Actually, I think that Digital Rights Management is actually the correct and honest-to-God description of it. They just hope you'll misunderstand whose rights they are protecting, and what those rights might be. A lot of people for example seem to think that if it mentions "rights", it might be your rights. In reality, it's about what rights they can give themselves to shaft you. E.g., their unilaterally self-given "right" to revoke your legal customer rights, by preventing you from reselling the game.
TBH, I'm not sure about satirizing
on
Algebra In Wonderland
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· Score: 3, Insightful
TBH, having read both Alice novels and The Hunting Of The Snark, I'm not sure that it's _all_ satirizing. There are some pretty important concepts illustrated in some places. In a humorous way, sure. But I don't think the concept itself is being satirized most of the time.
E.g., the Walrus and the Carpenter part of Through The Looking Glass illustrates the problems inherent in deciding something rashly based on incomplete data, and without exploring it any further. Alice flip-flops between liking the walrus or the carpenter more, as new information is provided. And eventually comes to the realization that _both_ are repulsive characters, regardless of which one of them may be slightly less so. That's a lesson which is still lost even on many adults who seem to think that when taking sides between two parties, they must go all the way and make one the knight in shiny armour if that's the side they chose. (Heck, fanboy wars or armchair political debates are a prime example of that in action.)
Is the concept of deciding badly based on incomplete data satirized there, or is it just illustrated in a humorous way?
In a sense, see my sig below this message. Sure, it's intended to be a funny way to go about it (though if it's actually funny to anyone else, that's another question), and I particularly like the utter nerdiness of it. But by spreading that quote, I'm _not_ satirizing the concept of polar coordinates. I don't find anything silly or invalid about them, and have used them before. The joke is merely in the equivocation fallacy around "polar", nothing else.
Reminds me of some experiences with the German Telekom some years back. Though it must be said that they mostly seem to have cleaned up their act a bit in the meantime. But anyway it's enough to make me shudder at the thought of even my single-player games depending on Internet access.
Act 1: So I get pressured by a couple of people to get a "proper" email address, because apparently my web based one was "unprofessional." (Someone better tell that to Google too;) So I go to the Telekom's site, activate the email, go to a page which said it would change the password for the email. I change it to one of my handful of password. (I know it's bad practice, but I reuse passwords to keep the total number manageable in my head, mostly grouped by categories.)
Thereafter suddenly I can't connect to the Internet any more. Neither my old nor the new email password work.
Hmm, ok, let's assume it's PEBCAK and call their support politely. I agree with the guy that I probably mis-typed the new password and all, ask him to reset my password. Asks for my invoice number, says it's OK. As per their rules, they'll send it to my home address, they can't tell me the new password by phone. (Dunno why. I'm calling from the phone number that's on the same line and all.) Means I'll be without internet for a couple of days, but ok.
After a week, I still didn't get it. I call again, get another drone, asks for my invoice number again, I read it to him off the latest invoice from them. It's ok, I'll get the new password by post, bla, bla, bla.
After a couple of days, still no password, I call again, read the invoice number to the drone, bla, bla, he'll send it right away.
The whole circus repeats every couple of days like clockword for a month and a half. (By that time I had installed an old ISDN card in the computer and was using a pay-by-call service at another provider to at least get my email.) Eventually I lose my temper, don't believe them any more, escalate it until someone tells me the problem: when I had moved, I had received a new invoice number. Dumbly enough, different invoice numbers from their telephone department and the internet one. Since I receive a combined invoice, only the telephone one was written on it.
Essentially for a month and a half those drones had _lied_ to me. They'd see the invoice number doesn't match and wouldn't even tell me so, or point me at some other office to solve the screw up. I can show up in person at one of their shops so they can see it's me, or whatever, you know? Nah, they kept telling me that they'll send me a new password, knowing full well that they _won't_.
Act 2: My brother buys a new house, asks them to move his DSL account to that address. They ask for his address, invoice number, etc, gets told he'll have internet access in no time. Nothing happens. Calls again, same circus, nothing happens. And again. And again.
I should also mention that we had discovered he was VIP customer at the Telekom for whatever reason. Maybe because he and his wife are practically addicted to their cell phones, and get a bill on par with what some companies get. Dunno. But at any rate this was how they treat their VIP customers.
Eventually he gets tired and annoyed, escalates, finds out the problem. Let's say his house number is "42 D". (Not the real one, but for illustration sake.) The drone who typed it in had hit the key next to that "D", so it was "42 S" in their computer. Which didn't even exist. So again and again they'd see that the address doesn't exist, and didn't actually tell him. They kept reassuring him that they'd do it, then basically just ignored it all.
(At this point he was smarter than me and just started looking for another provider instead. He soon moved both his phone and internet access to a cable company.)
Act 3: So after that ordeal I get paranoid, you know? They keep calling me to propose to upgrade my speed, give me some great deals, I just keep telling them to keep their hands off my line. Don't fix what's not
Don't forget the most important feature: the gamme suddenly shutting down and dumping you at the desktop without warning or saving, if your internet connection as much as hickups. (Dunno about other providers, but at least T-Online still has at least one mandatory disconnect per day.)
I don't know about you, but if my game doesn't randomly crash to desktop, it's just not the same thing dammit. It's like I'm not even playing an Ubisoft game;)
You're IMHO seeing the wrong problem, or rather just one half of the problem.
While a system like this won't and didn't stop piracy, it might just achieve what other systems have failed, and that the publishers have been whining for for a decade: it might just revoke a lot of honest customers' consumer rights.
Let's face it, one of the things they _have_ before whined about, and occasionally even tried to prevent, is that you can buy a second hand copy on eBay instead of paying them for it. You know, just for like any other product out there. You can buy a second hand car, a second hand lawnmower, even a second hand gun, but God forbid that you might buy a computer game second hand.
Tying your right to play to an account on their servers, well, pretty much means you can't sell the game without selling the account. If you registered more than one game on one account (I dunno this one, but for example EA's accounts are tied to an email address, and Joe Average only has one email address), it means you have to give someone access to them _all_ when you wanted to sell one game, and might also mean they get to use your DLC points, post in your name, see your details, and depending on how it's implemented it might lock you out while they play on that account. Heck, some of these might apply even without selling it, but even when just letting your kid play the game after you're done with it or viceversa.
