Yes, although the resulting status might well look very similar to the original messages. Consider if the original messages are from player x "move to 123,443" and player y "move to 116,151"; the notifications to player z may look like "player x moves to 123,443; player y moves to 116,151", which is close enough to the description that I would say it is covered. Also, look at claim 18 which is somewhat less specific about the contents of the messages sent by the server than the other claims.
That some of the parts may or may not be similar to the input, is obvious. My point is more that there would also be status that is different. E.g., if I enter a room and the innkeeper is sprawled on the floor dead, the server should hopefully not give me the replay of all the combat against the 40 level-1 gnome raid that killed him, but just the end status.
You seem to have missed some relevant patents in your search. 5,822,523 is very similar to the second one you listed, but was filed in Jan '96, thus predating UO. Not sure that helps them, though.
I think it doesn't necessarily make that much of a difference. There was other stuff which aggregated input from many clients and sent it in bigger chunks, which existed long before 1996 too.
Now I'm not an attorney, so the finer points of patent law go right over my head.
But if I understand it right, you're essentially saying that one can get a patent, collect license fees, and sue infringers... on something that someone else was doing for years before the patent application. And that seems morally wrong.
I'm not even talking "previous" by a couple of hours, but by a solid two years from UO alone. And indeed UO is only an arbitrary example, whose only merit is its being well known. It wasn't even the first graphical MMO which aggregated status information and distributed it to the clients. Dark Sun Online: Crimson Sands, for example, was released in 1996. So their patent comes a whole 3 years after _that_.
And honestly, if they want to tell me that (A) they're a company that develops gaming technology, but (B) they had no clue that some major, genre-defining titles, based on major franchises, and from major publishers and devs, even existed... well, that trips my suspension of disbelief. It's akin to someone coming and trying to patent a motion sensing remote nowadays and pretending that they totally missed all the news about the Wii and their invention was totally their own and from scratch.
But even that isn't the beginning of the road.
In the very early 90's a type of HTML-based chat was very much in vogue. It was basically a page split into two frames: an upper one which auto-refreshed every X seconds, and a narrow lower one which was a one-field input form. You'd type your text in the lower form, send it, the server would aggregate that from all the participants, and generate the new current text for the upper form. Then when your client refreshed (again, every X seconds), it gets the aggregate.
Not only it was used all over the place, it was in tutorials, books about web programming, etc. It predates their patent by about a decade.
And honestly, that ought to be too much. If anyone is patenting what was common knowledge for 10 years or so, I don't care whether they knew about it or reinvented the wheel from scratch. They can take an f-ing hike and invent something actually new, if anyone asks me.
Well, for you it may be as simple as that, but you can't go in front of a judge and just say that you don't believe in software patents. So until such time as it changes, looking at exactly what a patent says is actually a pretty good idea. IMHO.
Actually, we're talking about the same MS which bankrolled at least a part of SCO's lawsuit against IBM. Including, yes, by buying their bogus protection racket licenses. Funding yet another troll that could hurt their competitors more than it hurts them, is exactly what I'd expect from MS at this point.
Just to clarify, after reading the patents a bit, HearMe does look to me like a bit of a patent troll or potential patent troll. Everything reads like the kind of guess about what a game might need, by someone who never actually programmed a game.
E.g., trying to sychronize the VSync on two computers seems such a profoundly useless and counter-productive thing, that it boggles the mind. Let's just say it would prevent the following 3 people from playing together:
- Tom, who has a 60 Hz TFT
- Dick, who plays on a CRT in 85 Hz
- Harry, who bought one of the new bundles of NVidia 3D glasses and a 120 Hz monitor required for it
It's not just that any synchronization in the sync signal would last exactly one frame, it's that forcing the 3 computers to display the exact same image would prevent Harry from getting any stereoscopic 3D effect. (He needs alternating frames rendered from slightly different view points, which the other two don't and it would make them see double if they did.)
E.g., just collecting and routing aggregates is
1. Useless in that literal form not only for games, but for IM clients too (which seems to be all that HearMe actually did make). If the messages in a chat room are that fast that you gain anything with an aggregation time so small that it's unnoticeable to users, then it'll scroll too fast to read anyway. And if you aggregate over several seconds, it produces abrupt chunks of scrolling that actually are disruptive and annoying.
2. Already done pretty much anyone who ever wrote a batch job that runs periodically. And I'm pretty sure that, for example, that FidoNet already worked that way.
Ah, wait, they have the patent troll "over the internet" clause. And FidoNet wasn't over the Internet. Sorry.
Well, even then I'm pretty sure at least some mail servers and NNTP servers work exactly that way. For a backbone system, the mail or news servers down the line are the "clients", and it aggregates the mails or news items instead of routing each individually to each client.
As usual, Slashdot's summaries are the "OMG, here's a broad mis-representation of the patent, so we can whine about it" trolling. I swear if someone invented a new clock mechanism, it would come out on Slashdot as "OMG, they're patenting the cog." Because apparently some people just try that hard to belong to a big family of clueless whiners.
Actually searching for HearMe's patents (since TFA mentions that the patent was bought from HearMe) actually shows that they're a bit more speciffic than "showing the same world on two PCs". Not by much, mind you, but still. So the actual debate would be whether it's a multiplayer game, but whether it implements the exact synchronization algorithm described there.
And if you want to help those companies, knowing what they need help with, might help more. And just "it was a multiplayer" game ain't it.
The actual patents that seem even remotely relevant are these:
The problem is that I can't see how it even remotely applies to multiplayer games, except via an equivocation fallacy. It's about "seeing the same thing" in a much more literal way: literally seeing not just the same scene, but the exact same image and synchronizing the frames. As in, the VSync signal comes at the same moment.
