Well, I don't think that the average Windows user actually feels like an oppressed indentured servant, like he's portrayed around these parts.
I think for most people it's just utilitarian. It's what came with the computer, it's what works, now let me on teh intarwebs already.
Basically it's not as much about the presence of a negative conotation about MS, it's more like just the absence of a positive one. Having a Windows computer or hanging around a Windows store, just doesn't carry the same illusion of somehow being hip and cool. It's just a tool to an end.
Sorta like how nobody would hang around the Bosch power tools section of Home Depot, nor carry around an electric drill to look cool.
Surprisingly enough, people play games other than Counter-Strike. These games use dynamic loading so you never (or almost never) see a load screen and take advantage of multi-core CPUs. Not to mention the average user doesn't close every open application and unnecessary process before launching a game.
And even for those:
A) a faster hard drive will do you more good than a new OS
B) more free RAM will do you more good than a new OS
Loading Vista or Windows 7 on a 1GB machine is pretty much self-defeating, for example. No matter how much it optimizes file management, as long as the HDD still does have a very slow seek time, the less free RAM will cause more loading and unloading, and make it run slower.
And in that vein, if the user can't close other apps... a more bloated OS will only make it worse.
First of all, if file access is really that important for whatever game you're playing, just get a WD VelociRaptor HDD. It will do you more good than any OS optimization. It won't even cost more than buying a new version of Windows.
But really from what I notice, it only helped my system with the load times of levels. It doesn't seem to do anything at all for the FPS or latency, you know, the things that actually matter for whether you get headshot before you headshot the other guy.
Memory management, I suppose it could matter, except again I'm not sure how much it helps in games.
Processor scheduling, well, I guess games could become sensitive to that in some future, but right now they're still mostly a single-threaded affair. Well, ok, so some spawn 1 to 3 more threads for other stuff lately, but it's still not quite the thing where clever scheduling matters that much. It's not like any game has to juggle thousands of threads and shaving a nanosecond on context switches matters.
As I was saying, there _is_ at least one example which sold stuff that gave no actual in game advantage. So it's possible.
Whether CO will be like that... well, I'm not psychic. I'll just wait until they actually do something wrong, before I get all pumped up to whine about it:P
Well, I understand your point, but the alternative is that it's designed by Jack Emmert (Statesman) like COH:p
Now the game had a lot of good ideas (for my taste) and I still love the superhero setting. So Statesman gets my recognition for that.
But seriously, the game had _massive_ balance problems that could have been avoided by just doing some arithmetic on the back of a napkin. Jack Emmert was also genuinely surprised as to what happened to his game's balance when you just use level 22 equipment. Seriously, stuff like that a power that was supposed to be situational actually became _more_ than permanent (it actually stacked with itself!) if you use more than two standard equipment pieces available in bog-normal stores at level 22 was a surprise to him.
And attempts to rebalance it are best described as turning the knobs from 10 to 0 and then back to 10 and seeing what happens. Fixing the "city of blasters" screw up created the "city of fire tankers" screw up. Your hero could go from zero to god-mode and back to nobody in 3 consecutive patches. The last rebalancing attempt that Mr Emmert oversaw was the ED; and although as a principle something like that needed to be done, the way it was done actually broke whole "sets" of powers, like making Defense (and any tanker or scrapper who was based on that) useless.
I know someone will probably go "yeah, well, WoW nerfs players occasionally too" but trust me, WoW never did anything even close to the _scale_ of COH's balance swings. When you got boosted in a patch, suddenly you could do dungeons instanced for 8 people by yourself. Better yet, you could herd every single soul in the dungeon with impunity. At equal level. Then some patch would come and move you from that to non-viable overnight. _That_ kind of wild balance swings.
And all balance calculations for attack chains were made by players on the boards for him in the end, because two years after launch Cryptic was still using the wrong variable and not understanding what the limiting factor in an attack chain is.
Other elementary ideas also apparently weren't obvious either in design or in the beta. Like that in a game based on fighting large groups instead of one big boss, the tank _needs_ an AOE taunt. Seriously, you were apparently supposed to fight platoon sized groups with a single-target taunt.
COH only began to recover and become something stable and balanced after Statesman stepped down and Positron took the lead.
So if they can get someone responsible for Hellgate to do more of the CO design instead of Emmert... please, please, please, let them. Bring in John Romero too while we're at it:P
Well, I understand your point and would even side with it, if it was indeed that. Except it probably isn't. Even the summary mentions that they don't want to actually sell things which would break balance or give someone a leg up.
For example, since largely it's the same people who came up with City Of Heroes, here's what COH sells: higher resolution costume pieces.
If you come from an EQ/WoW school of MMO, that may sound like an advantage right there, but in reality it's 100% cosmetic. The costume or weapon don't have any stats or DPS like in WoW or EQ. The defense and attack powers are inherent in the super-hero, not in the costume pieces.
If you want to pretend that your hero gets his powers from some magical bracers, you put that in your description and wear some bracers. But technically the in-game bracers don't actually do anything. They're just a visual prop.
So really what you can buy in COH are some meshes and textures for your character. The only benefit is looking good, not extra DPS, nor extra defense, nor anything else which would actually translate in any actual in-game advantage.