It just added a layer of pain in the ass for every Joe Average out there who isn't even considering piracy at all, but just tries to exercises what passes for consumer rights in any other domain.
Playing wow while making eggs and bacon without leaving the PC?
Actually, that sounds even better to me. It's just a watercooling block and a nozzle away from a coffee maker. Just imagine it. The non-virtual Java Machine:P
I've heard the "we're listening/doing X because it's really nice/right/good, they're listening/doing Y just for some juvenile cool factor" rationalizations before, and it seems to me one of the silliest things ever.
For a start, I'm way beyond the age groups these guys are trying to drive off, but I not only am not fond of classcial music, but value a bit of peace and quiet too. Any place blaring that crap and disturbing the peace, would lose my business pretty fast, if I have the choice. Mom is even older (unsurprisingly) and is a die-hard heavy-metal fangirl. Much to dad's despair, I might add.
The idea that a little old lady would listen to that just because of some "cool factor" is hillarious. Cool factor among whom? It's not like she hands around highschools or anything.
And that goes double for such crap as "When you grow up, you hopefully realize that is pretty stupid, and can enjoy it." Really? Exactly at what age will she count as grown up, then?
Plus, may I point out that most of that music which is "classical" now, was once the avantgarde thing that shocked the elders of the day? Are you aware that Mozart, who now is used to deterr the youth from being there, once was pretty much the equivalent of punk and wrote such shock pieces as "Lick Me In The Arse" and "Lick Me In The Arse Really Nice And Clean"? Now that ought to have gotten a few proper old ladies ranting about the decadence of youth and their music these days.
Are you aware that complaints about "today's youth" and pretty much a verbatim rehash of all the "cool" stereotypes about them, can be found as early as Socrates or Hesiod in the 8'th century BC?
"I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on the frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words. When I was a boy, we were taught to be discrete and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise and impatient of restraint." -- Hesiod
Supposedly there is even a similar complaint dating from early Sumer on clay tablets.
Except, as here, it can be done in advance. Once you can generate an ID of that image -- and that can mean simply a hash value of it -- you can store it in a database, and use it in that small window of oportunity when you need it.
Virtually every captcha I've seen applies a transformation or two of that image, from a small set of effects. So effectively you can end up with just one image for a given word, or a small finite set of distinct images. Add to that the fact that most use words from the dictionary, and the set of data you must store is actually very manageable.
Some transformations can even be filtered out before you hash, even if you don't automatically do an OCR on the word afterwards anyway. E.g., mixing colours can just mean you filter it to black and white before hashing, or theoretical more complex stuff (which I haven't seen actually used) can be defeated by contour tracing before you hash.
Once you have a way to get people to crack those for you, be it by reusing them for a "free" porn site or just paying some chinese kid a dollar an hour to crack captchas for you, you essentially just need some kind of caching to squeeze that information in the actual time window.
Sure, if you've no moral qualms about what you're doing.
So, when we're talking about people already doing stuff that's immoral and often illegal, if the only barrier the captcha offers is "Sure, if you've no moral qualms about what you're doing"... then it seems to me like the most useless gimmick ever. Does anyone actually think that the kind of people we needed captchas against would go, "man, I only wanted to cheat, scam and pollute with email and link spam, but OMG breaking a captcha would be just morally _wrong_. I just can't do _that_."?
Plus, that was not the argument made back then for this crap. Everyone was ranting about how it's such a great defense. If you just tried to point out the ways it can be circumvented, everyone would treat you like you're some kind of a crazy conspiracy theorist.
Well, now it's been officially done, and it's been done for almost a decade, judging by how long these guys operated. Now what?
I'm not saying this as schadenfreude, but I find it genuinely sad that for so long millions of users have been outright excluded from some services, in the name of a solution which just simply doesn't work.
Some captchas are getting so obnoxious, that even I have trouble with some two times out of three, and God help you if you have eyesight problems. And most audio versions I never could decode in the first place. I guess the garbled, low signal to noise thing might not be that bad if you're a native English speaker, but God help you if you aren't.
And for what? For a stupid solution that only works if you have a moral problem with breaking it?
Actually, maybe it's just me, but it sounded to me like an euphemism for "troll". I mean, that's what we used to call the people who posted something shocking or inflamatory, to get attention.
Quite literally, really. The memory of caffeine is anti-caffeine, somehow. Don't ask.
Ok, I lied, not really. They're not countering specific chemicals, they're countering _symptoms_. Told you it's dumb. If your insomnia was caused by some completely other substance, that acts nothing like the caffeine mollecule, e.g., by a sugar rush, the memory of caffeine would still counter it.
Unless, of course, you count the vast array of herbs used through the ages that pharmaceuticals are now based on.
Except that
1. it took some actual evidence-medicine to separate the few that work from the thousands that don't work. There's a name for traditional medicine that actually worked: medicine. The whole alternative gang is the ones that don't.
2. That's irrelevant anyway, because that's not what homeopathy means. Homeopathy can be summarized like this:
A) You notice what herb or substance produces what symptoms. E.g., caffeine produces insomnia.
B) Like cures like. When someone comes to you complaining about insomnia, you give them something that causes insomnia. E.g., caffeine.
No, it's sadly not a joke. The ingredient in most real homeopathic sleeping pills is caffeine.
C) Except you don't really. You dillute it to the point where there's hardly even a mollecule of the original substance left. The dilutions used in homeopathy are all powers of 10. It goes like this:
1X = 1 part active substance in 10 parts water. But this is too concentrated. You don't give them this one. 2X = 1 part 1X solution in 10 parts water, i.e., 1% active substance. Ditto. 3X = 1 part 2X solution in 10 parts water, i.e., 0.1% active substance. Ditto. 4X = 1 part 3X solution in 10 parts water, i.e., 0.01% active substance. Waay to concentrated still, you only use this one to make... 5X = 1 part 4X solution in 10 parts water, i.e., 0.001% active substance. Still too concentrated.
Actual homeopathic remedies start can be anywhere between 10X and 100X. But there's the small problem of Avogadro's number. A 100X solution, you'd have to drink whole swimming pools of it, before an actual mollecule of caffeine actually entered your system to cure your insomnia.
D) But that's supposedly OK, because water somehow has "memory" and cures every symptom like a substance it ever encountered. (So I guess since a lot of water is more or less recycled, and so many people wank in the shower, tap water should be a bulletproof contraceptive.)