I don't think any game does that at all.
It includes such tidbits as temporarily changing the video mode to interlaced (which should look the same, according to them -- except to anyone who isn't blind, it isn't), to change the timings on one monitor, then switch back to non-interlaced when the sync signals synchronized with each other.
Again, I don't think any actual game does that. I don't think interlaced modes are even used at all nowadays.
The second problem with it, is that it's been filed on 23 December 1997, i.e., a good 3 months after the launch of Ultima Online. So if they actually want to push the "it's about seeing the same thing" equivocation, it seems to me the defense doesn't even have to go as far back in time as your Xanadu. UO already showed the same thing.
Basically this one is about this: you have a server and X clients, and all clients are sending packets to all other clients. Think, an IRC channel, basically. So they propose that instead of dumbly routing between clients, the server aggregates the packets and sends the aggregates periodically.
The first problem is that a MMO only does that in a very loose sense. It sends the resulting status, rather than the bundled messages from all other players.
The second problem is that even if they want to push the equivocation that that status processing is a form of aggregation, MUDs already did that. Whenever you entered a room and god a "PrincessLayMe and MrMacho are standing here", it was effectively an aggregate result of the previous movements of the two players.
Of course, this has the caveat that their patent actually mentions aggregating over an interval, and sending the status periodicially, which MUDs did not.
However here comes the third problem: the patent was applied in 1999, a solid two years after UO which _did_ do just that.
Maybe they're just trying to figure out what all the complicated legalese being thrown out by both sides is supposed to mean by checking out Wikipedia or Findlaw?
Actually, based on my uninformed, mysanthropic and cynical view of the current generation, I figure it might have been more like:
Lawyer: "Mr Burns, can you tell us in your own words what... Err... Your honour, the jury is playing with their phones again instead of paying attention!" Judge: "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I remind you that you're supposed to pay attention? Someone's freedom is at stake here." Jurror 1: "Sorry. I was paying attention." Lawyer: "Your honour, please ask her what we were talking about." Prosecution: "Objection!" Judge: "Overruled. Mrs Smith, can you tell us what the last question to the witness was?" Jurror 1: "I can has cheezburger? LOL!" Witness: "Did she actually pronounce 'LOL'?" Judge: "Silence, please. Ok, I see. Next member of the jury? Can you tell us what was being debated?" Jurror 2: "Chewbacca defense?" Lawyer: "What? Your honour, I must..." Judge: "Silence, please! Next member of the jurry? You, please?" Jurror 3: "Huh? What?" Judge: "What are you using that phone for, anyway? I must remind you that you're not allowed to look up any other information about the case than that presented in this court." Jurror 3: "Ah, nah, my girlfriend was sexting me her breasts. Sorry." Jurror 2: "Me too." Jurror 3: "I hope you mean your girlfriend." Jurror 2: "Nah, yours." Jurror 3: "Well, your mom was sexting me hers." Jurror 2: "Dude, mom is dead..." Jurror 4: "Geesh, guys, cut it out. I was cybering this hot chick and just wrote "your mom" by mistake. Crap." Jurror 5 blushes and quickly folds his phone and shoves it in the pocket. Jurror 4: "Crap, now she logged out."
Actually, no, it doesn't. If you RTFA, the "is afraid his organic crop could be irradiated" is really a piece of text by the journalist, not an actual quote from the guy. The relevant quote from him is in quotation marks: ""I think over a period of time it will change the DNA of the garlic because it shakes up the molecules," It's pretty clearly about micro-wave radiation, not, say, about ionizing radiation.
While he _probably_ is uneducated on the matter, enlarging the scope of his complaint yourself and then answering to that is nevertheless a strawman fallacy. If you want to call him an idiot, call him an idiot for the stupid things he actually said (like that a little shaking up mollecules can damage DNA), not about some strawman interpretation of what you guess he might have meant.
Short and translated version: the Telekom had built a cell phone mast in a village, and a lot of villagers started to complain about sleep problems and whatnot because of it. The comment of the Telekom was, "how bad must it get, when we actually turn it on":p
If you think "organic garlic" sounds stupid, I humbly submit the following anecdote which actually topped it for me: so I buy a tube of calcium tablets, and on the tube it says "Made from natural minerals!" Made me wonder if anyone synthetises their calcium in a nuclear reactor or something.
His crop is already being irradiated...BY THE SUN. Idiots. Sheesh.
You know, I wish people using that argument (or variants thereof) actually knew what they're talking about. No offense.
The Earth's atmosphere and ionosphere are only really transparent to a very narrow band of frequencies. As you go up in the UV range or lower into IR, actually less and less of it gets to ground level.
And let's put it this way: If enough microwave radiation from the Sun got to the Earth to be comparable to a cell phone tower, you couldn't actually use a cell phone. Because the white noise from the sun would not only give the tower a crap signal-to-noise ratio, but would be hundreds of decibels stronger than the milliwatts emitted by the phone itself or received by it in some places.
So no, it's not. Not in the same frequencies and/or not as much.
Yes, the "OMG, the crops will mutate" scare is incredibly stupid anyway. But countering it with the equally bogus "OMG, the sun already does the same", doesn't really debunk it.
Except you can't really fix things. Languages evolve and change no matter what.
Rome tried to fix the language, and basically the result was that it split into two increasingly diverging languages. Increasingly the language of the common folk, the so called "Vulgar Latin" had less and less to do with what you'd nowadays think of Classical Latin. Unless you were of senatorial class (by empire times it had become a hereditary class) or had some other reason to learn the official form, you probably didn't and it would sound as funny to you as your quote above to a modern English speaker.