The only morally questionable item they have for sale for RL cash is a jetpack. But the funny thing is, you can get an identical (performance-wise) jetpack at level 5 by just doing the bank mission, and at level 14 you can get an innate power that's actually faster. On the COV side, you can get 3 different ones, or you can just hike your butt to Grandville and buy one for a very small price in in-game currency even at level 1. Grandville _is_ the top level area but there are no enemies between the boat and the vendor.
So realistically the only advantage you'll get out of it is at levels 1 to 5. Or maybe 1 to 6 if you do that bank mission later, or had a ton of rested xp at level 4.
And it's only transportation. For about an hour (because that's about how long levels 1 to 5 take) you have faster transport than you would have had normally, but it won't help you at all in a fight.
Now I do have a bit of a moral problem even with the transport advantage, but, let's face it, it's not like it'll break the game if a newbie is spared running a couple of miles total on foot in their first hour. If anyone is silly enough to pay RL money for that, well, let's just say it'll tick me off a lot less than the guys paying RL money for gold to buy purple twink gear in WoW.
Except the answers of "everyone on the planet" actually depend more on their education and prior experiences, than on any kind of brain malfunction.
E.g., I can almost guarantee that an eskimo or a Touareg from Sahara are very unlikely to instinctively associate anything whatsoever with a butterfly, just because they haven't seen many. E.g., someone who's played a lot of WoW or is into classic mythology is a lot more likely to see half-human/half-animal figures, like, say, centaurs, without it involving any kind of alienation. It's just what the kind of thing they've been exposed to. E.g., at least one physicist saw an electron orbit (which actually is a lobed cloud, hence the similarity) in a picture, because that's the kind of thing _he_ deals with regularly.
That's really the kinds of RL answers that happen, not outright "I see mom chasing me with a machette."
So basically what we have again is taking the answers of a bunch of farmers and concluding that anyone who answers differently must be in some way broken. Or at least that's what the standard sets of interpretations tell us.
I.e., when it's not used as a prop for a cold reading, it's at best a test for mediocrity.
Eh, it was supposed to just be funny. You know, the kind of protest that ends up a confession?:)
In reality, I know only one person who probably wouldn't fit in a small car, and he isn't a nerd at all. But, eh, that wouldn't be as funny a thing to say.
Well, some vague traces of a class can still exist in skill-based systems too. E.g., in Vampire The Masqurade you're stuck with the Disciplines and other advantages and disadvantages of one clan. (Well, unless you commit diablerie, but let's not go there;)) E.g., in Morrowind and Oblivion you get to select a set of skills which are easier to raise than the others, although you still can raise the others too.
But, yes, you're right about the main point: skill based systems do allow a lot more customization.
Many games indeed use the skills-raise-by-use system insted of buying with xp. Oblivion and its predecessor Morrowind also did that. So maybe I should have just explained it as: the focus is on the character's skills, not on the level. Thanks for the point either way.
Actually, I think the problem is that the summary makes a hash of it. The "advancement through skill" from the quoted part, is not the same meaning of "skill" that the following submitter rant uses.
The "skill" in the "skill-based vs level-based MMO" debate, is not about the [b]player's[/b] skills, but about the [b]character's[/b] skills. _Major_ difference.
A "skill-based MMO" (or MUD) does _not_ mean you have to learn to circle-strafe or be a cyber-athlete or anything. They can be just as mindless affairs as WoW. (And I'm actually not saying that as a bad thing: I actually like WoW.) They just mean it has no levels, but they have a bunch of skill numbers and you spend your xp directly on the skills and stats.
Heck, you could even make a turn-based skill-based games if you wanted to, and in fact some have actually been made.
A good example of a skill-based system is Vampire: Bloodlines. It doesn't have levels at all. You get some xp and you spend it directly on raising your strenght, or your dexterity, or your melee skill, or your lockpicking skill. Having more experience doesn't automatically make you tougher at some point. You could buy only social abilities for a long while for example, and be an elder vampire that can't fight worth Jack, but could probably convince the Pope and Arafat to get married to each other. Or instead you could be the toughest kung-fu master but unable to talk even your best friend into seeing things your way. Or learn a lot of spells right from the start. Or anything in between.
A good example of a level-based game are most old D&D games. You inherently have a to-hit modifier or access to spells based on your level. Inherently being higher level makes you better.
And Fallout 3 is actually a hybrid rather than just level-based. At its heart, what matters are your character skills, not your level. The level just gives you points to put in your skills.
Or if you want an example based on WoW, imagine a game that plays exactly like WoW, but has no levels. Instead of your sword skill automatically raising its cap by 5 points each time you level up, you don't level up, but spend xp to buy more sword skill. Or instead of getting a new spell every 2 levels, you have no levels, but buy spells with xp. You don't get +1 this stat, and +2 that stat, etc, when you level up, you buy stat increases with xp.
That would also mean that all restrictions on equipment have to be skill based instead of level based. In a skill-based game you don't have some sword that requires minimum level 39, you have a sword that requires, say, minimum 195 sword skill. If you want to use it, you dump your xp into sword skill. If you want to be a mage, you dump your xp into spell skills instead and don't get to use that sword too soon.
