organization before or after. It's believed to be actually a train robbery, with the whole pretend terror attack being just a smoke screen. (If you thought it was stupid in Die Hard that the "mastermind" tried to disguise a simple robbery as an international terror attack and add kidnapping and murder to the charges too if caught, was stupid, these guys actually did it IRL.)
And again, even if you take the note at face value, those would be some home-grown wackos protesting the siege of Waco. It's not the kind of people you'd get at by attacking some Arab countries or trying to data-mine the Arab-Americans' grocery lists and telephone calls like happened under Bush.
- the Centennial Olympic Park bombing killed a total of 2 (yeah, major terror attack that, and totally worth giving up your freedoms to prevent;)) and again was the work of a lone nutter working alone, without an actual organization, without having told anyone about it, and generally without anything you can infiltrate or where an oppressive surveillance state would have helped. Short of actually monitoring every minute of the life of every single citizen, so you can just rewind the tape and see who placed a bomb at any given point and time, there is no way for oppressive stupid government policies and agencies to prevent a lone deranged guy from doing it. You can't find this kind of thing by waterboarding a few Arabs to make them tell you (what they think you want to hear about) who'll place the bomb and where, because he simply had no ties to Al Qaeda or Hamas or any other terror organization.
And again rather the kind of nutter the GOP tries to woo, rather than the kind you'd pen as having dangerous radical ideas, even if you profiled him. His peeve at the Summer Olympics was that he thought they promote global Socialism, and that it also somehow had something to do with abortions on demand. Or at least he thought that it would somehow shame America for allowing abortions. Don't ask _me_ how that would work. It's practically the poster child for their mid-west bigotted, right-wing, bible-thumping voter, rather than someone you'd single out for dangerous islamist or commie inclinations.
- Ressam is not mentioned, for the sole reason that an actual terror attack didn't actually happen there. He was caught without all the post-9/11 brouhaha anyway. You know, without actually waterboarding anyone, nor suspending any civil liberties, nor anything.
- The Empire State Building Shooting was again not even as much what most people would think of as a "terror attack", as just someone pulling a.380 handgun and opening fire on a bunch of people. (And managing to actually kill one before killing himself.)
Again, we're talking a lone nutter deciding to go out with a bang, rather than any kind of organized international terrorism. Really no different than any other case where a nutter decides to shoot up a school or abortion clinic, to make a point.
At any rate, again it's not the kind of thing that would have been discovered by waterboarding a bunch of suspected Al Qaeda members or anything. The guy worked alone, and no organization claimed credit for his shootings. In fact the palestinian organizations tried to distance themselves from it, an told his widow to deny that there was any political motivation behind it. (His widow had only learned of it when she received a copy of a note found on his body after the attack.) It was an attack that wasn't actually sponsored or wanted by anyone except the demented old guy that did it, and again nobody knew about it until after the fact. There was no organization to infiltrate, nor telephone calls to Hamas to data-mine or intercept, nor any accomplices to tortur
How about the year BEFORE 9/11?
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Top Secret America
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Actually, all this focus on "it must have worked because there were no attacks after" ignores a crucial point: there haven't actually been foreign terror attacks in the USA _before_ 9/11 for a very long time. You know, _before_ all those idiotic constitution violations in the name of security.
Even looking at it dispassionately, I'd want basically to see someone disprove the null hypothesis if they sell me some miracle solution for anything. What is the situation with and _without_ their miracle cure? The before and after?
The last major terror attack _before_ 9/11 was the Oklahoma City bombing, in 1995. (It also wasn't done by islamists, arabs, heathens, illegal immigrants, or the other scarecrows, but by two all-American nutters with a crazy right wing agenda. And I don't mean "right wing" as in "nazi", but the kind that goes "OMG, government is evil, gun control is evil, law enforcement is evil, load your guns and run for the hills!!!eleventeen")
The only things happening in between, and most of the stuff before 1995 too, were attacks abroad, which still haven't been stopped by the USA's giving up civil rights to stop the terrorists.
The main major terror show before that was the unabomber, who pretty much was the main show for the USA between 1978 and 1995, though not immediately and only managing to cause 3 fatalities. (And again it actually was a lone nutter who had no accomplices, belonged to no organization, and hadn't even told anyone about it. And he was a third-generation American at that. So neither much to infiltrate there, nor any profiling that would have helped.)
Look, when talking about events that rare, making a big fuss out of a short interval without them is stupid. (Although it's also false that there were none afterwards.)
I'm given the mental image of a couple of peasants who discover an elephant run away from a circus on their land. So they make up a stupid and inconvenient ritual for keeping elephants away, and unsurprisingly they never see an elephant on their land for 9 years straight. So they conclude that the ritual obviously works, and they must keep doing it every day. But the fact that they had also never seen an elephant on their land _before_ that ritual even existed, is lost on them.
Volkswagen owns Bugatti. Ford owned Aston Martin (but sold it in 2007). Fiat owns Ferrari. That makes your examples a bit unfortunate. Other than that, well spoken.
Not really. The keyword there is "only". Volkswagen for example still makes models like Fox and Polo and Golf for the low and mid-range, or largely the same as Skoda models for the even lower end, and as Audi models for the mid- to upper-mid-range models, and as Seat for, well, I can't really figure out for whom. Or its famous beetle. Well, "new beetle" nowadays. Ford still produces the likes of Ka and Fiesta and, well, probably no need to list all models actually. Fiat still produces the Uno (well, ok, is restarting it as the "new Uno) or Punto II or small and cheap city cars like the 600 and 500 (again, the latter as the "new 500").
My point was more like if VW decided to _only_ make Bugatti Veryons and Audi R8 and its own Phaeton luxury car, and basically got rid of any model below Phaeton prices. Because that's the phenomenon that's described in the article. The major game publishers got rid not only of the low end, but now of the middle segment too.
