Erm... of all the things I could think of to associate death with, "shameful" seems... illogical to the extreme.
"Shame" implies some sort of breaking some morals, and it makes no sense to have morals against something inevitable. You can have morals against, say, streaking, because that's something you can avoid doing. You can't have morals against something that will happen sooner or later to everyone, and has happened to a bunch of everyone's relatives anyway.
Basically contrast:
A) "We're ashamed of cousin John. He got drunk and sang obscene songs in the town square."
B) "We're ashamed of cousin Wang. He got ill and died."
Lets make an MMO that looks like and plays something like Wow, and expect it to do wonders! Nevermind that we're going up against the single most profitable game ever made, and one that has had 4 years to refine it's gameplay. Surely we shall succeed despite all odds!
Surely you realize that the same could be said -- and back then it _had_ been said -- about WoW and EQ. They too were going against the single most profitable game ever made, who had had years to refine its gameplay, bla, bla, bla.
Well, then neither did Everquest, City Of Heroes, or almost any other game, SWG included. Virtually any game's curve on MMOG Charts keeps going up for months or even years before it peaks and starts going back down. You have to fuck up pretty hard if your population curve peaks at the end of the free month.
So I don't think you can argue that the vast majority of games are the exception, and a couple of fuck-ups whose only merit was massive launch hype are the rule.
I also was on the EU servers at launch and they were splitting servers (i.e., adding new ones) like crazy for the first month. So if their problem was too few people per server, I have to wonder wtf were they _thinking_? Didn't they have a feedback loop there? You know, "how many people are average and max on this server? Do we really need to split it?"
Admittedly, it's after past 1AM, so maybe my maths stopped working by now, but isn't 2^13 about 8000 dollars for the grand prize? It seems a bit low for all the work of basically reviewing their code and concepts.
Hostile code disassembly? If it were that simple to disassemble someone else's code and automatically prove that it can't do anything wrong -- including by having security holes exploitable by a third party -- forget the browser, we'd have it standard in the OS or in the last step of make/ant/whatever. We could all stop worrying about antiviruses (who, in turn, would stop needing signatures and heuristics updated all the time anyway), reviewing code by hand to see if all buffers are checked, etc. Just run the magic utility and it'll tell you.
I'm willing to bet that at least the antivirus makers have tried that before, you know, what with all of them offering some forms of heuristics by now, and none of them got it past the level of hit-and-miss. More miss than hit, in fact.
Not saying that Google couldn't have got some genius that actually made it work, but at the very least it's not going to be a trivial job digging through all their cases to check if they really checked all possible attack vectors.
And 8192 dollars doesn't really seem to be much incentive for doing that work.
Actually, while I _am_ for socialized healthcare for other reasons (cue the flame wars), when it comes to the actual topic of TFA, namely incompetent doctors, I can assure you first hand that socialized healthcare doesn't solve that at all. Here in Germany plenty of doctors still prescribe the wrong things, do the wrong tests, or make judgment calls like "he's probably just imagining it, let's give him a homeopathic placebo"... for something that later turns out to be a real disease when actual tests are performed.
Let's put it like this: according to one study, about 3 out of 4 programmers can't actually program, and according to another one about 2 in 3 don't really know the language they're paid to program in. (Or not above the knowing the basic syntax level.) What makes you think it's any different for doctors?
And the insurer, one way or the other, can't know the expected benefit for _your_ case. Only the doctor knows if it looks like disease X or disease Y. If the doctor says it's a bad hip, and you need tests and procedures X, Y, and Z, even if they would be the best ones for that hip case, they won't do jack shit if the real source of the pain are for example the kidneys. Or if like in the summary, the doctor says you need a PAP test, the insurance doesn't know that you don't actually have a cervix, and isn't qualified to really understand such things in the first place. The best thing the insurer can do is trust the doctor there anyway, because he just isn't qualified to say otherwise.
And socialized healthcare, for all it's good parts, has also created the following problems down here:
1. There are doctors prescribing very expensive, and sometimes dangerous tests, because they need the money to pay for those machines and the insurance pays anyway. Now if it just meant taking a couple of millilitres of blood and running it through the machine that goes "bing", that's just a waste of money, but won't kill you. But you can be sent to get an X-Ray for example, when you don't actually need one, and that carries a tiny risk of getting cancer.
2. There are a lot of placebo treatments and remedies prescribed, mostly because the insurance can't (for one reason or the other) say that it won't pay for that.
E.g., at the doctor I used to go to, she had posters on the walls for such things as "natural pulsing magnetic field therapy". As far as I understand, they put a wide coil around you and hook it to a very low frequency AC power supply. Exactly what's natural about a coil and a PSU with lots of transistors, or where the f-word would you find such a pulsing magnetic field in nature, is still baffling me.
E.g., one of the treatments she offers is basically this: they take a pint of your blood, expose it to UV-B, then inject it right back. It's supposed to be some naturist "optical activation" or such. The problem is that it doesn't do jack squat for your blood, except kill a bunch of cells there and maybe give nasty mutations to the survivors. But at any rate UV-B _kills_. It's used to kill germs in water, for example. So they just killed a bunch of your healthy blood cells, and injected the result back, with the only effect being that the liver will now have to metabolize the resulting bilirubin. And exactly how is that natural, anyway?
E.g., another poster on her walls is for holistic natural homeopathic plant extracts for various ailments ranging from being tired, to shock. Now shock is a very nasty, life-threatening emergency. Even if you survive it, the body cuts off blood supply to muscles and inner organs to try to keep the brain alive as long as possible. Basically the rest of the body starts dying pretty fast, and it costs years of your life. Prescribing some naturist placebo there, or even helping spread the idea that one could just take a few drops of a placebo in a life-threatening emergency, is _criminal_ in my book. Or should be.
Now she certainly hasn't prescribed any of that to me, so I'm willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. It's probably th
I believe that ED is documented in the training levels (level 1) Outbreak and Breakout. However, it's pitifully small and single paged wall of text makes everyone click out of it without reading it.
That too, but I'd say the biggest problem is that it's vague and uninformative anyway.
I think a lot of the numbers that have changed over time without being updated shouldn't be considered a 'lie', it's just outdated. No malice was intended. I think if you're really that angry at the devs and don't think that the game is working for you, perhaps a break would be in order.
Well, I do think that Hanlon's Razor applies: "Never attribute to malice, that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
So, no, I don't think it's malice. I think it's stonking incompetence _and_ a half-arsed effort.
Why incompetence? Because that info should have been just read from the actual values used by those powers. That's what WoW does when it shows you those numbers, for example. It actually ready the min/max damage and attack rate values of your sword, looks at your actual modifiers and bonuses, and gives you the actual DPS you do with that weapon. It _can't_ show you false values there, because it's the same data and functions used when you actually swing that sword.
That they duplicated the data in the first place, is incompetence as it is. That they didn't even bother updating the copy, now that's such a half-arsed effort. It's exactly an illustration of why you shouldn't duplicate data or do copy-and-paste programming in the first place: you end up changing one copy without the other. Or would be, if it were a transient bug in one patch or another, but that it stays there for _years_ makes me wonder if they even give a flying fuck.
