Well, having been both in the games industry for a couple of years, and making a better living with no-brainer Java/DB stuff ever since... here's my insight into it:
People who want to program a game are there _because_ they haven't "grown the fuck up." I'm not necessarily saying that in a demeaning way. I've been there myself, remember? They're the people who haven't lost that young age idealism and all that. They're the people willing to take a massively sub-par pay (just look at the average pay in the games industry: the joke is that they haven't outsourced it to India because the Indians don't work for that little), do longer hours, etc, to do their idea of doing the right thing. It's the guys willing to thumb their nose at society's norms and at the measuring it all in money and your car's price. Otherwise they wouldn't be there in the first place.
That however also comes with certain ideas born of the very same idealism, like that being an ass in a suit still means being an ass. Or that worth should be measured by what you can do, not by what you wear or whose money you've earned. That it's what you know, not who you know. Etc.
But again, those who don't have, or no longer have, that idealism, also aren't there willing to work for peanuts and be mistreated just to fulfill some ideal of what they want to work on.
If you want those who have "grown the fuck up", and think it all in terms of doing a job by the numbers, for the money, you'll find those of us doing some no-brainer web sites with all the buzzwords. You want EJB with that? Sure. It's half the work and several times the pay. If you don't aim for outright consultant, you only need less than half the skills too, and you might not even need to learn much new for decades. In fact, I think I'll learn COBOL next, 'cause I hear those salaries are on the rise. I'm a professional. I'm a high-tech luxury prostitute. I'll even put a costume for you if you pay enough. (E.g., suit and tie, if that's your fantasy.)
I don't think you can mix and match from column A and B that easily. Or not without paying a lot more than I suspect the OP is willing to pay. You want the skills and willingness to learn and long hours from column A, but the mentality from column B. It's going to cost you a pretty penny. Because that mentality from column B also says "hey, the whole free market economics says it's good to look for the best possible pay for my skills." You'll have to pay a competitive price by column B standards.
And at that, it won't be the entry wage of the professional world either. Depending on which studies you wish to believe, about 3 out of 4 don't contribute much to their projects, and 2 out of 3 don't even really know the language they're supposed to program in. So you'll want to aim for the top 25% or so. Which also means paying a competitive wage for that segment. It won't be cheap.
Basically I doubt that when the OP said he can't get professional programmers at any price, he really meant at any price. Hey, if you want to pay my consulting fee, I'd be happy to work on a game too. I suspect more like he expected to pay a wage for a game programmer, and get a suit-bearer. Even better, a suit-bearer with the skills of one of the former. It ain't gonna happen at that price.
Well, that's kinda the whole point. Given that today's transistors are 45nm or so, 10 times smaller would be 4.5nm, or about 15 silicon atoms IIRC. I think we can worry about that already.
You seem to be a bit confused, there aren't any games out right now where crafting is required including your big example world of warcraft. Infact, WoW is so raid centric that people in crafted gear replace it by the first 10 man raid they participate in. You say there aren't any games where you don't have to craft but you are completely wrong, there are NO games where you must craft to get places left worth a damn.
No, you seem to be the confused one. He didn't say anywhere that it would be crafting-centric, he merely said that they'll have crafting. Same as a car can be advertised as having a radio, without it being the central and most important bit in there.
So the accusation that he's a lying bastard just doesn't stick, anyway I want to look at it.
Now, I'm not bashing hack and slash, I'm simply saying that yeah if you want to hack and slash? thats cool! Let me make the swords instead of a vendor because supporting the power gamers is more fun to me and rewarding than sitting in a raid for 5 hours a day 3 days a week. I'd rather be crafting new items.
And I'm saying that it's been tried, and it screwed up the game for everyone else. Suddenly those "power gamer" newbies (*) can't even buy a toothpick, much less a weapon, without paying millions for it. Which they don't even _have_. That kind of game very quickly catters only to those who have a top-level alt with lots of money, or to those willing to sink months of their own into hammering stuff. Because there's no freaking way a new player can even compete with those for anything worth using.
You _have_ to check it by having loot and vendor stuff too, because otherwise the prices shoot through the roof, and you get a few people who get their boner out of being teh virtual uber-smith... but at the expense of having a million newbies who get tired of not being able to afford anything, and leave the game.
It's simply a bad trade-off. In fact, it's a way for any game to shoot itself in the foot. Because old players get bored and go away all the time, and if you turn off your newbies you end up without a replacement for them.
_That_ is why all games so far nerfed crafting. Because it's something that fucks up your whole game if you let it run amok.
And, hey, you want to craft? That's cool. But I'm not willing to sacrifice _my_ enjoyment for it. That's the kind of selfish guy I am;)
(*)... actually, just normal people who just want to do the quests and see the story, not get a simulation of taking a second job
Well, I'm certainly not saying it's the only way. It's just an example of something which logically makes no sense, but the players wrap their head around anyway.
I don't see how that's lying. He said they'll _have_ crafting, not that crafting will be the only thing or the alpha and omega. There are a lot of games which have both crafting and loot. WoW is probably the most visible example, though you could take EQ2, LOTRO or WAR as equally good examples. It's the norm.
There are even games where you use the loot _for_ crafting. E.g., the seeds in WAR or the "invention" system in COH/COV.
Anyway, it sounds to me like you wanted the whole game to revolve around crafted stuff. It probably won't. But he didn't say it would. He only said there would _be_ crafting.
And I can also see why they wouldn't want a crafting-centric game. Invariably crafting produces inflation. That's why everything in WoW costs gold at the AH, when quests and mobs of that level pay copper coins. You don't want a game where soon newbies discover they have to farm and grind for months to afford any good item, so there has to be _some_ other source of decent equipment for those of us who hate farming and grinding. You want loot and quest rewards too. That's a lesson that most games and designers had to discover the hard way, after letting crafting create a hyper-inflation comparable to inter-war Germany and drive newbies away.
In fact, no offense, my wish would be the exact opposite than yours: I wish there would be at least one fucking MMO without crafting at all. I don't want my game tainted by a screwed up economy, just to catter to those who want to pretend they have a second job. If you want to pretend you're a baker or miner, there are plenty of games who let you be one. Heck, there's A Tale In The Desert, which is all about that. It's not that much to ask that at least _one_ fucking game lets me concentrate on the actual quests and adventure, instead of making me farm and hammer for hours to be able to afford some other retard's armours. The system is essentially punishing people like me, to reward people like you. And I'm getting sick and tired of that.
I don't want to play a Ferengi, spending hours at the AH, trying to get the best deals on cath-hound balls and goat horns, so I can afford a decent blaster. Ferengi are that-a-way in Star Treck. Different universe.
It's not even "realistic" for those who cling to that notion. Boba Fett earned his money by being a bounty hunter, not by having a main job in herding and skinning nerfs to support his bounty-hunting hobby. And for medieval MMOs, they had this idea of the 3 estates of society back then: those who fight, those who tend the God(s), and those who work. And they were supposed to stay separate. If you were a mercenary you'd get paid, and if you were a knight you'd have an estate. The last time when one had to use his day job to pay for his armour to defend his country was, oh, before the Marian reforms in Rome in 107 BC.
It worked well for City Of Heroes. Every player in COH is, at least in the design guideline, equal to three minions _and_ a lieutenant. That's what's needed for a fight against a hero to be a 50-50 chance, you know, better have a potion (ok, "inspiration") ready.
But that's ok, because the NPCs are also generated in packs of 3 for a solo mission, or pretty much in platoons for an 8 player group.
And yes, nobody seems to have a problem with being in a city with a thousand super-heroes roaming the streets at any given time.
Generally, when it comes to MMOs, probably the only sane option is to just accept what works and is proven to work, and not think much about what would be "realistic". Starting from the original idea waay back that it would be unrealistic to have quests, because it would be unrealistic if 1000 people saved the same princess or killed the same arch-villain. It turns out that people actually get used quite easily to situations along the lines of,
"Ok, did everyone get Van Cleef's head?" "Yep, I did." "Wait, I've got to junk something and then I'll take it too." "I killed him yesterday, thanks" "Crap, my buddy disconnected. Guess we'll have to come tomorrow so he can get VC's head too."
Same here. Even when logically it would make little sense to have 10,000 legendary bounty hunters, the players invariably can wrap their mind around that concept just fine anyway.
And, in the end, is it that illogical? How good do you have to be, to be a heroic version of whatever you're doing. One in a million? Being one in a million sounds pretty special to me. Well, a planet like Earth has some 6000 people who are one-in-a-million, and a planet like Coruscant could have 100,000 by itself, or more than enough for any server's population by itself. And there's a whole galaxy out there in Star Wars. There are probably trillions of trillions of sentient humanoids across the galaxy, and taking the best-of-the best, the one-in-a-million people would still mean more players than WoW has total or even than the Earth's total population.
Well, the more I hear about Google, the more they seem like everyone else. And I'm not saying it in a condemning way or anything. They're just human.
