Way I read it, it'll just make sure it goes just fast enough to want to make you scream for real anyway. I doubt that faking screaming alone will take care of the other variables they mention. But being genuinely stressed, probably will. And they'll underclock the computer until they start seeing what they consider an acceptable level of stress, regardless of whether you're actually screaming or not.
I seriously wonder who comes up with that kind of ideas. If the user seems to actually be enjoying his experience at the computer for a change, by all means, let's start degrading his/her experience until he starts showing some stress.
And it's good 'cause you can save a few watts! At the expense of probably reducing the user's life expectancy a little due to a constant baseline of stress, not just make him enjoy that life less. But it's teh green!
How much self-hate does someone need to actually want to punish themselves to save the planet? I guess we'll soon know.
The converse of that is that sometimes the high level content would be downright unbalancing to obtain at a lower level. Fire Controllers have a long hike to Fire Imps; Psychic Dominators have an even longer run to Psychic Shockwave, but if those powers were available at a low or modest level, no one would bother to make anything else.
That's just skirting the real problem. The problem isn't whether you have a particular power like Psychic Shockwave. The problem is whether you're having fun against enemies your own level.
And the teen levels in COH just plain old aren't fun for 95% or so of the builds. They're a stupid grind towards when you'll finally have enough endurance to both use your attacks and your defenses, or not run out of endurance before the current group of enemies is dead.
E.g., on my MA/SR scrapper, my problem wasn't that I don't have Eagle's Claw or Elude yet. My problem was that it felt like I'm The Amazing Asthmatic Guy. Even the few attacks I had, drained my endurance to zero in no time, and turning on any defenses doubly so. And then I'd get to twiddle thumbs until Rest recharges. To add insult to injury, before SOs and enough slots, those defenses did buggerall anyway.
My impression is that the COH team just didn't understand what character progression is about. The difference between level 1 and level 50 shouldn't be that between "suck" and "rule." Both should rule against enemies their own level. That level difference should just say that at level 1 I'm not going to go run up to a level 50 NPC and punch it in the face. But against enemies the same level, a level 1 or a level 15 or a level 50 should do just fine.
And since we're at comparing to WoW, there's no point in WoW where I experienced the same "gotta grind until I can start having fun" ranges. My mage at level 15 had enough mana to run at a comfortable and fun pace through level 15 enemies. Unlike my blasters on COH at level 15. (I.e., before Stamina at level 20.) My paladin at level 15 didn't have to do choices like "do I use my aura or do I attack?" because the game just wasn't designed around the idea that anything you do at low level should drop your stamina bar like a lead anvil. My warrior at level 15 generated just enough rage to use his special attacks at a comfortable rate, which is more than I can say for most of my scrappers on COH. Etc.
And then you have whole maps full of enemies which just make those problems worse. For no other reason than that some incompetent designer thought that if you already badly lack endurance at teen levels, it would be fun to give you enemies which actively drain stamina. (See, all those Mu guys in COV missions, for example.)
A game just has no reason to be designed as a progression from "suck" to "finally fun" to "rule." Those levels should just move the range of enemies which you're supposed to have fun with.
I don't see that as much of a saving grace, since most of those "exploits" were simply broken design to start with, not some obscure buffer overflow bug.
It's, if you will, simply a rerun of the self-stackable Hasten way back at game launch, or of the "City Of Blasters" smoke grenade exploit, or of the other of many _foreseeable_ problems that the COH team implemented without stopping and _thinking_ first.
They seem to just plough ahead and implement something that sounds cool, and only later discover whether it works or not. There doesn't seem to be any step where they sit down and do the maths first, or when they ask themselves "ok, if I were an evil bastard, how could I exploit this?"
That's very insightful and informative, and I'm not going to argue against that. But that's orthogonal to what I was saying there. All that I was... debating was the whole "oh, we're getting so much free content" idea. I've seen at least as much free content added in WoW too, and a bunch of other games for that matter. That's all I'm saying.
Yes, there is a lot of duplicated geometry in WoW too, and I should know, I've played both games more than some would consider healthy.
No, the overal feeling isn't the same. As the general feeling goes, in WoW sometimes you're in a cave, sometimes you're in the woods, sometimes you're on some snow-covered mountain, and sometimes you're in a fort, etc.... There's some copied stuff, but on the whole there's a _lot_ of content anyway. Even if you see some of it twice or thrice, there is nevertheless lots of different stuff.
In COH everything is instanced, and everything is made of the same very small number of chunks. You'll see each chunk not just twice, nor even just a dozen times in different places, you'll see the same lobby literally a few _thousand_ times in different missions. It's hard not to start noticing that it's the same map again, even if you actively tried to not notice it.
The thing that comes to mind about COH is an Evil Inc comic strip where villains call to rent some warehouse for their fight with the hero, only to be told it's only available on Saturday after 6 PM because other villains rented it the rest of the week. That's the sensation I get with COH's maps. I'm doing the same warehouse again, only this time it's with Tsoo in it, and last time it was with Freakshow in it. But otherwise it's not just the same, but the enemy groups are in the same places, the boss is in the same big room and the glowie is under the stairs again. It's as if literally someone owns half a dozen warehouses, maybe half a dozen office buildings, a couple of research-themed buildings, etc, and the various groups just rent one of them for their showdown after the previous gang is done with it.
Quantity doesn't say anything about quality. If my hypothetical restaurant boasted 100 different recipes on the menu, but they're all minor variations of the same cheeseburger, you're not going to think it's the most diverse food around.
What I'm trying to say is that in COH
A) all missions are one of:
- kill NPC and everyone else in the same room
- click on glowie
- rescue hostage
- kill everyone on map
- defend an object
And I don't mean at a conceptual level (as in, both Deadmines and Ulduar involve killing an end-boss in WoW), but they're all a map full of NPC groups and you have to do largely the same thing yet again on a different map. But what makes it worse is:
B) maps aren't very different. Like in the old Daggerfall, maps are made of a small number of huge and easily recognizable chunks, that are just interconnected in different ways. So for example it's very easy to recognize that you're in the same 4-level cavern room you've already seen a gazillion times before, or that you're in the exact same lobby with an overpass, or in the same 4-way warehouse junction.