Look, there is no big secret to WoW, since we started this thread at competing with it. WoW didn't invent much new, it just took the basic existing MMO idea, removed all rough edges and inconveniences to the players, balanced the hell out of it, and gave it all an amazing polish. That's it: in a world where MMOs were traditionally launched as unfinished crap, they polished the turd. There is no reason why COH couldn't do it too. But seeing them ignore known errors for years, or launch an issue/patch while they know it's buggy or unbalanced, it's blatant on the test server that it dosn't work right, and devs post on the boards that they know it is, but will probably fix it later, is just not the way to do it. It's blatant not even caring about quality and testing, and in the end their declining player numbers and inability to retain new players reflect that too.
I think if you're really that angry at the devs and don't think that the game is working for you, perhaps a break would be in order.
Well, thank you Captain Obvious. Whatever would we have done without you?;)
I believe that CoH needs some serious attention from the devs that Cryptic didn't bother with when they had MUO on their table. Now that NCSoft has picked up the CoH franchise lock stock and barrel, they might actually put in the effort to revive and refine the game.
Well, exactly. That's really all I was trying to say. They need to have a good look at it, because the twelfth hour is nigh. Before, they at least retained oldbie comic-book-fans because they were the only superhero MMO, and those people stayed there no matter what. Just for lack of choice. But this year there are _two_ super-hero MMOs scheduled for launch, the first one in a mere couple of months. COH is about to lose a lot of old players, and they still aren't even trying to attract new ones.
You can purchase Inspirations during a TF in the Oro Portal.
... except you're not allowed to use the Ouroboros portal until you're level 25. Which makes it less of an option for the teen-levels I was talking about:)
You can also get them from your Super Group Base.
I don't know about other players, but I waited a bit more before jumping in a SG. So that option won't help that many new players.
You call getting to level 20 a grind. Just who are you playing with? If you focus on doing story archs such as the initial contact arch, the Hollows Story Arch, and stick to a team. You'll to level 20 in less ten hours of playtime.
... if you're in 8 player groups all the time, otherwise it goes a lot slower. And God help you if you're trying it with some of the pickup-groups I've been in over the years. Or God help you if you're on the COV side and actually want a large group, or at times a group at all.
Nevertheless, that's 10 hours of being out of breath all the time like Captain Asthmatic. I haven't found it enjoyable on many builds.
They do allow you to respec your characters slotting and powers after doing a Task Force designed to be relatively easy.
You're kidding, right? It's a TF with force shields (pretty much accuracy debuffers) at a level where most people miss as it is. And otherwise the difficulty is just about on par with any other task forces, albeit with fewer missions.
Try it with a pickup group which actually _needs_ a respec badly because they messed up their spec, and watch the reactor blow up. I mean, I've actually been in a group there where one scrapper actually had 1 attack but the full Medicine pool, because he thought he's a paladin, the defender had all 3 travel pools maxed, but only the two heals and no buffs, another scrapper had two travel pools and no Stamina, and so on. People who knew they need a respec. The only saving grace is that we didn't blow up because we never made it to the reactor: by the second instanced mission before that the group disbanded because we had no chance.
I always wondered what's the big idea of aiming a TF-class challenge at people who are there because they messed up their spec.
Let's not forget that at level 10 you get a separate build for your character so that you can get a second chance at it.
... very recently. And at twice the cost. A genuine newbie won't be able to afford even two sets of DOs, unless they had had some insane luck and got a rare drop to sell.
Or maybe you've gotten about the Test Server where you can copy a character over and test everything out?
Except again, in the actual game almost nobody knows about it. Yet another feature that nothing in the game ever tells you about. I keep educating people about using it before using a respec and genuinely, everyone who isn't the seventh alt of a seventh alt has no clue that it even exists.
Look, it illustrates just what I'm saying: the game can do all this wonderful stuff, except nothing in there tells you about it. And when it does, it flat out lies. It's like the devs live in some imaginary wonderland where everyone automatically knows something that was only once announced on a board 3 years ago, or maybe was somehow born knowing it. The game should do a better job of educating people how to play, if it wants to compete with other games which do.
Accuracy is largely dependent on the level of your opponent. In a Task Force [your main complaint] the opponents that you are facing are typically +4 to +5 above your level at the start. As you level through the task force, you've gained levels towards the end were everything is down to +2 or +3. Let's not forget the amazing bonuses that the leader ship pool gi
I think the biggest problem with a constantly changing game like CoH is that there is no set of documentation that is maintained and updated so that new and mid range players can understand what is going on. The closest thing is the paragon wiki and perhaps red tomax, but there is no directed tutorial that gets you into the nuts and bolts of CoH.
I did say there was more than one problem, and yes that's another one. The game violates the principle of least astonishment big time.
E.g., based on actually interacting with newbies, the ED is _the_ biggest and least obvious surprise, and it isn't documented anywhere except on the forums. I've had at least one sidekick o' mine get all upset and outright quit the game when he discovered that his 6-slots in Hasten early became 3 wasted slots once he got to SO's. There was absolutely nothing in the game to warn about it. Either you just knew about the soft cap from somewhere else, or you can shoot yourself in the foot big time with it.
The developers now has changed their stance and have published numbers and mechanics for the game, but you must go into the forums in order to find out how and what the game is like for each of the separate parts of the game. It also doesn't help when the game is still evolving in areas such PvP (wholesale revamp), economy (marketplace and loot, and reward merits) and general powers and powersets (new primaries and secondaries, and invention origin enhancements and set bonuses).
Glad that you mention that, because that's a thing that got even _me_ angry: the game does give you some info, but actually it flat out _lies_ to the player. Because the detailed info screens are not generated from the actual info used by those powers, and nobody updates them.
E.g., both the load-screen tips _and_ the detailed info for the powers, still tell new players that Brutes taunt with their attacks like the tanks. That hasn't been true in more than a year. Probably even two, IIRC. E.g., after the activation times for most of the Assault Rifle attacks were reduced to 0.9s, and the patch notes said so, last time I played my AR Blaster the in game info for those powers still said 1.0s activation time and calculated the wrong DPS by 11%!
I'm sorry, but that's just bloody sad.
The 'greybeards' of CoH tend not to have any problems with the issues you've described because they know what to take/not to take, how to avoid/slot/team to minimize the downsides to having low endurance/recovery and low accuracy and speed.
Just for the record, I've been there for more than 4 years, according to my veteran awards.
But that brings me to another thing: it's not us "greybeards" that the game needs to cater the most to. It's the newbies that are needed to grow, or even to replace the oldies that eventually get bored anyway and bugger off.
My perfect example are the veteran reward attacks. Everyone who's not a DPS class needed extra attacks at low levels, but they give them only to veterans of many years. Why? Just so they can continue to shed new players almost as fast as they get them?
If you have a defender or tank with a single attack, and you want to build a character who does have some kind of attack, use mids hero designer. It is third party standalone, and accurate enough where you can plan ahead to choose what powers you have and what the powers do.
Oh, I have Mid's Hero Designer. Newbies don't have it, though, and that's who COH really needs to start retaining more.
Knockback at any level can be problematic until you get to higher levels. Some ATs/powersets have a lot of -kb in specific powers, like tankers and scrappers. Use mids or the forums to find out which. Acrobatics is available at level 20 in the Leaping Pool if you don't have access to -kb in your powerset, although the current trend for a lot of people is to slot -kb procs in th
So, you can't tell a human player from an AI one, and that's the game's fault? It's very clear. since player chars have their hame, clan, and title above them.
They didn't at launch. And now it's too late anyway.
guess since TR required skill to aim, fire, and use the cover system, it couldn't attract the WoW players who are used to standing still and hitting the same three buttons over and over. Boo hoo.