Dunno, I actually liked the ground game too. Charging in with a bat'leth was a nice adrenaline rush. Granted, it wasn't something deep or complicated or with tremendous lasting power either, but sometimes playing slice-a-mole with the Romulans is good fun anyway:P
So games that aren't in the top X aren't going to make top X bucks. Is there any actual information being given here?
If it was that strawman, yes, that wouldn't be much information.
What he's saying is that is that of the games that try to be the biggest, baddest, most epic ever, only the top X will be making a profit at all. Most will actually make a loss.
And that is something that seems to escape most people, sad to say. From people going into making games with delusions of being paid a million like Carmack, to kiddies who think that pirating a game is some kind of act of resistance to some uber-rich fatcat who's only charging 40$ for it because of greed, to people starting some monumental epic as some mod and expecting to finish it with 5 people in a few months, to fanboys arguing that a publisher is the incarnation of pure Evil if they had an upper limit at all for budget and didn't give the team an infinite limit on money and time to produce the perfect game, to ultimately the devs end publishers who increasingly compete only in that segment. The fact that there's a finite amount of money to chase in that segment seems to be genuinely news to most people.
It's not even a matter of "get off my turf" as some other poster made it sound. We have the equivalent of, say, 90% of the car makers deciding they want to compete only at the Bugatti Veryon end of the market. Or 90% of the computer manufacturers deciding they want to make only supercomputers. Sure, it's great if you do manage to sell the next Bugatti Veryon for 1 million a pop, but there are only so many buyers who will buy at those prices. If actually all major companies, from Ford and Fiat and Volkswagen to Bugatti and Ferrari decided to make only supercars in that segment, that most _will_ make a loss. Same here. There simply isn't enough money in the market to cover the costs of _everyone_ who wants to make the next super-game.
Well, tbh, that was an entirely secondary point, though. If the guy in my story had said, "hey, we're here anyway and maybe we'll get lucky" or even "bah, I want to kill something", I'd have really had nothing against it. I'm not telling people what to like in the game. If someone simply wants to take a big detour because their character concept has the equivalent of the D&D rangers' racial enemies and _must_ kill every single kobold they see, fine, I can live with that. Heck, I could live with mom stopping to kill every single squirrel and rabbit for the first week or so, until the novelty wore off, back when I was teaching her to play WoW. It was the first game she ever played that involved weapons and killing, see?
It's just the blind faith in "the little cube" knowing everything (e.g., if it points at some NPC, it means it's the one who'll drop the item), even in the faith of proof to the contrary that strikes me as illogical. Whatever assumptions or guesses one may have made, insisting they're right when proven wrong several times in a row isn't exactly a quality I admire in someone.
Plus, Quest Helper isn't all that omniscient or anything. I've had it installed a short time and it often proposed very questionable of action, such as taking the gryphon from Honour Hold back to the old world, to get ale for that quest, instead of doing other quests in the area that took far less time than that flight. Apparently just because the gryphon was closer to me at the moment. Seeing someone insisting on just following the cube even when someone with 3 years experience and a dozen alts who did that zone repeatedly tells him that another combination or route _is_ better bang per buck, strikes me as weird to say the least.
But even that is one big tangent. My main point was merely that such people end up so absorbed by just obsessively-compulsively following that cube, that sometimes you can ask someone "hey, you said you just did quest X. Where did you hand it in, please?" and they literally wouldn't know. They just followed the cube like Alice followed the white rabbit. Even zone names or major landmarks sometimes simply didn't register.
Hence, I'm not sure you could make a MMO based on RL geography and expect people to actually learn that geography for long. Eventually someone would make a quest helper for it, and you'd get people who just followed it from New York to Washington DC and back, and still don't know even on what coast it is. Because they weren't paying attention to that. They could run right around Washington's monument while following some cube on the minimap, and then be like, "what obelisk?" when you ask them.
It's a random drop, as such you where a moron for not killing kobolds on the way to the 'better drop rate'.
So, you only need to not know that random drops have different rates on different mobs, nor realize the problem in going back and out of the way for some lone spawn that probably doesn't have that stuff anyway, and you can call people morons. Nice. Are you this complete a cretin naturally, or did you have to work hard at it?:P
Well, it would be that and even the quests could be at least a good reading exercise, if people actually read that stuff any more. But nowadays they just go wherever the little cube points them and then chances are they might not even know where they've been.
I still remember teaching someone to play WoW, and let's leave him unnamed for the moment for the sake of protecting the idi... err... innocent. It went well until he found Quest Helper. Ouch. Then came talks like:
Me: Ok, we'll get the egg first and then for the other quest we'll get the kobolds further south, they have much better drop rate. Him: Wait, wait, the little cube says there's a kobold there that has it! Me: Ah, screw those, the drop rate is homeopathic on those. Him: No, you don't understand! The cube says it has it! Me: How the heck would it know that? The drops aren't even generated until you kill them? It'll show you the nearest kobold in the area, regardless of drop rate. Him: No, the little cube says that kobold has it! Me: *sigh* Ok, let's prove it then.
*Skip a minute of whack-a-kobold, and obviously it didn't drop the quest item*
Me: Did that kobold drop it? Him: No... Me: Told ya. Let's go south, as I was saying. Those have better drop rates. Him: Ok
*Walk 10 ft*
Him: Wait, wait, the little cube says there's another kobold over there and it has the item! Me: Didn't we just go through this? The "little cube" as you call it, can't possibly know what it will drop. Him: Well, it just knows. If I mouse over it, it says it's for that quest. You'll see. Me: *sigh* Ok, go get him, tiger.
*More whack-a-kobold, no drop*
Me: Ok, NOW do you see that it doesn't know that? Him: Must have been a glitch. Me: Look, seriously, just follow me, we could have gotten it already from the group down south. Just trust me, ok? Him: Ok.