Once you recognize that, you don't just know the exact architecture and have seen it before. (As in, at the level of, "oh, around that corner are the cubicles and around that other corner is a ramp up.") After a while you also know exactly where the enemies can spawn and around which corners you should be careful.
In WoW terms, for whoever is more familiar with that, think how memorable the cave with the ship was in the Deadmines when you saw it the first time as a newbie. Now think if it were reused in a thousand other dungeons, and you're seeing the same bloody room again from level 1 to level 80. Because it's reused again and again and again.
Just saying that it's a lot of missions is kind of misleading, when you run into such copied and pasted rooms over and over again.
And even worse...
C) The number of different combinations of those pieces is also rather limited. So not just the chunks of some maps can be what you've already seen before, but the whole bloody map can be an exact duplicate of something you've already played a hundred times.
And sometimes it's as if they don't even try to hide it at all. In fact as if they try to rub your nose in it.
E.g., I can think of one teen-level task force where three missions in a row are identical. As in, you do the exact same map, with the exact same layout, and the exact same enemies, 3 times in a row. It's just placed in different buildings around the city, but it's the same mission again. What was the purpose of _that_? Just to make sure I know it's a copy-and-paste time sink?
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that the game as a whole sucks or anything. That's a matter of personal tastes, anyway. But saying that it has lots of content is IMHO highly misleading, since actually it's very little content copied and pasted over and over again. Repetition doesn't really make it more content.
The problem is that that's not what the devs wanted to do. If their vision had been "screw this, we'll let players skip as many levels as they want", I can respect that. After all, the Death Knights in WoW start directly at level 55 out of 80 levels.
But it gets funny reading some Positron statement in COH where he complains about the players abusing the mission designer as power-levelling, and promises punishments to everyone who made farming missions and/or everyone who used them. And reminding everyone that it was really intended for players to make deep and meaningful story arcs, and expects it to be used that way. Now _that_ is funny.
What did he expect there to happen?
That does not sound to me like he's treating players as adults. It's
A) as usual, implementing stuff without any forethought and then being thoroughly surprised that it doesn't work as expected
B) then treating players like children who need to be threatened into doing things the way you want them to do it, instead of the way that your game allows and rewards
And I especially would like you to roll the latter around in your head. As a general rule of thumb, each game gets the players and behaviours that it rewards. If a game rewards farming it gets farmers, if it rewards all out PvP it gets mostly PvP-ers, and if it rewards being a ultra-competitive dick it gets ultra-competitive dicks, etc. If nothing else, because anyone who wanted something radically different in a game, gets the hint that he'll always be a second class citizen and leaves. And everyone who was ambivalent gets the idea that action A is more rewarding than action B, and learns to do A more than B.
It's not just about COH, btw. E.g., if in WoW you see mostly soloing from levels 1 to 79, it's because that's the kind of thing that offers the most bang-per-buck (or reward per effort) within the constraints of that game's design.
It's really that simple.
And any designer who ends up threatening players for using game mechanic A instead of game mechanic B, in my book he's incompetent. Either sit back and let players use what works, or fix your own god damned game so option A isn't that rewarding. Or have the forethought to not implement it in the first place, if it's that predictable that it will be abused in ways you don't like.
While I do play COH and like it, I don't see it as that special in that aspect.
For example WoW also released a lot of individual instances, story arcs, etc, for free in between the two expansion packs. E.g., the endgame content in both the original game and BC was released as such free patches, and even WOTLK has just seen for example Ulduar released as such a free patch. Just because they don't call them "issues" or make a big fuss about it, it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Furthermore, 14 issues sounds a bit vague. Exactly how much content is an issue? Well, it ranged from whole areas to little more than bugfixes or rebalances being called issues.
Well, we've had front page stories about most other MMOs so far. I certainly remember articles speculating about Wrath Of The Lich King, back before when that was released. And articles about how WAR is adding a whole two classes... copied and renamed from other races. And then about how it's merging servers. Or about how Eve, after years of ignoring individual players if they don't happen to be some dev's best buddies, now is letting players elect a council. (Which it will likely still ignore, but now it gives players something to do and somewhere to argue with each other, instead of pestering the devs.) Etc.
It's the games section. What did you really think goes there?
problem is they are empty "calories" meaning they are just calories and not much more. what we need is lots of different nutrients calories are easy to come by these days but it wasnt always that way so we like them when we can get them and our bodies store the extra calories in fat and since we dont burn them it just accumulates.
Bullshit. There is no such thing as "empty calories". That very concept is on par with those who sell you some holistic natural salt based on claims that its mollecules are more jagged like the natural ones, not round and unnatural like the industrial made ones. Or on par with the audiophile-grade network cables. It's bullcrap for idiots who want to feel all superior about their nutrition, but aren't actually smart or educated enough to understand nutrition.
For a start pretty much any animal meat will contain the same aminoacids (in its proteins) as your body is made of. There is very little you can do, short of incinerating that meat to a fine ash, to destroy those and be left with "empty calories."
Do you understand that? There is no fucking thing that McDonald can do to a piece of beef or chicken (while still keeping it edible at all) to stop it from having the exact same 20 aminoacids that your body uses or needs.
Also your body is very good at synthetising various things from various other things. E.g., sugars get turned into fats and viceversa. (Which is why Atkins works or why drinking will give you a fat liver.) E.g., over half the aminoacids can be synthetised from other stuff, and viceversa.
Even "empty calories" would still have their use, since the above synthesis takes energy, same as anything your body uses. It has to come from somewhere.
But again, there is no such thing as "empty calories". There are sugars, fats, proteins, etc, which incidentally your body can all burn to energy. Or use in other ways.