Are you retarded, or just can't read? At least at launch the cover system didn't work _at_ _all_.
Also, I wouldn't consider "keep the crosshair over someone for ages to lock" to actually count as "skill to aim". It's more of a test of being that bored as to waste time with that pointless time sink.
Well, I understand your point, and the comparison has merit. Still, just to clear things up a bit:
1. Well, it's the same publisher, not the same developers. So, to be pedantic, it's not exactly the same people who made both.
2. The problem is that COH actually has 50 levels. So it doesn't even have the excuse of normal content vs endgame content. (By and large COH doesn't even have endgame content.) It's just almost half of the normal zones and content that one has to just gnash the teeth and grind through, just to get to a point where they don't have 50%+ downtime.
That is, if you knew to plan ahead. Which already isn't fun by itself, because you have more than half of your skills already accounted for just so you can stop sucking at level 20. There's not much flexibility or room for experimentation, just grinding ahead and checking checkmarks on a list of skills you must have by level 20.
But most newbies don't even know they need to do that. So if they made it to 20 without quitting, typically it's with a character which still sucks, and it just got suckier than ever. Now they're moving towards 75% downtime without those mandatory skills. If they hadn't quit in the teens, half of them will quit in the 20's, after discovering that the game let them plough ahead and get a non-viable character.
It just makes me wonder what the heck were they _thinking_ when they came up with that system.
It's kinda sad, though. The game had actual potential, so it was a bit painful to see it fuck up repeatedly. And while it's not half as bad nowadays than in Statesman's time, the game still has real problems.
The biggest of which IMHO is the screwed up difficulty curve, which makes it really hard to keep newbies there even if they try the game.
See, for example WoW starts easy and simple. You're awesomely powerful at level 1 compared to level 1 enemies. (The wolves in Northshire do 1hp per attack, so it would take a while to kill you even if you were trying to get killed.) There is no downtime. There isn't much running around. As the game progresses, actually you become weaker compared to the enemies. You need more tricks, more talents, purple equipment, etc, just to kill an enemy as easily as you were doing it at level 1. But at any rate, you can start having fun right here and now.
In COH it's exactly the other way around. In the beginning you have:
- buggerall attacks for a long time. (As a tanker or defender it's not uncommon to have one single weak attack until the mid-20's or so, and much twiddling your thumb while you wait for it to recharge.)
- you run out of endurance (think: mana) within a fight, and the "rest" button recharges once in a blue moon, so mostly you just get to sit around twiddling your thumbs for 3 f-ing minutes until it slowly recharges. And it gets even worse if you actually use your defenses, because those suck your endurance even faster.
- get to run to the other end of a zone and back all the time, and often through enemies which can kill you easily (running into level 6 enemies when running to a level 1 mission is not really great fun. And as that level means, it's more like running through level 10 enemies on WoW.)
- your accuracy sucks, so you'll have big streaks of missing the enemy
- you only need to take one wrong turn to wake up at the hospital
Etc.
And, you know, because that sucks already, let's add some enemies which make it worse. E.g., I know, if everyone is missing lots already, let's give them enemies which debuff to-hit. (The Circle Of Thorns ghosts, for example.) If everyone is already running out of endurance all the time, like they're The Amazing Asthmatic Man, let's give them enemies which actively drain endurance. (E.g., Clockworks or the Mu guys on Arachnos missions.) Etc. Oh, and just because nobody has any defense against knock-back or status effect yet, let's give them enemies which mez (tsoo) or that Kadabra Kill guy in a villain mission, which can perma-bounce you to death if he gets his Singularity out.
To get an idea how bad it can get, I was in a low-level task-force again recently where I was actually hitting the enemies 5% of the time. Measured, ffs. Whole chains of 20 to 50 swings at thin air, because some idiot designer thought it would be fun to fill the mission with accuracy-debuffers, at levels where nobody can have much accuracy to start with. That's the face that COH shows to new players.
What I'm getting at is that for the vast majority of classes, levels 1 to 20 are a frustrating grind. Unless you were the kind of masochistic guy who actually likes being kicked in the nuts hard and often. Or for some classes (e.g., controller) a grind to level 32. (Which in terms of time and effort invested is akin to having to grind to level 60 on WoW.) _Then_ you can start to actually enjoy the game.
Could they stop losing to WoW? Well, they could. The game keeps getting new people trying it all the time. I know I meet new newbies in it all the time. It would just need to give them a reason to stay there. But it just doesn't even try to be nice and gentle to them, so it loses them right back. Whoever expects to just enjoy the game right away, instead of gnashing teeth, counting xp and grinding to a level where it stops sucking, is gone by level 14.
Which incidentally is also the level cap in the downloadable demo. Yes, you've heard that right. They put the worst and most frustrating
Well, stuff like the game telling you in the tutorial to use cover, but then it didn't actually do anything. You could take cover behind a crate, and then you (or better someone else looking at it from the side) could see the enemy fire or spells going straight to the crate, then up, horizontally over the crate, then down behind the crate at you. Like it was a terrain-following cruise missile, instead of a stupid bullet.
Then stuff like that it was nigh impossible to even tell who's a player and who's an NPC, because:
A. There were no names or anything equally obvious on the screen
B. Everyone looked the same
So I'd run into a group of merry retards jumping around shooting at some enemy, and I'd think, "ah, it must be players jumping like that, I better not steal their kill", and then discover it was NPCs after all.
Lighting also didn't help. Under the trees for example it was really dark, so I had trouble even telling that someone's there, much less who's who. And again, bear in mind that everyone dressed pretty much the same, and in the dark it was even more hopeless to tell who's who.
The minimap was a funky SF thing in blue, which was unnecessarily hard to read. If you look at the one in WoW, it being in colour really helped recognize the terrain. You can go, basically, "ah, there's the road because it's a brown stripe." You didn't really have those clues in TR.
Balance was a joke too, though I've come to kinda expect that in MMOs. Other than Blizzard, it seems like nobody ever tried to get that right.
The mix of FPS and MMO was IMHO badly done. It was neither really FPS, nor the, well, bastard child of EQ or MMO. It was as if Mr Macho FPS got Miss MMO pregnant, but they were both on drugs and she was taking Thalidomide too at the time, and then they both scratch their heads and wonder why the kid was born with flippers instead of arms and legs;) Joke aside, they took the worst of both worlds, basically. You could neither just turn and shoot at what's under the cursor (and expect to hit, anyway) like in a twitch-gamer fps, nor just select the enemy and use the mouse on your toolbar like in most MMOs.
Etc.
Finally, again, bear in mind that "sucked" is a very subjective thing. We have at least one person in this thread who actually thought it was a great game. Also, well, maybe "sucked" is too hard put. We're not talking Anarchy Online class crap, but merely a thoroughly uninspired game which tried to ignore all that was known about game design, and what works and what doesn't in a game, and reinvet it all from scratch. (Hence the "Tabula Rasa" name.) And ended up not much fun to play. Maybe not as in "I'd rather have root canal instead", but at the very least up to the "why would I actually want to pay a monthly fee for this?" mark.
I guess it just shows how subjective tastes are. I also tried it when it was first released, like many other people did -- you know, because it's Lord British and all -- and my conclusion was the exact opposite: there was not much to like about it. In fact, I hated every single design decision about it, except for "let's make it SF." Even as the "let's make a bastard child of MMO and FPS" went, it had been done much better before: e.g., Planetside.