That's really what a skill-based MMO would look like.
But other than that, the game would still play exactly like WoW. You wouldn't need any more player skill to go do the Lakeshire quests in that setup, than you need in the real level-based WoW.
Well, as someone who's been on MUDs long before MMOs, and briefly even tried his hand at creating content on one, I can at least say this: I had thought I've heard every excuse before. There was always a segment (the ones Bartle called "killers") who'd whine at length that if you don't let them repeatedly gank newbies:
A. you're infringing upon their freedom of speech. (Never mind that that ammendment is about congress, not about their behaviour on someone else's private property.)
B.... and their dad is a lawyer and will sue you for it. (Never did somehow.)
C.... and that's the road to fascism and slavery. (Yeah, right.)
D. You're making roleplaying impossible. (Apparently being an out-of-character griefer is the only possible role to play.)
E. You're depriving those newbies of _fun_. They may not know it, but they secretly _want_ to be ganked repeatedly and otherwise harrassed. If you let them opt out of that instead of being thrown to the wolves from the first minute, they'll all get bored and leave! (I think Everquest 1 disproved that one quite nicely.)
F. Somehow a failure of a human being, along with everyone else who even thinks of being, you know, social in a massively multiplayer game.
And, umm, that's about it off the top of my head.
The research one is actually kind of new. Of course, this "researcher" didn't invent it, but still, it's kinda refreshing to see the douchebags have broadened their repertoire a little. They were starting to sound like a broken record.
I dunno, I can see how it could be done. Say, have the next The Sims expansion pack have tea and crumpets as a food, and have the sim run for the House Of Commons at the end of the politics career track:p
Eh, I have nothing against a free market. I'm just saying that I expect that the combination of dumb and greedy won't go extinct any time soon, and, yes, we'll see more flops done in the name of that.
Well, way I see it, not really. At _least_ half the mistakes there are about cutting corners (e.g., the crappy cheap keyboards, an ultra-expensive computer shoved out the door with an unreliable floppy drive, etc), and most of the rest are about blatantly trying to nickel-and-dime the users (e.g., the lack of a format command so they have to buy their floppies from you only, or all the connectors on the PC Jr being incompatible with the standard PC ones, etc.)
Unfortunately both types of failures are standard stapples of capitalism, so don't expect them to go away any time soon. Even though those particular 15 manifestations of them might not happen again, we're just seeing new and innovative ways to do the same two things. E.g., when EA cuts costs on testing their new game, _and_ launches a new game with over half the content sold separately (check out The Sims 3: from day 1 there was more virtual furniture for sale for real money on their site than included with the game)... I'm sure you can see the same two things at work.
E.g., for hardware, when as you correctly mention a system that's waay underpowered for Vista is sold as Vista ready, you have the first failure mode in action: they wanted to sell a system as Vista ready, without actually including the expensive hardware needed to actually be ready. It's just cutting corners.
E.g., nickel-and-diming... well, let's just say HP's whole printer ink business is based on that. It recently even reached such absurdity as including chips to make the ink or toner cartridge artifficially "expire" after a while, even if there's actually plenty of ink left inside. For some users that already was the straw that broke the camel's back, but I expect some bright MBA to try something even more ham-fisted soon.
And my point is that one's image is inherently a different thing than knee-jerk copyright reaction, even if copyright ends up the trick used to get someone to take it down.
You can use my source code, if you have any use for that. You can repost my messages, if you think it makes some point better than you can be bothered to. (Yeah, right.) You can repost or modify the mods I did for Fallout 3 and a couple of other games, and even cheerfully tutored or helped other people make competing mods. You can take my attempts at humour here and make a TV sketch out of them, if you want to. I'm as easy going about copyright of stuff I created, or about bragging rights for those creations, as it possibly gets.
But my image? No, sorry. I can do without having to hunt down all uses and seeing which are ok and which not.
The fundamental distinction is that the forme is something I _created_, and can create some more, and is no different from what someone else can create or improve upon. The latter is _me_, and is implicitly assumed to be _me_. Just that the same copyright law is used to take them down, doesn't make them the same concept.
And incidentally, how do you know in advance that your use surely is ok for someone. E.g., if a supermarket chain used my photos, I _would_ find it distasteful. See, I have something against donating to the rich. (I'm on Slashdot, after all, so some kind of ideological crusading shouldn't come as a surprise, right?;) A corporation can jolly well pay its own photographers and models. So in addition to the thing about it being the image of _me_, you would nevertheless have the distaste for that.
I don't think there's anything about copyright laws in not wanting your photos used by everyone and their pervert uncle without permission. Duly noted, in this case no big harm was done, but I can easily imagine a few uses where you probably wouldn't go "eh, creative commons all the way" about your photos.
As a still mild example, a case on The Register a couple of years ago involved a family discovering their daughter's photos -- which apparently they did realease under some kind of cretive commons license which allowed that -- being plastered all over the town on some "ditch your girlfriend by SMS" ads. If you don't see how being the poster girl for a "ditch your girlfriend" campaign can be stressful, I dare say you don't remember high school too well.