"Different types of calories" and storing the different types as fat? Do you even know what a calory is, junior? Or what fat is? It's the same fat stored in your cells either way. If your body can convert something into fat, it will be the same fat which is used as an energy reserve. As the _same_ kind of energy reserve, as it'll get converted into glucose first when it's needed as fuel.
There is no such thing as storing, say, vitamins or proteins as fat for later.
So do yourself a favour. If you want to talk about nutrition, read about nutrition, not sensationalist pseudo-science or sensationalist propaganda.
That grand old place where we compare video game licensing schemes and the massacre of eighty million people under a brutal totalitarian regime, and judge the former to be worse.
Ah yes, the grand old place where a minority takes their own comprehension problems as some claim to glory and superiority.
Did I claim that the former was worse? Well, blimey, no, that's your own strawman.
"Duke Nukem 4": Duke is out to kick ass and chew bubblegum, but he's not just out of bubblegum, he also can't use his boot and a flashlight at the same time. The refreshing twist that will inject new life into the series.
And the exciting expansion pack: "Duke Nukem 4 Dark Edition". He's not just out of bubblegum, he's also out of batteries for that flashlight.
"Duke Nukem 5: Attack Of The Nazi Demon Babes from Mars" ID hopes to also attract fans of their Wolfenstein and Doom/Quake franchises with this twist. Plus, nobody around the office had any ideas that don't involve nazis or demons. Plus, at least it will still have the demons left in for the German or French markets, after the nazi symbols and references have to be removed. (See, Return To Castle Wolfenstein.)
Or it could get sold to Bethesda, who'll add such exciting new twists as item damage (Duke's boots will need repairs after every 5 asses kicked), armours that don't actually stop much damage, etc. And a construction kit which the users can use to add such original, meaningful, in-character stuff as jedi lightsabers, black recolours of everything (hey, it's an easy to use filter in either Photoshop or Gimp), silenced portable fully-automatic nuclear howitzers, and the ever popular DD-cup naked female bodies.
As a welcome twist for nostalgic fans of their past games, the creative genius behind Morrowind's story is brought back. In Duke too, the story will again be along the lines of, "go and save the world, if you can be arsed to. No hurry. If you can't be bothered, someone else will. See if we care. It's not like the evil will happen in less than a few thousand years anyway. If it does at all, that is."
Gamers sick of being told where to go and how urgent their mission is, will undoubtedly welcome the change. Self-confessed casual gamer John Smith is quoted as saying, "Finally a game which doesn't put me under pressure. I couldn't take it any more, being told how I'm the only one who can save the world, or how urgent it is. It can make a guy incredibly stressed, you know? It made me want to curl up in a corner and cry, like when I can't find a card to move in Windows Solitaire. I was waking up at night in cold sweat, thinking that maybe the Ultimate Evil is finally succeeding while I sleep. It's a stressful life, knowing you're the big hero. Knowing that I'm a completely unimportant nobody and that nothing bad is going to happen anyway, now that's a welcome change of pace."
I've lost or damaged the CDs to many of my games, while I can still download them (and do) off Steam. It's a huge convenience.
So basically all that a piece of call-home spyware has to do is offer you some advantage... compared to other DRM's that shouldn't exist in the first place, either?
Reminds me of a joke some eastern-european coleague told me some years ago. Went something like, the constant state surveillance and phone taps weren't all bad. If you forgot what hour you're supposed to meet your girlfriend, you could call the police and ask them.
Actually, if we're at using WoW as an example, an even better thing they do is: generate statistics from the servers, so they can actually know if they actually have a problem or just a bunch of whiny arseholes. They don't need to have the players vote on whether the Rogues' backstab needs to be even stronger. (Let's be honest. Half the players will likely tell you that if there is anything on the server, whether player, elite boss, end boss, or faction ruler, that they can't one-shot, they're nerfed and mistreated by the game.) They can just generate the statistics and see if one class, faction, piece of equipment, or whatever, is performing as intended and balanced.
Like, lets say, Left 4 Dead? Yeah, great story: "Here is your gun, there are zombies, guess what". And it is one of funnier games I've played recently. We should abandon the idea of games being a form of art, and retake them as a funny way to spend time.
Each time I read something like that... I can't help getting the picture of someone with his head so far up his rear end that he assumes that he's not just a representative sample of 1 for the whole gamer population, and indeed world, but verily _the_ prototype from which all others were moulded. And if, god forbid, they happen to like something else, they must be deluded in some way.
Guess what? We all play games "as a funny way to spend time." You're not revealing some great wisdom to anyone, you just reveal your own disconnect from the real world. The idea that someone actually tries to play games as some form of art _as_ _opposed_ to actually having fun, and to the exclusion of actually having fun, is a delusion that exists only in the imagination of fanboys. Again: we _all_ play games "as a funny way to spend time."
We just find different things fun. Some like to read a book, some like to watch a movie, and some like their stories in a more interactive form. And then some others seem to genuinely like mindlessly mowing down gazillions of NPCs just for score/level/whatever. (And who am I to say there's anything wrong with it?) Different things for different people. That's all.
Still seems silly to me, when you start renaming actual medical conditions just for fear of hurting the emotions of someone even worse off. Should we also stop calling autism autism, just because someone even more autistic out there could feel unhappy about it? Should we stop calling asthma asthma, just because some people are even more crippled by it?
The real insulting part in your example would be your using that term as an inherent insult, instead of a medical condition. _That_ is what ends up annoying those who genuinely have that condition.
But when you get to the point of actually using the euphemisms even for the actual disease, something tells me that you're missing the whole point.
Uh, dude, there _are_ sources of information besides Wikipedia and newspapers. That's all I'm saying. Saying basically "yeah, but some newspapers were worse" is hardly an endorsement of Wikipedia's accuracy. It's a bit like saying that someone is more honest than Peter Lustig.