In fact, you're the first person I even hear about which considered it a great game. I know several gamers IRL, and lemme tell you their tastes are spread all over the spectrum. There are a couple which prefer EQ2 over WoW, there's one guy who's actually become a big WAR fan, the mandatory couple of WoW addicts too, etc, among other distinctions. So, you know, at least about them you can't say that they didn't even try TR because of WoW, because more than half don't even like WoW. And invariably the talk went something along the lines of:
Mr X: "So, what have you been up to lately?" Me: "Ah, I got Tabula Rasa last week." Mr X: "And, how do you like it so far?" Me: "To be honest, I'm don't like it that much." Mr X: "Heh. Why don't you ever ask first? I could have told you it sucked."
Mind you, I'm not going to tell you that you're wrong in a matter of subjective tastes. Just that you were obviously a too small minority to keep the game running.
Additionally, fun for who? It's a thoroughly subjective thing.
As a good example, take The Sims. It sold more copies than the top two FPS _combined_, and got more women into gaming than any game before it. Some people obviously loved it. But put some l33t FPS'ers in front of it, and most of them will find it a pointles waste of time: where's the score? Where's the competition with other players? Where are the bragging rights? Etc. And make no mistake, viceversa too. A lot of the people who loved The Sims, thought that Quake 3 or CounterStrike sucked.
E.g., if we're talking about consoles, take _the_ number one flame-war from the N64 era: platformers vs RPGs. At a time when there were more Final Fantasy games sold than all N64 Nintendo games combined, the his-own-fanboy Hiroshi Yamauchi shot his mouth all over the place with such pearls as "[People who play RPGs are] depressed gamers who like to sit alone in their dark rooms and play slow games" and (about RPGs again) "Stop playing boring games." Never mind that he was proud to never having played either kind of game (or any game at all, for that matter,) so he was basically just telling us "buy my game and not the competitors" in the most obnoxious asshat way. But lots of actual gamers did fall squarely into one of the categories:
A) "if I wanted to read, I'd get a book" vs
B) "what's the point if there's no story?"
And the flamewar between the two laid waste to many a board.
Which of them was right? Neither, actually. In a subjective matter of taste there is no "right" or "wrong".
But what I'm trying to say is: who decides which game is more fun? A lot of the guys from category A would have ranked FF7 as the biggest pile of crap, while a lot of those from category B thought that Mario 64 was a simplistic kiddie game. And both were right... for their own subjective tastes.
So basically it seems strange to me see such a list which combines something which can be measured objectively (sales, sequels, whatever you measure success and influence in) with something purely subjective (fun.) It's like claiming to make a top of cars based on horsepower _and_ how nice their colour is.
Well, I guess you can argue with NVidia to open source that driver. I'm certainly not going to object to that:P
Different kind of "nil" ;)
on
Designer Babies
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· Score: 2, Interesting
"The probability that _both_ the egg _and_ the sperm have that mutation out of nowhere, is pretty much nil."
Welcome to the evolution creation debate.
1. Not really. There's a massive difference between:
A) the chance of you and your wife doing it, by repeatedly getting her pregnant and screening the embryo to see if it matches your expectations
B) the chance of some mutation happening across billions of individuals and millions of years
To illustrate the difference: a 1 in a million chance per pregnancy is unfeasible for case A. Even if you got her pregnant on every ovulation, you'd need an average if 4 million weeks. The same 1 in a million case is peanuts for the world's population. There are about 4 people born per second world-wide, so 1-in-a-million chances will happen on the average every 250,000 seconds = approx 70 hours = more than once per 3 days.
Simply put, what's feasible for _one_ family is entirely different from what's possible for the whole species.
2. Here we're talking about the chance of getting a very specific mutation, wanted in advance by the parents. Evolution does't have such predestined outcomes. It can yield literally billions of different mutations which are just as ok, if they pass the natural selection test.
To illustrate the difference: think of getting a mutation that gives one green eyes. For "designer babies", well, if the parents really wanted blue eyes, it's the wrong one and the foetus will be discarded. For evolution it's a non-issue. The baby will be born anyway, and since it gives no other disadvantage, the mutation will survive just fine.
Or in the words of Richard Feynman: "You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won't believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!"
That's exactly the difference we're talkig about here:
I. Creationists come all the time with ideas like "what are the chances of exactly us being created by accident?" But that's like the license plate here. We're just one of the billions of different species, and billions of different mutations each. It didn't _have_ to be us, and it didn't have to be any particular mutation. We're just a random thing that worked.
We're not even the best thing imaginable. E.g., birds' lungs are much more efficient than mammalian lungs. We would have had an advantage if we had that other type of lung but we didn't, because that random chance didn't happen.
Evolution doesn't call it in advance "it's going to have to be blond with blue eyes." It just tosses the dice and see what works better out of the random results. Maybe it'll be green hair and yellow eyes instead. If it works, it works.
II. Whereas here the proposition is precisely that the parent say in advance what they want to get. They want blond with blue eyes, for example. Now the aim isn't just to have anything that works, but a given combination required in advance. A lot of otherwise viable combinations for the evolution scenario just became "wrong" for what a given mom and dad want. That makes the chances a lot shittier.
I thought FSAA was supposed to cause blurring, not the pixel dropouts you describe. Besides, games that aren't PC exclusives are also designed for SDTVs and EDTVs, and their fonts look fine even in 480p.
A. It's not FSAA. It's interleaving. So whatever you thought about FSAA doesn't apply here, sadly.
B. It's not rendered as two 1680x525 images, but as two 1680x1050 images with every other line missing. Which, yes, kills small fonts.
1. Actually, from my experience, I've seen actually intelligent people fall to such scams once greed clouds their judgment. E.g., I failed to convince an otherwise extremely intelligent woman -- and for bonus points, usually she was the one selling snake oil to gullible PHBs -- to not "invest" in a pyramid scam. She understood exponents perfectly, but there was no getting her to accept that she is not in the first ranks who'll get their payoff, and/or that there aren't enough suckers any more to fill more than the first ranks of such a scheme.
At some point wishful thinking takes over any other kind of reason. They _want_ it to be true so hard, that basically cognitive dissonance rebuilds their mental model to something where they can win.
That's how the brain works: when you have two conflicting pieces of your mental model, it has to be resolved to something internally consistent one way or the other. And it's extremely uncomfortable while not yet resolved. All animals seem to work that way. What's different in humans is that you can essentially have a piece of the model that's so important to you that it can't be displaced, so something else has to go. Basically you _can_ distort your mental model as far as needed for any kind of wishful thinking, if you wish hard enough, and being intelligent or perceptive has nothing to do with it.
Among other things, that's why once someone started on such a path, it's harder than ever to quit. Accepting "ok, I've been a dolt, the Nigerian prince doesn't exist, I'll never see that money again" means basically a loss of self-respect, so it's a big no. So something else in that mental model has to be changed to support the idea that you're smart after all, too smart to be fooled in fact, and you only make smart investments. Hence the already lost money becomes a smart investment to be continued.
If anything, having such immovable ideas about oneself makes it easier to happen. If you're too convinced that you're too smart to be fooled, that just creates the setup for defending a dumb decision against all evidence.
2. Actually it seems to me like it's a test of honesty. As the saying goes, "you can't scam an honest person." Virtually all scams, from pyramid schemes to Nigerian advance fee scams to "Soapy" Smith's soap-with-banknotes scam to everything else, have the same common denominator: the "mark" thought he's getting some undeserved money at someone else's expense.