The Greeks tried the same with, well, Greek and it too split.
English itself is an example of precisely the results of the idiocy of trying to stop language evolution. At one point English was actually phonetic. E.g., "knight" was really read as it's written, i.e., with a short "i" like in "time" and with the "k" and "g" and "h" actually pronounced. I.e., akin to the German "knecht". But language kept changing. From that word it turned into the modern one which sounds like "night". But due to stupidly trying to stick to the old form, the written form didn't change too, and English writing by and large stopped being phonetic. You're back to, basically, words being hieroglyphs that offer you no indication of how it's pronounced. It's using a phonetic alphabet, but phonetic it ain't any more.
And what was the gain? As I was saying, language still evolved anyway. Words changed, meanings changed, constructs changed, etc. That didn't stop at all. Just the orthography increasingly became an arbitrary bunch of letters that are associated with that word for nothing more than historical reasons.
Actually, that seems to be like exactly the kind of move that will drive players away, no matter how it's done.
See, it's not just whether the turning to FPS is well done or (as was the case) crap done. It's that it turns the game into a whole other genre than I signed for.
If I wanted to play a FPS, I would be playing one of the many FPS-es without an online fee. It's not like people were sitting going, "man, I'd so play a FPS, but I have no clue where to get one. If only Sony could turn one of their game into a FPS..."
Then there were changes like that to the skill system. Honestly, when you hear someone rant about how great the old SWG was, _the_ thing that invariably comes up is the skill system. There were a lot of people who basically put up with its many other sins, just because it was the only one which didn't force them into the mould of a pre-defined class.
So then Sony comes and throws exactly that away.
It doesn't really matter inside which framework you do something like that. It's going to piss people off.
Then there were the changes to the characters. Everyone had their own combination that they played because genuinely that was what they liked to play, and they had spent months tweaking them to exactly their taste, collecting gear, etc. Then suddenly that combination isn't even available any more. I'm not talking just "nerfed" or "changed", but, really, whatever combination you were playing, chances are there wasn't any close equivalent available after the NGE. For some, like animal handlers, there was nothing that even played similarly after the change.
For those without SWG experience: Imagine if Blizzard one day and said basically, "nah, hybrid and pet classes are now out, they're too complicated for you lot. And you've been bitching about specs and your guild making you respec since we first added raid dungeons, so we're throwing those out too. So from effective now, we'll only have the classes: fighter, archer, cleric and thief. (Which incidentally don't play like warrior, hunter, priest and rogue either.) With a fixed progression of a abilities. If you were playing a paladin or druid, sucks to be you, you get to choose one or the other, not be that jack of all trades crap."
"Oh, and what's that crap about being a warrior _and_ a blacksmith? Can't you just make up your mind? From now on, you can be a fighting class or you can be a trade class, not both. The traders won't even have a combat level, but we'll make all monsters ignore them."
Also imagine that it wasn't an April Fools post.
I'm willing to bet that three quarters of their population would cancel their subscription over such a drastic change. Which is what happened to SWG.
Actually, I think the emphasis was a bit wrong on "ethics" and "morals". A more correct definition is that some people lack "empathy". See, psychopathy.
Morals and ethics can be see as an agreed upon code, but empathy is something built in and arguably hard-wired. See, mirror neurons.
In effect, most of those morals and ethics -- and the real reason why most people go along with them -- are based on that empathy. We're hard-wired to be nice to our fellow humans. Well, about 97% of us, anyway. We don't kill basically because at a hard-wired level something says "well, _I_ wouldn't like to be killed." We don't steal for the same reason. Etc.
To address your objection: We agree to not have sex with a 14 year old, basically because nowadays we understand that it would cause some psychological harm and that it would make her parents very unhappy. And we're nicer than that.
But it's a bit deeper, actually. It's not just about direct harm, it's that we tend to understand that others have the same needs on Maslow's pyramid, so to speak. Even without knowing what those are. We tend to realize that others need to feel safe too, for example. Or that they need their private space too. Etc.
Basically while the actual social contract may vary and is subjective, it's based upon something which doesn't. Sure, we may find different solutions to the same problem, but that problem is real and pretty objective. (You can actually see it on an MRI scan, if you want something which isn't dependent of subjective interpretations.)
A second factor is that, essentially, we're social animals and want to belong in a group of our peers. (See Maslow's pyramid again.) We want to be accepted, maybe even appreciated, etc. We're prepared to work out a compromise to that end, so the group can function or even exist.
There are rules and morals and ethics which, basically, solve _that_ problem. They're how the group organizes itself, so it can exist as a group. I won't stress you, if you won't stress me, and all that, in a nutshell.
That's something that all the moral relativists seem to miss. They dig up some seemingly arbitrary rule, like "don't have sex with too young people", and wave it as a banner for the idea that all rules are just arbitrary conventions. But they miss the foundation for that body of rules, and the purpose they serve. But I digress.
Sociopaths are amoral basically because they lack that foundation which makes the other people be moral and ethical. The difference is basically at a different level than the morals and ethics themselves.
Well, as I was saying, I'm not claiming that COH is some golden standard of flexibility. Far from it.
I'm just left with the impression that in CO there's actually even less. Sure, you can mix and match the attacks better, and you can even get a heal. Ok, it gets bonus points for that. But basically gone is any thought of what secondaries (or primaries for a tank) I take, and what balance do I strike between offense and defense. In CO I'll take one defense and one block power, like everyone else, because there really is no other choice. There just aren't more slots.