1. I'll again point at the fact that a hoax about didgeridoos being cloned, complete with pictures of little didgeridoos in test tubes and considerations about the life expectancy of cloned didgeridoos, survived on the German Wikipedia for more than a year. So I guess sometimes it's not that great at self-correcting, eh?
2. _How_ he did it, is less relevant than the fact that it did survive. And yes, some people routinely seem have the time to get into edit wars, or even get more creative (e.g., invent bogus credentials) to have their version stick.
3. An objection that boils down to "yeah, but it takes effort", is a non-objection. If anything it's an illustration as to why the real experts eventually give up. Because routinely there's an idiot willing to invest more time and effort than the real expert.
Yes, it's happened before. Yes, it'll happen again. No, it's not a nice thing to do. But it will happen again anyway.
And _that_ is the problem. Something that is so easily vandalized, isn't that great a source of information.
If you will, I'll draw your attention to your own point:
It's hypocrisy. How would these so-called "experimenters" like it if someone repeatedly inserted hoax lines in their already-written news stories or sociology papers? It's OK, though, because it's an "experiment", right?
_That_ is the whole point. If a peer-reviewed journal was as easy to "experiment" on, it anyone with enough time could redefine physics or history in it just because he was bored, then everyone would agree that it's a fucking useless journal. So, yes, how about we apply the same standard to Wikipedia?
Again: what's not OK, isn't just the experiment itself, but the very fact that it's trivial to make such an experiment. Not that just it's hypothetically possible, but that it actually happens again and again.
Yes, it means that some people are assholes. Do you have some safeguards against that? Because otherwise it's the same failing of techno-utopianism as of any other utopianism. If to work it would need everyone to play nice, stick to the rules, and know their own limits -- i.e., if to work it needs humans as a whole to change -- then that's the failure of any utopianism. Communism too would have worked perfectly, for example, if it weren't for those pesky humans who insist on being what they are instead of the new breed that Marx, Engels and Lenin envisioned.
That very need to scream that someone else didn't play by your rules, _that_ is what tells me that it's yet another failed utopianism.
1. Well, some of us are brought in as consultants to bail a bunch of cargo-cultists out of the hole they have dug themselves into. I'm not talking about guessing about whether some completely unrelated job is done right or wrong, but about something which _is_ my job and theirs.
And when I see whole teams, "architect" included, think that it's a clever optimization to use Integer instead of int for your method's arguments, "because for an int Java copies the whole value on the stack, but for an Integer it only copies a pointer to it"... there are very few conclusions I can get to, other than that they're genuinely not qualified for their job.
2. Some things are well documented as anti-patterns, and not just in programming. I don't have to fully understand someone's job to find an exact verbatim example of why that's the wrong thing to do. Written by smarter people than me on the domain.
E.g., I don't have to be an MBA to recognize a corncob manager or a management feud when I see one.
3. Some things are just that obvious.
For example, the most... depressing thing I've seen was a team leader who was just using his Java project to try to prove that Java sucks and VB is much better. Blown deadlines and bugs were actually _good_ for _his_ agenda, because it just allowed him to run to some hapless non-techie manager and make a "see, that's what happens when you use Java!" speech out of it. And once you learned that, it also became more easily understandable why he's changing scope in mid-flight, move the goalposts, and generally doing anything to keep his project from succeeding.
Maybe I'm not fully qualified to do his job, but I don't think he's paid to do _that_. After all, if the company actually wanted that project never finished, they could have just not started it in the first place.
Or when you see whole departments do nothing more than get in the way -- e.g., DBAs who argue that simultaneously (A) it's not their job to tune the database, and (B) you can't get the rights to do that yourself either; apparently they're just there to make sure the databases run, but no more, and they just try to keep you from it, for fear of bringing it down -- it's hard not to get the idea that _someone_ in that organization is doing a crap and anti-productive job. Maybe it's not the DBAs themselves, but whatever dolt defined the IT's job as just making sure that the computers run, but _someone_ out there is definitely not helping get the real job done. The real job is to have a working complete system, and I mean including the software, not to have a computer from which users and developers are kept away from as much as possible.
1. It was rebutted by Britannica long ago, and the rebuttal is on the very page you linked to. Short version: it turns out that if you review paragraphs taken out of context, make up non-existent Britannica articles, label stuff that's actually correct as Britannica's error, etc, you too can complain that Britannica is incomplete and superficial.
Oh yeah, and let's not distinguish between the occasional typo in Britannica and outright error. Let's pretend that all errors are equal. Then finally we dragged Britannica down at the level of a circle-jerk truth-by-consensus gang.
2. Well, I don't know about their methods, but based on my random excursions to Wikipedia, I'd say probably nobody vandalizes Britannica with whole paragraphs or even articles of 100% bullshit. Just as a random sample, off the top of my head, I learned from Wikipedia such things as that:
- didgeridoos are cloned in test tubes (the article stayed on the German wikipedia for more than a fucking year)
- iron is extracted from monkeys
- one of ancient Rome's bridges was manufactured in Japan
- that primus pilus meant _and_ _didn't_ mean "first spear" at the same time (different articles said polar opposite things about that)
And other such fine bullshit.
Basically when I go to Wikipedia, I have to wonder not only if there's some small omission or typo in the text, but whether the whole fucking article is (currently) a vandalism. I'll continue to have my doubts that that kind of thing happens to Britannica.
And here's a fun parting thought: if a source is so often wrong about the things that I do know about, I'll be paranoid about trusting it about the things that I don't know about.
That's some lovely circular logic there! YOU have ASSUMED without the slightest basis in fact, that a few entries on the list are not quite entirely what a layman might make of them. And then you use your own assumption as EVIDENCE to jump to the conclusion that other entries MUST BE inaccurate.
Do you even understand the difference between "makes me wonder" and "evidence"? Or were you that busy doing that ego-masturbation to let such details get in the way?
And they do.
Really? Who?
All you've managed to prove in your nice long post is that you have an EXTREMELY limited imagination, and your assumptions are pretty universally completely wrong.