The whole thing is stupid on several levels. Not just the "like cures like" or "water memory" stupidity, but starting on the very fact that it focuses on "what causes the same _symptoms_?" instead of the actual pathogen or mechanism involved. If you went to a homeopath with a pain in the throat, he/she wouldn't look at whether you have a pharingitis or a thyroid cancer, but simply at what else causes a pain in the throat. And give you a dilluted version of that. But curing RL illnesses doesn't work that way. Imitating the symptoms doesn't cure a cancer, nor kill MRSA. It's what you get from a brand of "medicine" which appeared before microscopes and is based on little more than ignorance and wild guesses, and inability to distinguish between symptoms and cause of a disease.
Well, I decided to be scientific about it, and try to beat off to a gun, a reality TV show, Billy Graham, muscle cars and naked pictures of women. I'd say that the women win hands down.
I'm trying to be even more scientific and do a double blind study, but so far everyone I've asked to get blindfolded and masturbate has looked at me funny and even threatened to sue.;)
1. Actually human civilization has existed for a long time without coinage or an equivalent in metals at all. See, for example, ancient Egypt. But really, the first coins appear around 550-600 BC in Anatolia, or according to other historians there is some stuff in 900 BC in China which could pass for a coin. Even the equivalent in metal weight comes actually after more than a millenium and a half of human civilization.
2. Even then, not everyone used gold. Chinese coins for example had for millenia been _bronze_, which had the advantage that at least you could do something with it. If all else failed, you could actually melt those coins and make a sword out of that bronze, or even viceversa. (Private minting of bronze coins was actually allowed for most of their history.) Or in ancient Egypt, we have plenty of transactions which happened in deben (a weight unit) of copper, or bronze, or whatever.
So basically if human civilization had actually waited for gold to begin, you'd probably still wear a leather loincloth and hunt gazelles.
Well, I don't think there is a generic "we" in any kind of human behaviour. I know there's a tendency to assume that somehow we're all the same, and look what "we" do to each other, and all that. But, really, some people do and some people don't.
Read Bartle's player types for example, and you'll see that not all players play for the same reasons. Some are perfectly content to find a claim to glory in what _they_ achieved, be it money in the bank, achievement score, equipment score, or whatever. Some just use the game as a glorified chat room and/or social site. Etc.
And probably even among the griefer segment, not all have the same motivation. Some are probably essentially trolls: they want attention, but the only way they know how to get it, is to annoy someone. Some, I'm left with the impression, are just a nasty ball of complexes, and essentially the only claim to glory they can make even to themselves isn't "I'm great" but "you're worse." They're essentially just trying to drag someone down between themselves and the bottom of the proverbial barrel. (You can find the equivalent on forums too: the kind whose only contribution to a thread is along the lines of how much you suck because you wrote "maths" instead of "math.") Some just want to go out with a bang, when they're bored and tired of everything else in the game. I guess the virtual equivalent of an amok run. And some are probably just what happens when you give a pyschopath complete anonymity and a complete lack of consequences for his actions. He already feels no empathy or remorse for what he does to other people, and this is his chance to drop the mask and basically be himself.
Actually, sorry, I've actually helped code for a MUD before and generally even reading the boards was enough to form an opinion.
I've _never_ seen one complain about griefing oportunities (e.g., about thieving like in the summary) from a genuine "I like it when it happens to me" perspective. The people doing the arguing for it were invariably the same griefers who'd do it to _others_.
Oh, they argued lots about how fun it is for the ones ganked or otherwise griefed, straight out of the newbie area, and how everyone will leave your game if they aren't ganked or scammed within half an hour of joining. Basically just arguing why other people should be forced to be their victims.
And the occasional smart guy even went and posted the occasional lie account about how much fun it is when it happens to him. Except if you went and looked in the logs, it wasn't the guy who made a newbie so he can be ganked, but the guy who brought his max level char to gank newbies again. The whole "look how fun it is from the victim's point of view" was just a lie, and they were just hoping you're stupid enough to actually believe it.
Just helped lower my opinion of the whole psychopathic bunch of them some more.
But at any rate, it's not entirely guesswork. I've had that kind of idiot whine at me as to why the MUD should become pure, mandatory PK, and how everything else is not fun, more often than you'd think. So, you know, I think I can be excused if I do an extrapolation based on _that_ very real data, when someone complains twice in a paragraph about the lack of thieving.
No, sorry, he's not whining that people don't steal from him. He's whining that he can't steal from newbies.
Having actually been one of the early adopters of WoW, I wonder where you found that adventure and exploration and where do you think it disappeared. The same original zones are still there, the same quests are there, and people always just wanted a good game.
And most importantly, again, this is the same kind of people we had from day 1, and this is the kind of things they've asked for. I just need to remember the history of the plugins and sites, to realize that the average player always just wanted to be shown where to go to hand it in and collect his loot, and that's how they played the game.
Compared to other games, WoW offered the _least_ mystery and exploration, and people actually _liked_ it that way. E.g., it was very much appreciated that you actually saw a big yellow mark over the head of everyone who could give you a quest. As opposed to actually having to go talk to every single stupid NPC, only to see that 99% still have nothing for you, like in a couple of other online games.
But anyway, really, exactly which place you used to adventure and explore in, that no longer exists?
Methinks that the only thing that changed is you. You were seeing it back then through the eyes of someone who's all new to it, and for whom discovering a new town was an exciting new thing. You're now a jaded old veteran who not only knows exactly where that town is, but also where every single NPC is, and what quests they have, and what items they sell. That's really what killed any sense of adventure and exploration, not anything Blizzard did.
Well, your analogy has merit in its own right, but it's actually a bit mis-leading in the context of UO and generally of online griefing.
RL oppressing and exploiting the masses was at least generally done for personal gain. Some guy got to make some money or have a big castle or whatever, by oppressing those peasants.
In UO the somewhat surprising thing for many players was that a lot of people were not motivated by any kind of gain. They just wanted to make _you_ miserable. There was not even an attempt to enforce their will upon you, as in "you must do X because I'm the boss." They just wanted to make you miserable, that's all.
My perfect example is the way some people tried (and for a while succeeded) to screw up the economy. It's not the most grief-worthy thing, mind you, but it's an illustration of something done not just without any personal gain, but often even at a personal loss.