Or what if I used your photo in some glowing testimonial about herbal viagra or penis enlargement pills? I'm sure that'll be some fun talks all around. Or in some drug rehab ad? Kleptomaniacs Anonymous? Disgruntled employee of the month? I'm sure that'll be fun when HR runs into that before your next job interview. You might not even know they did. Or an ad for a gay sex hotline? Now that will be fun in the bible belt.
If nothing else, at some point or another, your image or reputation might actually be important. Having some control over how it's used is just common sense. It has nothing to do with copyright culture, but just with the fact that libel -- even vaguely implied, like associating your image with something you don't want to be associated with -- can and does cause real harm.
Actually, you may be surprised to learn that women get addicted to gaming just as easily.
A pretty surrealistic attempt at a relationship in late high school went nowhere fast after I showed her a computer game. Her parents didn't have or want a computer, for whatever reason. (Presumably also because back then they cost a lot more and did a lot less, so it wasn't really mainstream yet.) I figure it didn't take more than an hour or two for her to become interested in the computer instead of me. She only wanted to come over, play a game all afternoon, then go back home.
(Cue wisecracks about the computer having a nicer personality than me;)
Plus, probably the best example of a MMO addict I know is... mom. Last I heard, she's sleeping about 4 hours a night 'cause any more and she can't do all her daily quests for that day. So, you know, you would have thought she'd get dad off it, but she actually got more addicted.
Fair point, but as you probably remember they said the same about WoW. It was going to compete with the big elephant called EQ1, and EQ2 was announced soon too. Sony was _the_ name in MMOs, nobody had dethroned their game yet, and there was no reason to assume that the sequel will fare any worse. (Turns out that Sony fucked up anyway.) Blizzard was yet another company making a me-too MMO. They had yet to prove themselves in that arena. Surely they can't compete with Sony by just doing same old, right?
Turns out that there is some merit in polishing the same old turd after all.
Going with the assumption that this is a young couple, not even married yet, if they were more towards the norm, sex WOULD be one of the primary items on the agenda.
I'm not going to comment much about most the rest, since others beat me to it, but at the very least what I'm trying to say is this: there's a long way between "primry items on the agenda" and being the _only_ thing you do together.
Because that's the crux of the matter. Whenever someone asks something along the lines of "how would I go about doing X with my GF/fiancee/wife?" there has to be someone who'll chime in with "try having sex with her instead." Which, even skipping past the psychology considerations, would only work if you can genuinely fill a day with only sex. Because otherwise it still leaves plenty of room to do something else together, be it a MMO or, like in Tom Lehrer's song, "poisoning pigeons in the park", or whatever else.
There are 16 hours awake in a Sunday or Saturday. That is, if you don't skip any sleep. You can't have sex 16 hours in a row. Well, not without marinating yourself in medicines, anyway. Try even doing pelvic thrusts at the empty air (or wiggling your tongue, since an AC earlier suggested the tongue as a solution) for 16 hours straight and then tell me how those muscles feel after that exercise.
Nobody says not to have sex. Nobody says not to be interested in sex. Yes, ideally you'd have some of that too.
But the real keyword in there is the "too."
Relationship "solutions" which imply doing only sex, instead and to the exclusion of any other activity together, just tell me that whoever comes up with those (I mean the OP, not you) hasn't actually had either sex or a real relationship. And I mean with a woman whose last name isn't.avi,.mpeg or.wmv;)
Even shorter: it's not an exclusive or.
True, but, for heterosexual men, they can satisfy 99% of those needs on their own, but, for sex they need the woman there. Self satisfaction jokes aside. Face it, the old joke of "Why did God give women breasts? So men would talk to them" holds a lot of merit.
If a guy didn't want women for sex, he'd not likely give them much attention otherwise...
Well, I could comment about the mysoginism there, but as I was saying others beat me to it. But even so, what I'm trying to say is:
1. Regardless, even if _you_ (think you) don't need a woman for anything but sex, she does need you for more than sex. It's not a sex doll you can just deflate and pack somewhere until your next erection. You usually have to maintain that relationship with more activities than just having sex.
2. I'm not buying it. Yes, it's a popular pretense in today's culture, but I don't buy it. If men were really that self-sufficient and free from half of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, we wouldn't have half as much jealousy and insecurity around.
Well, the idea is sane enough. In fact, that's why I was saying that a competently written game would not render at all in the first place when it's minimized. If you listen to the graphic card's fan when you alt-tab out of full-screen WoW (and it neatly minimizes), it actually revs down after a while. COH keeps re-maximizing itself and rendering behind the browser anyway. I have little doubt that the same happens when running two copies of itself.
As for the textures, well, both characters were similarly dressed and in the same city zone. (I was giving some money to an alt on the other account.) Whether textures can be shared between two different processes, though, that's the better question. I don't know. It's been a decade since I had anything to do with game programming, so I'm pretty clueless about the latest and greatest DirectX or OpenGL tricks.
Still, something's weird anyway. The game runs ok in a 256 MB graphics card. Not great, but ok. On a 1024 MB graphics card, it should be able to fit in two instances IMHO. Though exactly how it handles swapping textures in there, I wouldn't know.