E.g., most people actually understand a pyramid scheme and that it will run out of marks soon very well, but they think they can join in early enough to be a part of the scammers not of the losers. E.g., I doubt that anyone in the Nigerian advanced fee scam was actually planning to dutifully give the widow's/orphan's/whatever money once it's in their account. And at any rate they were willing to break some laws and do shady stuff. So even if (ad absurdum) it were just for the promised fee, it's still a wannabe crook willing to break or bend the law for money. E.g., stock tip scams work on people who think that they can move fast enough to sell when it peaks and basically be a part of the scammers instead of the victims. E.g., the dolts who bought the Eiffel Tower from Victor Lustig thought they can give a bribe to get the rights to that metal at substantial discount, i.e., that they can use corruption to scam the state. Etc.
So basically it's just a honesty test. If you can say "no, that wouldn't be right", you can't be scammed. If you go, basically, "OMG, it's a one in a lifetime occasion to scam someone out of their money" then congrats, it's your own dishonesty that pwns you.
From there, again, being too convinced that you're too smart to be scammed is just making it actually easier. Those guys who bought the Eiffel Tower too were convinced that they're too smart to be fooled, savvy, good judges of caracter, etc, and know a genuine corrupt government official when they see one. The ones who think they understand exponents or the stock market too well to possibly be wrong about anything, just use that to support and defend the decision to jump on a pyramid scam or stock tip scam respectively, once greed started to cloud their judgment. Etc.
"Pass through" is one way to put it. It wasn't just some peacefully marching down the road. It also involved quite a bit of good, ol' fashioned attacking, plundering and looting. The Helvetii had made the arrangements for peaceful passing through the territory of their immediate neighbours, but the Allobroges and pretty much everyone else were already fair game.
At any rate, it seems to me that the ones in the way of that migration weren't exactly happy about it.
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Erm... of all the things I could think of to associate death with, "shameful" seems... illogical to the extreme.
"Shame" implies some sort of breaking some morals, and it makes no sense to have morals against something inevitable. You can have morals against, say, streaking, because that's something you can avoid doing. You can't have morals against something that will happen sooner or later to everyone, and has happened to a bunch of everyone's relatives anyway.
Basically contrast:
A) "We're ashamed of cousin John. He got drunk and sang obscene songs in the town square."
B) "We're ashamed of cousin Wang. He got ill and died."
The latter makes no sense to me.
So basically they had to over-invest in way too many servers because their code sucked?
Surely you realize that the same could be said -- and back then it _had_ been said -- about WoW and EQ. They too were going against the single most profitable game ever made, who had had years to refine its gameplay, bla, bla, bla.
Well, then neither did Everquest, City Of Heroes, or almost any other game, SWG included. Virtually any game's curve on MMOG Charts keeps going up for months or even years before it peaks and starts going back down. You have to fuck up pretty hard if your population curve peaks at the end of the free month.
So I don't think you can argue that the vast majority of games are the exception, and a couple of fuck-ups whose only merit was massive launch hype are the rule.
Only if they wear white ;)
I also was on the EU servers at launch and they were splitting servers (i.e., adding new ones) like crazy for the first month. So if their problem was too few people per server, I have to wonder wtf were they _thinking_? Didn't they have a feedback loop there? You know, "how many people are average and max on this server? Do we really need to split it?"
Funny. WoW didn't have that problem.
WTF? So what did they replace the whole plaguelands, undercity, Tirisfal, and Silverpine with? Evil Tibetans? ;)
Admittedly, it's after past 1AM, so maybe my maths stopped working by now, but isn't 2^13 about 8000 dollars for the grand prize? It seems a bit low for all the work of basically reviewing their code and concepts.
Hostile code disassembly? If it were that simple to disassemble someone else's code and automatically prove that it can't do anything wrong -- including by having security holes exploitable by a third party -- forget the browser, we'd have it standard in the OS or in the last step of make/ant/whatever. We could all stop worrying about antiviruses (who, in turn, would stop needing signatures and heuristics updated all the time anyway), reviewing code by hand to see if all buffers are checked, etc. Just run the magic utility and it'll tell you.
I'm willing to bet that at least the antivirus makers have tried that before, you know, what with all of them offering some forms of heuristics by now, and none of them got it past the level of hit-and-miss. More miss than hit, in fact.
Not saying that Google couldn't have got some genius that actually made it work, but at the very least it's not going to be a trivial job digging through all their cases to check if they really checked all possible attack vectors.
And 8192 dollars doesn't really seem to be much incentive for doing that work.
Actually, while I _am_ for socialized healthcare for other reasons (cue the flame wars), when it comes to the actual topic of TFA, namely incompetent doctors, I can assure you first hand that socialized healthcare doesn't solve that at all. Here in Germany plenty of doctors still prescribe the wrong things, do the wrong tests, or make judgment calls like "he's probably just imagining it, let's give him a homeopathic placebo"... for something that later turns out to be a real disease when actual tests are performed.
Let's put it like this: according to one study, about 3 out of 4 programmers can't actually program, and according to another one about 2 in 3 don't really know the language they're paid to program in. (Or not above the knowing the basic syntax level.) What makes you think it's any different for doctors?
And the insurer, one way or the other, can't know the expected benefit for _your_ case. Only the doctor knows if it looks like disease X or disease Y. If the doctor says it's a bad hip, and you need tests and procedures X, Y, and Z, even if they would be the best ones for that hip case, they won't do jack shit if the real source of the pain are for example the kidneys. Or if like in the summary, the doctor says you need a PAP test, the insurance doesn't know that you don't actually have a cervix, and isn't qualified to really understand such things in the first place. The best thing the insurer can do is trust the doctor there anyway, because he just isn't qualified to say otherwise.
And socialized healthcare, for all it's good parts, has also created the following problems down here:
1. There are doctors prescribing very expensive, and sometimes dangerous tests, because they need the money to pay for those machines and the insurance pays anyway. Now if it just meant taking a couple of millilitres of blood and running it through the machine that goes "bing", that's just a waste of money, but won't kill you. But you can be sent to get an X-Ray for example, when you don't actually need one, and that carries a tiny risk of getting cancer.
2. There are a lot of placebo treatments and remedies prescribed, mostly because the insurance can't (for one reason or the other) say that it won't pay for that.
E.g., at the doctor I used to go to, she had posters on the walls for such things as "natural pulsing magnetic field therapy". As far as I understand, they put a wide coil around you and hook it to a very low frequency AC power supply. Exactly what's natural about a coil and a PSU with lots of transistors, or where the f-word would you find such a pulsing magnetic field in nature, is still baffling me.
E.g., one of the treatments she offers is basically this: they take a pint of your blood, expose it to UV-B, then inject it right back. It's supposed to be some naturist "optical activation" or such. The problem is that it doesn't do jack squat for your blood, except kill a bunch of cells there and maybe give nasty mutations to the survivors. But at any rate UV-B _kills_. It's used to kill germs in water, for example. So they just killed a bunch of your healthy blood cells, and injected the result back, with the only effect being that the liver will now have to metabolize the resulting bilirubin. And exactly how is that natural, anyway?