E.g., UO at launch required two wolves to make a third wolf. Some people took it upon themselves to exterminate the wolves, not to gain anything themselves in the process, but to keep the other players from having stuff to kill.
E.g., UO at launch tried to have a maximum total quantity of metal in the world, including in swords and armours and whatnot, and would only spawn more ore when some metal items got destroyed. (Sold to vendors, despawned, etc.) That was their idea of enforcing some realistic level of supply and demand. But then some people started filling their and their alts' bank vaults with swords and armours and whatnot, just to prevent more ore from spawning. Not to corner the market and make a profit later, or any other kind of realistic motivation. Just for the sake of screwing up the economy for everyone else. Just to keep _you_ from finding ore if you want to play a smith.
E.g., even plain old ganking, the stereotypical ganker didn't even own anything other than a cheap replaceable halberd. They didn't even bother getting new armour after being killed, but would just run around in their death shroud. They didn't kill you for your money or your posessions, except in as much as to prevent you from enjoying those money or posessions.
What I'm trying to say is that RL history actually favoured more those who actually knew how to profit from others, not the plain old psychopath. To be a successful king RL you needed not just to make the peasants miserable, but to drum up popular support, make alliances, play the piety card big time, etc. UO was the other way around. It favoured the psychopaths who really had no other plan than spreading the grief.
The real key is what you wrote at point 2: the lack of consequences for the griefer. And I don't mean as in "permanent death" or anything, but rather the more mundane realization that there's nothing you can do to someone's character that'll matter, when they only see that character as a disposable griefing tool. It's akin to making a murderer wear a different shirt for 5 minutes as a RL penalty for murder: you can probably see how some people would then run amok every day. Not because they gain anything, but just because they can.
You know, I sort of idly wonder if publisher or other kind of pressure had anything to do with it. The thing that makes me wonder is the fact that DAOC had launched about 1 year before AC2, and was a success in its niche. The whole Kingdom-vs-Kingdom setup, and the various ham-fisted ways to push players towards PvP, just scream that _someone_ was aiming for a slice of the same pie and badly.
It's the same kind of fuckups I've seen other games do when they try to copy something from another game in a hurry, without even understanding what they're copying or why it works there. And not even all having to do with PvP. Sony for example did some pretty clueless trying to copy disjointed carricatures of this or that WoW feature into their games for years.
But at any rate, the whole idea of trying to push players to PvP and give extra skills for whoever does do PvP and so on, seems kind of out of character there. There must have been some pressure to do that.
Actually, "be able to" never played much of a role in UO griefing. The only question was whether you want to be a griefing fucktard or not. Most of the exploits were so trivially simple, that if you could click with a mouse at all, you'd be perfectly able to. (And if you can't click, you wouldn't play UO in the first place.) There were no twitch-reflexes or l33t PvP skillz involved, just the willingness to be a griefer or not.
E.g., since the summary mentions housing _and_ thieving together, that combination simply meant using a clipping bug to steal someone's furniture through the walls. There were no player or character skills involved at all. You didn't even need to be able to lockpick their lock or evade notice or anything. Just click yourself near a corner and do it. That was all.
So, yes, everyone could do it. Maybe not "back", but rather to some other victim, but they could do it, if they wanted to. Some of us simply weren't inclined to spread the grief around.
E.g., you could trap the lock on a chest and leave it by the roadside. (Heck, that was the _only_ use for tinkering skill anyway.) Then some hapless brand-new player would stumble upon it, try to open it, and die. Or poison some food, put it in a sack, and leave it by the roadside. Same deal.
There wasn't even any "social engineering" involved or anything. Just wait for some newbie to spring the trap, before even knowing what they're doing in the game.
E.g., even straight player-killing actually rarely involved any bravery or combat skill at all. Most of those did stuff as lame as waiting until some miner is overloaded with ore, so they can't get away, then gank them. Or they actually grouped to muster the balls to attack some newbie.
Even the character skills involved, were often just gotten through some exploit. E.g., at launch the infamous drop-and-pick-a-coin trick, repeated for a couple of hours, would get you to the strength cap with no risks or adventuring or skills involved. Just brainless clicking or using a script were enough.
Again, it was nothing that a casual player couldn't do if they wanted to. The coin trick was well known very soon, for example. But some people chose to do stuff like role-playing, or building their dream mix of abilities, instead of doing the one-track-minded griefer build.
Methinks that's missing the point. Judging by the summary, what his friend misses isn't crafting or just housing, but the opportunity to be a griefing fucktard with impunity. He doesn't miss just housing (which half the games have nowadays anyway), but more specifically thieving, which in the context of housing really boiled down to exploiting some clipping bug to nick someone's furniture that per the game rules you shouldn't have had access to. Basically he's missing a game that's equally half-baked, buggy, exploitable, and with equally piss-poor GM support, so he can be as big a griefer as in the good old days of UO.
And I seriously doubt that many games aim for the bottom of the proverbial barrel nowadays. Even those who end up there, it's not by design. They may end up an exploitable griefer's paradise by plain old fashioned half-arsed effort, but not by aiming to be a buggy exploitable mess by design.
Arguably even UO didn't aim to be the mess it was for its first years. Lord British and later Raph Koster didn't as much aim to fuck up, but just found rationales as to why and how the players will do all the policing and content so they don't have to bother with that. (Raph Koster would then take this idea with him to SWG, and contribute to that one's ending up barely niche appeal, in spite of the millions of SW fans who awaited it like the second cumming of the Messiah.) UO was not _supposed_ to be a lawless griefer's paradise and driving almost all the player base off, as soon as the first competitor appeared. It was supposed to be the place where players form their own posses and do their own policing and enforcing the rules, so Origin and EA don't have to spend money and manpower on that. All that happened was simply that that idea didn't work: there was nothing you could do in-character to a griefer seeing his character as just a disposable harrassment tool. Even if you could get a bunch of people to form a posse to hunt him down, that just fed the troll, instead of deterring him.
But anyway UO ended up a griefer's paradise more by simple fuck-up, than by design. People and social dynamics were supposed to take the place of coded restrictions, except they never actually worked that way. And the end result was just the result of that "it never worked as they intended."
So, yeah, I doubt that the guy's friend will find many games which _aim_ to be what he misses.
Slashdot Mirror
Never heard of him until now. Why?