I gather that must have been in the early days, before Regen was nerfed repeatedly. Mine was after the ED. Yes, it changed a bit in the meantime.
Also, "a melee character that's supposed to take a beating" is only a very approximate description of a scrapper. Yes, you could dump both scrapper and tanker under that vague description, but only in as much as you could lump the WoW Paladin and Rogue under it too. It's not a very useful description at that point.
And the point wasn't to get you impressed (I'm sure there are people who play better than I do), but to make a point that there was some variability built in without a "make me a tank now" and "nah, make me a blaster again" button that you can toggle at will. Yes, CO does let you switch stances like that, negating any need to form a balanced group and essentially replayability too. (I don't really need to play a scrapper _and_ a tank _and_ a blaster, when I can really flip my role around at will.) My point was that nevertheless it results in nothing new or that flexible. It's a simplistic game with a change-role button built in. Whop-de-do.
Yes, you can be a healer that can switch to blaster or tank or melee character. Same as every other cookie-cutter character on the server.
As for the other questions, ok, I'll be serious and answer them too:
- tank that can heal... not main healer, to be sure, but I've been healed by the stone tanker before
- blaster that can tank... doable and done, with the right team
Yes, both need a bit of teamwork for that, but that's kinda the whole point in a Massively Multiplayer Game. Giving everyone a "flip my role around" button doesn't make the game any more complex or flexible, it makes it a herd of cookie-cutter clones where everyone can heal and tank and blast and crowd-control.
Heck, if you want something like that, you can actually do that in COH too. Just make a team of 8 rad defenders:p
Hmm... Well, I certainly see your point. Just maybe I wouldn't go as far as to damn _all_ games released for both platforms. Some games are really made to be mindless button mashers, and there's not much anyone can do about it. IMHO. And personally I'm even ok with a button-masher, provided that it's a 10 hour single-player game. I can use a couple of mindless evenings now and then.
It's just that in a MMO I've come to expect a bit more complexity. If something is supposed to keep my interest long enough to justify such claims as that a $200 life-time subscription actually saves you any money, you get the idea, it better be actually varied and interesting enough to actually keep me interested for that long.
I'm an explorer/socializer by Bartle's classification, so I actually need _something_ to explore. Game mechanics included. There better be at least that factor of "what happens if I use power X instead of power Y" or "which of them works best together with power Z". A game with a few small zones and gameplay that boils down to mashing a couple of buttons, doesn't even come close.
The posters problem is that it's not like WoW. Clearly he is trying to play it like it is.
Heh. So, I'm complaining about the difference to _COH_, and your conclusion is that it's about it not being like _WOW_? Well, that's certainly a new kind of troll. The kind who can't even read.
When I put the biker vest (as a random example) on a character in the old COH, I can really see the wrinkles and whatnot on it. In CO it just looks a lot more bland and smoothed out, in between those cel shading lines.
I'm not saying that the Archetypes are the apex of free-form character development, but merely that it feels like the CO system is even less.
And no, not everyone in COH took the same powers. I know Regens who skipped the Fitness pool entirely, for example, since you mention that one. Yes, it's not the best min-maxed way to build a character, but it's an option. Even myself I was one of the people who never took the 6-slotted Hasten before ED, because I didn't feel like being a cookie-cutter clone. I had tons of fun without it anyway.
And I've even met such crazy builds in COH like, say, a Scrapper who apparently always wanted to be a healer. He had two attacks and the whole medicine pool and leadership. Not a very efficient build, but there you have it. I've met an Empathy Defender in her 20's who really had two heals and all 4 travel pools full. Yes, she even had the utterly useless group fly and team teleport. Etc.
Your CO Valkyrie has... oh yeah, she has the Regeneration power from Supernatural... and that's it. I'm sure you can do a totally unique build with that one power;) No offense.
And a mix of attack powers that seem to follow no logical concept other than having one of every type of damage. What, you have unarmed attacks _and_ dual blades? You mean, unlike my dual blades chars on COH which took, say, Air Superiority?;)
Switching roles? I had temporary powers for just that in COH. I've tanked archvillains as a regen scrapper before, by just toggling on the wedding band and a few other things. Admittedly, though, most of the credit should really go to the defender who kept me alive, but just shows that it can be done with the right people.
Hmm... 5 attacks by level 20 seems a bit... sub-optimal, compared to just increasing the strength of the existing ones. I can't really imagine that all 5 have been brought to level 3.
Then again, since you're having fun with your build and I don't with mine, I guess that's all that matters.
Still, I dunno, somehow I just don't feel the love, so to speak. It's not just the build.
For example turning from COH's being heavily-based on instanced mission to cramped outdoors zones where 50 players pummel on 30 NPCs... dunno, just doesn't do anything for me. I see the reviewer actually seems to have liked it, but I just fail to get enthusiastic. What for? It didn't even turn the game more social, as it just doesn't have enough surface for all the players to actually be in the same world. So each zone is instanced on the fly into 50 different copies of it. You'll still be separated from the vast majority of people on the server.
But, as I was saying, maybe I've just set my hopes too high.
Yes, well, it's the second game done by Statesman. Did you actually expect balance?:P
No disrespect to the guy's creative ideas and all, but balancing COH until he gave up and let Positron do it... let's just say it turned from City of Blasters to City Of Fire Tankers to biggest nerf ever, with a few other extreme swings in between.
Actually, COH already had that, sorta. You could copy a character to the test server any time you wished and any number of times you wished. So if you wanted to test your next choice of power or your respec, you already could do just that.