E.g., another poster on her walls is for holistic natural homeopathic plant extracts for various ailments ranging from being tired, to shock. Now shock is a very nasty, life-threatening emergency. Even if you survive it, the body cuts off blood supply to muscles and inner organs to try to keep the brain alive as long as possible. Basically the rest of the body starts dying pretty fast, and it costs years of your life. Prescribing some naturist placebo there, or even helping spread the idea that one could just take a few drops of a placebo in a life-threatening emergency, is _criminal_ in my book. Or should be.
Now she certainly hasn't prescribed any of that to me, so I'm willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. It's probably th
About level 10-12 sounds just about right, come to think of it.
That too, but I'd say the biggest problem is that it's vague and uninformative anyway.
Well, I do think that Hanlon's Razor applies: "Never attribute to malice, that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
So, no, I don't think it's malice. I think it's stonking incompetence _and_ a half-arsed effort.
Why incompetence? Because that info should have been just read from the actual values used by those powers. That's what WoW does when it shows you those numbers, for example. It actually ready the min/max damage and attack rate values of your sword, looks at your actual modifiers and bonuses, and gives you the actual DPS you do with that weapon. It _can't_ show you false values there, because it's the same data and functions used when you actually swing that sword.
That they duplicated the data in the first place, is incompetence as it is. That they didn't even bother updating the copy, now that's such a half-arsed effort. It's exactly an illustration of why you shouldn't duplicate data or do copy-and-paste programming in the first place: you end up changing one copy without the other. Or would be, if it were a transient bug in one patch or another, but that it stays there for _years_ makes me wonder if they even give a flying fuck.
Look, there is no big secret to WoW, since we started this thread at competing with it. WoW didn't invent much new, it just took the basic existing MMO idea, removed all rough edges and inconveniences to the players, balanced the hell out of it, and gave it all an amazing polish. That's it: in a world where MMOs were traditionally launched as unfinished crap, they polished the turd. There is no reason why COH couldn't do it too. But seeing them ignore known errors for years, or launch an issue/patch while they know it's buggy or unbalanced, it's blatant on the test server that it dosn't work right, and devs post on the boards that they know it is, but will probably fix it later, is just not the way to do it. It's blatant not even caring about quality and testing, and in the end their declining player numbers and inability to retain new players reflect that too.
Well, thank you Captain Obvious. Whatever would we have done without you? ;)
Well, exactly. That's really all I was trying to say. They need to have a good look at it, because the twelfth hour is nigh. Before, they at least retained oldbie comic-book-fans because they were the only superhero MMO, and those people stayed there no matter what. Just for lack of choice. But this year there are _two_ super-hero MMOs scheduled for launch, the first one in a mere couple of months. COH is about to lose a lot of old players, and they still aren't even trying to attract new ones.
I don't know about other players, but I waited a bit more before jumping in a SG. So that option won't help that many new players.
Nevertheless, that's 10 hours of being out of breath all the time like Captain Asthmatic. I haven't found it enjoyable on many builds.
You're kidding, right? It's a TF with force shields (pretty much accuracy debuffers) at a level where most people miss as it is. And otherwise the difficulty is just about on par with any other task forces, albeit with fewer missions.
Try it with a pickup group which actually _needs_ a respec badly because they messed up their spec, and watch the reactor blow up. I mean, I've actually been in a group there where one scrapper actually had 1 attack but the full Medicine pool, because he thought he's a paladin, the defender had all 3 travel pools maxed, but only the two heals and no buffs, another scrapper had two travel pools and no Stamina, and so on. People who knew they need a respec. The only saving grace is that we didn't blow up because we never made it to the reactor: by the second instanced mission before that the group disbanded because we had no chance.
I always wondered what's the big idea of aiming a TF-class challenge at people who are there because they messed up their spec.
Except again, in the actual game almost nobody knows about it. Yet another feature that nothing in the game ever tells you about. I keep educating people about using it before using a respec and genuinely, everyone who isn't the seventh alt of a seventh alt has no clue that it even exists.
Look, it illustrates just what I'm saying: the game can do all this wonderful stuff, except nothing in there tells you about it. And when it does, it flat out lies. It's like the devs live in some imaginary wonderland where everyone automatically knows something that was only once announced on a board 3 years ago, or maybe was somehow born knowing it. The game should do a better job of educating people how to play, if it wants to compete with other games which do.
I did say there was more than one problem, and yes that's another one. The game violates the principle of least astonishment big time.
E.g., based on actually interacting with newbies, the ED is _the_ biggest and least obvious surprise, and it isn't documented anywhere except on the forums. I've had at least one sidekick o' mine get all upset and outright quit the game when he discovered that his 6-slots in Hasten early became 3 wasted slots once he got to SO's. There was absolutely nothing in the game to warn about it. Either you just knew about the soft cap from somewhere else, or you can shoot yourself in the foot big time with it.
Glad that you mention that, because that's a thing that got even _me_ angry: the game does give you some info, but actually it flat out _lies_ to the player. Because the detailed info screens are not generated from the actual info used by those powers, and nobody updates them.
E.g., both the load-screen tips _and_ the detailed info for the powers, still tell new players that Brutes taunt with their attacks like the tanks. That hasn't been true in more than a year. Probably even two, IIRC. E.g., after the activation times for most of the Assault Rifle attacks were reduced to 0.9s, and the patch notes said so, last time I played my AR Blaster the in game info for those powers still said 1.0s activation time and calculated the wrong DPS by 11%!
I'm sorry, but that's just bloody sad.
Just for the record, I've been there for more than 4 years, according to my veteran awards.
But that brings me to another thing: it's not us "greybeards" that the game needs to cater the most to. It's the newbies that are needed to grow, or even to replace the oldies that eventually get bored anyway and bugger off.
My perfect example are the veteran reward attacks. Everyone who's not a DPS class needed extra attacks at low levels, but they give them only to veterans of many years. Why? Just so they can continue to shed new players almost as fast as they get them?
Oh, I have Mid's Hero Designer. Newbies don't have it, though, and that's who COH really needs to start retaining more.
They didn't at launch. And now it's too late anyway.
Are you retarded, or just can't read? At least at launch the cover system didn't work _at_ _all_.
Also, I wouldn't consider "keep the crosshair over someone for ages to lock" to actually count as "skill to aim". It's more of a test of being that bored as to waste time with that pointless time sink.
Well, I understand your point, and the comparison has merit. Still, just to clear things up a bit:
1. Well, it's the same publisher, not the same developers. So, to be pedantic, it's not exactly the same people who made both.
2. The problem is that COH actually has 50 levels. So it doesn't even have the excuse of normal content vs endgame content. (By and large COH doesn't even have endgame content.) It's just almost half of the normal zones and content that one has to just gnash the teeth and grind through, just to get to a point where they don't have 50%+ downtime.
That is, if you knew to plan ahead. Which already isn't fun by itself, because you have more than half of your skills already accounted for just so you can stop sucking at level 20. There's not much flexibility or room for experimentation, just grinding ahead and checking checkmarks on a list of skills you must have by level 20.
But most newbies don't even know they need to do that. So if they made it to 20 without quitting, typically it's with a character which still sucks, and it just got suckier than ever. Now they're moving towards 75% downtime without those mandatory skills. If they hadn't quit in the teens, half of them will quit in the 20's, after discovering that the game let them plough ahead and get a non-viable character.
It just makes me wonder what the heck were they _thinking_ when they came up with that system.
It's kinda sad, though. The game had actual potential, so it was a bit painful to see it fuck up repeatedly. And while it's not half as bad nowadays than in Statesman's time, the game still has real problems.