*Move another 10 ft*
Him: Wait, wait, the cube says the first kobold just respawned and it has the item! Me: Not again... Him: You'll see! If it says kill that one, then that one has it! Me: Jesus Haploid Christ... Ok, let's prove it again, shall we?
Repeat about a dozen times, after which it dawned upon me that no amount of reasoning or failed tests would shake his religious faith in "the little cube" knowing everything, and just let him lead wherever the cube may point him. Better to spend another hour chasing a 1% drop rate than spend another hour making an enemy.
But, either way, if you asked him afterwards where he's been for that quest or what road to follow there, he'd be as clueless as a baby. He just followed the little cube. Any names, landmarks, etc, didn't even register and really didn't need to register. There was no need to notice stuff like sub-zone name or notice even where the road is or anything. Those were not what told him where to go. The only thing that mattered, the alpha and omega, was just where the little cube was on the minimap.
And just so I don't pick on just WoW, the same thing has been done for EQ2 too, in the form of maps with all quest positions already marked. And if anyone did a game based on RL geography, well, the same would happen. You'd get people who _still_ don't know where Oregon is, even after following the trail to it and back for a quest, because they weren't even noticing where they are or where they're going. The were just following the little cube.
Yes, well, homophobia in the USA is something sad and something I still don't rightly "get". I'll agree that it's a serious problem and didn't mean to imply otherwise. But my train of thought is really a bunch of clown cars chasing each other, and throwing pies at each other, and occasionally I get funny slapstick ideas like that about just about any kind of topic.
Well, maybe not expect retribution, but the tech savvy needed to be a glorified rubberstamp office doesn't put the whole incident past what Hanlon's Razor adequately describes either.
But at any rate, my point is more like: if you do expect them to be the whore of the industry, and a whore with no regulation power either at that, even if you don't expect them to lose your email, still... why bother? It's like writing to the boss's boytoy to complain about her business practices. You don't really expect him to set her straight, do you?
Well, think positively. As more and more people grow up with CS and clones and other online games, soon we'll have a whole generation who thinks "gay" means "got more than one kill with a sniper rifle" or "won the roll on a piece of loot you wanted too".
And for that matter than "I fucked your mom" is the new "good morning, sir. How do you do?" I can imagine a business meeting in 2020 going something like:
CEO: "And now Mr Stevens the VIP of marketing will present the results from the latest market poll." Stevens: "I fucked your moms, ladies and gentlemen." Chorus: "Your mom's fat." Stevens: "As you can see on this graph, after our latest PR campaign, our brand recognition has risen by almost 20% and the sales by nearly 10%." PHB from the audience: "Dude, you're gay." Stevens: "Thank you."
At any rate, they'll probably think that having been subscribed to a gay magazine is like subscribing to some gaming tricks site;)
Actually, it strikes me more like some hens going to the foxes' own self-regulating organization to complain that a fox is harassing them. And being told basically that none of the foxes on the commission sees a problem with what that, and furthermore oops, here's where one can find the hens that complained.
The ESRB isn't some government agency, nor even some really independent group, but the game industry's own attempt at saying, "wait, we don't need no stinking government giving ratings for our games, we can do it ourselves." It's main reason to exist is as some organization who won't give an AO rating when the publisher doesn't want one, because WalMart doesn't carry AO games. Whereas a government agency might actually do such nasty things as actually slap an AO rating on a couple of games.
And even if you want to think they're still somehow independent, the fact still remains that they have no legal power or anything. Getting an ESRB rating is entirely voluntary. They rely on the major publishers actually being arsed to submit their games to them instead of getting together to make another rating agency. Or just deciding that a government agency wouldn't be that much worse after all. (The promise of a well paid honorary advisory job after a few years of bending over for the right folks, has worked wonders to buy government bureaucrats in other domains, after all.) Or they might just use the PEGI ratings they get in Europe in the USA too, since they have to go through with those anyway. It might even help their cause if they can pull that stunt off, since seeing tits is ok here at earlier ages.
And doubly so since we're not talking an indie market with lots of small publishers, where one breaking front would just hurt itself. We're talking a market dominated by a few big names who are so important not to lose, that even console manufacturers or major reviews sites bend over backwards to accomodate them. Ask for example Sega how well getting into a pissing contest with EA and giving "we don't need no stinking EA games" speeches worked for them back in the Dreamcast days. You don't even need to lose more than 1 or 2 of the biggest ones for the ESRB to become basically irrelevant.
At any rate, the ESRB has nothing to gain by helping _you_ against Vivendi, and everything to lose if it makes itself hated by the likes of Vivendi.
And these people went complaining to the ESRB about privacy? This strikes me as... well, not _exactly_ like going to the RIAA to complain about Sony's lawsuits, but not very far off that mark anyway.
Actually, if I'm to take longevity as any useful measure, I'd take longevity as in whether it will still appeal to new listeners, rather than merely because the same people remained stuck on it long after everyone else forgot it even exists. I mean, let's face it, medicine is getting better and better at keeping people alive longer. I was hearing recently that the number of people over 100 is expected to rise significantly. I can tell you that even in 2100 there'll be some grandmas in nursing homes listening to the music of their youth. If you apply longevity as in strictly it's being listened to by anyone at all, then you're pretty much guaranteed to end up concluding that the newer the music the better, and Back Street Boys beating Frank Sinatra. Just by virtue that the fans of the former will live longer than fans of the latter lived.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not even disagreeing much there.
I've always maintained that blame is not a zero sum game. It seems to me like:
1. the admins are still guilty of being careless and incompetent.
2. that guy is still guilty of the computer equivalent of breaking an entering.
And I think neither diminishes the other. Those guys being careless and incompetent should not excuse the perp, nor be some kind of mitigating circumstance in his sentencing. But, yes, I'll also agree with your point, that having been hacked does not diminish _their_ own blame. Quite wholeheartedly too.
You know, the whole "victims are to blame if they didn't make the crime impossible" meme is starting to rub me the wrong way.