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Well, I don't think that the average Windows user actually feels like an oppressed indentured servant, like he's portrayed around these parts.
I think for most people it's just utilitarian. It's what came with the computer, it's what works, now let me on teh intarwebs already.
Basically it's not as much about the presence of a negative conotation about MS, it's more like just the absence of a positive one. Having a Windows computer or hanging around a Windows store, just doesn't carry the same illusion of somehow being hip and cool. It's just a tool to an end.
Sorta like how nobody would hang around the Bosch power tools section of Home Depot, nor carry around an electric drill to look cool.
And even for those:
A) a faster hard drive will do you more good than a new OS
B) more free RAM will do you more good than a new OS
Loading Vista or Windows 7 on a 1GB machine is pretty much self-defeating, for example. No matter how much it optimizes file management, as long as the HDD still does have a very slow seek time, the less free RAM will cause more loading and unloading, and make it run slower.
And in that vein, if the user can't close other apps... a more bloated OS will only make it worse.
And that matters for games... why?
First of all, if file access is really that important for whatever game you're playing, just get a WD VelociRaptor HDD. It will do you more good than any OS optimization. It won't even cost more than buying a new version of Windows.
But really from what I notice, it only helped my system with the load times of levels. It doesn't seem to do anything at all for the FPS or latency, you know, the things that actually matter for whether you get headshot before you headshot the other guy.
Memory management, I suppose it could matter, except again I'm not sure how much it helps in games.
Processor scheduling, well, I guess games could become sensitive to that in some future, but right now they're still mostly a single-threaded affair. Well, ok, so some spawn 1 to 3 more threads for other stuff lately, but it's still not quite the thing where clever scheduling matters that much. It's not like any game has to juggle thousands of threads and shaving a nanosecond on context switches matters.
Well, I guess we'll wait and see.
As I was saying, there _is_ at least one example which sold stuff that gave no actual in game advantage. So it's possible.
Whether CO will be like that... well, I'm not psychic. I'll just wait until they actually do something wrong, before I get all pumped up to whine about it :P
Well, I understand your point, but the alternative is that it's designed by Jack Emmert (Statesman) like COH :p
Now the game had a lot of good ideas (for my taste) and I still love the superhero setting. So Statesman gets my recognition for that.
But seriously, the game had _massive_ balance problems that could have been avoided by just doing some arithmetic on the back of a napkin. Jack Emmert was also genuinely surprised as to what happened to his game's balance when you just use level 22 equipment. Seriously, stuff like that a power that was supposed to be situational actually became _more_ than permanent (it actually stacked with itself!) if you use more than two standard equipment pieces available in bog-normal stores at level 22 was a surprise to him.
And attempts to rebalance it are best described as turning the knobs from 10 to 0 and then back to 10 and seeing what happens. Fixing the "city of blasters" screw up created the "city of fire tankers" screw up. Your hero could go from zero to god-mode and back to nobody in 3 consecutive patches. The last rebalancing attempt that Mr Emmert oversaw was the ED; and although as a principle something like that needed to be done, the way it was done actually broke whole "sets" of powers, like making Defense (and any tanker or scrapper who was based on that) useless.
I know someone will probably go "yeah, well, WoW nerfs players occasionally too" but trust me, WoW never did anything even close to the _scale_ of COH's balance swings. When you got boosted in a patch, suddenly you could do dungeons instanced for 8 people by yourself. Better yet, you could herd every single soul in the dungeon with impunity. At equal level. Then some patch would come and move you from that to non-viable overnight. _That_ kind of wild balance swings.
And all balance calculations for attack chains were made by players on the boards for him in the end, because two years after launch Cryptic was still using the wrong variable and not understanding what the limiting factor in an attack chain is.
Other elementary ideas also apparently weren't obvious either in design or in the beta. Like that in a game based on fighting large groups instead of one big boss, the tank _needs_ an AOE taunt. Seriously, you were apparently supposed to fight platoon sized groups with a single-target taunt.
COH only began to recover and become something stable and balanced after Statesman stepped down and Positron took the lead.
So if they can get someone responsible for Hellgate to do more of the CO design instead of Emmert... please, please, please, let them. Bring in John Romero too while we're at it :P
Well, I understand your point and would even side with it, if it was indeed that. Except it probably isn't. Even the summary mentions that they don't want to actually sell things which would break balance or give someone a leg up.
For example, since largely it's the same people who came up with City Of Heroes, here's what COH sells: higher resolution costume pieces.
If you come from an EQ/WoW school of MMO, that may sound like an advantage right there, but in reality it's 100% cosmetic. The costume or weapon don't have any stats or DPS like in WoW or EQ. The defense and attack powers are inherent in the super-hero, not in the costume pieces.
If you want to pretend that your hero gets his powers from some magical bracers, you put that in your description and wear some bracers. But technically the in-game bracers don't actually do anything. They're just a visual prop.
So really what you can buy in COH are some meshes and textures for your character. The only benefit is looking good, not extra DPS, nor extra defense, nor anything else which would actually translate in any actual in-game advantage.