They too need some big expensive toy as suspicious consumption. They too would rape your privacy if it helps optimize 0.01% off their average search time, and thus make an extra buck. They too will sell some Chinese babbling about "democracy" to the authorities if that's the price to make a billion dollars in business in China. They too will expose your data occasionally if it's cheaper than hiring testers. And they too apparently aren't above making a backroom deal with Yahoo or using patents keep the competition out of their little monopoly field.
(According to at least one analysis, that's why MS wants to buy Yahoo. Some time ago Yahoo apparently bought a small company who had a blanket patent on matching ads to the text on the page. Yahoo licensed it to Google, but refuses to license it to MS or anyone else.)
In a nutshell, they're like any other corporation. Plus a funky meaningless motto, that some people mistake for some kind of final proof that Google is the digital-age Mother Theresa. Heh.
The thing is, no other corporation is "evil" in the sense of seeking to cause the maximum misery, pain and destruction possible. Even MS, I'd bet they never had a board meeting along the lines of, "how can we make more people miserable?" There are no super-villains cackling over doomsday device blueprints. And there are no altruistic super-heroes either. There are only greedy people trying to make a buck, and the difference is in how many corpses they feel they can get away with stepping over, on their way to the top.
At any rate, Google "doing no evil"... well, it's technically true, but only in as much as you could say with a straight face that MS does no evil. They don't sacrifice babies to Satan or anything. But from there, both have shown repeatedly that their goal is simply to make the most money, and both don't have much consideration for whoever might get to suffer for it. As is, indeed, expected of a corporation.
They're just human. They're just a corporation. That's it. It doesn't make them evil, it merely makes them the same as everyone else. One just has the funny motto.
Well, I think I'll make "36 inch penis" my motto. I'm sure some people will actually believe that I live up to that;)
So, basically, you just told me that only the buyers know who they buy it for. Yet you insist that studies which actually asked the buyers are wrong, but the perception of some retail employee who didn't is better? Because you just used the latter as some kind of proof or at least hint that the former are BS. I'm not sure I follow that logic, then.
Actually, unless any of those retailers actually did a proper study, you're probably just seeing selective confirmation at work. Selective confirmation works like this: if you really want to believe something, you'll notice all the confirmation, and conveniently forget all the counter-examples.
One prime example of this is, well, all the "women can't drive" machos. Everyone of them can tell you a dozen anecdotes where some woman was driving only 60 in a 50 zone and "holding up the traffic". Everyone of the them is swift to hand-wave an excuse as to why it doesn't count or is just normal, if you point out a guy doing something even more stupid. But the funny thing is, last I saw a statistic from an insurance company (you know, the guys who tally up the accidents because they pay for them and have to adjust their premiums based on it), the average woman caused only _half_ as many accidents per mile driven as the average guy. Actually the absolute worst category isn't the women, it's the very young guys who drive like it proves their penis size. So that skewed perception doesn't actually match reality.
Which is why we do studies and polls, and don't rely on what Jack who works at GameStop remembers offhand.
Additionally, retailers... which retailers? Did you poll all of them? Or what?
Because for example the biggest games retailer in the USA is WallMart, not the mom-and-pop franchises that all the kiddies hang around. For every kid that hangs around EB Games all day and maybe buys a new game every two months, there'll be several moms and pops who get their stuff from WallMart and move on. And a bunch of other people get their games from electronics supermarkets like (at least here) Saturn, MediaMarkt, and the like. You won't see hordes of kids hanging around the aisles there. And I doubt that any given employee at such a big store has the time to hang around and see who takes what off the aisles.
So if you're using some games-only shop as your source, you're looking at a prime representation of the Biased Sample fallacy. What you see is actually just saying what kind of people hang around their shop, not a random sample of gamers as a whole.
It's like having a poll on Slashdot and concluding that 90% of the population are computer-savy nerds, and 50% run linux on the desktop. Or like having a poll on Sony's site and concluding that 4 times more people have a PS3 than a Wii, and 5 times more have a PSP than a DS.
The number of games bought FOR children is nearly impossible to determine except by firsthand knowledge.
Actually that "firsthand knowledge" is skewed again. Especially during the peak of the "games are for children only, and women never play games" mentality, a lot of people and especially women pretended to buy their games for a non-existent kid. Just because that seemed like the more socially acceptable kind of thing.
So unless said employee actually followed that guy/gal home and saw who's playing the game, it is _not_ first hand knowledge of it. It's at best an pretentious ass trying to defend a stereotype.
Actually, that would be the discredited idea of Lamarckian evolution: in which body parts change to match the environment, and the children inherit the slightly improved body parts. E.g., that basically because Schwarzenegger had big muscles, his kids would automatically start with bigger muscles too.
In TFA they claimed that that's the kind of evolution that Spore has, but you just made the point that, yeah, it's not even that. A creature in Spore may never use its +1 wings, and then get the +5 wings out of a sudden anyway.
Well, the way I understand the point, though, it's not that the game _should_ be an accurate represetation of unguided evolution. It's that EA has marketed it as an accurate representation of evolution, and as a way to teach evolution. Clearly that claim doesn't match the game's content.
And normally I'd have said the said you did. But if they made some very clear claims about the game, I think it's fair to judge it by those claims.
I mean, for example, if UT claimed to be (among other things) an accurate flight simulator, it would be entirely fair to expect it to match that claim. After all, that's what their own marketers are telling you to use as your buying criterion.
Way I can tell, that's what they do in TFA. They didn't just come out of nowhere with the idea that a game must be like evolution. (Which would be a silly expectation indeed.) But once EA claimed that it _is_ an accurate representation of evolution, and good enough to be used in colleges, well, the game is on. Let's see how true that statement is.
I never paid much attention to they hype and went mostly by the criterion that I'd even buy Pee if it's Will Wright's anyway. Also, that it's just a game anyway.
According to TFA, though, it sounds like EA's bulshitters... err... marketers have been shooting their mouth all over the place about how the game is an accurate representation of evolution, and how there's interest from colleges to use it to teach science. And while the former borders on fraud, the latter makes me cringe. As others have said, it's really an ID game, with some evolution language thrown in. The very idea of selling that as accurate science is ridiculous enough, but hyping it as a way to _teach_ evolution... is irresponsible at best.
*Sigh* It's times like these that I see Bill Hicks's point about marketing...
Damned if I know. I don't design this stuff. Personally, I suspect it's impossible. That would be why there have been so many attempts, and zero successes.
Bingo: that's actually the point of most of us. It's not even possible, but in the name of it we do get saddled with stuff that does only harm and no good. If you were wondering why so many people are against DRM a priori, that's why: because nobody offered yet proof -- or even reasonable suspicion -- that it might actually do what it says.
True. Tell you what... let's outlaw door locks. After all, no one can say whether someone who enters your house at three in the morning and loads your stereo, television, and other valuables into a truck is a burgler except the courts. And safe deposit boxes. And every other type of security device.
Tell you what: you come up with an analogy that isn't that melodramatic and actually is relevant, and then we'll use it:P
Seriously, these things are not like a lock. Locks exist, are known to work, keep more bad guys out than owners out of their own homes, and don't infringe on anyone's rights on their own property. And you're free to remove or change your lock if you don't like it. DRM so far is just the opposite: it's an idea that never worked, (and likely can't even theoretically work,) it never kept pirates out, it routinely keeps people from using their own bought stuff, and is even bragged about as a way to defeat first sale doctrine and other consumer rights.
And I don't even propose to flat out outlaw them. Rather: let's see one that actually works like that, before I'm saddled with yet another dysfunctional idiocy in the name of that idea.
My point here is, as it has always been in these discussions (to stretch the definition of the word "discussion" to its breaking point), that DRM is the equivalent of a lock. If well designed, it should do what a door lock does: keep lawbreakers out, while letting in the people you want to let in. The fact is, no one has yet come up with a good design for DRM: it never keeps out the lawbreakers for long, and it generally keeps out some people you want to let in. That doesn't mean the concept is flawed; just the execution.
Well, that's a bit like saying that the following concept is sound: a Santa Claus who doesn't spy on you.
But in practice it's an impossibility within a contradiction. It's not even theoretically possible, and it's internally contradictory. Yes, it would be nice to have something like that, great concept, but I'll cheer when/if it actually works that way. I see no pragmatic need to debate the merits of concepts like Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, or a DRM which magically keeps only law-breakers out and doesn't hold anyone's media or computer hostage;) I'll be more concerned with those who try to sneak in some nasty surveilance scheme disguised as Santa, or yet another annoying bit of snake oil disguised as "keeping the law breakers out". Especially when it (or at least the latter) has already happened a dozen times verbatim.
Actually, standards are a late 20'th century issue. It's the standards that used to not exist, and the whole free market theory was based on, well, survival of the fittest.
The whole market-solves-it-all idea is, essentially, a genetic optimization algorithm. There are lots of companies and products competing with each other, and the best one wins, the worst ones die out. And then someone takes the ideas from the ones that did well, and tries to tweak them even further. And the whole cycle repeats.