No doubt, some people should have secured their computers better. But, no, that doesn't automatically give anyone right to do something just because they can.
There are millions of homes out there that just about anyone who isn't a quadriplegic _can_ break in. If nothing else, an axe takes care of most doors and a simple brick can defeat most windows. Talk about gaping security holes when securing one's home, eh? We should start excusing the criminals because the homeowners didn't make their house as secure as a bunker, eh? Well, no, it doesn't work that way.
There are millions of bycicles out there that one can steal quite easily for a quick joyride. Most of the older locks can be "bumped" by a 10 year old. But no, we don't excuse someone just because the bike wasn't impossible to steal.
Etc.
In no other domain do we think, "well, the victim failed to make the crime impossible, so the criminal has a good excuse there." Being able to do something isn't and never was an automatic right to do it.
So, really, exactly why should #3 even be a factor at all when it comes to computers? Just because to some nerds the harm _they_ can do should be legal, while harm done to them (e.g., bullying in school) should be a hanging offence? Do some people have delusions of being royalty, or what?
Granted, it's not the best analogy out there by a wide margin, but there is a limited number of things out there that are easily recognizable as basically "sounds great on paper, but it would need a different kind of people for that." Ones that don't invite dissecting one or the other (e.g., does it even sound that good on paper) _and_ don't have any possible negative connotations _and_ doesn't trip someone's pet dogma, are even more scarce. If you can think of one, I'm all ears, because I'm drawing blanks.
I mean, seriously, what would you use there? Anarchy? Libertarianism? Now those would be a porcupine that causes even more problems. Daikatana?
... but only in the aspect explicitly mentioned there. The news is... what? That you don't know how an analogy works? Sorry to spoil your BS trolling, but sharing one aspect doesn't mean "as bad as", nor "equivalent", nor any other delusion you may have. Sorry.
Explicitly means exactly what I think it means. The part that goes "It's a great idea on paper and at worst harmless on paper, but really it would need a different kind of people to work that way" tells you _exactly_ which part is similar. That's what "explicitly" means, lemming. The scope of that analogy and what was meant by it, was in the same paragraph and spelled out loud and clear.
But generally, here's some news for you: analogies aren't supposed to be 100% accurate and cover all aspects. The only thing that's 100% like achievements is... achievements. Nothing else will be a perfect analogy. I _know_ that, and so does virtually everyone else who's not trying to sound smart by picking on words out of context. That's how analogies work in the first place. They're supposed to illustrate just one aspect, and in this case it even told you exactly which.
To give another example, saying "running without backups is like screwing the boss's daughter, you do it at your own risk" also only illustrates the latent risk part. It doesn't actually say you're doing actual sex with the server, nor the possibility of pregnancy, nor get people thinking "mmm, sex is good, so backups are bad," nor anything else. Similes that only illustrate one aspect, not all of them, are not only anything but unusual, they're the majority of them.
Or saying, "managing programmers is like herding cats" only illustrates a supposed problem with following orders. It does not mean you should get the programmers catnip or let them sleep half the time or anything else. Again, an analogy that isn't 100% equivalent in all aspects is actually the normal kind of analogy.
Same here: yes, you've correctly noticed that there are lots of other aspects in which achievements are _not_ like communism. Congrats. You're just discovering how a normal analogy works. If you didn't know that already and needed to make a big fuss just about that, then, well, consider yourself educated now. But then it's your problem, not a problem with the analogy itself.
As for the rest of your strawmen, I'm not responsible for gross misunderstandings that exist only in your mind. That you can invent some weird kind of intimidation attempt if you only fill in the non-existent blanks with your own bull, is not my failure.
Except it's not the same kind of analogy at all. Analogy is illustrating an aspect of the problem matter by transferring that which is known in another context. Your example isn't even an analogy at all, it's simple guilt by association fallacy. If you said for example, "but just like Mussolini's famous keeping the train on time, the plan only worked in press releases so far", then you'd have an actual analogy: it is a way to illustrate (even if in a non-nice way) a certain aspect of it, in this case its not working. Whereas yours is merely using that plan to make a fallacious connection between the principal and 'Il Duce' or Stalin.
Ag
So, you only need to quote something so badly out of context, that you only quote about 20% of the sentence, to have a reason to sound smart?
I know this is Slashdot where losers try to sound smart without actually having anything of value to contribute, but something basically boiling down to "I'm so smart that I can't even follow a whole sentence" is kinda stupid.
The comparison to communism was a light hearted one, and even explicitly said in which way, namely needing better people. It had explicitly nothing to do with redistribution of wealth, elimination of incentives, or any other of your strawmen there. Of course, you'd know that if you weren't too stupid to actually read to the end of the sentence before trying to sound smart about it.
Considering that I've even said twice it's a human failure... yes.
But, see, the same could be said for anarchy or communism or whatever. There's no shortage of people who'll tell you at great length about how communism as envisioned by Marx (or Lenin or Che Guevara or whoever) was totally ok, and the only problem was idiots doing it wrong. In fact, somewhere some student wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt is probably arguing that right as we speak.
1. Maybe not you personally, but I do know people first hand (as in, IRL) for whom getting all achievements _is_ a major driving factor.
E.g., someone who actually did the same dungeon well over 100 times until a mount dropped, _and_ then forked over real money for the buyable mount, so he can get the 100 mounts achievement in WoW. Roll that around in your head. He didn't just put countless hours into a repetitive grind where even any other rewards than that elusive drop weren't worth anything, but actually paid RL money. I mean, geesh.
E.g., I've heard it from two different people I know IRL that they normally wouldn't have even considered teabagging someone in a multiplayer game, but they just had to have all achievements, including that one.
I would assume that a major difference is that you're talking about single-player games, while these were multiplayer. The idea that everyone on the same server can see (and in some people's imagination even envy) your having the highest achievement score or are riding the vanity mount unlocked by some such grind, seems to be a powerful motivation.