Actually, I think that Digital Rights Management is actually the correct and honest-to-God description of it. They just hope you'll misunderstand whose rights they are protecting, and what those rights might be. A lot of people for example seem to think that if it mentions "rights", it might be your rights. In reality, it's about what rights they can give themselves to shaft you. E.g., their unilaterally self-given "right" to revoke your legal customer rights, by preventing you from reselling the game.
TBH, having read both Alice novels and The Hunting Of The Snark, I'm not sure that it's _all_ satirizing. There are some pretty important concepts illustrated in some places. In a humorous way, sure. But I don't think the concept itself is being satirized most of the time.
E.g., the Walrus and the Carpenter part of Through The Looking Glass illustrates the problems inherent in deciding something rashly based on incomplete data, and without exploring it any further. Alice flip-flops between liking the walrus or the carpenter more, as new information is provided. And eventually comes to the realization that _both_ are repulsive characters, regardless of which one of them may be slightly less so. That's a lesson which is still lost even on many adults who seem to think that when taking sides between two parties, they must go all the way and make one the knight in shiny armour if that's the side they chose. (Heck, fanboy wars or armchair political debates are a prime example of that in action.)
Is the concept of deciding badly based on incomplete data satirized there, or is it just illustrated in a humorous way?
In a sense, see my sig below this message. Sure, it's intended to be a funny way to go about it (though if it's actually funny to anyone else, that's another question), and I particularly like the utter nerdiness of it. But by spreading that quote, I'm _not_ satirizing the concept of polar coordinates. I don't find anything silly or invalid about them, and have used them before. The joke is merely in the equivocation fallacy around "polar", nothing else.
Reminds me of some experiences with the German Telekom some years back. Though it must be said that they mostly seem to have cleaned up their act a bit in the meantime. But anyway it's enough to make me shudder at the thought of even my single-player games depending on Internet access.
Act 1: So I get pressured by a couple of people to get a "proper" email address, because apparently my web based one was "unprofessional." (Someone better tell that to Google too;) So I go to the Telekom's site, activate the email, go to a page which said it would change the password for the email. I change it to one of my handful of password. (I know it's bad practice, but I reuse passwords to keep the total number manageable in my head, mostly grouped by categories.)
Thereafter suddenly I can't connect to the Internet any more. Neither my old nor the new email password work.
Hmm, ok, let's assume it's PEBCAK and call their support politely. I agree with the guy that I probably mis-typed the new password and all, ask him to reset my password. Asks for my invoice number, says it's OK. As per their rules, they'll send it to my home address, they can't tell me the new password by phone. (Dunno why. I'm calling from the phone number that's on the same line and all.) Means I'll be without internet for a couple of days, but ok.
After a week, I still didn't get it. I call again, get another drone, asks for my invoice number again, I read it to him off the latest invoice from them. It's ok, I'll get the new password by post, bla, bla, bla.
After a couple of days, still no password, I call again, read the invoice number to the drone, bla, bla, he'll send it right away.
The whole circus repeats every couple of days like clockword for a month and a half. (By that time I had installed an old ISDN card in the computer and was using a pay-by-call service at another provider to at least get my email.) Eventually I lose my temper, don't believe them any more, escalate it until someone tells me the problem: when I had moved, I had received a new invoice number. Dumbly enough, different invoice numbers from their telephone department and the internet one. Since I receive a combined invoice, only the telephone one was written on it.
Essentially for a month and a half those drones had _lied_ to me. They'd see the invoice number doesn't match and wouldn't even tell me so, or point me at some other office to solve the screw up. I can show up in person at one of their shops so they can see it's me, or whatever, you know? Nah, they kept telling me that they'll send me a new password, knowing full well that they _won't_.
Act 2: My brother buys a new house, asks them to move his DSL account to that address. They ask for his address, invoice number, etc, gets told he'll have internet access in no time. Nothing happens. Calls again, same circus, nothing happens. And again. And again.
I should also mention that we had discovered he was VIP customer at the Telekom for whatever reason. Maybe because he and his wife are practically addicted to their cell phones, and get a bill on par with what some companies get. Dunno. But at any rate this was how they treat their VIP customers.
Eventually he gets tired and annoyed, escalates, finds out the problem. Let's say his house number is "42 D". (Not the real one, but for illustration sake.) The drone who typed it in had hit the key next to that "D", so it was "42 S" in their computer. Which didn't even exist. So again and again they'd see that the address doesn't exist, and didn't actually tell him. They kept reassuring him that they'd do it, then basically just ignored it all.
(At this point he was smarter than me and just started looking for another provider instead. He soon moved both his phone and internet access to a cable company.)
Act 3: So after that ordeal I get paranoid, you know? They keep calling me to propose to upgrade my speed, give me some great deals, I just keep telling them to keep their hands off my line. Don't fix what's not
Don't forget the most important feature: the gamme suddenly shutting down and dumping you at the desktop without warning or saving, if your internet connection as much as hickups. (Dunno about other providers, but at least T-Online still has at least one mandatory disconnect per day.)
I don't know about you, but if my game doesn't randomly crash to desktop, it's just not the same thing dammit. It's like I'm not even playing an Ubisoft game ;)
You're IMHO seeing the wrong problem, or rather just one half of the problem.
While a system like this won't and didn't stop piracy, it might just achieve what other systems have failed, and that the publishers have been whining for for a decade: it might just revoke a lot of honest customers' consumer rights.
Let's face it, one of the things they _have_ before whined about, and occasionally even tried to prevent, is that you can buy a second hand copy on eBay instead of paying them for it. You know, just for like any other product out there. You can buy a second hand car, a second hand lawnmower, even a second hand gun, but God forbid that you might buy a computer game second hand.
Tying your right to play to an account on their servers, well, pretty much means you can't sell the game without selling the account. If you registered more than one game on one account (I dunno this one, but for example EA's accounts are tied to an email address, and Joe Average only has one email address), it means you have to give someone access to them _all_ when you wanted to sell one game, and might also mean they get to use your DLC points, post in your name, see your details, and depending on how it's implemented it might lock you out while they play on that account. Heck, some of these might apply even without selling it, but even when just letting your kid play the game after you're done with it or viceversa.
It just added a layer of pain in the ass for every Joe Average out there who isn't even considering piracy at all, but just tries to exercises what passes for consumer rights in any other domain.