The whole idea was that someone would get an idea, like, "let's make the wheels larger." Or, "let's try a thinner rope made of synthetic fibres instead of hemp." Or, "let's make a rope tightening device instead of using nails and screws to build a fence."
Standards are an attempt to prevent that from happening. Essentially now you have the sacrosanct standard that says exactly how thick your rope must be, and woe if you deviate from the standard. (Don't laugh, you couldn't have a wider VHS tape, for example.)
What nowadays is seen as "OMG, MS is evil because their JavaScript implementation isn't 100% standard" used to have another name: innovation. Roll that around in your head.
Now I'm not saying that MS is good or innovative, and their being a monopoly subverted the free market anyway in the first place. It's just a silly example to get the point across. And the point is: you used to be _supposed_ to try to take a good thing and make it even better. Then let the market decide if it's really better or not.
If you want a non-MS example, take cordite. (Modern smokeless "gunpowder".) Nobel's original idea involved a liquid solvent. Then someone figured out a way to make it all solid and still not self-ignite. And it was called innovation, not "OMG, they're evil because they make non-standard cordite."
The whole rise of standards and having any need for them at all, is something rather new. It's not some sacred tradition.
That, however, misses half the point of DRM. Or rather, what the media companies expect from a DRM.
Most of the point of DRM is, basically, "Thou shall not distribute unencrypted copies of our data." Because that's what a pirate would _do_. He wouldn't just distribute the encrypted file and urge the downloaders to purchase a legit key. He'd strip the DRM right out, and distribute the unencrypted non-DRM-ed version.
Now even the media companies realize that they can't prevent that _completely_. E.g., there's no way they can prevent you from recording from the analog audio output, or just holding a microphone in front of the speakers. So they've learned to grudgingly accept it, as long as enough loss of quality occurs in the process.
What they _don't_ want is you just decrypting the file and getting the same quality as the paying customers. That's where they draw the line.
And let me show you how that source of yours can be modified by a pirate to save a decrypted copy of anything it plays:
That's it. Now I can take that decrypted file and upload it on P2P or whatever, and their DRM has no more power over it. The whole lock for that key has been removed. Best of all: it's of exactly the same quality as the DRM-ed version.
Exactly one person had to buy a copy there, and everyone else gets it cracked. It's no improvement over, say, just selling it on a CD. Anyone who doesn't want to rip it off the CD, has to have the "key" (the physical CD), everyone who rips it, doesn't need the "key" any more.
So, yes, it's as pointless as alcohol-free vodka. It removes the whole control that those media bigwigs wanted in the first place. It doesn't prevent piracy in any form or shape. Why bother with a DRM in the first place, then?
1. Now I'm against piracy, but claiming something as broad as "invisible to people who aren't breaking the law" is BS.
For example, from what I understand, you only need to try playing t on a device which isn't "Marlin-enabled", for it to become very visible right there. I fail to see what counts as "breaking the law" if I merely take my bought song and try to play it on my old car stereo. Care to explain?
2. How _do_ you enforce a DRM without locking access to certain parts of the "pipeline"? E.g., if I can use open-source sound drivers, what's to keep me from writing an un-DRM-ed.WAV to disk of their music? E.g., if I can play it in a self-compiled music player, what's to keep me from writing the decrypted stream from the player instead of playing it? Etc.
That's why MS's "trusted computing" insists on authorizing and authenticating every single bit of your computing, starting from the CPU. And you can't have a signed program that you can change, recompile and have it still stay signed.
So basically they _have_ to restrict what drivers, software, etc, you use, or they can't guarantee enforcing that DRM. And as soon as you, say, went the OSS route and recompiled anything, again, it _has_ to become very visible. Because as soon as the binary has changed at all, you no longer know whether it now has a backdoor which extracts the binary stream.
_But_, and here's the important part, the binary changes even if you didn't do anything devious there. If I, say, decide to play with these stupid drivers and make them able to play multiple streams like under windows (Gnome and KDE do come with daemons that do that mixing, but natively it isn't available) it necessarily produces a different executable.
So, again, care to explain what's illegal or "breaking the law" if I decide to tweak my sound drivers on this here Linux machine? I mean, FFS, even MS's FUD at its darkest hour stayed clear of claiming that doing any OSS work is criminal.
4. I thought that it was up to the courts to decide if a law has been broken? Just a thought. Deciding a priori that anyone running into trouble with a particular piece of retarded software is a criminal, is rich. The whole fundament of the western justice is based on such ideas as establishing exactly what happened, the degree of evil intent ("mens rea"), hearing the other side's half of the story too, etc. It seems to me that deciding a priori that, basically, anyone doing things differently than you imagined is automatically a criminal, goes against pretty much everything that justice stands for.
Well, that's kinda _why_ I wonder. The way I remember that article, they had free reign to choose the era too.
But even the era isn't really everything. Bioware ended up writing the history of the Sand People, for example, in the process, plus invented new planets, some bits of galactic history, etc, all which do influence the "present". They pretty much wrote new pieces of SW canon. And Lucas apparently had no problem with that.
I kind of have trouble reconciling a Lucas which is more like "do whatever you want" to Bioware, with the image of him being the iron-fisted despot of WoW. _If_ he ended up ruling SWG with an iron fist, I dunno, I wouldn't be surprised if there was a bit more than "I don't like your turrets" involved. Like maybe that they were really shitting on his franchise.
As I was saying, it's just idle musings and I don't actually _know_ what happened there. So it's all wild guesses and trying to put two and two together. Something doesn't quite add up there. Of course, I'm probably wrong about what's really missing in that equation. I just can't help wondering anyway.
Well, I guess we'll never know exactly what went on in there, but I just have to wonder.
Did Lucas actually tell them how to code it? Get into the tiniest details of the interface? Surely nobody (sane or half-competent) drags the client into that kind of talks.
I don't doubt that _some_ details got vetoed by Lucas, but I doubt that the whole NGE fiasco can be blamed on them. How much of it is really to blame on Lucas, and how much just on incompetent design and implementation?
The reason I wonder is that Bioware seemed to have had a lot more free hand with their KOTOR. I don't doubt that they had a bunch of details vetoed by Lucas or forced upon them, but the result was still a thoroughly enjoyable game.
For example, on one hand Bioware was free to move their game completely out of the trilogy time and invent their own story and planets and characters... on the other hand, the NGE turned the whole f-ing storyline into nothing more than a merchandising exercise for key SW characters. (You know, same as printing Vader's head on a t-shirt.) Did Lucas demand that? Is Lucas as schizophrenic as to behave that fundamentally differently to the two teams? Or is the unimaginative story in the NGE really just to blame on the SWG team?
Did Lucas force them to make the NGE first person... and not even update the enemy AI or interface to actually be fit for FPS play? Well, they didn't demand that KOTOR be first person or anything. How much of it is really due to Lucas's demands, and how much of that fucked-up interface is just... design out of spite, for lack of a better word? The whole thing almost feels like something designed out of spite.
And if SWG ended up practically micro-managed by Lucasarts, how did it come to that? Not many end up managed that way, even by Lucas, so it's a valid question. Just to play the devil's advocate: Can it be that Sony and RK just couldn't manage that team and that franchise, and Lucasarts ended up having to do that job too, whether they actually want it or not?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a Lucasarts fanboy or anything, and I'm sure they have their share of the blame. I'm just wondering how much of it, and how _did_ it come to that.
Ah well, as I was saying, we'll probably never know.
In all fairness, though, I don't think it was a general Sony problem. The SWG team was something different and let to play by its own rules. Stuff like repeatedly lying to customers, the Sith Lord approach to dealing with players and board posts, etc, were something I haven't experienced in other Sony games.
And while the NGE and its bad interface were bad, let's not kid ourselves: pre-NGE SWG was a one-trick pony. It had exactly _one_ saving grace that everyone remembers fondly: the flexible character development system. That's it.
It was launched as a largely-empty DIKU MUD with graphics, without Jedi _or_ vehicles _or_ spaceships. If that's what SW is about, I rest my case. It's been a scramble since then to figure out how to shoehorn Jedi in. And even the excuse "but SW doesn't have thousands of Jedi"... well, they made it even worse lore-wise.
I mean, basically the story of a typical Jedi in SWG was: You're a grizzled old veteran, you've seen wars and have been on the wrong side as often as on the right side. You learned that winning and getting out in one piece beat being right. You setted in somewhere and took a job as an entertainer in a cantina. You learned pretty quickly that the pretty semi-naked girl or the bishounen in gay outfits get all the tips, and nobody even notices the master musician. You got your pretty haircut and (if apropriate) your implants and strutted your anatomy for cash. You didn't end up a misanthrope, you ended up despising every sentient species in the galaxy. Then you decided to try your hand at crafting. You prospected every corner of every known planet, you've made backroom backstabbing and deals, and generally made Hutts look like Mother Theresa by comparison. And you rose to the top like the biggest shit floats to the top of the septic tank. Then for reasons you'd rather not talk about, you went into smuggling instead. The less talked about that period the better. Then you tried your hand as a bounty hunter, and it's been largely an exercise in being a paid assassin, and elliminating gamblers who didn't pay their debts and opponents of some of the biggest scum in the galaxy. You learned again that being paid beats being morally right.