2. I don't think I'd even blame it on just OCD, as in, the condition described in the DSM as opposed to a cheap reuse as a pejorative term.
There are games where you can get actual bonuses for doing the right set of achievements. E.g., in COH/COV, you can get stuff as powerful as +10% health, or +5% health _and_ endurance (mana) regen, or even extra powers (spells), for doing the right set of achievements. The problem is that the COH/COV achievements can be as arbitrary as needing to take 1 million points of damage (so now you have the healer charging in melee because otherwise he'll never get that stuff) or spending a total 100 hours mezzed/stunned/etc (so now you see tanks turning off their mez protection toggle for that) or dying 1000 times, or clicking the right plaques out of the hundreds scattered all over the place, or killing 10000 rikti monkeys, or selling 1000 recipes at the auction house, and so on.
And if the numbers sound like BS hyperbole, they aren't. COH actually has an exponential scale for achievements and the numbers can get insane fast. There are achievements for literally 10,000 hours doing something or another. Do the maths. And yes, before it got toned down, it literally required one to kill that many monkeys for one achievement.
And, really, I'll side with the GP there. Dangling a carrot in front of the players to make them do something for that long is stupid. At best it's something they would do anyway (e.g., the tank taking damage), but at worse it's something they should actually be avoiding (e.g., the healer getting enough aggro to take that much damage), and at worst it's something they hate but will grind through for an insane number of hours just for that reward.
Well, hey, it's news for us who thought the achievements were made by Oompa-Loompas. Oh wait, that was game devs. They gave up on Oompa-Loompas when they realized humans work cheaper and longer hours for the privilege of being in game development ;)
Well, I can think of several ways that achievements irritated me before. Well, not achievements as such, but the potential to be use as what they aren't, and the propensity of the clueless puppies to do so.
1. The first one was waay back around the time Oblivion was launched. I remember reading on Slashdot some PHB expounding how he caught on that a tele-commuting worker wasn't actually working at home: he had 5 achievement points in Oblivion in one week! For whoever hasn't actually played Oblivion, getting your first 5 achievements was trivial. You just needed to complete the tutorial sewer for the first one, and after that even doing some trivial quests to join the guilds would give you more. Getting 5 points was something that could be done in an hour if you knew what you're doing, and in a couple of hours tops even by accident if you didn't actively avoid doing quests. In a whole week, as in 7 days, even half an hour of playing a day was something that would get you there and then some.
So in effect what that PHB was saying is that an employee totally was untrustworthy and a loafer because in a whole fucking week he actually had played a couple of hours too. At home, mind you. I guess ass opposed to putting in 7x16 hours for work, like a proper slave on the plantation should. Or is reserving 8 hours for sleep too much too? But more likely he was judging someone based on stuff he didn't understand at all, truly earning himself the achievement "clueless PHB".
2. For that matter the same kind of judging by raw numbers taken in the opposite direction: you're not l33t enough to be in our group if you don't have X achievement points.
3. Achievements which promote anti-social behaviour. E.g., the infamous teabagging achievements. Kiddies trying to outdo each other for acting like a complete asshole, and men at midlife crisis trying to outdo the kiddies to show they still got it, is already a problem in online games as it is. We really _don't_ need even more people doing some insulting thing to a new player, just for wanting the whole set of achievements.
I mean, geesh, what next? An achievement for calling the opposing team's sniper "gay"? An achievement for telling 5 people you fucked their mother _and_ that she's fat and ugly? (That combination always cracks me up. I think some people still don't get that it really says "I'm so desperate I go for old women that I find fat and ugly.";) Because that's what the corpse humping was really supposed to be in the first place: another insult to an opposing player by some insecure kiddie. If we give achievement points for that, why not for the others, once we get parsing natural language good enough to do it reliably?
4. Achievements which are by themselves something antisocial, e.g., by promoting over-farming some resource needed by other players (think for example: the turkey hunter one in WoW, while other people needed those turkeys for the quests,) or killing some quest NPCs, or going against group roles (e.g., yeah, I so want a tank in COH who turns off his protections to get the titles for numbers of hours stunned/held/sleeping/etc or number of deaths), or the like.
Etc.
Basically it seems to me like communism or late-19'th century French military doctrines based on "elan". It's a great idea on paper and at worst harmless on paper, but really it would need a different kind of people to work that way. Both for the players and for the devs and publishers, actually.
I think the point about being new to computers actually makes sense if you again think of it from the perspective of "It is important to be sure your customer is getting what he wants" and in a "cover your ass" kind of way, rather than simple ease of use or learning.
Someone new to computers basically has no idea yet what he actually wants to do with that computer, much less what they'll want to run in a year. Even if you pulled a Monty Python-eqsque Spanish Inquisition gig on them and made them tell you in great detail what pact they made with the Devi... err... what they plan to do with that computer, you'd get a very incomplete picture. Even skipping past the fact that non-analysts can be prone to leaving out all details (think of that 200 page spec you extracted from a client, only to learn afterwards that they forgot to tell you everything that spells a completely different program), they don't even know what they _can_ do with a computer or what will look good after they try it once.
E.g., most people will tell you that they only want to browse the web and send email to their kids. If you push hard, they may also mention that they want to store pictures from their digital camera. That's it. You could get a sworn affidavit that that's all they'll _ever_ _possibly_ do with a computer, so help them God, cross their hearts and hope to die... and it would still be false every single time.
You really don't know if they forgot to tell you that they also wanted to try this iTunes thing their kid's been talking about, or if a month from now they suddenly get curious about it. You don't really know if those digital photos will also go onto some site that absolutely needs IE and ActiveX to use, or if they'll try some cutesy online game that absolutely needs IE and ActiveX. (And some would not even think of it as gaming, really, if you asked them explicitly if they're gaming too on that computer.) You don't know if, heck, in a couple of months they decide to play WoW on it. There _is_ an increasing segment of retired seniors in MMOs, because it's relatively cheap and offers some social contact and it all around beats sitting alone and getting bored and depressed.