The only morally questionable item they have for sale for RL cash is a jetpack. But the funny thing is, you can get an identical (performance-wise) jetpack at level 5 by just doing the bank mission, and at level 14 you can get an innate power that's actually faster. On the COV side, you can get 3 different ones, or you can just hike your butt to Grandville and buy one for a very small price in in-game currency even at level 1. Grandville _is_ the top level area but there are no enemies between the boat and the vendor.
So realistically the only advantage you'll get out of it is at levels 1 to 5. Or maybe 1 to 6 if you do that bank mission later, or had a ton of rested xp at level 4.
And it's only transportation. For about an hour (because that's about how long levels 1 to 5 take) you have faster transport than you would have had normally, but it won't help you at all in a fight.
Now I do have a bit of a moral problem even with the transport advantage, but, let's face it, it's not like it'll break the game if a newbie is spared running a couple of miles total on foot in their first hour. If anyone is silly enough to pay RL money for that, well, let's just say it'll tick me off a lot less than the guys paying RL money for gold to buy purple twink gear in WoW.
Except the answers of "everyone on the planet" actually depend more on their education and prior experiences, than on any kind of brain malfunction.
E.g., I can almost guarantee that an eskimo or a Touareg from Sahara are very unlikely to instinctively associate anything whatsoever with a butterfly, just because they haven't seen many. E.g., someone who's played a lot of WoW or is into classic mythology is a lot more likely to see half-human/half-animal figures, like, say, centaurs, without it involving any kind of alienation. It's just what the kind of thing they've been exposed to. E.g., at least one physicist saw an electron orbit (which actually is a lobed cloud, hence the similarity) in a picture, because that's the kind of thing _he_ deals with regularly.
That's really the kinds of RL answers that happen, not outright "I see mom chasing me with a machette."
So basically what we have again is taking the answers of a bunch of farmers and concluding that anyone who answers differently must be in some way broken. Or at least that's what the standard sets of interpretations tell us.
I.e., when it's not used as a prop for a cold reading, it's at best a test for mediocrity.
Eh, it was supposed to just be funny. You know, the kind of protest that ends up a confession? :)
In reality, I know only one person who probably wouldn't fit in a small car, and he isn't a nerd at all. But, eh, that wouldn't be as funny a thing to say.
Well, some vague traces of a class can still exist in skill-based systems too. E.g., in Vampire The Masqurade you're stuck with the Disciplines and other advantages and disadvantages of one clan. (Well, unless you commit diablerie, but let's not go there;)) E.g., in Morrowind and Oblivion you get to select a set of skills which are easier to raise than the others, although you still can raise the others too.
But, yes, you're right about the main point: skill based systems do allow a lot more customization.
Oi! I resent the blanket generalization. I'm pretty sure I _could_ fit about half an ass cheek in that thing.
Are you aware that Arena was xp and level based and was not using the same system? I.e., that it wouldn't illustrate the point I'`m talking about?
Many games indeed use the skills-raise-by-use system insted of buying with xp. Oblivion and its predecessor Morrowind also did that. So maybe I should have just explained it as: the focus is on the character's skills, not on the level. Thanks for the point either way.
Indeed, they've been done for ages in pen and paper games. Thanks for making that point.
Actually, I think the problem is that the summary makes a hash of it. The "advancement through skill" from the quoted part, is not the same meaning of "skill" that the following submitter rant uses.
The "skill" in the "skill-based vs level-based MMO" debate, is not about the [b]player's[/b] skills, but about the [b]character's[/b] skills. _Major_ difference.
A "skill-based MMO" (or MUD) does _not_ mean you have to learn to circle-strafe or be a cyber-athlete or anything. They can be just as mindless affairs as WoW. (And I'm actually not saying that as a bad thing: I actually like WoW.) They just mean it has no levels, but they have a bunch of skill numbers and you spend your xp directly on the skills and stats.
Heck, you could even make a turn-based skill-based games if you wanted to, and in fact some have actually been made.
A good example of a skill-based system is Vampire: Bloodlines. It doesn't have levels at all. You get some xp and you spend it directly on raising your strenght, or your dexterity, or your melee skill, or your lockpicking skill. Having more experience doesn't automatically make you tougher at some point. You could buy only social abilities for a long while for example, and be an elder vampire that can't fight worth Jack, but could probably convince the Pope and Arafat to get married to each other. Or instead you could be the toughest kung-fu master but unable to talk even your best friend into seeing things your way. Or learn a lot of spells right from the start. Or anything in between.
A good example of a level-based game are most old D&D games. You inherently have a to-hit modifier or access to spells based on your level. Inherently being higher level makes you better.
And Fallout 3 is actually a hybrid rather than just level-based. At its heart, what matters are your character skills, not your level. The level just gives you points to put in your skills.
Or if you want an example based on WoW, imagine a game that plays exactly like WoW, but has no levels. Instead of your sword skill automatically raising its cap by 5 points each time you level up, you don't level up, but spend xp to buy more sword skill. Or instead of getting a new spell every 2 levels, you have no levels, but buy spells with xp. You don't get +1 this stat, and +2 that stat, etc, when you level up, you buy stat increases with xp.