And only after that, when you're a jaded, cynical, burnt-out shell of a former human, _of_ _course_ you're ready to be trained as a Jedi.
I mean, hello? Wasn't that why they took them as kids? So they _haven't_ learned all those bad reflexes and views yet?
But even that's reading too much into it, because it was basically one big empty sandbox, where players were supposed to create their own content... but without the tools or rights to do so. Smugglers _still_ can't actually smuggle, quests were generally a late addition and mostly an exercise in merchandising the SW key characters, etc. Even the holocron grind wasn't as much thought to be the little story I wrote above, it was just an unimaginative exercise in taking the old "remort" system of MUDs ten steps too far and turning it into an _unholy_ grind.
I'm sorry, but that's not a _Sony_ problem, that's a Raph Koster problem. That's his ideas you have at work there. I don't think, say, Sony's old Everquest was like that. It only became a Sony problem in as much as they let him tell them what to do in other games too, and for example in EQ2 they've been struggling to fix that bad touch ever since.
And even after that bad era, SWG still is a... weird exception even among Sony games. They didn't turn EQ2 into a FPS, for example. Or I don't remember such SWG-typical idiocies as for example having classes which don't even have a combat level and can't do the quests, in any other Sony game. Talk about a fundamentally broken balance. On the contrary, most of the rest evolved to have better balance, get more story, etc. Nor, again, lying to the customers instead of fixing the damned bug reports. Etc.
SWG also had their own rules on Sony's website. It's the only Sony game where unsubscribing took me to a page which basically said, "go away, we don't wa
Unfortunately, Fermi's Paradox is based on postulating certain axioms which aren't that self-evident at all. So at best it's not a "paradox", but rather proof that you can reach a false conclusion if you start from a false hypothesis.
E.g., that if a sentient civilization exists, it will necessarily colonize every rock and planet in sight. I'm sorry, but while that's the bread and butter of SF, it's not self-obvious at all in the real world. Colonizing is a matter of too many factors which may, or may not, add up that way. E.g.,
1. Colonization happened on Earth only when overpopulation pressures made it happen. Prior to that, most "colonies" were merely trading posts. We were merely interested in buying cheap stuff there and selling it expensively over here, and viceversa.
But here's the fun stuff about over-population: on Earth it seems to have stopped and actually reversed in every country which has access to good medical care and sanitation. People make lots of kids when survival is a crapshot, and they have to beat the odds. If only 1 in 3 of your kids will likely survive, you make 6 to try to beat the odds and occasional flukes. But as soon as survival becomes just short of guaranteed, people first go through a population boom for about a generation, then it sinks in that they really don't need more than 1 child. They might make a second as a sort of a backup, but that's really it then. Most western countries either _are_ currently going down in numbers, or are only saved by immigration from the poorer ones.
So given an Earth where the vast majority of people can get medical care for their child, the population of the whole Earth would actually decline. It's not that far fetched, as possible futures go. Give it a billion years or so, and Earth will probably be no more than a few thousand people in a few quaint towns, surrounded by square miles of woods and nature preserves.
So there you go: that's one example of a civilization which might never have the pressure to offload its population to other planets.
2. Let's go back to those trading posts I mentioned. They happened because there was an economic incentive to. The same incentive doesn't exist yet even for importing anything from the moon.
Basically the hypothesis that we'll start colonizing all around, _depends_ on discovering some miracle engines and/or some miracle sources of energy, so hauling a thounsand tons of steel from Alpha Centauri is cheaper than making it at home. What if the physics we know now _is_ mostly correct, and that economics never works out that way? Who's going to pay for some trillions of dollars worth of a colony ship, if they don't ever expect a return on that investment?
3. (Or 2.a.) To further nail that coffin, what if FTL is really impossible? How's interstellar trade even going to happen without that? (To pay for that colony, you know.) No, please don't jump to a half-baked answer yet.
Let's say we build a mining colony only 5 light years away from Earth. Now let's say we have some damn good engines, that can accelerate to nearly the speed of light by the middle of that distance, then decelerate for the other half of that trip. (And I mean really _awesome_ SF engines there. Nuclear or even fusion don't come even close.) So it takes 10 years for a ship from there to come to Earth. It takes another 5 years for signals from Earth to get there. So from the moment you sent a "yes, I want to buy 1000 tons of steel" order, to the moment you get that steel, it'll be 15 years.
But let's say we build that colony on the idea that it will continuously send stuff, so Earth gets a continuous stream of shipments. Ok. So it takes 10 years for the colony ship to get there, let's say a year to really get the colony going, then 10 years back with the ore. That's 21 years from the moment you bought the ship, to when you get your first shipment. Are you willing to bet a trillion dollars on the idea that you'll still need that ore in 21 years?
The problem that remains, though is: just because you can think up a random number to put on something, doesn't mean it's the right number.
And if economists were that good at calculating the values, the USSR would still be going strong and would have the strongest economy in the world. After all, that was the whole idea: instead of letting the free market work it out by trial and error, have a handful of smart guys who calculate exactly how many bycicles are needed and exactly how much should they cost. It should be much more efficient, right? It didn't quite work out that way.
So, yes, some people like to put a dollar value on anything in sight. It doesn't mean it's the right one.
The only moment when you can know the real value, is, yes, when you can apply what we knew at least since Publilius Syrus: "Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it." As long as you can't have a purchaser, that value you put on it is just a pointless abstraction. Again, I know that some people love to paint the whole world in dollar worths, but it doesn't mean it actually means anything or that you can do anything with that number.
E.g., they even put a $ worth on a human life. What _can_ you do with that number? Can I come shoot you if I have that money on hand to pay as weregeld? Can I buy you? Or what? Exactly what _does_ that number tell me?
In practice it's just an abstraction used to handwave stuff like "see, the legal speed on highways should by higher/lower because it means X million dollars in lost lives, vs Y million gained in commerce along that road." But it's ultimately just a made up excuse, and usually working backwards from the conclusion one wants to an acceptable excuse for it.
Hmmm, I'm not sure I understand in which way it is a Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc fallacy.
Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc, means almost literally what its translation says: Y happened after X, therefore Y happened because of X. In other words it's mistaking chronology for causation. E.g.,
- I bought a new cell phone last year, and this year I occasionally have migraines. Therefore, the cell phone is obviously the cause of my headaches.
- Bill Hicks spoke against God and religion, then (after many years of it) Bill Hicks died relatively young. Of cancer. Obviously his lack of faith is the cause of his illness.
- I got a raise, and soon thereafter the latest economic bubble burst and the credit crunch kicked in. Obviously my raise the cause of the recession. My wage is that big a burden on the economy;)
- Jane bought a new TFT monitor, and soon thereafter she got diagnosed with melanoma. Therefore the radiation from TFT monitors must have caused it.
- John switched from Linux to BSD, and soon afterwards he ended up in a mental institution. Therefore BSD drives people insane.
Etc.
The common theme there is really this: "happened after, therefore happened because". Temporal succession => causality.
The difference between it and, say, "correlation != causation" is that here usually you don't even have enough of a sample to even have a proper correlation. You have two random anecdotes and the only thing that connects them is the order of their timestamps, so to speak, and that succession is taken to mean causation.
But you probably knew that already.
So, anyway, assuming that you did mean that particular fallacy, in which way do you see it at work there? It doesn't seem obvious at all to me, and I'm genuinely curious. What case of chronology mistaken for casuality do you have in mind there?
About PR and "cause X" I go back to my point there is NO actual group or organisation behind any attacks on Scientology
I never said it had to be an organised thing. If X people try to effect change Y, that's their "cause" I'm talking about. Even if they're not organized or centralized at all. Even if they don't know each other even exists.
All I'm saying is that if Y people fight for the "idea" X, it only takes one idiot to taint the efforts of the other Y-1.
Ditto by "PR image". I don't mean hiring a PR agency. But there is an "image" associated with that cause X, whatever that may be. To spread the word, you want people to think positively of it and the people advocating it. You don't want to offer the handwaved excuse of, basically, "bah, it's just a bunch of crazy asshats."
To offer a better example, I remember when SCO started their attack on Linux. So a bunch of people started talking of DDOS-ing or hacking SCO. Not sure any more if anyone actually did, but that's irrelevant for what I'm trying to say. Those people didn't belong to any formal advocacy group, but their "cause" was "Linux." That's the kind of "cause" I'm talking about. Well, the reaction from virtually all advocacy groups was, basically, "please don't! We don't want people to associate Linux with that kind of thing."
That's what I'm talking about, really. People are quick to build guilt by association and extrapolate from unrepresentative biased samples. To further your ideas, you don't want to give them that.
And to get back to the topic, it's the same thing I'm saying about fighting against Scientology. It's a noble goal. Let's not taint it with asshattery.
So, just to be clear, you are looking for raids where you fight the same mobs alongside the same guildies week after week? But at the same time you think WAR will somehow get boring for you?