And you managed to prove, what? That you just want to call people names without offering even the faintest trace of either fact or conjecture or even imagination? Why, blimey, you said it's wrong, it must be wrong.
You've gotten that utterly and totally wrong. What's more, I can't possibly see how a sane person would reach that conclusion...
Really? Well, then you're the informed one, you tell me. What _does_ a McDonald restaurant (remember, they said "restaurants", not the central systems) use SCO for? What does a pharmacy use, and actively license, SCO Unix for? Is there some computing centre in the back of a McDonald restaurant that I wasn't aware of?
Or was the whole purpose of the exercise to complain about my imagination, based on... nothing more than your bare assertion that it's wrong?
Slashdot Mirror
Way I read it, it'll just make sure it goes just fast enough to want to make you scream for real anyway. I doubt that faking screaming alone will take care of the other variables they mention. But being genuinely stressed, probably will. And they'll underclock the computer until they start seeing what they consider an acceptable level of stress, regardless of whether you're actually screaming or not.
I seriously wonder who comes up with that kind of ideas. If the user seems to actually be enjoying his experience at the computer for a change, by all means, let's start degrading his/her experience until he starts showing some stress.
And it's good 'cause you can save a few watts! At the expense of probably reducing the user's life expectancy a little due to a constant baseline of stress, not just make him enjoy that life less. But it's teh green!
How much self-hate does someone need to actually want to punish themselves to save the planet? I guess we'll soon know.
Rofl. Well played. I'd mod you funny, but alas I posted already.
That's just skirting the real problem. The problem isn't whether you have a particular power like Psychic Shockwave. The problem is whether you're having fun against enemies your own level.
And the teen levels in COH just plain old aren't fun for 95% or so of the builds. They're a stupid grind towards when you'll finally have enough endurance to both use your attacks and your defenses, or not run out of endurance before the current group of enemies is dead.
E.g., on my MA/SR scrapper, my problem wasn't that I don't have Eagle's Claw or Elude yet. My problem was that it felt like I'm The Amazing Asthmatic Guy. Even the few attacks I had, drained my endurance to zero in no time, and turning on any defenses doubly so. And then I'd get to twiddle thumbs until Rest recharges. To add insult to injury, before SOs and enough slots, those defenses did buggerall anyway.
My impression is that the COH team just didn't understand what character progression is about. The difference between level 1 and level 50 shouldn't be that between "suck" and "rule." Both should rule against enemies their own level. That level difference should just say that at level 1 I'm not going to go run up to a level 50 NPC and punch it in the face. But against enemies the same level, a level 1 or a level 15 or a level 50 should do just fine.
And since we're at comparing to WoW, there's no point in WoW where I experienced the same "gotta grind until I can start having fun" ranges. My mage at level 15 had enough mana to run at a comfortable and fun pace through level 15 enemies. Unlike my blasters on COH at level 15. (I.e., before Stamina at level 20.) My paladin at level 15 didn't have to do choices like "do I use my aura or do I attack?" because the game just wasn't designed around the idea that anything you do at low level should drop your stamina bar like a lead anvil. My warrior at level 15 generated just enough rage to use his special attacks at a comfortable rate, which is more than I can say for most of my scrappers on COH. Etc.
And then you have whole maps full of enemies which just make those problems worse. For no other reason than that some incompetent designer thought that if you already badly lack endurance at teen levels, it would be fun to give you enemies which actively drain stamina. (See, all those Mu guys in COV missions, for example.)
A game just has no reason to be designed as a progression from "suck" to "finally fun" to "rule." Those levels should just move the range of enemies which you're supposed to have fun with.
I don't see that as much of a saving grace, since most of those "exploits" were simply broken design to start with, not some obscure buffer overflow bug.
It's, if you will, simply a rerun of the self-stackable Hasten way back at game launch, or of the "City Of Blasters" smoke grenade exploit, or of the other of many _foreseeable_ problems that the COH team implemented without stopping and _thinking_ first.
They seem to just plough ahead and implement something that sounds cool, and only later discover whether it works or not. There doesn't seem to be any step where they sit down and do the maths first, or when they ask themselves "ok, if I were an evil bastard, how could I exploit this?"
That's very insightful and informative, and I'm not going to argue against that. But that's orthogonal to what I was saying there. All that I was... debating was the whole "oh, we're getting so much free content" idea. I've seen at least as much free content added in WoW too, and a bunch of other games for that matter. That's all I'm saying.
Sort of, yes and no.
Yes, there is a lot of duplicated geometry in WoW too, and I should know, I've played both games more than some would consider healthy.
No, the overal feeling isn't the same. As the general feeling goes, in WoW sometimes you're in a cave, sometimes you're in the woods, sometimes you're on some snow-covered mountain, and sometimes you're in a fort, etc.... There's some copied stuff, but on the whole there's a _lot_ of content anyway. Even if you see some of it twice or thrice, there is nevertheless lots of different stuff.
In COH everything is instanced, and everything is made of the same very small number of chunks. You'll see each chunk not just twice, nor even just a dozen times in different places, you'll see the same lobby literally a few _thousand_ times in different missions. It's hard not to start noticing that it's the same map again, even if you actively tried to not notice it.
The thing that comes to mind about COH is an Evil Inc comic strip where villains call to rent some warehouse for their fight with the hero, only to be told it's only available on Saturday after 6 PM because other villains rented it the rest of the week. That's the sensation I get with COH's maps. I'm doing the same warehouse again, only this time it's with Tsoo in it, and last time it was with Freakshow in it. But otherwise it's not just the same, but the enemy groups are in the same places, the boss is in the same big room and the glowie is under the stairs again. It's as if literally someone owns half a dozen warehouses, maybe half a dozen office buildings, a couple of research-themed buildings, etc, and the various groups just rent one of them for their showdown after the previous gang is done with it.
Quantity doesn't say anything about quality. If my hypothetical restaurant boasted 100 different recipes on the menu, but they're all minor variations of the same cheeseburger, you're not going to think it's the most diverse food around.