That would also mean that all restrictions on equipment have to be skill based instead of level based. In a skill-based game you don't have some sword that requires minimum level 39, you have a sword that requires, say, minimum 195 sword skill. If you want to use it, you dump your xp into sword skill. If you want to be a mage, you dump your xp into spell skills instead and don't get to use that sword too soon.
That's really what a skill-based MMO would look like.
But other than that, the game would still play exactly like WoW. You wouldn't need any more player skill to go do the Lakeshire quests in that setup, than you need in the real level-based WoW.
Well, as someone who's been on MUDs long before MMOs, and briefly even tried his hand at creating content on one, I can at least say this: I had thought I've heard every excuse before. There was always a segment (the ones Bartle called "killers") who'd whine at length that if you don't let them repeatedly gank newbies:
A. you're infringing upon their freedom of speech. (Never mind that that ammendment is about congress, not about their behaviour on someone else's private property.)
B. ... and their dad is a lawyer and will sue you for it. (Never did somehow.)
C. ... and that's the road to fascism and slavery. (Yeah, right.)
D. You're making roleplaying impossible. (Apparently being an out-of-character griefer is the only possible role to play.)
E. You're depriving those newbies of _fun_. They may not know it, but they secretly _want_ to be ganked repeatedly and otherwise harrassed. If you let them opt out of that instead of being thrown to the wolves from the first minute, they'll all get bored and leave! (I think Everquest 1 disproved that one quite nicely.)
F. Somehow a failure of a human being, along with everyone else who even thinks of being, you know, social in a massively multiplayer game.
And, umm, that's about it off the top of my head.
The research one is actually kind of new. Of course, this "researcher" didn't invent it, but still, it's kinda refreshing to see the douchebags have broadened their repertoire a little. They were starting to sound like a broken record.
I dunno, I can see how it could be done. Say, have the next The Sims expansion pack have tea and crumpets as a food, and have the sim run for the House Of Commons at the end of the politics career track :p
Eh, I have nothing against a free market. I'm just saying that I expect that the combination of dumb and greedy won't go extinct any time soon, and, yes, we'll see more flops done in the name of that.
Well, way I see it, not really. At _least_ half the mistakes there are about cutting corners (e.g., the crappy cheap keyboards, an ultra-expensive computer shoved out the door with an unreliable floppy drive, etc), and most of the rest are about blatantly trying to nickel-and-dime the users (e.g., the lack of a format command so they have to buy their floppies from you only, or all the connectors on the PC Jr being incompatible with the standard PC ones, etc.)
Unfortunately both types of failures are standard stapples of capitalism, so don't expect them to go away any time soon. Even though those particular 15 manifestations of them might not happen again, we're just seeing new and innovative ways to do the same two things. E.g., when EA cuts costs on testing their new game, _and_ launches a new game with over half the content sold separately (check out The Sims 3: from day 1 there was more virtual furniture for sale for real money on their site than included with the game)... I'm sure you can see the same two things at work.
E.g., for hardware, when as you correctly mention a system that's waay underpowered for Vista is sold as Vista ready, you have the first failure mode in action: they wanted to sell a system as Vista ready, without actually including the expensive hardware needed to actually be ready. It's just cutting corners.
E.g., nickel-and-diming... well, let's just say HP's whole printer ink business is based on that. It recently even reached such absurdity as including chips to make the ink or toner cartridge artifficially "expire" after a while, even if there's actually plenty of ink left inside. For some users that already was the straw that broke the camel's back, but I expect some bright MBA to try something even more ham-fisted soon.
And my point is that one's image is inherently a different thing than knee-jerk copyright reaction, even if copyright ends up the trick used to get someone to take it down.
You can use my source code, if you have any use for that. You can repost my messages, if you think it makes some point better than you can be bothered to. (Yeah, right.) You can repost or modify the mods I did for Fallout 3 and a couple of other games, and even cheerfully tutored or helped other people make competing mods. You can take my attempts at humour here and make a TV sketch out of them, if you want to. I'm as easy going about copyright of stuff I created, or about bragging rights for those creations, as it possibly gets.
But my image? No, sorry. I can do without having to hunt down all uses and seeing which are ok and which not.
The fundamental distinction is that the forme is something I _created_, and can create some more, and is no different from what someone else can create or improve upon. The latter is _me_, and is implicitly assumed to be _me_. Just that the same copyright law is used to take them down, doesn't make them the same concept.
And incidentally, how do you know in advance that your use surely is ok for someone. E.g., if a supermarket chain used my photos, I _would_ find it distasteful. See, I have something against donating to the rich. (I'm on Slashdot, after all, so some kind of ideological crusading shouldn't come as a surprise, right?;) A corporation can jolly well pay its own photographers and models. So in addition to the thing about it being the image of _me_, you would nevertheless have the distaste for that.
I don't think there's anything about copyright laws in not wanting your photos used by everyone and their pervert uncle without permission. Duly noted, in this case no big harm was done, but I can easily imagine a few uses where you probably wouldn't go "eh, creative commons all the way" about your photos.