The biggest of which IMHO is the screwed up difficulty curve, which makes it really hard to keep newbies there even if they try the game.
See, for example WoW starts easy and simple. You're awesomely powerful at level 1 compared to level 1 enemies. (The wolves in Northshire do 1hp per attack, so it would take a while to kill you even if you were trying to get killed.) There is no downtime. There isn't much running around. As the game progresses, actually you become weaker compared to the enemies. You need more tricks, more talents, purple equipment, etc, just to kill an enemy as easily as you were doing it at level 1. But at any rate, you can start having fun right here and now.
In COH it's exactly the other way around. In the beginning you have:
- buggerall attacks for a long time. (As a tanker or defender it's not uncommon to have one single weak attack until the mid-20's or so, and much twiddling your thumb while you wait for it to recharge.)
- you run out of endurance (think: mana) within a fight, and the "rest" button recharges once in a blue moon, so mostly you just get to sit around twiddling your thumbs for 3 f-ing minutes until it slowly recharges. And it gets even worse if you actually use your defenses, because those suck your endurance even faster.
- get to run to the other end of a zone and back all the time, and often through enemies which can kill you easily (running into level 6 enemies when running to a level 1 mission is not really great fun. And as that level means, it's more like running through level 10 enemies on WoW.)
- your accuracy sucks, so you'll have big streaks of missing the enemy
- you only need to take one wrong turn to wake up at the hospital
Etc.
And, you know, because that sucks already, let's add some enemies which make it worse. E.g., I know, if everyone is missing lots already, let's give them enemies which debuff to-hit. (The Circle Of Thorns ghosts, for example.) If everyone is already running out of endurance all the time, like they're The Amazing Asthmatic Man, let's give them enemies which actively drain endurance. (E.g., Clockworks or the Mu guys on Arachnos missions.) Etc. Oh, and just because nobody has any defense against knock-back or status effect yet, let's give them enemies which mez (tsoo) or that Kadabra Kill guy in a villain mission, which can perma-bounce you to death if he gets his Singularity out.
To get an idea how bad it can get, I was in a low-level task-force again recently where I was actually hitting the enemies 5% of the time. Measured, ffs. Whole chains of 20 to 50 swings at thin air, because some idiot designer thought it would be fun to fill the mission with accuracy-debuffers, at levels where nobody can have much accuracy to start with. That's the face that COH shows to new players.
What I'm getting at is that for the vast majority of classes, levels 1 to 20 are a frustrating grind. Unless you were the kind of masochistic guy who actually likes being kicked in the nuts hard and often. Or for some classes (e.g., controller) a grind to level 32. (Which in terms of time and effort invested is akin to having to grind to level 60 on WoW.) _Then_ you can start to actually enjoy the game.
Could they stop losing to WoW? Well, they could. The game keeps getting new people trying it all the time. I know I meet new newbies in it all the time. It would just need to give them a reason to stay there. But it just doesn't even try to be nice and gentle to them, so it loses them right back. Whoever expects to just enjoy the game right away, instead of gnashing teeth, counting xp and grinding to a level where it stops sucking, is gone by level 14.
Which incidentally is also the level cap in the downloadable demo. Yes, you've heard that right. They put the worst and most frustrating
Well, stuff like the game telling you in the tutorial to use cover, but then it didn't actually do anything. You could take cover behind a crate, and then you (or better someone else looking at it from the side) could see the enemy fire or spells going straight to the crate, then up, horizontally over the crate, then down behind the crate at you. Like it was a terrain-following cruise missile, instead of a stupid bullet.
Then stuff like that it was nigh impossible to even tell who's a player and who's an NPC, because:
A. There were no names or anything equally obvious on the screen
B. Everyone looked the same
So I'd run into a group of merry retards jumping around shooting at some enemy, and I'd think, "ah, it must be players jumping like that, I better not steal their kill", and then discover it was NPCs after all.
Lighting also didn't help. Under the trees for example it was really dark, so I had trouble even telling that someone's there, much less who's who. And again, bear in mind that everyone dressed pretty much the same, and in the dark it was even more hopeless to tell who's who.
The minimap was a funky SF thing in blue, which was unnecessarily hard to read. If you look at the one in WoW, it being in colour really helped recognize the terrain. You can go, basically, "ah, there's the road because it's a brown stripe." You didn't really have those clues in TR.
Balance was a joke too, though I've come to kinda expect that in MMOs. Other than Blizzard, it seems like nobody ever tried to get that right.
The mix of FPS and MMO was IMHO badly done. It was neither really FPS, nor the, well, bastard child of EQ or MMO. It was as if Mr Macho FPS got Miss MMO pregnant, but they were both on drugs and she was taking Thalidomide too at the time, and then they both scratch their heads and wonder why the kid was born with flippers instead of arms and legs ;) Joke aside, they took the worst of both worlds, basically. You could neither just turn and shoot at what's under the cursor (and expect to hit, anyway) like in a twitch-gamer fps, nor just select the enemy and use the mouse on your toolbar like in most MMOs.
Etc.
Finally, again, bear in mind that "sucked" is a very subjective thing. We have at least one person in this thread who actually thought it was a great game. Also, well, maybe "sucked" is too hard put. We're not talking Anarchy Online class crap, but merely a thoroughly uninspired game which tried to ignore all that was known about game design, and what works and what doesn't in a game, and reinvet it all from scratch. (Hence the "Tabula Rasa" name.) And ended up not much fun to play. Maybe not as in "I'd rather have root canal instead", but at the very least up to the "why would I actually want to pay a monthly fee for this?" mark.
I guess it just shows how subjective tastes are. I also tried it when it was first released, like many other people did -- you know, because it's Lord British and all -- and my conclusion was the exact opposite: there was not much to like about it. In fact, I hated every single design decision about it, except for "let's make it SF." Even as the "let's make a bastard child of MMO and FPS" went, it had been done much better before: e.g., Planetside.
In fact, you're the first person I even hear about which considered it a great game. I know several gamers IRL, and lemme tell you their tastes are spread all over the spectrum. There are a couple which prefer EQ2 over WoW, there's one guy who's actually become a big WAR fan, the mandatory couple of WoW addicts too, etc, among other distinctions. So, you know, at least about them you can't say that they didn't even try TR because of WoW, because more than half don't even like WoW. And invariably the talk went something along the lines of:
Mr X: "So, what have you been up to lately?"
Me: "Ah, I got Tabula Rasa last week."
Mr X: "And, how do you like it so far?"
Me: "To be honest, I'm don't like it that much."
Mr X: "Heh. Why don't you ever ask first? I could have told you it sucked."
Mind you, I'm not going to tell you that you're wrong in a matter of subjective tastes. Just that you were obviously a too small minority to keep the game running.
Additionally, fun for who? It's a thoroughly subjective thing.
As a good example, take The Sims. It sold more copies than the top two FPS _combined_, and got more women into gaming than any game before it. Some people obviously loved it. But put some l33t FPS'ers in front of it, and most of them will find it a pointles waste of time: where's the score? Where's the competition with other players? Where are the bragging rights? Etc. And make no mistake, viceversa too. A lot of the people who loved The Sims, thought that Quake 3 or CounterStrike sucked.