You and I have different levels of boredeom I guess. Raiding in WoW was tedium on a level I never felt even at my day job, with rewards that were even less certain (I always get paid as a programmer, much less so as a priest). If you honestly think WoW is fun, and you're not just caught up in the keep-up-with-the-Joneses raid mentality of that "community", well then keep it up.
I could ask the exact same in return: so raiding the about a dozen endgame instances on WoW is boring for you... but having the lopsided siege of Altdorf as the _only_ endgame, somehow isn't? Exactly how many times do you have to win that battle before it gets boring for you?
Even skipping over the gross imbalance in numbers between the two factions, that's... what? Equivalent to _one_ WoW battleground? Oh, wait, my bad, it's _two_ battlegrounds, if you also count defense of your own capital. Even if you're that hard into PvP, it seems to me that WoW _still_ has more content there.
As you were saying, "You and I have different levels of boredeom I guess."
Slashdot Mirror
Well, having been both in the games industry for a couple of years, and making a better living with no-brainer Java/DB stuff ever since... here's my insight into it:
People who want to program a game are there _because_ they haven't "grown the fuck up." I'm not necessarily saying that in a demeaning way. I've been there myself, remember? They're the people who haven't lost that young age idealism and all that. They're the people willing to take a massively sub-par pay (just look at the average pay in the games industry: the joke is that they haven't outsourced it to India because the Indians don't work for that little), do longer hours, etc, to do their idea of doing the right thing. It's the guys willing to thumb their nose at society's norms and at the measuring it all in money and your car's price. Otherwise they wouldn't be there in the first place.
That however also comes with certain ideas born of the very same idealism, like that being an ass in a suit still means being an ass. Or that worth should be measured by what you can do, not by what you wear or whose money you've earned. That it's what you know, not who you know. Etc.
But again, those who don't have, or no longer have, that idealism, also aren't there willing to work for peanuts and be mistreated just to fulfill some ideal of what they want to work on.
If you want those who have "grown the fuck up", and think it all in terms of doing a job by the numbers, for the money, you'll find those of us doing some no-brainer web sites with all the buzzwords. You want EJB with that? Sure. It's half the work and several times the pay. If you don't aim for outright consultant, you only need less than half the skills too, and you might not even need to learn much new for decades. In fact, I think I'll learn COBOL next, 'cause I hear those salaries are on the rise. I'm a professional. I'm a high-tech luxury prostitute. I'll even put a costume for you if you pay enough. (E.g., suit and tie, if that's your fantasy.)
I don't think you can mix and match from column A and B that easily. Or not without paying a lot more than I suspect the OP is willing to pay. You want the skills and willingness to learn and long hours from column A, but the mentality from column B. It's going to cost you a pretty penny. Because that mentality from column B also says "hey, the whole free market economics says it's good to look for the best possible pay for my skills." You'll have to pay a competitive price by column B standards.
And at that, it won't be the entry wage of the professional world either. Depending on which studies you wish to believe, about 3 out of 4 don't contribute much to their projects, and 2 out of 3 don't even really know the language they're supposed to program in. So you'll want to aim for the top 25% or so. Which also means paying a competitive wage for that segment. It won't be cheap.
Basically I doubt that when the OP said he can't get professional programmers at any price, he really meant at any price. Hey, if you want to pay my consulting fee, I'd be happy to work on a game too. I suspect more like he expected to pay a wage for a game programmer, and get a suit-bearer. Even better, a suit-bearer with the skills of one of the former. It ain't gonna happen at that price.
Well, that's kinda the whole point. Given that today's transistors are 45nm or so, 10 times smaller would be 4.5nm, or about 15 silicon atoms IIRC. I think we can worry about that already.
No, you seem to be the confused one. He didn't say anywhere that it would be crafting-centric, he merely said that they'll have crafting. Same as a car can be advertised as having a radio, without it being the central and most important bit in there.
So the accusation that he's a lying bastard just doesn't stick, anyway I want to look at it.
And I'm saying that it's been tried, and it screwed up the game for everyone else. Suddenly those "power gamer" newbies (*) can't even buy a toothpick, much less a weapon, without paying millions for it. Which they don't even _have_. That kind of game very quickly catters only to those who have a top-level alt with lots of money, or to those willing to sink months of their own into hammering stuff. Because there's no freaking way a new player can even compete with those for anything worth using.
You _have_ to check it by having loot and vendor stuff too, because otherwise the prices shoot through the roof, and you get a few people who get their boner out of being teh virtual uber-smith... but at the expense of having a million newbies who get tired of not being able to afford anything, and leave the game.
It's simply a bad trade-off. In fact, it's a way for any game to shoot itself in the foot. Because old players get bored and go away all the time, and if you turn off your newbies you end up without a replacement for them.
_That_ is why all games so far nerfed crafting. Because it's something that fucks up your whole game if you let it run amok.
And, hey, you want to craft? That's cool. But I'm not willing to sacrifice _my_ enjoyment for it. That's the kind of selfish guy I am ;)
(*) ... actually, just normal people who just want to do the quests and see the story, not get a simulation of taking a second job
Well, I'm certainly not saying it's the only way. It's just an example of something which logically makes no sense, but the players wrap their head around anyway.
I don't see how that's lying. He said they'll _have_ crafting, not that crafting will be the only thing or the alpha and omega. There are a lot of games which have both crafting and loot. WoW is probably the most visible example, though you could take EQ2, LOTRO or WAR as equally good examples. It's the norm.
There are even games where you use the loot _for_ crafting. E.g., the seeds in WAR or the "invention" system in COH/COV.
Anyway, it sounds to me like you wanted the whole game to revolve around crafted stuff. It probably won't. But he didn't say it would. He only said there would _be_ crafting.
And I can also see why they wouldn't want a crafting-centric game. Invariably crafting produces inflation. That's why everything in WoW costs gold at the AH, when quests and mobs of that level pay copper coins. You don't want a game where soon newbies discover they have to farm and grind for months to afford any good item, so there has to be _some_ other source of decent equipment for those of us who hate farming and grinding. You want loot and quest rewards too. That's a lesson that most games and designers had to discover the hard way, after letting crafting create a hyper-inflation comparable to inter-war Germany and drive newbies away.
In fact, no offense, my wish would be the exact opposite than yours: I wish there would be at least one fucking MMO without crafting at all. I don't want my game tainted by a screwed up economy, just to catter to those who want to pretend they have a second job. If you want to pretend you're a baker or miner, there are plenty of games who let you be one. Heck, there's A Tale In The Desert, which is all about that. It's not that much to ask that at least _one_ fucking game lets me concentrate on the actual quests and adventure, instead of making me farm and hammer for hours to be able to afford some other retard's armours. The system is essentially punishing people like me, to reward people like you. And I'm getting sick and tired of that.
I don't want to play a Ferengi, spending hours at the AH, trying to get the best deals on cath-hound balls and goat horns, so I can afford a decent blaster. Ferengi are that-a-way in Star Treck. Different universe.
It's not even "realistic" for those who cling to that notion. Boba Fett earned his money by being a bounty hunter, not by having a main job in herding and skinning nerfs to support his bounty-hunting hobby. And for medieval MMOs, they had this idea of the 3 estates of society back then: those who fight, those who tend the God(s), and those who work. And they were supposed to stay separate. If you were a mercenary you'd get paid, and if you were a knight you'd have an estate. The last time when one had to use his day job to pay for his armour to defend his country was, oh, before the Marian reforms in Rome in 107 BC.
It worked well for City Of Heroes. Every player in COH is, at least in the design guideline, equal to three minions _and_ a lieutenant. That's what's needed for a fight against a hero to be a 50-50 chance, you know, better have a potion (ok, "inspiration") ready.
But that's ok, because the NPCs are also generated in packs of 3 for a solo mission, or pretty much in platoons for an 8 player group.
And yes, nobody seems to have a problem with being in a city with a thousand super-heroes roaming the streets at any given time.
Generally, when it comes to MMOs, probably the only sane option is to just accept what works and is proven to work, and not think much about what would be "realistic". Starting from the original idea waay back that it would be unrealistic to have quests, because it would be unrealistic if 1000 people saved the same princess or killed the same arch-villain. It turns out that people actually get used quite easily to situations along the lines of,
"Ok, did everyone get Van Cleef's head?"
"Yep, I did."
"Wait, I've got to junk something and then I'll take it too."
"I killed him yesterday, thanks"
"Crap, my buddy disconnected. Guess we'll have to come tomorrow so he can get VC's head too."
Same here. Even when logically it would make little sense to have 10,000 legendary bounty hunters, the players invariably can wrap their mind around that concept just fine anyway.
And, in the end, is it that illogical? How good do you have to be, to be a heroic version of whatever you're doing. One in a million? Being one in a million sounds pretty special to me. Well, a planet like Earth has some 6000 people who are one-in-a-million, and a planet like Coruscant could have 100,000 by itself, or more than enough for any server's population by itself. And there's a whole galaxy out there in Star Wars. There are probably trillions of trillions of sentient humanoids across the galaxy, and taking the best-of-the best, the one-in-a-million people would still mean more players than WoW has total or even than the Earth's total population.