Yes, you could trick some of those with Wine, but it's not something I'd recommend to someone who is self-confessedly new to computers.
In the end even for them the OS is just a tool to run the programs they want. For someone who doesn't really know what they'll want, Windows _is_ the safest bet. Not because of the learning curve or ease of use of the OS itself, but because just about every task you might have in mind, is available and mostly just works. You may have to pay for it, or some GPL fans would probably say you have to sell your soul to the devil, but nevertheless there is a program out there that does whatever you want done and is more usable by the average newbie than the likes of GIMP.
Except for the facts that there's a reason you won't see most of those on a timeline of actual terror attacks. Perusing your links in no particular order, it turns out that:
- the Palo Verde incident is not actually believed to be an actual terror attack, and nobody ever heard of that "Sons Of Gestapo" organization before or after. It's believed to be actually a train robbery, with the whole pretend terror attack being just a smoke screen. (If you thought it was stupid in Die Hard that the "mastermind" tried to disguise a simple robbery as an international terror attack and add kidnapping and murder to the charges too if caught, was stupid, these guys actually did it IRL.)
And again, even if you take the note at face value, those would be some home-grown wackos protesting the siege of Waco. It's not the kind of people you'd get at by attacking some Arab countries or trying to data-mine the Arab-Americans' grocery lists and telephone calls like happened under Bush.
- the Centennial Olympic Park bombing killed a total of 2 (yeah, major terror attack that, and totally worth giving up your freedoms to prevent;)) and again was the work of a lone nutter working alone, without an actual organization, without having told anyone about it, and generally without anything you can infiltrate or where an oppressive surveillance state would have helped. Short of actually monitoring every minute of the life of every single citizen, so you can just rewind the tape and see who placed a bomb at any given point and time, there is no way for oppressive stupid government policies and agencies to prevent a lone deranged guy from doing it. You can't find this kind of thing by waterboarding a few Arabs to make them tell you (what they think you want to hear about) who'll place the bomb and where, because he simply had no ties to Al Qaeda or Hamas or any other terror organization.
And again rather the kind of nutter the GOP tries to woo, rather than the kind you'd pen as having dangerous radical ideas, even if you profiled him. His peeve at the Summer Olympics was that he thought they promote global Socialism, and that it also somehow had something to do with abortions on demand. Or at least he thought that it would somehow shame America for allowing abortions. Don't ask _me_ how that would work. It's practically the poster child for their mid-west bigotted, right-wing, bible-thumping voter, rather than someone you'd single out for dangerous islamist or commie inclinations.
- Ressam is not mentioned, for the sole reason that an actual terror attack didn't actually happen there. He was caught without all the post-9/11 brouhaha anyway. You know, without actually waterboarding anyone, nor suspending any civil liberties, nor anything.
- The Empire State Building Shooting was again not even as much what most people would think of as a "terror attack", as just someone pulling a .380 handgun and opening fire on a bunch of people. (And managing to actually kill one before killing himself.)
Again, we're talking a lone nutter deciding to go out with a bang, rather than any kind of organized international terrorism. Really no different than any other case where a nutter decides to shoot up a school or abortion clinic, to make a point.
At any rate, again it's not the kind of thing that would have been discovered by waterboarding a bunch of suspected Al Qaeda members or anything. The guy worked alone, and no organization claimed credit for his shootings. In fact the palestinian organizations tried to distance themselves from it, an told his widow to deny that there was any political motivation behind it. (His widow had only learned of it when she received a copy of a note found on his body after the attack.) It was an attack that wasn't actually sponsored or wanted by anyone except the demented old guy that did it, and again nobody knew about it until after the fact. There was no organization to infiltrate, nor telephone calls to Hamas to data-mine or intercept, nor any accomplices to tortur
Actually, all this focus on "it must have worked because there were no attacks after" ignores a crucial point: there haven't actually been foreign terror attacks in the USA _before_ 9/11 for a very long time. You know, _before_ all those idiotic constitution violations in the name of security.
Even looking at it dispassionately, I'd want basically to see someone disprove the null hypothesis if they sell me some miracle solution for anything. What is the situation with and _without_ their miracle cure? The before and after?
The last major terror attack _before_ 9/11 was the Oklahoma City bombing, in 1995. (It also wasn't done by islamists, arabs, heathens, illegal immigrants, or the other scarecrows, but by two all-American nutters with a crazy right wing agenda. And I don't mean "right wing" as in "nazi", but the kind that goes "OMG, government is evil, gun control is evil, law enforcement is evil, load your guns and run for the hills!!!eleventeen")
The only things happening in between, and most of the stuff before 1995 too, were attacks abroad, which still haven't been stopped by the USA's giving up civil rights to stop the terrorists.
The main major terror show before that was the unabomber, who pretty much was the main show for the USA between 1978 and 1995, though not immediately and only managing to cause 3 fatalities. (And again it actually was a lone nutter who had no accomplices, belonged to no organization, and hadn't even told anyone about it. And he was a third-generation American at that. So neither much to infiltrate there, nor any profiling that would have helped.)
Look, when talking about events that rare, making a big fuss out of a short interval without them is stupid. (Although it's also false that there were none afterwards.)
I'm given the mental image of a couple of peasants who discover an elephant run away from a circus on their land. So they make up a stupid and inconvenient ritual for keeping elephants away, and unsurprisingly they never see an elephant on their land for 9 years straight. So they conclude that the ritual obviously works, and they must keep doing it every day. But the fact that they had also never seen an elephant on their land _before_ that ritual even existed, is lost on them.
Damn. Looks like I knew it by the wrong name all along. Thanks for the correction.