What I'm trying to say is that in COH
A) all missions are one of:
- kill NPC and everyone else in the same room
- click on glowie
- rescue hostage
- kill everyone on map
- defend an object
And I don't mean at a conceptual level (as in, both Deadmines and Ulduar involve killing an end-boss in WoW), but they're all a map full of NPC groups and you have to do largely the same thing yet again on a different map. But what makes it worse is:
B) maps aren't very different. Like in the old Daggerfall, maps are made of a small number of huge and easily recognizable chunks, that are just interconnected in different ways. So for example it's very easy to recognize that you're in the same 4-level cavern room you've already seen a gazillion times before, or that you're in the exact same lobby with an overpass, or in the same 4-way warehouse junction.
Once you recognize that, you don't just know the exact architecture and have seen it before. (As in, at the level of, "oh, around that corner are the cubicles and around that other corner is a ramp up.") After a while you also know exactly where the enemies can spawn and around which corners you should be careful.
In WoW terms, for whoever is more familiar with that, think how memorable the cave with the ship was in the Deadmines when you saw it the first time as a newbie. Now think if it were reused in a thousand other dungeons, and you're seeing the same bloody room again from level 1 to level 80. Because it's reused again and again and again.
Just saying that it's a lot of missions is kind of misleading, when you run into such copied and pasted rooms over and over again.
And even worse...
C) The number of different combinations of those pieces is also rather limited. So not just the chunks of some maps can be what you've already seen before, but the whole bloody map can be an exact duplicate of something you've already played a hundred times.
And sometimes it's as if they don't even try to hide it at all. In fact as if they try to rub your nose in it.
E.g., I can think of one teen-level task force where three missions in a row are identical. As in, you do the exact same map, with the exact same layout, and the exact same enemies, 3 times in a row. It's just placed in different buildings around the city, but it's the same mission again. What was the purpose of _that_? Just to make sure I know it's a copy-and-paste time sink?
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that the game as a whole sucks or anything. That's a matter of personal tastes, anyway. But saying that it has lots of content is IMHO highly misleading, since actually it's very little content copied and pasted over and over again. Repetition doesn't really make it more content.
The problem is that that's not what the devs wanted to do. If their vision had been "screw this, we'll let players skip as many levels as they want", I can respect that. After all, the Death Knights in WoW start directly at level 55 out of 80 levels.
But it gets funny reading some Positron statement in COH where he complains about the players abusing the mission designer as power-levelling, and promises punishments to everyone who made farming missions and/or everyone who used them. And reminding everyone that it was really intended for players to make deep and meaningful story arcs, and expects it to be used that way. Now _that_ is funny.
What did he expect there to happen?
That does not sound to me like he's treating players as adults. It's
A) as usual, implementing stuff without any forethought and then being thoroughly surprised that it doesn't work as expected
B) then treating players like children who need to be threatened into doing things the way you want them to do it, instead of the way that your game allows and rewards
And I especially would like you to roll the latter around in your head. As a general rule of thumb, each game gets the players and behaviours that it rewards. If a game rewards farming it gets farmers, if it rewards all out PvP it gets mostly PvP-ers, and if it rewards being a ultra-competitive dick it gets ultra-competitive dicks, etc. If nothing else, because anyone who wanted something radically different in a game, gets the hint that he'll always be a second class citizen and leaves. And everyone who was ambivalent gets the idea that action A is more rewarding than action B, and learns to do A more than B.
It's not just about COH, btw. E.g., if in WoW you see mostly soloing from levels 1 to 79, it's because that's the kind of thing that offers the most bang-per-buck (or reward per effort) within the constraints of that game's design.
It's really that simple.
And any designer who ends up threatening players for using game mechanic A instead of game mechanic B, in my book he's incompetent. Either sit back and let players use what works, or fix your own god damned game so option A isn't that rewarding. Or have the forethought to not implement it in the first place, if it's that predictable that it will be abused in ways you don't like.
While I do play COH and like it, I don't see it as that special in that aspect.
For example WoW also released a lot of individual instances, story arcs, etc, for free in between the two expansion packs. E.g., the endgame content in both the original game and BC was released as such free patches, and even WOTLK has just seen for example Ulduar released as such a free patch. Just because they don't call them "issues" or make a big fuss about it, it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Furthermore, 14 issues sounds a bit vague. Exactly how much content is an issue? Well, it ranged from whole areas to little more than bugfixes or rebalances being called issues.
Well, we've had front page stories about most other MMOs so far. I certainly remember articles speculating about Wrath Of The Lich King, back before when that was released. And articles about how WAR is adding a whole two classes... copied and renamed from other races. And then about how it's merging servers. Or about how Eve, after years of ignoring individual players if they don't happen to be some dev's best buddies, now is letting players elect a council. (Which it will likely still ignore, but now it gives players something to do and somewhere to argue with each other, instead of pestering the devs.) Etc.
It's the games section. What did you really think goes there?
Bullshit. There is no such thing as "empty calories". That very concept is on par with those who sell you some holistic natural salt based on claims that its mollecules are more jagged like the natural ones, not round and unnatural like the industrial made ones. Or on par with the audiophile-grade network cables. It's bullcrap for idiots who want to feel all superior about their nutrition, but aren't actually smart or educated enough to understand nutrition.
For a start pretty much any animal meat will contain the same aminoacids (in its proteins) as your body is made of. There is very little you can do, short of incinerating that meat to a fine ash, to destroy those and be left with "empty calories."
Do you understand that? There is no fucking thing that McDonald can do to a piece of beef or chicken (while still keeping it edible at all) to stop it from having the exact same 20 aminoacids that your body uses or needs.
Also your body is very good at synthetising various things from various other things. E.g., sugars get turned into fats and viceversa. (Which is why Atkins works or why drinking will give you a fat liver.) E.g., over half the aminoacids can be synthetised from other stuff, and viceversa.