Actually, that sounds even better to me. It's just a watercooling block and a nozzle away from a coffee maker. Just imagine it. The non-virtual Java Machine :P
I've heard the "we're listening/doing X because it's really nice/right/good, they're listening/doing Y just for some juvenile cool factor" rationalizations before, and it seems to me one of the silliest things ever.
For a start, I'm way beyond the age groups these guys are trying to drive off, but I not only am not fond of classcial music, but value a bit of peace and quiet too. Any place blaring that crap and disturbing the peace, would lose my business pretty fast, if I have the choice. Mom is even older (unsurprisingly) and is a die-hard heavy-metal fangirl. Much to dad's despair, I might add.
The idea that a little old lady would listen to that just because of some "cool factor" is hillarious. Cool factor among whom? It's not like she hands around highschools or anything.
And that goes double for such crap as "When you grow up, you hopefully realize that is pretty stupid, and can enjoy it." Really? Exactly at what age will she count as grown up, then?
Plus, may I point out that most of that music which is "classical" now, was once the avantgarde thing that shocked the elders of the day? Are you aware that Mozart, who now is used to deterr the youth from being there, once was pretty much the equivalent of punk and wrote such shock pieces as "Lick Me In The Arse" and "Lick Me In The Arse Really Nice And Clean"? Now that ought to have gotten a few proper old ladies ranting about the decadence of youth and their music these days.
Are you aware that complaints about "today's youth" and pretty much a verbatim rehash of all the "cool" stereotypes about them, can be found as early as Socrates or Hesiod in the 8'th century BC?
"I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on
the frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless
beyond words. When I was a boy, we were taught to be discrete and respectful of
elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise and impatient of
restraint." -- Hesiod
Supposedly there is even a similar complaint dating from early Sumer on clay tablets.
Except, as here, it can be done in advance. Once you can generate an ID of that image -- and that can mean simply a hash value of it -- you can store it in a database, and use it in that small window of oportunity when you need it.
Virtually every captcha I've seen applies a transformation or two of that image, from a small set of effects. So effectively you can end up with just one image for a given word, or a small finite set of distinct images. Add to that the fact that most use words from the dictionary, and the set of data you must store is actually very manageable.
Some transformations can even be filtered out before you hash, even if you don't automatically do an OCR on the word afterwards anyway. E.g., mixing colours can just mean you filter it to black and white before hashing, or theoretical more complex stuff (which I haven't seen actually used) can be defeated by contour tracing before you hash.
Once you have a way to get people to crack those for you, be it by reusing them for a "free" porn site or just paying some chinese kid a dollar an hour to crack captchas for you, you essentially just need some kind of caching to squeeze that information in the actual time window.
So, when we're talking about people already doing stuff that's immoral and often illegal, if the only barrier the captcha offers is "Sure, if you've no moral qualms about what you're doing"... then it seems to me like the most useless gimmick ever. Does anyone actually think that the kind of people we needed captchas against would go, "man, I only wanted to cheat, scam and pollute with email and link spam, but OMG breaking a captcha would be just morally _wrong_. I just can't do _that_."?
Plus, that was not the argument made back then for this crap. Everyone was ranting about how it's such a great defense. If you just tried to point out the ways it can be circumvented, everyone would treat you like you're some kind of a crazy conspiracy theorist.
Well, now it's been officially done, and it's been done for almost a decade, judging by how long these guys operated. Now what?
I'm not saying this as schadenfreude, but I find it genuinely sad that for so long millions of users have been outright excluded from some services, in the name of a solution which just simply doesn't work.
Some captchas are getting so obnoxious, that even I have trouble with some two times out of three, and God help you if you have eyesight problems. And most audio versions I never could decode in the first place. I guess the garbled, low signal to noise thing might not be that bad if you're a native English speaker, but God help you if you aren't.
And for what? For a stupid solution that only works if you have a moral problem with breaking it?
What, you mean, you don't? Hmm... maybe that's why they were looking at me like that in the last meeting ;)
Actually, maybe it's just me, but it sounded to me like an euphemism for "troll". I mean, that's what we used to call the people who posted something shocking or inflamatory, to get attention.
BTW, in case it wasn't clear, that's why it's called [b]homeo[/b]pathy. The "like cures like" idea is actually the fundamental one.
Quite literally, really. The memory of caffeine is anti-caffeine, somehow. Don't ask.
Ok, I lied, not really. They're not countering specific chemicals, they're countering _symptoms_. Told you it's dumb. If your insomnia was caused by some completely other substance, that acts nothing like the caffeine mollecule, e.g., by a sugar rush, the memory of caffeine would still counter it.
It's magical thinking at its finest, really.
Except that
1. it took some actual evidence-medicine to separate the few that work from the thousands that don't work. There's a name for traditional medicine that actually worked: medicine. The whole alternative gang is the ones that don't.
2. That's irrelevant anyway, because that's not what homeopathy means. Homeopathy can be summarized like this:
A) You notice what herb or substance produces what symptoms. E.g., caffeine produces insomnia.
B) Like cures like. When someone comes to you complaining about insomnia, you give them something that causes insomnia. E.g., caffeine.
No, it's sadly not a joke. The ingredient in most real homeopathic sleeping pills is caffeine.
C) Except you don't really. You dillute it to the point where there's hardly even a mollecule of the original substance left. The dilutions used in homeopathy are all powers of 10. It goes like this:
1X = 1 part active substance in 10 parts water. But this is too concentrated. You don't give them this one.
2X = 1 part 1X solution in 10 parts water, i.e., 1% active substance. Ditto.
3X = 1 part 2X solution in 10 parts water, i.e., 0.1% active substance. Ditto.
4X = 1 part 3X solution in 10 parts water, i.e., 0.01% active substance. Waay to concentrated still, you only use this one to make...
5X = 1 part 4X solution in 10 parts water, i.e., 0.001% active substance. Still too concentrated.
Actual homeopathic remedies start can be anywhere between 10X and 100X. But there's the small problem of Avogadro's number. A 100X solution, you'd have to drink whole swimming pools of it, before an actual mollecule of caffeine actually entered your system to cure your insomnia.
D) But that's supposedly OK, because water somehow has "memory" and cures every symptom like a substance it ever encountered. (So I guess since a lot of water is more or less recycled, and so many people wank in the shower, tap water should be a bulletproof contraceptive.)