Not really. The keyword there is "only". Volkswagen for example still makes models like Fox and Polo and Golf for the low and mid-range, or largely the same as Skoda models for the even lower end, and as Audi models for the mid- to upper-mid-range models, and as Seat for, well, I can't really figure out for whom. Or its famous beetle. Well, "new beetle" nowadays. Ford still produces the likes of Ka and Fiesta and, well, probably no need to list all models actually. Fiat still produces the Uno (well, ok, is restarting it as the "new Uno) or Punto II or small and cheap city cars like the 600 and 500 (again, the latter as the "new 500").
My point was more like if VW decided to _only_ make Bugatti Veryons and Audi R8 and its own Phaeton luxury car, and basically got rid of any model below Phaeton prices. Because that's the phenomenon that's described in the article. The major game publishers got rid not only of the low end, but now of the middle segment too.
Dunno, I actually liked the ground game too. Charging in with a bat'leth was a nice adrenaline rush. Granted, it wasn't something deep or complicated or with tremendous lasting power either, but sometimes playing slice-a-mole with the Romulans is good fun anyway :P
If it was that strawman, yes, that wouldn't be much information.
What he's saying is that is that of the games that try to be the biggest, baddest, most epic ever, only the top X will be making a profit at all. Most will actually make a loss.
And that is something that seems to escape most people, sad to say. From people going into making games with delusions of being paid a million like Carmack, to kiddies who think that pirating a game is some kind of act of resistance to some uber-rich fatcat who's only charging 40$ for it because of greed, to people starting some monumental epic as some mod and expecting to finish it with 5 people in a few months, to fanboys arguing that a publisher is the incarnation of pure Evil if they had an upper limit at all for budget and didn't give the team an infinite limit on money and time to produce the perfect game, to ultimately the devs end publishers who increasingly compete only in that segment. The fact that there's a finite amount of money to chase in that segment seems to be genuinely news to most people.
It's not even a matter of "get off my turf" as some other poster made it sound. We have the equivalent of, say, 90% of the car makers deciding they want to compete only at the Bugatti Veryon end of the market. Or 90% of the computer manufacturers deciding they want to make only supercomputers. Sure, it's great if you do manage to sell the next Bugatti Veryon for 1 million a pop, but there are only so many buyers who will buy at those prices. If actually all major companies, from Ford and Fiat and Volkswagen to Bugatti and Ferrari decided to make only supercars in that segment, that most _will_ make a loss. Same here. There simply isn't enough money in the market to cover the costs of _everyone_ who wants to make the next super-game.
Well, tbh, that was an entirely secondary point, though. If the guy in my story had said, "hey, we're here anyway and maybe we'll get lucky" or even "bah, I want to kill something", I'd have really had nothing against it. I'm not telling people what to like in the game. If someone simply wants to take a big detour because their character concept has the equivalent of the D&D rangers' racial enemies and _must_ kill every single kobold they see, fine, I can live with that. Heck, I could live with mom stopping to kill every single squirrel and rabbit for the first week or so, until the novelty wore off, back when I was teaching her to play WoW. It was the first game she ever played that involved weapons and killing, see?
It's just the blind faith in "the little cube" knowing everything (e.g., if it points at some NPC, it means it's the one who'll drop the item), even in the faith of proof to the contrary that strikes me as illogical. Whatever assumptions or guesses one may have made, insisting they're right when proven wrong several times in a row isn't exactly a quality I admire in someone.
Plus, Quest Helper isn't all that omniscient or anything. I've had it installed a short time and it often proposed very questionable of action, such as taking the gryphon from Honour Hold back to the old world, to get ale for that quest, instead of doing other quests in the area that took far less time than that flight. Apparently just because the gryphon was closer to me at the moment. Seeing someone insisting on just following the cube even when someone with 3 years experience and a dozen alts who did that zone repeatedly tells him that another combination or route _is_ better bang per buck, strikes me as weird to say the least.
But even that is one big tangent. My main point was merely that such people end up so absorbed by just obsessively-compulsively following that cube, that sometimes you can ask someone "hey, you said you just did quest X. Where did you hand it in, please?" and they literally wouldn't know. They just followed the cube like Alice followed the white rabbit. Even zone names or major landmarks sometimes simply didn't register.
Hence, I'm not sure you could make a MMO based on RL geography and expect people to actually learn that geography for long. Eventually someone would make a quest helper for it, and you'd get people who just followed it from New York to Washington DC and back, and still don't know even on what coast it is. Because they weren't paying attention to that. They could run right around Washington's monument while following some cube on the minimap, and then be like, "what obelisk?" when you ask them.
So, you only need to not know that random drops have different rates on different mobs, nor realize the problem in going back and out of the way for some lone spawn that probably doesn't have that stuff anyway, and you can call people morons. Nice. Are you this complete a cretin naturally, or did you have to work hard at it? :P
Well, it would be that and even the quests could be at least a good reading exercise, if people actually read that stuff any more. But nowadays they just go wherever the little cube points them and then chances are they might not even know where they've been.
I still remember teaching someone to play WoW, and let's leave him unnamed for the moment for the sake of protecting the idi... err... innocent. It went well until he found Quest Helper. Ouch. Then came talks like:
Me: Ok, we'll get the egg first and then for the other quest we'll get the kobolds further south, they have much better drop rate.
Him: Wait, wait, the little cube says there's a kobold there that has it!
Me: Ah, screw those, the drop rate is homeopathic on those.
Him: No, you don't understand! The cube says it has it!
Me: How the heck would it know that? The drops aren't even generated until you kill them? It'll show you the nearest kobold in the area, regardless of drop rate.
Him: No, the little cube says that kobold has it!
Me: *sigh* Ok, let's prove it then.
*Skip a minute of whack-a-kobold, and obviously it didn't drop the quest item*
Me: Did that kobold drop it?
Him: No...
Me: Told ya. Let's go south, as I was saying. Those have better drop rates.
Him: Ok
*Walk 10 ft*
Him: Wait, wait, the little cube says there's another kobold over there and it has the item!