Even "empty calories" would still have their use, since the above synthesis takes energy, same as anything your body uses. It has to come from somewhere.
But again, there is no such thing as "empty calories". There are sugars, fats, proteins, etc, which incidentally your body can all burn to energy. Or use in other ways.
"Different types of calories" and storing the different types as fat? Do you even know what a calory is, junior? Or what fat is? It's the same fat stored in your cells either way. If your body can convert something into fat, it will be the same fat which is used as an energy reserve. As the _same_ kind of energy reserve, as it'll get converted into glucose first when it's needed as fuel.
There is no such thing as storing, say, vitamins or proteins as fat for later.
So do yourself a favour. If you want to talk about nutrition, read about nutrition, not sensationalist pseudo-science or sensationalist propaganda.
Ah yes, the grand old place where a minority takes their own comprehension problems as some claim to glory and superiority.
Did I claim that the former was worse? Well, blimey, no, that's your own strawman.
Come on, you can do better than that.
I can just see what ID could do with it.
"Duke Nukem 4": Duke is out to kick ass and chew bubblegum, but he's not just out of bubblegum, he also can't use his boot and a flashlight at the same time. The refreshing twist that will inject new life into the series.
And the exciting expansion pack: "Duke Nukem 4 Dark Edition". He's not just out of bubblegum, he's also out of batteries for that flashlight.
"Duke Nukem 5: Attack Of The Nazi Demon Babes from Mars" ID hopes to also attract fans of their Wolfenstein and Doom/Quake franchises with this twist. Plus, nobody around the office had any ideas that don't involve nazis or demons. Plus, at least it will still have the demons left in for the German or French markets, after the nazi symbols and references have to be removed. (See, Return To Castle Wolfenstein.)
Or it could get sold to Bethesda, who'll add such exciting new twists as item damage (Duke's boots will need repairs after every 5 asses kicked), armours that don't actually stop much damage, etc. And a construction kit which the users can use to add such original, meaningful, in-character stuff as jedi lightsabers, black recolours of everything (hey, it's an easy to use filter in either Photoshop or Gimp), silenced portable fully-automatic nuclear howitzers, and the ever popular DD-cup naked female bodies.
As a welcome twist for nostalgic fans of their past games, the creative genius behind Morrowind's story is brought back. In Duke too, the story will again be along the lines of, "go and save the world, if you can be arsed to. No hurry. If you can't be bothered, someone else will. See if we care. It's not like the evil will happen in less than a few thousand years anyway. If it does at all, that is."
Gamers sick of being told where to go and how urgent their mission is, will undoubtedly welcome the change. Self-confessed casual gamer John Smith is quoted as saying, "Finally a game which doesn't put me under pressure. I couldn't take it any more, being told how I'm the only one who can save the world, or how urgent it is. It can make a guy incredibly stressed, you know? It made me want to curl up in a corner and cry, like when I can't find a card to move in Windows Solitaire. I was waking up at night in cold sweat, thinking that maybe the Ultimate Evil is finally succeeding while I sleep. It's a stressful life, knowing you're the big hero. Knowing that I'm a completely unimportant nobody and that nothing bad is going to happen anyway, now that's a welcome change of pace."
So basically all that a piece of call-home spyware has to do is offer you some advantage... compared to other DRM's that shouldn't exist in the first place, either?
Reminds me of a joke some eastern-european coleague told me some years ago. Went something like, the constant state surveillance and phone taps weren't all bad. If you forgot what hour you're supposed to meet your girlfriend, you could call the police and ask them.
Actually, if we're at using WoW as an example, an even better thing they do is: generate statistics from the servers, so they can actually know if they actually have a problem or just a bunch of whiny arseholes. They don't need to have the players vote on whether the Rogues' backstab needs to be even stronger. (Let's be honest. Half the players will likely tell you that if there is anything on the server, whether player, elite boss, end boss, or faction ruler, that they can't one-shot, they're nerfed and mistreated by the game.) They can just generate the statistics and see if one class, faction, piece of equipment, or whatever, is performing as intended and balanced.
Each time I read something like that... I can't help getting the picture of someone with his head so far up his rear end that he assumes that he's not just a representative sample of 1 for the whole gamer population, and indeed world, but verily _the_ prototype from which all others were moulded. And if, god forbid, they happen to like something else, they must be deluded in some way.
Guess what? We all play games "as a funny way to spend time." You're not revealing some great wisdom to anyone, you just reveal your own disconnect from the real world. The idea that someone actually tries to play games as some form of art _as_ _opposed_ to actually having fun, and to the exclusion of actually having fun, is a delusion that exists only in the imagination of fanboys. Again: we _all_ play games "as a funny way to spend time."
We just find different things fun. Some like to read a book, some like to watch a movie, and some like their stories in a more interactive form. And then some others seem to genuinely like mindlessly mowing down gazillions of NPCs just for score/level/whatever. (And who am I to say there's anything wrong with it?) Different things for different people. That's all.
Hmm, maybe it's just me, but I never thought "aspie" was an insult or heard it used as an obvious insult.
Still seems silly to me, when you start renaming actual medical conditions just for fear of hurting the emotions of someone even worse off. Should we also stop calling autism autism, just because someone even more autistic out there could feel unhappy about it? Should we stop calling asthma asthma, just because some people are even more crippled by it?
The real insulting part in your example would be your using that term as an inherent insult, instead of a medical condition. _That_ is what ends up annoying those who genuinely have that condition.
But when you get to the point of actually using the euphemisms even for the actual disease, something tells me that you're missing the whole point.
Errata: I meant Victor Lustig, sorry.
Uh, dude, there _are_ sources of information besides Wikipedia and newspapers. That's all I'm saying. Saying basically "yeah, but some newspapers were worse" is hardly an endorsement of Wikipedia's accuracy. It's a bit like saying that someone is more honest than Peter Lustig.
Really?