The whole thing is stupid on several levels. Not just the "like cures like" or "water memory" stupidity, but starting on the very fact that it focuses on "what causes the same _symptoms_?" instead of the actual pathogen or mechanism involved. If you went to a homeopath with a pain in the throat, he/she wouldn't look at whether you have a pharingitis or a thyroid cancer, but simply at what else causes a pain in the throat. And give you a dilluted version of that. But curing RL illnesses doesn't work that way. Imitating the symptoms doesn't cure a cancer, nor kill MRSA. It's what you get from a brand of "medicine" which appeared before microscopes and is based on little more than ignorance and wild guesses, and inability to distinguish between symptoms and cause of a disease.
Well, I decided to be scientific about it, and try to beat off to a gun, a reality TV show, Billy Graham, muscle cars and naked pictures of women. I'd say that the women win hands down.
I'm trying to be even more scientific and do a double blind study, but so far everyone I've asked to get blindfolded and masturbate has looked at me funny and even threatened to sue. ;)
Bullshit.
1. Actually human civilization has existed for a long time without coinage or an equivalent in metals at all. See, for example, ancient Egypt. But really, the first coins appear around 550-600 BC in Anatolia, or according to other historians there is some stuff in 900 BC in China which could pass for a coin. Even the equivalent in metal weight comes actually after more than a millenium and a half of human civilization.
2. Even then, not everyone used gold. Chinese coins for example had for millenia been _bronze_, which had the advantage that at least you could do something with it. If all else failed, you could actually melt those coins and make a sword out of that bronze, or even viceversa. (Private minting of bronze coins was actually allowed for most of their history.) Or in ancient Egypt, we have plenty of transactions which happened in deben (a weight unit) of copper, or bronze, or whatever.
So basically if human civilization had actually waited for gold to begin, you'd probably still wear a leather loincloth and hunt gazelles.
Well, I don't think there is a generic "we" in any kind of human behaviour. I know there's a tendency to assume that somehow we're all the same, and look what "we" do to each other, and all that. But, really, some people do and some people don't.
Read Bartle's player types for example, and you'll see that not all players play for the same reasons. Some are perfectly content to find a claim to glory in what _they_ achieved, be it money in the bank, achievement score, equipment score, or whatever. Some just use the game as a glorified chat room and/or social site. Etc.
And probably even among the griefer segment, not all have the same motivation. Some are probably essentially trolls: they want attention, but the only way they know how to get it, is to annoy someone. Some, I'm left with the impression, are just a nasty ball of complexes, and essentially the only claim to glory they can make even to themselves isn't "I'm great" but "you're worse." They're essentially just trying to drag someone down between themselves and the bottom of the proverbial barrel. (You can find the equivalent on forums too: the kind whose only contribution to a thread is along the lines of how much you suck because you wrote "maths" instead of "math.") Some just want to go out with a bang, when they're bored and tired of everything else in the game. I guess the virtual equivalent of an amok run. And some are probably just what happens when you give a pyschopath complete anonymity and a complete lack of consequences for his actions. He already feels no empathy or remorse for what he does to other people, and this is his chance to drop the mask and basically be himself.
Actually, sorry, I've actually helped code for a MUD before and generally even reading the boards was enough to form an opinion.
I've _never_ seen one complain about griefing oportunities (e.g., about thieving like in the summary) from a genuine "I like it when it happens to me" perspective. The people doing the arguing for it were invariably the same griefers who'd do it to _others_.
Oh, they argued lots about how fun it is for the ones ganked or otherwise griefed, straight out of the newbie area, and how everyone will leave your game if they aren't ganked or scammed within half an hour of joining. Basically just arguing why other people should be forced to be their victims.
And the occasional smart guy even went and posted the occasional lie account about how much fun it is when it happens to him. Except if you went and looked in the logs, it wasn't the guy who made a newbie so he can be ganked, but the guy who brought his max level char to gank newbies again. The whole "look how fun it is from the victim's point of view" was just a lie, and they were just hoping you're stupid enough to actually believe it.
Just helped lower my opinion of the whole psychopathic bunch of them some more.
But at any rate, it's not entirely guesswork. I've had that kind of idiot whine at me as to why the MUD should become pure, mandatory PK, and how everything else is not fun, more often than you'd think. So, you know, I think I can be excused if I do an extrapolation based on _that_ very real data, when someone complains twice in a paragraph about the lack of thieving.
No, sorry, he's not whining that people don't steal from him. He's whining that he can't steal from newbies.
Having actually been one of the early adopters of WoW, I wonder where you found that adventure and exploration and where do you think it disappeared. The same original zones are still there, the same quests are there, and people always just wanted a good game.
And most importantly, again, this is the same kind of people we had from day 1, and this is the kind of things they've asked for. I just need to remember the history of the plugins and sites, to realize that the average player always just wanted to be shown where to go to hand it in and collect his loot, and that's how they played the game.
Compared to other games, WoW offered the _least_ mystery and exploration, and people actually _liked_ it that way. E.g., it was very much appreciated that you actually saw a big yellow mark over the head of everyone who could give you a quest. As opposed to actually having to go talk to every single stupid NPC, only to see that 99% still have nothing for you, like in a couple of other online games.
But anyway, really, exactly which place you used to adventure and explore in, that no longer exists?
Methinks that the only thing that changed is you. You were seeing it back then through the eyes of someone who's all new to it, and for whom discovering a new town was an exciting new thing. You're now a jaded old veteran who not only knows exactly where that town is, but also where every single NPC is, and what quests they have, and what items they sell. That's really what killed any sense of adventure and exploration, not anything Blizzard did.
Well, your analogy has merit in its own right, but it's actually a bit mis-leading in the context of UO and generally of online griefing.
RL oppressing and exploiting the masses was at least generally done for personal gain. Some guy got to make some money or have a big castle or whatever, by oppressing those peasants.
In UO the somewhat surprising thing for many players was that a lot of people were not motivated by any kind of gain. They just wanted to make _you_ miserable. There was not even an attempt to enforce their will upon you, as in "you must do X because I'm the boss." They just wanted to make you miserable, that's all.
My perfect example is the way some people tried (and for a while succeeded) to screw up the economy. It's not the most grief-worthy thing, mind you, but it's an illustration of something done not just without any personal gain, but often even at a personal loss.