Me: Didn't we just go through this? The "little cube" as you call it, can't possibly know what it will drop.
Him: Well, it just knows. If I mouse over it, it says it's for that quest. You'll see.
Me: *sigh* Ok, go get him, tiger.
*More whack-a-kobold, no drop*
Me: Ok, NOW do you see that it doesn't know that?
Him: Must have been a glitch.
Me: Look, seriously, just follow me, we could have gotten it already from the group down south. Just trust me, ok?
Him: Ok.
*Move another 10 ft*
Him: Wait, wait, the cube says the first kobold just respawned and it has the item!
Me: Not again...
Him: You'll see! If it says kill that one, then that one has it!
Me: Jesus Haploid Christ... Ok, let's prove it again, shall we?
Repeat about a dozen times, after which it dawned upon me that no amount of reasoning or failed tests would shake his religious faith in "the little cube" knowing everything, and just let him lead wherever the cube may point him. Better to spend another hour chasing a 1% drop rate than spend another hour making an enemy.
But, either way, if you asked him afterwards where he's been for that quest or what road to follow there, he'd be as clueless as a baby. He just followed the little cube. Any names, landmarks, etc, didn't even register and really didn't need to register. There was no need to notice stuff like sub-zone name or notice even where the road is or anything. Those were not what told him where to go. The only thing that mattered, the alpha and omega, was just where the little cube was on the minimap.
And just so I don't pick on just WoW, the same thing has been done for EQ2 too, in the form of maps with all quest positions already marked. And if anyone did a game based on RL geography, well, the same would happen. You'd get people who _still_ don't know where Oregon is, even after following the trail to it and back for a quest, because they weren't even noticing where they are or where they're going. The were just following the little cube.
Yes, well, homophobia in the USA is something sad and something I still don't rightly "get". I'll agree that it's a serious problem and didn't mean to imply otherwise. But my train of thought is really a bunch of clown cars chasing each other, and throwing pies at each other, and occasionally I get funny slapstick ideas like that about just about any kind of topic.
Well, maybe not expect retribution, but the tech savvy needed to be a glorified rubberstamp office doesn't put the whole incident past what Hanlon's Razor adequately describes either.
But at any rate, my point is more like: if you do expect them to be the whore of the industry, and a whore with no regulation power either at that, even if you don't expect them to lose your email, still... why bother? It's like writing to the boss's boytoy to complain about her business practices. You don't really expect him to set her straight, do you?
Well, think positively. As more and more people grow up with CS and clones and other online games, soon we'll have a whole generation who thinks "gay" means "got more than one kill with a sniper rifle" or "won the roll on a piece of loot you wanted too".
And for that matter than "I fucked your mom" is the new "good morning, sir. How do you do?" I can imagine a business meeting in 2020 going something like:
CEO: "And now Mr Stevens the VIP of marketing will present the results from the latest market poll."
Stevens: "I fucked your moms, ladies and gentlemen."
Chorus: "Your mom's fat."
Stevens: "As you can see on this graph, after our latest PR campaign, our brand recognition has risen by almost 20% and the sales by nearly 10%."
PHB from the audience: "Dude, you're gay."
Stevens: "Thank you."
At any rate, they'll probably think that having been subscribed to a gay magazine is like subscribing to some gaming tricks site ;)
Actually, it strikes me more like some hens going to the foxes' own self-regulating organization to complain that a fox is harassing them. And being told basically that none of the foxes on the commission sees a problem with what that, and furthermore oops, here's where one can find the hens that complained.
The ESRB isn't some government agency, nor even some really independent group, but the game industry's own attempt at saying, "wait, we don't need no stinking government giving ratings for our games, we can do it ourselves." It's main reason to exist is as some organization who won't give an AO rating when the publisher doesn't want one, because WalMart doesn't carry AO games. Whereas a government agency might actually do such nasty things as actually slap an AO rating on a couple of games.
And even if you want to think they're still somehow independent, the fact still remains that they have no legal power or anything. Getting an ESRB rating is entirely voluntary. They rely on the major publishers actually being arsed to submit their games to them instead of getting together to make another rating agency. Or just deciding that a government agency wouldn't be that much worse after all. (The promise of a well paid honorary advisory job after a few years of bending over for the right folks, has worked wonders to buy government bureaucrats in other domains, after all.) Or they might just use the PEGI ratings they get in Europe in the USA too, since they have to go through with those anyway. It might even help their cause if they can pull that stunt off, since seeing tits is ok here at earlier ages.
And doubly so since we're not talking an indie market with lots of small publishers, where one breaking front would just hurt itself. We're talking a market dominated by a few big names who are so important not to lose, that even console manufacturers or major reviews sites bend over backwards to accomodate them. Ask for example Sega how well getting into a pissing contest with EA and giving "we don't need no stinking EA games" speeches worked for them back in the Dreamcast days. You don't even need to lose more than 1 or 2 of the biggest ones for the ESRB to become basically irrelevant.
At any rate, the ESRB has nothing to gain by helping _you_ against Vivendi, and everything to lose if it makes itself hated by the likes of Vivendi.
And these people went complaining to the ESRB about privacy? This strikes me as... well, not _exactly_ like going to the RIAA to complain about Sony's lawsuits, but not very far off that mark anyway.
Actually, if I'm to take longevity as any useful measure, I'd take longevity as in whether it will still appeal to new listeners, rather than merely because the same people remained stuck on it long after everyone else forgot it even exists. I mean, let's face it, medicine is getting better and better at keeping people alive longer. I was hearing recently that the number of people over 100 is expected to rise significantly. I can tell you that even in 2100 there'll be some grandmas in nursing homes listening to the music of their youth. If you apply longevity as in strictly it's being listened to by anyone at all, then you're pretty much guaranteed to end up concluding that the newer the music the better, and Back Street Boys beating Frank Sinatra. Just by virtue that the fans of the former will live longer than fans of the latter lived.