As a still mild example, a case on The Register a couple of years ago involved a family discovering their daughter's photos -- which apparently they did realease under some kind of cretive commons license which allowed that -- being plastered all over the town on some "ditch your girlfriend by SMS" ads. If you don't see how being the poster girl for a "ditch your girlfriend" campaign can be stressful, I dare say you don't remember high school too well.
Or what if I used your photo in some glowing testimonial about herbal viagra or penis enlargement pills? I'm sure that'll be some fun talks all around. Or in some drug rehab ad? Kleptomaniacs Anonymous? Disgruntled employee of the month? I'm sure that'll be fun when HR runs into that before your next job interview. You might not even know they did. Or an ad for a gay sex hotline? Now that will be fun in the bible belt.
If nothing else, at some point or another, your image or reputation might actually be important. Having some control over how it's used is just common sense. It has nothing to do with copyright culture, but just with the fact that libel -- even vaguely implied, like associating your image with something you don't want to be associated with -- can and does cause real harm.
Actually, you may be surprised to learn that women get addicted to gaming just as easily.
A pretty surrealistic attempt at a relationship in late high school went nowhere fast after I showed her a computer game. Her parents didn't have or want a computer, for whatever reason. (Presumably also because back then they cost a lot more and did a lot less, so it wasn't really mainstream yet.) I figure it didn't take more than an hour or two for her to become interested in the computer instead of me. She only wanted to come over, play a game all afternoon, then go back home.
(Cue wisecracks about the computer having a nicer personality than me;)
Plus, probably the best example of a MMO addict I know is... mom. Last I heard, she's sleeping about 4 hours a night 'cause any more and she can't do all her daily quests for that day. So, you know, you would have thought she'd get dad off it, but she actually got more addicted.
Fair point, but as you probably remember they said the same about WoW. It was going to compete with the big elephant called EQ1, and EQ2 was announced soon too. Sony was _the_ name in MMOs, nobody had dethroned their game yet, and there was no reason to assume that the sequel will fare any worse. (Turns out that Sony fucked up anyway.) Blizzard was yet another company making a me-too MMO. They had yet to prove themselves in that arena. Surely they can't compete with Sony by just doing same old, right?
Turns out that there is some merit in polishing the same old turd after all.
Point taken and true, but IMHO it would still be a piss-poor multi-core architecture that can only multithread and is no good at multitasking.
I'm not going to comment much about most the rest, since others beat me to it, but at the very least what I'm trying to say is this: there's a long way between "primry items on the agenda" and being the _only_ thing you do together.
Because that's the crux of the matter. Whenever someone asks something along the lines of "how would I go about doing X with my GF/fiancee/wife?" there has to be someone who'll chime in with "try having sex with her instead." Which, even skipping past the psychology considerations, would only work if you can genuinely fill a day with only sex. Because otherwise it still leaves plenty of room to do something else together, be it a MMO or, like in Tom Lehrer's song, "poisoning pigeons in the park", or whatever else.
There are 16 hours awake in a Sunday or Saturday. That is, if you don't skip any sleep. You can't have sex 16 hours in a row. Well, not without marinating yourself in medicines, anyway. Try even doing pelvic thrusts at the empty air (or wiggling your tongue, since an AC earlier suggested the tongue as a solution) for 16 hours straight and then tell me how those muscles feel after that exercise.
Nobody says not to have sex. Nobody says not to be interested in sex. Yes, ideally you'd have some of that too.
But the real keyword in there is the "too."
Relationship "solutions" which imply doing only sex, instead and to the exclusion of any other activity together, just tell me that whoever comes up with those (I mean the OP, not you) hasn't actually had either sex or a real relationship. And I mean with a woman whose last name isn't .avi, .mpeg or .wmv ;)
Even shorter: it's not an exclusive or.
Well, I could comment about the mysoginism there, but as I was saying others beat me to it. But even so, what I'm trying to say is:
1. Regardless, even if _you_ (think you) don't need a woman for anything but sex, she does need you for more than sex. It's not a sex doll you can just deflate and pack somewhere until your next erection. You usually have to maintain that relationship with more activities than just having sex.
2. I'm not buying it. Yes, it's a popular pretense in today's culture, but I don't buy it. If men were really that self-sufficient and free from half of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, we wouldn't have half as much jealousy and insecurity around.
Well, the idea is sane enough. In fact, that's why I was saying that a competently written game would not render at all in the first place when it's minimized. If you listen to the graphic card's fan when you alt-tab out of full-screen WoW (and it neatly minimizes), it actually revs down after a while. COH keeps re-maximizing itself and rendering behind the browser anyway. I have little doubt that the same happens when running two copies of itself.
As for the textures, well, both characters were similarly dressed and in the same city zone. (I was giving some money to an alt on the other account.) Whether textures can be shared between two different processes, though, that's the better question. I don't know. It's been a decade since I had anything to do with game programming, so I'm pretty clueless about the latest and greatest DirectX or OpenGL tricks.
Still, something's weird anyway. The game runs ok in a 256 MB graphics card. Not great, but ok. On a 1024 MB graphics card, it should be able to fit in two instances IMHO. Though exactly how it handles swapping textures in there, I wouldn't know.