Well, the more I hear about Google, the more they seem like everyone else. And I'm not saying it in a condemning way or anything. They're just human.
They too need some big expensive toy as suspicious consumption. They too would rape your privacy if it helps optimize 0.01% off their average search time, and thus make an extra buck. They too will sell some Chinese babbling about "democracy" to the authorities if that's the price to make a billion dollars in business in China. They too will expose your data occasionally if it's cheaper than hiring testers. And they too apparently aren't above making a backroom deal with Yahoo or using patents keep the competition out of their little monopoly field.
(According to at least one analysis, that's why MS wants to buy Yahoo. Some time ago Yahoo apparently bought a small company who had a blanket patent on matching ads to the text on the page. Yahoo licensed it to Google, but refuses to license it to MS or anyone else.)
In a nutshell, they're like any other corporation. Plus a funky meaningless motto, that some people mistake for some kind of final proof that Google is the digital-age Mother Theresa. Heh.
The thing is, no other corporation is "evil" in the sense of seeking to cause the maximum misery, pain and destruction possible. Even MS, I'd bet they never had a board meeting along the lines of, "how can we make more people miserable?" There are no super-villains cackling over doomsday device blueprints. And there are no altruistic super-heroes either. There are only greedy people trying to make a buck, and the difference is in how many corpses they feel they can get away with stepping over, on their way to the top.
At any rate, Google "doing no evil"... well, it's technically true, but only in as much as you could say with a straight face that MS does no evil. They don't sacrifice babies to Satan or anything. But from there, both have shown repeatedly that their goal is simply to make the most money, and both don't have much consideration for whoever might get to suffer for it. As is, indeed, expected of a corporation.
They're just human. They're just a corporation. That's it. It doesn't make them evil, it merely makes them the same as everyone else. One just has the funny motto.
Well, I think I'll make "36 inch penis" my motto. I'm sure some people will actually believe that I live up to that ;)
So, basically, you just told me that only the buyers know who they buy it for. Yet you insist that studies which actually asked the buyers are wrong, but the perception of some retail employee who didn't is better? Because you just used the latter as some kind of proof or at least hint that the former are BS. I'm not sure I follow that logic, then.
Actually, unless any of those retailers actually did a proper study, you're probably just seeing selective confirmation at work. Selective confirmation works like this: if you really want to believe something, you'll notice all the confirmation, and conveniently forget all the counter-examples.
One prime example of this is, well, all the "women can't drive" machos. Everyone of them can tell you a dozen anecdotes where some woman was driving only 60 in a 50 zone and "holding up the traffic". Everyone of the them is swift to hand-wave an excuse as to why it doesn't count or is just normal, if you point out a guy doing something even more stupid. But the funny thing is, last I saw a statistic from an insurance company (you know, the guys who tally up the accidents because they pay for them and have to adjust their premiums based on it), the average woman caused only _half_ as many accidents per mile driven as the average guy. Actually the absolute worst category isn't the women, it's the very young guys who drive like it proves their penis size. So that skewed perception doesn't actually match reality.
Which is why we do studies and polls, and don't rely on what Jack who works at GameStop remembers offhand.
Additionally, retailers... which retailers? Did you poll all of them? Or what?
Because for example the biggest games retailer in the USA is WallMart, not the mom-and-pop franchises that all the kiddies hang around. For every kid that hangs around EB Games all day and maybe buys a new game every two months, there'll be several moms and pops who get their stuff from WallMart and move on. And a bunch of other people get their games from electronics supermarkets like (at least here) Saturn, MediaMarkt, and the like. You won't see hordes of kids hanging around the aisles there. And I doubt that any given employee at such a big store has the time to hang around and see who takes what off the aisles.
So if you're using some games-only shop as your source, you're looking at a prime representation of the Biased Sample fallacy. What you see is actually just saying what kind of people hang around their shop, not a random sample of gamers as a whole.
It's like having a poll on Slashdot and concluding that 90% of the population are computer-savy nerds, and 50% run linux on the desktop. Or like having a poll on Sony's site and concluding that 4 times more people have a PS3 than a Wii, and 5 times more have a PSP than a DS.
Actually that "firsthand knowledge" is skewed again. Especially during the peak of the "games are for children only, and women never play games" mentality, a lot of people and especially women pretended to buy their games for a non-existent kid. Just because that seemed like the more socially acceptable kind of thing.
So unless said employee actually followed that guy/gal home and saw who's playing the game, it is _not_ first hand knowledge of it. It's at best an pretentious ass trying to defend a stereotype.
Actually, that would be the discredited idea of Lamarckian evolution: in which body parts change to match the environment, and the children inherit the slightly improved body parts. E.g., that basically because Schwarzenegger had big muscles, his kids would automatically start with bigger muscles too.
In TFA they claimed that that's the kind of evolution that Spore has, but you just made the point that, yeah, it's not even that. A creature in Spore may never use its +1 wings, and then get the +5 wings out of a sudden anyway.
Well, the way I understand the point, though, it's not that the game _should_ be an accurate represetation of unguided evolution. It's that EA has marketed it as an accurate representation of evolution, and as a way to teach evolution. Clearly that claim doesn't match the game's content.
And normally I'd have said the said you did. But if they made some very clear claims about the game, I think it's fair to judge it by those claims.
I mean, for example, if UT claimed to be (among other things) an accurate flight simulator, it would be entirely fair to expect it to match that claim. After all, that's what their own marketers are telling you to use as your buying criterion.
Way I can tell, that's what they do in TFA. They didn't just come out of nowhere with the idea that a game must be like evolution. (Which would be a silly expectation indeed.) But once EA claimed that it _is_ an accurate representation of evolution, and good enough to be used in colleges, well, the game is on. Let's see how true that statement is.
Actually, having RTFA, I stand corrected.
I never paid much attention to they hype and went mostly by the criterion that I'd even buy Pee if it's Will Wright's anyway. Also, that it's just a game anyway.
According to TFA, though, it sounds like EA's bulshitters... err... marketers have been shooting their mouth all over the place about how the game is an accurate representation of evolution, and how there's interest from colleges to use it to teach science. And while the former borders on fraud, the latter makes me cringe. As others have said, it's really an ID game, with some evolution language thrown in. The very idea of selling that as accurate science is ridiculous enough, but hyping it as a way to _teach_ evolution... is irresponsible at best.
*Sigh* It's times like these that I see Bill Hicks's point about marketing...
Reminds me of some decade ago or so, when someone warned that the stone age wasn't like in The Flintstones. I never would have guessed ;)
Bingo: that's actually the point of most of us. It's not even possible, but in the name of it we do get saddled with stuff that does only harm and no good. If you were wondering why so many people are against DRM a priori, that's why: because nobody offered yet proof -- or even reasonable suspicion -- that it might actually do what it says.
Tell you what: you come up with an analogy that isn't that melodramatic and actually is relevant, and then we'll use it :P
Seriously, these things are not like a lock. Locks exist, are known to work, keep more bad guys out than owners out of their own homes, and don't infringe on anyone's rights on their own property. And you're free to remove or change your lock if you don't like it. DRM so far is just the opposite: it's an idea that never worked, (and likely can't even theoretically work,) it never kept pirates out, it routinely keeps people from using their own bought stuff, and is even bragged about as a way to defeat first sale doctrine and other consumer rights.
And I don't even propose to flat out outlaw them. Rather: let's see one that actually works like that, before I'm saddled with yet another dysfunctional idiocy in the name of that idea.
Well, that's a bit like saying that the following concept is sound: a Santa Claus who doesn't spy on you.
But in practice it's an impossibility within a contradiction. It's not even theoretically possible, and it's internally contradictory. Yes, it would be nice to have something like that, great concept, but I'll cheer when/if it actually works that way. I see no pragmatic need to debate the merits of concepts like Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, or a DRM which magically keeps only law-breakers out and doesn't hold anyone's media or computer hostage ;) I'll be more concerned with those who try to sneak in some nasty surveilance scheme disguised as Santa, or yet another annoying bit of snake oil disguised as "keeping the law breakers out". Especially when it (or at least the latter) has already happened a dozen times verbatim.
Actually, standards are a late 20'th century issue. It's the standards that used to not exist, and the whole free market theory was based on, well, survival of the fittest.
The whole market-solves-it-all idea is, essentially, a genetic optimization algorithm. There are lots of companies and products competing with each other, and the best one wins, the worst ones die out. And then someone takes the ideas from the ones that did well, and tries to tweak them even further. And the whole cycle repeats.
The whole idea was that someone would get an idea, like, "let's make the wheels larger." Or, "let's try a thinner rope made of synthetic fibres instead of hemp." Or, "let's make a rope tightening device instead of using nails and screws to build a fence."