Slashdot Mirror
That some of the parts may or may not be similar to the input, is obvious. My point is more that there would also be status that is different. E.g., if I enter a room and the innkeeper is sprawled on the floor dead, the server should hopefully not give me the replay of all the combat against the 40 level-1 gnome raid that killed him, but just the end status.
I think it doesn't necessarily make that much of a difference. There was other stuff which aggregated input from many clients and sent it in bigger chunks, which existed long before 1996 too.
Now I'm not an attorney, so the finer points of patent law go right over my head.
But if I understand it right, you're essentially saying that one can get a patent, collect license fees, and sue infringers... on something that someone else was doing for years before the patent application. And that seems morally wrong.
I'm not even talking "previous" by a couple of hours, but by a solid two years from UO alone. And indeed UO is only an arbitrary example, whose only merit is its being well known. It wasn't even the first graphical MMO which aggregated status information and distributed it to the clients. Dark Sun Online: Crimson Sands, for example, was released in 1996. So their patent comes a whole 3 years after _that_.
And honestly, if they want to tell me that (A) they're a company that develops gaming technology, but (B) they had no clue that some major, genre-defining titles, based on major franchises, and from major publishers and devs, even existed... well, that trips my suspension of disbelief. It's akin to someone coming and trying to patent a motion sensing remote nowadays and pretending that they totally missed all the news about the Wii and their invention was totally their own and from scratch.
But even that isn't the beginning of the road.
In the very early 90's a type of HTML-based chat was very much in vogue. It was basically a page split into two frames: an upper one which auto-refreshed every X seconds, and a narrow lower one which was a one-field input form. You'd type your text in the lower form, send it, the server would aggregate that from all the participants, and generate the new current text for the upper form. Then when your client refreshed (again, every X seconds), it gets the aggregate.
Not only it was used all over the place, it was in tutorials, books about web programming, etc. It predates their patent by about a decade.
And honestly, that ought to be too much. If anyone is patenting what was common knowledge for 10 years or so, I don't care whether they knew about it or reinvented the wheel from scratch. They can take an f-ing hike and invent something actually new, if anyone asks me.
Well, for you it may be as simple as that, but you can't go in front of a judge and just say that you don't believe in software patents. So until such time as it changes, looking at exactly what a patent says is actually a pretty good idea. IMHO.
Actually, we're talking about the same MS which bankrolled at least a part of SCO's lawsuit against IBM. Including, yes, by buying their bogus protection racket licenses. Funding yet another troll that could hurt their competitors more than it hurts them, is exactly what I'd expect from MS at this point.
Just to clarify, after reading the patents a bit, HearMe does look to me like a bit of a patent troll or potential patent troll. Everything reads like the kind of guess about what a game might need, by someone who never actually programmed a game.
E.g., trying to sychronize the VSync on two computers seems such a profoundly useless and counter-productive thing, that it boggles the mind. Let's just say it would prevent the following 3 people from playing together:
- Tom, who has a 60 Hz TFT
- Dick, who plays on a CRT in 85 Hz
- Harry, who bought one of the new bundles of NVidia 3D glasses and a 120 Hz monitor required for it
It's not just that any synchronization in the sync signal would last exactly one frame, it's that forcing the 3 computers to display the exact same image would prevent Harry from getting any stereoscopic 3D effect. (He needs alternating frames rendered from slightly different view points, which the other two don't and it would make them see double if they did.)
E.g., just collecting and routing aggregates is
1. Useless in that literal form not only for games, but for IM clients too (which seems to be all that HearMe actually did make). If the messages in a chat room are that fast that you gain anything with an aggregation time so small that it's unnoticeable to users, then it'll scroll too fast to read anyway. And if you aggregate over several seconds, it produces abrupt chunks of scrolling that actually are disruptive and annoying.
2. Already done pretty much anyone who ever wrote a batch job that runs periodically. And I'm pretty sure that, for example, that FidoNet already worked that way.
Ah, wait, they have the patent troll "over the internet" clause. And FidoNet wasn't over the Internet. Sorry.
Well, even then I'm pretty sure at least some mail servers and NNTP servers work exactly that way. For a backbone system, the mail or news servers down the line are the "clients", and it aggregates the mails or news items instead of routing each individually to each client.
As usual, Slashdot's summaries are the "OMG, here's a broad mis-representation of the patent, so we can whine about it" trolling. I swear if someone invented a new clock mechanism, it would come out on Slashdot as "OMG, they're patenting the cog." Because apparently some people just try that hard to belong to a big family of clueless whiners.
Actually searching for HearMe's patents (since TFA mentions that the patent was bought from HearMe) actually shows that they're a bit more speciffic than "showing the same world on two PCs". Not by much, mind you, but still. So the actual debate would be whether it's a multiplayer game, but whether it implements the exact synchronization algorithm described there.
And if you want to help those companies, knowing what they need help with, might help more. And just "it was a multiplayer" game ain't it.
The actual patents that seem even remotely relevant are these:
1. Method and apparatus for loosely synchronizing closed free running raster displays
The problem is that I can't see how it even remotely applies to multiplayer games, except via an equivocation fallacy. It's about "seeing the same thing" in a much more literal way: literally seeing not just the same scene, but the exact same image and synchronizing the frames. As in, the VSync signal comes at the same moment.
I don't think any game does that at all.
It includes such tidbits as temporarily changing the video mode to interlaced (which should look the same, according to them -- except to anyone who isn't blind, it isn't), to change the timings on one monitor, then switch back to non-interlaced when the sync signals synchronized with each other.