1. I'll again point at the fact that a hoax about didgeridoos being cloned, complete with pictures of little didgeridoos in test tubes and considerations about the life expectancy of cloned didgeridoos, survived on the German Wikipedia for more than a year. So I guess sometimes it's not that great at self-correcting, eh?
2. _How_ he did it, is less relevant than the fact that it did survive. And yes, some people routinely seem have the time to get into edit wars, or even get more creative (e.g., invent bogus credentials) to have their version stick.
3. An objection that boils down to "yeah, but it takes effort", is a non-objection. If anything it's an illustration as to why the real experts eventually give up. Because routinely there's an idiot willing to invest more time and effort than the real expert.
That's nice, but it's missing the whole point.
Yes, it's happened before. Yes, it'll happen again. No, it's not a nice thing to do. But it will happen again anyway.
And _that_ is the problem. Something that is so easily vandalized, isn't that great a source of information.
If you will, I'll draw your attention to your own point:
_That_ is the whole point. If a peer-reviewed journal was as easy to "experiment" on, it anyone with enough time could redefine physics or history in it just because he was bored, then everyone would agree that it's a fucking useless journal. So, yes, how about we apply the same standard to Wikipedia?
Again: what's not OK, isn't just the experiment itself, but the very fact that it's trivial to make such an experiment. Not that just it's hypothetically possible, but that it actually happens again and again.
Yes, it means that some people are assholes. Do you have some safeguards against that? Because otherwise it's the same failing of techno-utopianism as of any other utopianism. If to work it would need everyone to play nice, stick to the rules, and know their own limits -- i.e., if to work it needs humans as a whole to change -- then that's the failure of any utopianism. Communism too would have worked perfectly, for example, if it weren't for those pesky humans who insist on being what they are instead of the new breed that Marx, Engels and Lenin envisioned.
That very need to scream that someone else didn't play by your rules, _that_ is what tells me that it's yet another failed utopianism.
1. Well, some of us are brought in as consultants to bail a bunch of cargo-cultists out of the hole they have dug themselves into. I'm not talking about guessing about whether some completely unrelated job is done right or wrong, but about something which _is_ my job and theirs.
And when I see whole teams, "architect" included, think that it's a clever optimization to use Integer instead of int for your method's arguments, "because for an int Java copies the whole value on the stack, but for an Integer it only copies a pointer to it"... there are very few conclusions I can get to, other than that they're genuinely not qualified for their job.
2. Some things are well documented as anti-patterns, and not just in programming. I don't have to fully understand someone's job to find an exact verbatim example of why that's the wrong thing to do. Written by smarter people than me on the domain.
E.g., I don't have to be an MBA to recognize a corncob manager or a management feud when I see one.
3. Some things are just that obvious.
For example, the most... depressing thing I've seen was a team leader who was just using his Java project to try to prove that Java sucks and VB is much better. Blown deadlines and bugs were actually _good_ for _his_ agenda, because it just allowed him to run to some hapless non-techie manager and make a "see, that's what happens when you use Java!" speech out of it. And once you learned that, it also became more easily understandable why he's changing scope in mid-flight, move the goalposts, and generally doing anything to keep his project from succeeding.
Maybe I'm not fully qualified to do his job, but I don't think he's paid to do _that_. After all, if the company actually wanted that project never finished, they could have just not started it in the first place.
Or when you see whole departments do nothing more than get in the way -- e.g., DBAs who argue that simultaneously (A) it's not their job to tune the database, and (B) you can't get the rights to do that yourself either; apparently they're just there to make sure the databases run, but no more, and they just try to keep you from it, for fear of bringing it down -- it's hard not to get the idea that _someone_ in that organization is doing a crap and anti-productive job. Maybe it's not the DBAs themselves, but whatever dolt defined the IT's job as just making sure that the computers run, but _someone_ out there is definitely not helping get the real job done. The real job is to have a working complete system, and I mean including the software, not to have a computer from which users and developers are kept away from as much as possible.
1. It was rebutted by Britannica long ago, and the rebuttal is on the very page you linked to. Short version: it turns out that if you review paragraphs taken out of context, make up non-existent Britannica articles, label stuff that's actually correct as Britannica's error, etc, you too can complain that Britannica is incomplete and superficial.
Oh yeah, and let's not distinguish between the occasional typo in Britannica and outright error. Let's pretend that all errors are equal. Then finally we dragged Britannica down at the level of a circle-jerk truth-by-consensus gang.
2. Well, I don't know about their methods, but based on my random excursions to Wikipedia, I'd say probably nobody vandalizes Britannica with whole paragraphs or even articles of 100% bullshit. Just as a random sample, off the top of my head, I learned from Wikipedia such things as that:
- didgeridoos are cloned in test tubes (the article stayed on the German wikipedia for more than a fucking year)
- iron is extracted from monkeys
- one of ancient Rome's bridges was manufactured in Japan
- that primus pilus meant _and_ _didn't_ mean "first spear" at the same time (different articles said polar opposite things about that)
And other such fine bullshit.
Basically when I go to Wikipedia, I have to wonder not only if there's some small omission or typo in the text, but whether the whole fucking article is (currently) a vandalism. I'll continue to have my doubts that that kind of thing happens to Britannica.
And here's a fun parting thought: if a source is so often wrong about the things that I do know about, I'll be paranoid about trusting it about the things that I don't know about.
Do you even understand the difference between "makes me wonder" and "evidence"? Or were you that busy doing that ego-masturbation to let such details get in the way?
Really? Who?
And you managed to prove, what? That you just want to call people names without offering even the faintest trace of either fact or conjecture or even imagination? Why, blimey, you said it's wrong, it must be wrong.
Really? Well, then you're the informed one, you tell me. What _does_ a McDonald restaurant (remember, they said "restaurants", not the central systems) use SCO for? What does a pharmacy use, and actively license, SCO Unix for? Is there some computing centre in the back of a McDonald restaurant that I wasn't aware of?
Or was the whole purpose of the exercise to complain about my imagination, based on... nothing more than your bare assertion that it's wrong?
Heh. Cretin.