E.g., UO at launch required two wolves to make a third wolf. Some people took it upon themselves to exterminate the wolves, not to gain anything themselves in the process, but to keep the other players from having stuff to kill.
E.g., UO at launch tried to have a maximum total quantity of metal in the world, including in swords and armours and whatnot, and would only spawn more ore when some metal items got destroyed. (Sold to vendors, despawned, etc.) That was their idea of enforcing some realistic level of supply and demand. But then some people started filling their and their alts' bank vaults with swords and armours and whatnot, just to prevent more ore from spawning. Not to corner the market and make a profit later, or any other kind of realistic motivation. Just for the sake of screwing up the economy for everyone else. Just to keep _you_ from finding ore if you want to play a smith.
E.g., even plain old ganking, the stereotypical ganker didn't even own anything other than a cheap replaceable halberd. They didn't even bother getting new armour after being killed, but would just run around in their death shroud. They didn't kill you for your money or your posessions, except in as much as to prevent you from enjoying those money or posessions.
What I'm trying to say is that RL history actually favoured more those who actually knew how to profit from others, not the plain old psychopath. To be a successful king RL you needed not just to make the peasants miserable, but to drum up popular support, make alliances, play the piety card big time, etc. UO was the other way around. It favoured the psychopaths who really had no other plan than spreading the grief.
The real key is what you wrote at point 2: the lack of consequences for the griefer. And I don't mean as in "permanent death" or anything, but rather the more mundane realization that there's nothing you can do to someone's character that'll matter, when they only see that character as a disposable griefing tool. It's akin to making a murderer wear a different shirt for 5 minutes as a RL penalty for murder: you can probably see how some people would then run amok every day. Not because they gain anything, but just because they can.
You know, I sort of idly wonder if publisher or other kind of pressure had anything to do with it. The thing that makes me wonder is the fact that DAOC had launched about 1 year before AC2, and was a success in its niche. The whole Kingdom-vs-Kingdom setup, and the various ham-fisted ways to push players towards PvP, just scream that _someone_ was aiming for a slice of the same pie and badly.
It's the same kind of fuckups I've seen other games do when they try to copy something from another game in a hurry, without even understanding what they're copying or why it works there. And not even all having to do with PvP. Sony for example did some pretty clueless trying to copy disjointed carricatures of this or that WoW feature into their games for years.
But at any rate, the whole idea of trying to push players to PvP and give extra skills for whoever does do PvP and so on, seems kind of out of character there. There must have been some pressure to do that.
Clips are different from box magazines. I don't think that extracting the left-over rounds from a Garand clip would be that unrealistic a fuss.
Actually, "be able to" never played much of a role in UO griefing. The only question was whether you want to be a griefing fucktard or not. Most of the exploits were so trivially simple, that if you could click with a mouse at all, you'd be perfectly able to. (And if you can't click, you wouldn't play UO in the first place.) There were no twitch-reflexes or l33t PvP skillz involved, just the willingness to be a griefer or not.
E.g., since the summary mentions housing _and_ thieving together, that combination simply meant using a clipping bug to steal someone's furniture through the walls. There were no player or character skills involved at all. You didn't even need to be able to lockpick their lock or evade notice or anything. Just click yourself near a corner and do it. That was all.
So, yes, everyone could do it. Maybe not "back", but rather to some other victim, but they could do it, if they wanted to. Some of us simply weren't inclined to spread the grief around.
E.g., you could trap the lock on a chest and leave it by the roadside. (Heck, that was the _only_ use for tinkering skill anyway.) Then some hapless brand-new player would stumble upon it, try to open it, and die. Or poison some food, put it in a sack, and leave it by the roadside. Same deal.
There wasn't even any "social engineering" involved or anything. Just wait for some newbie to spring the trap, before even knowing what they're doing in the game.
E.g., even straight player-killing actually rarely involved any bravery or combat skill at all. Most of those did stuff as lame as waiting until some miner is overloaded with ore, so they can't get away, then gank them. Or they actually grouped to muster the balls to attack some newbie.
Even the character skills involved, were often just gotten through some exploit. E.g., at launch the infamous drop-and-pick-a-coin trick, repeated for a couple of hours, would get you to the strength cap with no risks or adventuring or skills involved. Just brainless clicking or using a script were enough.
Again, it was nothing that a casual player couldn't do if they wanted to. The coin trick was well known very soon, for example. But some people chose to do stuff like role-playing, or building their dream mix of abilities, instead of doing the one-track-minded griefer build.
Methinks that's missing the point. Judging by the summary, what his friend misses isn't crafting or just housing, but the opportunity to be a griefing fucktard with impunity. He doesn't miss just housing (which half the games have nowadays anyway), but more specifically thieving, which in the context of housing really boiled down to exploiting some clipping bug to nick someone's furniture that per the game rules you shouldn't have had access to. Basically he's missing a game that's equally half-baked, buggy, exploitable, and with equally piss-poor GM support, so he can be as big a griefer as in the good old days of UO.
And I seriously doubt that many games aim for the bottom of the proverbial barrel nowadays. Even those who end up there, it's not by design. They may end up an exploitable griefer's paradise by plain old fashioned half-arsed effort, but not by aiming to be a buggy exploitable mess by design.
Arguably even UO didn't aim to be the mess it was for its first years. Lord British and later Raph Koster didn't as much aim to fuck up, but just found rationales as to why and how the players will do all the policing and content so they don't have to bother with that. (Raph Koster would then take this idea with him to SWG, and contribute to that one's ending up barely niche appeal, in spite of the millions of SW fans who awaited it like the second cumming of the Messiah.) UO was not _supposed_ to be a lawless griefer's paradise and driving almost all the player base off, as soon as the first competitor appeared. It was supposed to be the place where players form their own posses and do their own policing and enforcing the rules, so Origin and EA don't have to spend money and manpower on that. All that happened was simply that that idea didn't work: there was nothing you could do in-character to a griefer seeing his character as just a disposable harrassment tool. Even if you could get a bunch of people to form a posse to hunt him down, that just fed the troll, instead of deterring him.
But anyway UO ended up a griefer's paradise more by simple fuck-up, than by design. People and social dynamics were supposed to take the place of coded restrictions, except they never actually worked that way. And the end result was just the result of that "it never worked as they intended."
So, yeah, I doubt that the guy's friend will find many games which _aim_ to be what he misses.