Again, I don't think any actual game does that. I don't think interlaced modes are even used at all nowadays.
The second problem with it, is that it's been filed on 23 December 1997, i.e., a good 3 months after the launch of Ultima Online. So if they actually want to push the "it's about seeing the same thing" equivocation, it seems to me the defense doesn't even have to go as far back in time as your Xanadu. UO already showed the same thing.
2. Server-group messaging system for interactive applications
Basically this one is about this: you have a server and X clients, and all clients are sending packets to all other clients. Think, an IRC channel, basically. So they propose that instead of dumbly routing between clients, the server aggregates the packets and sends the aggregates periodically.
The first problem is that a MMO only does that in a very loose sense. It sends the resulting status, rather than the bundled messages from all other players.
The second problem is that even if they want to push the equivocation that that status processing is a form of aggregation, MUDs already did that. Whenever you entered a room and god a "PrincessLayMe and MrMacho are standing here", it was effectively an aggregate result of the previous movements of the two players.
Of course, this has the caveat that their patent actually mentions aggregating over an interval, and sending the status periodicially, which MUDs did not.
However here comes the third problem: the patent was applied in 1999, a solid two years after UO which _did_ do just that.
Actually, thanks for the correction. Awful brain-fart on my part there.
Actually, based on my uninformed, mysanthropic and cynical view of the current generation, I figure it might have been more like:
Lawyer: "Mr Burns, can you tell us in your own words what... Err... Your honour, the jury is playing with their phones again instead of paying attention!"
Judge: "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I remind you that you're supposed to pay attention? Someone's freedom is at stake here."
Jurror 1: "Sorry. I was paying attention."
Lawyer: "Your honour, please ask her what we were talking about."
Prosecution: "Objection!"
Judge: "Overruled. Mrs Smith, can you tell us what the last question to the witness was?"
Jurror 1: "I can has cheezburger? LOL!"
Witness: "Did she actually pronounce 'LOL'?"
Judge: "Silence, please. Ok, I see. Next member of the jury? Can you tell us what was being debated?"
Jurror 2: "Chewbacca defense?"
Lawyer: "What? Your honour, I must..."
Judge: "Silence, please! Next member of the jurry? You, please?"
Jurror 3: "Huh? What?"
Judge: "What are you using that phone for, anyway? I must remind you that you're not allowed to look up any other information about the case than that presented in this court."
Jurror 3: "Ah, nah, my girlfriend was sexting me her breasts. Sorry."
Jurror 2: "Me too."
Jurror 3: "I hope you mean your girlfriend."
Jurror 2: "Nah, yours."
Jurror 3: "Well, your mom was sexting me hers."
Jurror 2: "Dude, mom is dead..."
Jurror 4: "Geesh, guys, cut it out. I was cybering this hot chick and just wrote "your mom" by mistake. Crap."
Jurror 5 blushes and quickly folds his phone and shoves it in the pocket.
Jurror 4: "Crap, now she logged out."
Actually, no, it doesn't. If you RTFA, the "is afraid his organic crop could be irradiated" is really a piece of text by the journalist, not an actual quote from the guy. The relevant quote from him is in quotation marks: ""I think over a period of time it will change the DNA of the garlic because it shakes up the molecules," It's pretty clearly about micro-wave radiation, not, say, about ionizing radiation.
And a quick googling for differently reported versions of the same story, shows that at least some mention microwave radiation explicitly about his complaint. E.g., http://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2009/09/16/Garlic-farmer-High-speed-Internet-stinks/UPI-79211253122064/
While he _probably_ is uneducated on the matter, enlarging the scope of his complaint yourself and then answering to that is nevertheless a strawman fallacy. If you want to call him an idiot, call him an idiot for the stupid things he actually said (like that a little shaking up mollecules can damage DNA), not about some strawman interpretation of what you guess he might have meant.
Reminds me of http://german-bash.org/101161.
Short and translated version: the Telekom had built a cell phone mast in a village, and a lot of villagers started to complain about sleep problems and whatnot because of it. The comment of the Telekom was, "how bad must it get, when we actually turn it on" :p
If you think "organic garlic" sounds stupid, I humbly submit the following anecdote which actually topped it for me: so I buy a tube of calcium tablets, and on the tube it says "Made from natural minerals!" Made me wonder if anyone synthetises their calcium in a nuclear reactor or something.
You know, I wish people using that argument (or variants thereof) actually knew what they're talking about. No offense.
The Earth's atmosphere and ionosphere are only really transparent to a very narrow band of frequencies. As you go up in the UV range or lower into IR, actually less and less of it gets to ground level.
And let's put it this way: If enough microwave radiation from the Sun got to the Earth to be comparable to a cell phone tower, you couldn't actually use a cell phone. Because the white noise from the sun would not only give the tower a crap signal-to-noise ratio, but would be hundreds of decibels stronger than the milliwatts emitted by the phone itself or received by it in some places.
So no, it's not. Not in the same frequencies and/or not as much.
Yes, the "OMG, the crops will mutate" scare is incredibly stupid anyway. But countering it with the equally bogus "OMG, the sun already does the same", doesn't really debunk it.
Except you can't really fix things. Languages evolve and change no matter what.
Rome tried to fix the language, and basically the result was that it split into two increasingly diverging languages. Increasingly the language of the common folk, the so called "Vulgar Latin" had less and less to do with what you'd nowadays think of Classical Latin. Unless you were of senatorial class (by empire times it had become a hereditary class) or had some other reason to learn the official form, you probably didn't and it would sound as funny to you as your quote above to a modern English speaker.