Standards are an attempt to prevent that from happening. Essentially now you have the sacrosanct standard that says exactly how thick your rope must be, and woe if you deviate from the standard. (Don't laugh, you couldn't have a wider VHS tape, for example.)
What nowadays is seen as "OMG, MS is evil because their JavaScript implementation isn't 100% standard" used to have another name: innovation. Roll that around in your head.
Now I'm not saying that MS is good or innovative, and their being a monopoly subverted the free market anyway in the first place. It's just a silly example to get the point across. And the point is: you used to be _supposed_ to try to take a good thing and make it even better. Then let the market decide if it's really better or not.
If you want a non-MS example, take cordite. (Modern smokeless "gunpowder".) Nobel's original idea involved a liquid solvent. Then someone figured out a way to make it all solid and still not self-ignite. And it was called innovation, not "OMG, they're evil because they make non-standard cordite."
The whole rise of standards and having any need for them at all, is something rather new. It's not some sacred tradition.
That, however, misses half the point of DRM. Or rather, what the media companies expect from a DRM.
Most of the point of DRM is, basically, "Thou shall not distribute unencrypted copies of our data." Because that's what a pirate would _do_. He wouldn't just distribute the encrypted file and urge the downloaders to purchase a legit key. He'd strip the DRM right out, and distribute the unencrypted non-DRM-ed version.
Now even the media companies realize that they can't prevent that _completely_. E.g., there's no way they can prevent you from recording from the analog audio output, or just holding a microphone in front of the speakers. So they've learned to grudgingly accept it, as long as enough loss of quality occurs in the process.
What they _don't_ want is you just decrypting the file and getting the same quality as the paying customers. That's where they draw the line.
And let me show you how that source of yours can be modified by a pirate to save a decrypted copy of anything it plays:
Original source:
Changed source:
That's it. Now I can take that decrypted file and upload it on P2P or whatever, and their DRM has no more power over it. The whole lock for that key has been removed. Best of all: it's of exactly the same quality as the DRM-ed version.
Exactly one person had to buy a copy there, and everyone else gets it cracked. It's no improvement over, say, just selling it on a CD. Anyone who doesn't want to rip it off the CD, has to have the "key" (the physical CD), everyone who rips it, doesn't need the "key" any more.
So, yes, it's as pointless as alcohol-free vodka. It removes the whole control that those media bigwigs wanted in the first place. It doesn't prevent piracy in any form or shape. Why bother with a DRM in the first place, then?
1. Now I'm against piracy, but claiming something as broad as "invisible to people who aren't breaking the law" is BS.
For example, from what I understand, you only need to try playing t on a device which isn't "Marlin-enabled", for it to become very visible right there. I fail to see what counts as "breaking the law" if I merely take my bought song and try to play it on my old car stereo. Care to explain?
2. How _do_ you enforce a DRM without locking access to certain parts of the "pipeline"? E.g., if I can use open-source sound drivers, what's to keep me from writing an un-DRM-ed .WAV to disk of their music? E.g., if I can play it in a self-compiled music player, what's to keep me from writing the decrypted stream from the player instead of playing it? Etc.
That's why MS's "trusted computing" insists on authorizing and authenticating every single bit of your computing, starting from the CPU. And you can't have a signed program that you can change, recompile and have it still stay signed.
So basically they _have_ to restrict what drivers, software, etc, you use, or they can't guarantee enforcing that DRM. And as soon as you, say, went the OSS route and recompiled anything, again, it _has_ to become very visible. Because as soon as the binary has changed at all, you no longer know whether it now has a backdoor which extracts the binary stream.
_But_, and here's the important part, the binary changes even if you didn't do anything devious there. If I, say, decide to play with these stupid drivers and make them able to play multiple streams like under windows (Gnome and KDE do come with daemons that do that mixing, but natively it isn't available) it necessarily produces a different executable.
So, again, care to explain what's illegal or "breaking the law" if I decide to tweak my sound drivers on this here Linux machine? I mean, FFS, even MS's FUD at its darkest hour stayed clear of claiming that doing any OSS work is criminal.
4. I thought that it was up to the courts to decide if a law has been broken? Just a thought. Deciding a priori that anyone running into trouble with a particular piece of retarded software is a criminal, is rich. The whole fundament of the western justice is based on such ideas as establishing exactly what happened, the degree of evil intent ("mens rea"), hearing the other side's half of the story too, etc. It seems to me that deciding a priori that, basically, anyone doing things differently than you imagined is automatically a criminal, goes against pretty much everything that justice stands for.
Well, that's kinda _why_ I wonder. The way I remember that article, they had free reign to choose the era too.
But even the era isn't really everything. Bioware ended up writing the history of the Sand People, for example, in the process, plus invented new planets, some bits of galactic history, etc, all which do influence the "present". They pretty much wrote new pieces of SW canon. And Lucas apparently had no problem with that.
I kind of have trouble reconciling a Lucas which is more like "do whatever you want" to Bioware, with the image of him being the iron-fisted despot of WoW. _If_ he ended up ruling SWG with an iron fist, I dunno, I wouldn't be surprised if there was a bit more than "I don't like your turrets" involved. Like maybe that they were really shitting on his franchise.
As I was saying, it's just idle musings and I don't actually _know_ what happened there. So it's all wild guesses and trying to put two and two together. Something doesn't quite add up there. Of course, I'm probably wrong about what's really missing in that equation. I just can't help wondering anyway.
Well, I guess we'll never know exactly what went on in there, but I just have to wonder.
Did Lucas actually tell them how to code it? Get into the tiniest details of the interface? Surely nobody (sane or half-competent) drags the client into that kind of talks.
I don't doubt that _some_ details got vetoed by Lucas, but I doubt that the whole NGE fiasco can be blamed on them. How much of it is really to blame on Lucas, and how much just on incompetent design and implementation?
The reason I wonder is that Bioware seemed to have had a lot more free hand with their KOTOR. I don't doubt that they had a bunch of details vetoed by Lucas or forced upon them, but the result was still a thoroughly enjoyable game.
For example, on one hand Bioware was free to move their game completely out of the trilogy time and invent their own story and planets and characters... on the other hand, the NGE turned the whole f-ing storyline into nothing more than a merchandising exercise for key SW characters. (You know, same as printing Vader's head on a t-shirt.) Did Lucas demand that? Is Lucas as schizophrenic as to behave that fundamentally differently to the two teams? Or is the unimaginative story in the NGE really just to blame on the SWG team?
Did Lucas force them to make the NGE first person... and not even update the enemy AI or interface to actually be fit for FPS play? Well, they didn't demand that KOTOR be first person or anything. How much of it is really due to Lucas's demands, and how much of that fucked-up interface is just... design out of spite, for lack of a better word? The whole thing almost feels like something designed out of spite.
And if SWG ended up practically micro-managed by Lucasarts, how did it come to that? Not many end up managed that way, even by Lucas, so it's a valid question. Just to play the devil's advocate: Can it be that Sony and RK just couldn't manage that team and that franchise, and Lucasarts ended up having to do that job too, whether they actually want it or not?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a Lucasarts fanboy or anything, and I'm sure they have their share of the blame. I'm just wondering how much of it, and how _did_ it come to that.
Ah well, as I was saying, we'll probably never know.
In all fairness, though, I don't think it was a general Sony problem. The SWG team was something different and let to play by its own rules. Stuff like repeatedly lying to customers, the Sith Lord approach to dealing with players and board posts, etc, were something I haven't experienced in other Sony games.
And while the NGE and its bad interface were bad, let's not kid ourselves: pre-NGE SWG was a one-trick pony. It had exactly _one_ saving grace that everyone remembers fondly: the flexible character development system. That's it.
It was launched as a largely-empty DIKU MUD with graphics, without Jedi _or_ vehicles _or_ spaceships. If that's what SW is about, I rest my case. It's been a scramble since then to figure out how to shoehorn Jedi in. And even the excuse "but SW doesn't have thousands of Jedi"... well, they made it even worse lore-wise.
I mean, basically the story of a typical Jedi in SWG was: You're a grizzled old veteran, you've seen wars and have been on the wrong side as often as on the right side. You learned that winning and getting out in one piece beat being right. You setted in somewhere and took a job as an entertainer in a cantina. You learned pretty quickly that the pretty semi-naked girl or the bishounen in gay outfits get all the tips, and nobody even notices the master musician. You got your pretty haircut and (if apropriate) your implants and strutted your anatomy for cash. You didn't end up a misanthrope, you ended up despising every sentient species in the galaxy. Then you decided to try your hand at crafting. You prospected every corner of every known planet, you've made backroom backstabbing and deals, and generally made Hutts look like Mother Theresa by comparison. And you rose to the top like the biggest shit floats to the top of the septic tank. Then for reasons you'd rather not talk about, you went into smuggling instead. The less talked about that period the better. Then you tried your hand as a bounty hunter, and it's been largely an exercise in being a paid assassin, and elliminating gamblers who didn't pay their debts and opponents of some of the biggest scum in the galaxy. You learned again that being paid beats being morally right.