E.g., if we're talking about consoles, take _the_ number one flame-war from the N64 era: platformers vs RPGs. At a time when there were more Final Fantasy games sold than all N64 Nintendo games combined, the his-own-fanboy Hiroshi Yamauchi shot his mouth all over the place with such pearls as "[People who play RPGs are] depressed gamers who like to sit alone in their dark rooms and play slow games" and (about RPGs again) "Stop playing boring games." Never mind that he was proud to never having played either kind of game (or any game at all, for that matter,) so he was basically just telling us "buy my game and not the competitors" in the most obnoxious asshat way. But lots of actual gamers did fall squarely into one of the categories:
A) "if I wanted to read, I'd get a book" vs
B) "what's the point if there's no story?"
And the flamewar between the two laid waste to many a board.
Which of them was right? Neither, actually. In a subjective matter of taste there is no "right" or "wrong".
But what I'm trying to say is: who decides which game is more fun? A lot of the guys from category A would have ranked FF7 as the biggest pile of crap, while a lot of those from category B thought that Mario 64 was a simplistic kiddie game. And both were right... for their own subjective tastes.
So basically it seems strange to me see such a list which combines something which can be measured objectively (sales, sequels, whatever you measure success and influence in) with something purely subjective (fun.) It's like claiming to make a top of cars based on horsepower _and_ how nice their colour is.
Well, I guess you can argue with NVidia to open source that driver. I'm certainly not going to object to that :P
1. Not really. There's a massive difference between:
A) the chance of you and your wife doing it, by repeatedly getting her pregnant and screening the embryo to see if it matches your expectations
B) the chance of some mutation happening across billions of individuals and millions of years
To illustrate the difference: a 1 in a million chance per pregnancy is unfeasible for case A. Even if you got her pregnant on every ovulation, you'd need an average if 4 million weeks. The same 1 in a million case is peanuts for the world's population. There are about 4 people born per second world-wide, so 1-in-a-million chances will happen on the average every 250,000 seconds = approx 70 hours = more than once per 3 days.
Simply put, what's feasible for _one_ family is entirely different from what's possible for the whole species.
2. Here we're talking about the chance of getting a very specific mutation, wanted in advance by the parents. Evolution does't have such predestined outcomes. It can yield literally billions of different mutations which are just as ok, if they pass the natural selection test.
To illustrate the difference: think of getting a mutation that gives one green eyes. For "designer babies", well, if the parents really wanted blue eyes, it's the wrong one and the foetus will be discarded. For evolution it's a non-issue. The baby will be born anyway, and since it gives no other disadvantage, the mutation will survive just fine.
Or in the words of Richard Feynman: "You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won't believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!"
That's exactly the difference we're talkig about here:
I. Creationists come all the time with ideas like "what are the chances of exactly us being created by accident?" But that's like the license plate here. We're just one of the billions of different species, and billions of different mutations each. It didn't _have_ to be us, and it didn't have to be any particular mutation. We're just a random thing that worked.
We're not even the best thing imaginable. E.g., birds' lungs are much more efficient than mammalian lungs. We would have had an advantage if we had that other type of lung but we didn't, because that random chance didn't happen.
Evolution doesn't call it in advance "it's going to have to be blond with blue eyes." It just tosses the dice and see what works better out of the random results. Maybe it'll be green hair and yellow eyes instead. If it works, it works.
II. Whereas here the proposition is precisely that the parent say in advance what they want to get. They want blond with blue eyes, for example. Now the aim isn't just to have anything that works, but a given combination required in advance. A lot of otherwise viable combinations for the evolution scenario just became "wrong" for what a given mom and dad want. That makes the chances a lot shittier.
A. It's not FSAA. It's interleaving. So whatever you thought about FSAA doesn't apply here, sadly.
B. It's not rendered as two 1680x525 images, but as two 1680x1050 images with every other line missing. Which, yes, kills small fonts.
1. Actually, from my experience, I've seen actually intelligent people fall to such scams once greed clouds their judgment. E.g., I failed to convince an otherwise extremely intelligent woman -- and for bonus points, usually she was the one selling snake oil to gullible PHBs -- to not "invest" in a pyramid scam. She understood exponents perfectly, but there was no getting her to accept that she is not in the first ranks who'll get their payoff, and/or that there aren't enough suckers any more to fill more than the first ranks of such a scheme.
At some point wishful thinking takes over any other kind of reason. They _want_ it to be true so hard, that basically cognitive dissonance rebuilds their mental model to something where they can win.
That's how the brain works: when you have two conflicting pieces of your mental model, it has to be resolved to something internally consistent one way or the other. And it's extremely uncomfortable while not yet resolved. All animals seem to work that way. What's different in humans is that you can essentially have a piece of the model that's so important to you that it can't be displaced, so something else has to go. Basically you _can_ distort your mental model as far as needed for any kind of wishful thinking, if you wish hard enough, and being intelligent or perceptive has nothing to do with it.
Among other things, that's why once someone started on such a path, it's harder than ever to quit. Accepting "ok, I've been a dolt, the Nigerian prince doesn't exist, I'll never see that money again" means basically a loss of self-respect, so it's a big no. So something else in that mental model has to be changed to support the idea that you're smart after all, too smart to be fooled in fact, and you only make smart investments. Hence the already lost money becomes a smart investment to be continued.
If anything, having such immovable ideas about oneself makes it easier to happen. If you're too convinced that you're too smart to be fooled, that just creates the setup for defending a dumb decision against all evidence.
2. Actually it seems to me like it's a test of honesty. As the saying goes, "you can't scam an honest person." Virtually all scams, from pyramid schemes to Nigerian advance fee scams to "Soapy" Smith's soap-with-banknotes scam to everything else, have the same common denominator: the "mark" thought he's getting some undeserved money at someone else's expense.
E.g., most people actually understand a pyramid scheme and that it will run out of marks soon very well, but they think they can join in early enough to be a part of the scammers not of the losers. E.g., I doubt that anyone in the Nigerian advanced fee scam was actually planning to dutifully give the widow's/orphan's/whatever money once it's in their account. And at any rate they were willing to break some laws and do shady stuff. So even if (ad absurdum) it were just for the promised fee, it's still a wannabe crook willing to break or bend the law for money. E.g., stock tip scams work on people who think that they can move fast enough to sell when it peaks and basically be a part of the scammers instead of the victims. E.g., the dolts who bought the Eiffel Tower from Victor Lustig thought they can give a bribe to get the rights to that metal at substantial discount, i.e., that they can use corruption to scam the state. Etc.
So basically it's just a honesty test. If you can say "no, that wouldn't be right", you can't be scammed. If you go, basically, "OMG, it's a one in a lifetime occasion to scam someone out of their money" then congrats, it's your own dishonesty that pwns you.
From there, again, being too convinced that you're too smart to be scammed is just making it actually easier. Those guys who bought the Eiffel Tower too were convinced that they're too smart to be fooled, savvy, good judges of caracter, etc, and know a genuine corrupt government official when they see one. The ones who think they understand exponents or the stock market too well to possibly be wrong about anything, just use that to support and defend the decision to jump on a pyramid scam or stock tip scam respectively, once greed started to cloud their judgment. Etc.
"Pass through" is one way to put it. It wasn't just some peacefully marching down the road. It also involved quite a bit of good, ol' fashioned attacking, plundering and looting. The Helvetii had made the arrangements for peaceful passing through the territory of their immediate neighbours, but the Allobroges and pretty much everyone else were already fair game.
At any rate, it seems to me that the ones in the way of that migration weren't exactly happy about it.