The Greeks tried the same with, well, Greek and it too split.
English itself is an example of precisely the results of the idiocy of trying to stop language evolution. At one point English was actually phonetic. E.g., "knight" was really read as it's written, i.e., with a short "i" like in "time" and with the "k" and "g" and "h" actually pronounced. I.e., akin to the German "knecht". But language kept changing. From that word it turned into the modern one which sounds like "night". But due to stupidly trying to stick to the old form, the written form didn't change too, and English writing by and large stopped being phonetic. You're back to, basically, words being hieroglyphs that offer you no indication of how it's pronounced. It's using a phonetic alphabet, but phonetic it ain't any more.
And what was the gain? As I was saying, language still evolved anyway. Words changed, meanings changed, constructs changed, etc. That didn't stop at all. Just the orthography increasingly became an arbitrary bunch of letters that are associated with that word for nothing more than historical reasons.
Actually, that seems to be like exactly the kind of move that will drive players away, no matter how it's done.
See, it's not just whether the turning to FPS is well done or (as was the case) crap done. It's that it turns the game into a whole other genre than I signed for.
If I wanted to play a FPS, I would be playing one of the many FPS-es without an online fee. It's not like people were sitting going, "man, I'd so play a FPS, but I have no clue where to get one. If only Sony could turn one of their game into a FPS..."
Then there were changes like that to the skill system. Honestly, when you hear someone rant about how great the old SWG was, _the_ thing that invariably comes up is the skill system. There were a lot of people who basically put up with its many other sins, just because it was the only one which didn't force them into the mould of a pre-defined class.
So then Sony comes and throws exactly that away.
It doesn't really matter inside which framework you do something like that. It's going to piss people off.
Then there were the changes to the characters. Everyone had their own combination that they played because genuinely that was what they liked to play, and they had spent months tweaking them to exactly their taste, collecting gear, etc. Then suddenly that combination isn't even available any more. I'm not talking just "nerfed" or "changed", but, really, whatever combination you were playing, chances are there wasn't any close equivalent available after the NGE. For some, like animal handlers, there was nothing that even played similarly after the change.
For those without SWG experience: Imagine if Blizzard one day and said basically, "nah, hybrid and pet classes are now out, they're too complicated for you lot. And you've been bitching about specs and your guild making you respec since we first added raid dungeons, so we're throwing those out too. So from effective now, we'll only have the classes: fighter, archer, cleric and thief. (Which incidentally don't play like warrior, hunter, priest and rogue either.) With a fixed progression of a abilities. If you were playing a paladin or druid, sucks to be you, you get to choose one or the other, not be that jack of all trades crap."
"Oh, and what's that crap about being a warrior _and_ a blacksmith? Can't you just make up your mind? From now on, you can be a fighting class or you can be a trade class, not both. The traders won't even have a combat level, but we'll make all monsters ignore them."
Also imagine that it wasn't an April Fools post.
I'm willing to bet that three quarters of their population would cancel their subscription over such a drastic change. Which is what happened to SWG.
Actually, I think the emphasis was a bit wrong on "ethics" and "morals". A more correct definition is that some people lack "empathy". See, psychopathy.
Morals and ethics can be see as an agreed upon code, but empathy is something built in and arguably hard-wired. See, mirror neurons.
In effect, most of those morals and ethics -- and the real reason why most people go along with them -- are based on that empathy. We're hard-wired to be nice to our fellow humans. Well, about 97% of us, anyway. We don't kill basically because at a hard-wired level something says "well, _I_ wouldn't like to be killed." We don't steal for the same reason. Etc.
To address your objection: We agree to not have sex with a 14 year old, basically because nowadays we understand that it would cause some psychological harm and that it would make her parents very unhappy. And we're nicer than that.
But it's a bit deeper, actually. It's not just about direct harm, it's that we tend to understand that others have the same needs on Maslow's pyramid, so to speak. Even without knowing what those are. We tend to realize that others need to feel safe too, for example. Or that they need their private space too. Etc.
Basically while the actual social contract may vary and is subjective, it's based upon something which doesn't. Sure, we may find different solutions to the same problem, but that problem is real and pretty objective. (You can actually see it on an MRI scan, if you want something which isn't dependent of subjective interpretations.)
A second factor is that, essentially, we're social animals and want to belong in a group of our peers. (See Maslow's pyramid again.) We want to be accepted, maybe even appreciated, etc. We're prepared to work out a compromise to that end, so the group can function or even exist.
There are rules and morals and ethics which, basically, solve _that_ problem. They're how the group organizes itself, so it can exist as a group. I won't stress you, if you won't stress me, and all that, in a nutshell.
That's something that all the moral relativists seem to miss. They dig up some seemingly arbitrary rule, like "don't have sex with too young people", and wave it as a banner for the idea that all rules are just arbitrary conventions. But they miss the foundation for that body of rules, and the purpose they serve. But I digress.
Sociopaths are amoral basically because they lack that foundation which makes the other people be moral and ethical. The difference is basically at a different level than the morals and ethics themselves.
Well, as I was saying, I'm not claiming that COH is some golden standard of flexibility. Far from it.
I'm just left with the impression that in CO there's actually even less. Sure, you can mix and match the attacks better, and you can even get a heal. Ok, it gets bonus points for that. But basically gone is any thought of what secondaries (or primaries for a tank) I take, and what balance do I strike between offense and defense. In CO I'll take one defense and one block power, like everyone else, because there really is no other choice. There just aren't more slots.
I gather that must have been in the early days, before Regen was nerfed repeatedly. Mine was after the ED. Yes, it changed a bit in the meantime.
Also, "a melee character that's supposed to take a beating" is only a very approximate description of a scrapper. Yes, you could dump both scrapper and tanker under that vague description, but only in as much as you could lump the WoW Paladin and Rogue under it too. It's not a very useful description at that point.
And the point wasn't to get you impressed (I'm sure there are people who play better than I do), but to make a point that there was some variability built in without a "make me a tank now" and "nah, make me a blaster again" button that you can toggle at will. Yes, CO does let you switch stances like that, negating any need to form a balanced group and essentially replayability too. (I don't really need to play a scrapper _and_ a tank _and_ a blaster, when I can really flip my role around at will.) My point was that nevertheless it results in nothing new or that flexible. It's a simplistic game with a change-role button built in. Whop-de-do.
Yes, you can be a healer that can switch to blaster or tank or melee character. Same as every other cookie-cutter character on the server.
As for the other questions, ok, I'll be serious and answer them too:
- tank that can heal... not main healer, to be sure, but I've been healed by the stone tanker before
- blaster that can tank... doable and done, with the right team
Yes, both need a bit of teamwork for that, but that's kinda the whole point in a Massively Multiplayer Game. Giving everyone a "flip my role around" button doesn't make the game any more complex or flexible, it makes it a herd of cookie-cutter clones where everyone can heal and tank and blast and crowd-control.
Heck, if you want something like that, you can actually do that in COH too. Just make a team of 8 rad defenders :p
Hmm, you could copy to the test server on WoW whenever you wanted? Interesting. I didn't know that.
Hmm... Well, I certainly see your point. Just maybe I wouldn't go as far as to damn _all_ games released for both platforms. Some games are really made to be mindless button mashers, and there's not much anyone can do about it. IMHO. And personally I'm even ok with a button-masher, provided that it's a 10 hour single-player game. I can use a couple of mindless evenings now and then.
It's just that in a MMO I've come to expect a bit more complexity. If something is supposed to keep my interest long enough to justify such claims as that a $200 life-time subscription actually saves you any money, you get the idea, it better be actually varied and interesting enough to actually keep me interested for that long.
I'm an explorer/socializer by Bartle's classification, so I actually need _something_ to explore. Game mechanics included. There better be at least that factor of "what happens if I use power X instead of power Y" or "which of them works best together with power Z". A game with a few small zones and gameplay that boils down to mashing a couple of buttons, doesn't even come close.
But maybe that's just me.
Heh. So, I'm complaining about the difference to _COH_, and your conclusion is that it's about it not being like _WOW_? Well, that's certainly a new kind of troll. The kind who can't even read.
Actually, it's good to see I'm not the only one.
And I don't think it's just the engine.
When I put the biker vest (as a random example) on a character in the old COH, I can really see the wrinkles and whatnot on it. In CO it just looks a lot more bland and smoothed out, in between those cel shading lines.
I'm not saying that the Archetypes are the apex of free-form character development, but merely that it feels like the CO system is even less.
And no, not everyone in COH took the same powers. I know Regens who skipped the Fitness pool entirely, for example, since you mention that one. Yes, it's not the best min-maxed way to build a character, but it's an option. Even myself I was one of the people who never took the 6-slotted Hasten before ED, because I didn't feel like being a cookie-cutter clone. I had tons of fun without it anyway.
And I've even met such crazy builds in COH like, say, a Scrapper who apparently always wanted to be a healer. He had two attacks and the whole medicine pool and leadership. Not a very efficient build, but there you have it. I've met an Empathy Defender in her 20's who really had two heals and all 4 travel pools full. Yes, she even had the utterly useless group fly and team teleport. Etc.
Your CO Valkyrie has... oh yeah, she has the Regeneration power from Supernatural... and that's it. I'm sure you can do a totally unique build with that one power ;) No offense.
And a mix of attack powers that seem to follow no logical concept other than having one of every type of damage. What, you have unarmed attacks _and_ dual blades? You mean, unlike my dual blades chars on COH which took, say, Air Superiority? ;)
Switching roles? I had temporary powers for just that in COH. I've tanked archvillains as a regen scrapper before, by just toggling on the wedding band and a few other things. Admittedly, though, most of the credit should really go to the defender who kept me alive, but just shows that it can be done with the right people.
Hmm... 5 attacks by level 20 seems a bit... sub-optimal, compared to just increasing the strength of the existing ones. I can't really imagine that all 5 have been brought to level 3.
Then again, since you're having fun with your build and I don't with mine, I guess that's all that matters.
Still, I dunno, somehow I just don't feel the love, so to speak. It's not just the build.
For example turning from COH's being heavily-based on instanced mission to cramped outdoors zones where 50 players pummel on 30 NPCs... dunno, just doesn't do anything for me. I see the reviewer actually seems to have liked it, but I just fail to get enthusiastic. What for? It didn't even turn the game more social, as it just doesn't have enough surface for all the players to actually be in the same world. So each zone is instanced on the fly into 50 different copies of it. You'll still be separated from the vast majority of people on the server.
But, as I was saying, maybe I've just set my hopes too high.
Yes, well, it's the second game done by Statesman. Did you actually expect balance? :P
No disrespect to the guy's creative ideas and all, but balancing COH until he gave up and let Positron do it... let's just say it turned from City of Blasters to City Of Fire Tankers to biggest nerf ever, with a few other extreme swings in between.
Actually, COH already had that, sorta. You could copy a character to the test server any time you wished and any number of times you wished. So if you wanted to test your next choice of power or your respec, you already could do just that.