And only after that, when you're a jaded, cynical, burnt-out shell of a former human, _of_ _course_ you're ready to be trained as a Jedi.
I mean, hello? Wasn't that why they took them as kids? So they _haven't_ learned all those bad reflexes and views yet?
But even that's reading too much into it, because it was basically one big empty sandbox, where players were supposed to create their own content... but without the tools or rights to do so. Smugglers _still_ can't actually smuggle, quests were generally a late addition and mostly an exercise in merchandising the SW key characters, etc. Even the holocron grind wasn't as much thought to be the little story I wrote above, it was just an unimaginative exercise in taking the old "remort" system of MUDs ten steps too far and turning it into an _unholy_ grind.
I'm sorry, but that's not a _Sony_ problem, that's a Raph Koster problem. That's his ideas you have at work there. I don't think, say, Sony's old Everquest was like that. It only became a Sony problem in as much as they let him tell them what to do in other games too, and for example in EQ2 they've been struggling to fix that bad touch ever since.
And even after that bad era, SWG still is a... weird exception even among Sony games. They didn't turn EQ2 into a FPS, for example. Or I don't remember such SWG-typical idiocies as for example having classes which don't even have a combat level and can't do the quests, in any other Sony game. Talk about a fundamentally broken balance. On the contrary, most of the rest evolved to have better balance, get more story, etc. Nor, again, lying to the customers instead of fixing the damned bug reports. Etc.
SWG also had their own rules on Sony's website. It's the only Sony game where unsubscribing took me to a page which basically said, "go away, we don't wa
Unfortunately, Fermi's Paradox is based on postulating certain axioms which aren't that self-evident at all. So at best it's not a "paradox", but rather proof that you can reach a false conclusion if you start from a false hypothesis.
E.g., that if a sentient civilization exists, it will necessarily colonize every rock and planet in sight. I'm sorry, but while that's the bread and butter of SF, it's not self-obvious at all in the real world. Colonizing is a matter of too many factors which may, or may not, add up that way. E.g.,
1. Colonization happened on Earth only when overpopulation pressures made it happen. Prior to that, most "colonies" were merely trading posts. We were merely interested in buying cheap stuff there and selling it expensively over here, and viceversa.
But here's the fun stuff about over-population: on Earth it seems to have stopped and actually reversed in every country which has access to good medical care and sanitation. People make lots of kids when survival is a crapshot, and they have to beat the odds. If only 1 in 3 of your kids will likely survive, you make 6 to try to beat the odds and occasional flukes. But as soon as survival becomes just short of guaranteed, people first go through a population boom for about a generation, then it sinks in that they really don't need more than 1 child. They might make a second as a sort of a backup, but that's really it then. Most western countries either _are_ currently going down in numbers, or are only saved by immigration from the poorer ones.
So given an Earth where the vast majority of people can get medical care for their child, the population of the whole Earth would actually decline. It's not that far fetched, as possible futures go. Give it a billion years or so, and Earth will probably be no more than a few thousand people in a few quaint towns, surrounded by square miles of woods and nature preserves.
So there you go: that's one example of a civilization which might never have the pressure to offload its population to other planets.
2. Let's go back to those trading posts I mentioned. They happened because there was an economic incentive to. The same incentive doesn't exist yet even for importing anything from the moon.
Basically the hypothesis that we'll start colonizing all around, _depends_ on discovering some miracle engines and/or some miracle sources of energy, so hauling a thounsand tons of steel from Alpha Centauri is cheaper than making it at home. What if the physics we know now _is_ mostly correct, and that economics never works out that way? Who's going to pay for some trillions of dollars worth of a colony ship, if they don't ever expect a return on that investment?
3. (Or 2.a.) To further nail that coffin, what if FTL is really impossible? How's interstellar trade even going to happen without that? (To pay for that colony, you know.) No, please don't jump to a half-baked answer yet.
Let's say we build a mining colony only 5 light years away from Earth. Now let's say we have some damn good engines, that can accelerate to nearly the speed of light by the middle of that distance, then decelerate for the other half of that trip. (And I mean really _awesome_ SF engines there. Nuclear or even fusion don't come even close.) So it takes 10 years for a ship from there to come to Earth. It takes another 5 years for signals from Earth to get there. So from the moment you sent a "yes, I want to buy 1000 tons of steel" order, to the moment you get that steel, it'll be 15 years.
But let's say we build that colony on the idea that it will continuously send stuff, so Earth gets a continuous stream of shipments. Ok. So it takes 10 years for the colony ship to get there, let's say a year to really get the colony going, then 10 years back with the ore. That's 21 years from the moment you bought the ship, to when you get your first shipment. Are you willing to bet a trillion dollars on the idea that you'll still need that ore in 21 years?
Remember that on Earth some resources went
The problem that remains, though is: just because you can think up a random number to put on something, doesn't mean it's the right number.
And if economists were that good at calculating the values, the USSR would still be going strong and would have the strongest economy in the world. After all, that was the whole idea: instead of letting the free market work it out by trial and error, have a handful of smart guys who calculate exactly how many bycicles are needed and exactly how much should they cost. It should be much more efficient, right? It didn't quite work out that way.
So, yes, some people like to put a dollar value on anything in sight. It doesn't mean it's the right one.
The only moment when you can know the real value, is, yes, when you can apply what we knew at least since Publilius Syrus: "Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it." As long as you can't have a purchaser, that value you put on it is just a pointless abstraction. Again, I know that some people love to paint the whole world in dollar worths, but it doesn't mean it actually means anything or that you can do anything with that number.
E.g., they even put a $ worth on a human life. What _can_ you do with that number? Can I come shoot you if I have that money on hand to pay as weregeld? Can I buy you? Or what? Exactly what _does_ that number tell me?
In practice it's just an abstraction used to handwave stuff like "see, the legal speed on highways should by higher/lower because it means X million dollars in lost lives, vs Y million gained in commerce along that road." But it's ultimately just a made up excuse, and usually working backwards from the conclusion one wants to an acceptable excuse for it.
Hmmm, I'm not sure I understand in which way it is a Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc fallacy.
Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc, means almost literally what its translation says: Y happened after X, therefore Y happened because of X. In other words it's mistaking chronology for causation. E.g.,
- I bought a new cell phone last year, and this year I occasionally have migraines. Therefore, the cell phone is obviously the cause of my headaches.
- Bill Hicks spoke against God and religion, then (after many years of it) Bill Hicks died relatively young. Of cancer. Obviously his lack of faith is the cause of his illness.
- I got a raise, and soon thereafter the latest economic bubble burst and the credit crunch kicked in. Obviously my raise the cause of the recession. My wage is that big a burden on the economy ;)
- Jane bought a new TFT monitor, and soon thereafter she got diagnosed with melanoma. Therefore the radiation from TFT monitors must have caused it.
- John switched from Linux to BSD, and soon afterwards he ended up in a mental institution. Therefore BSD drives people insane.
Etc.
The common theme there is really this: "happened after, therefore happened because". Temporal succession => causality.
The difference between it and, say, "correlation != causation" is that here usually you don't even have enough of a sample to even have a proper correlation. You have two random anecdotes and the only thing that connects them is the order of their timestamps, so to speak, and that succession is taken to mean causation.
But you probably knew that already.
So, anyway, assuming that you did mean that particular fallacy, in which way do you see it at work there? It doesn't seem obvious at all to me, and I'm genuinely curious. What case of chronology mistaken for casuality do you have in mind there?
I never said it had to be an organised thing. If X people try to effect change Y, that's their "cause" I'm talking about. Even if they're not organized or centralized at all. Even if they don't know each other even exists.
All I'm saying is that if Y people fight for the "idea" X, it only takes one idiot to taint the efforts of the other Y-1.
Ditto by "PR image". I don't mean hiring a PR agency. But there is an "image" associated with that cause X, whatever that may be. To spread the word, you want people to think positively of it and the people advocating it. You don't want to offer the handwaved excuse of, basically, "bah, it's just a bunch of crazy asshats."
To offer a better example, I remember when SCO started their attack on Linux. So a bunch of people started talking of DDOS-ing or hacking SCO. Not sure any more if anyone actually did, but that's irrelevant for what I'm trying to say. Those people didn't belong to any formal advocacy group, but their "cause" was "Linux." That's the kind of "cause" I'm talking about. Well, the reaction from virtually all advocacy groups was, basically, "please don't! We don't want people to associate Linux with that kind of thing."
That's what I'm talking about, really. People are quick to build guilt by association and extrapolate from unrepresentative biased samples. To further your ideas, you don't want to give them that.
And to get back to the topic, it's the same thing I'm saying about fighting against Scientology. It's a noble goal. Let's not taint it with asshattery.
I could ask the exact same in return: so raiding the about a dozen endgame instances on WoW is boring for you... but having the lopsided siege of Altdorf as the _only_ endgame, somehow isn't? Exactly how many times do you have to win that battle before it gets boring for you?
Even skipping over the gross imbalance in numbers between the two factions, that's... what? Equivalent to _one_ WoW battleground? Oh, wait, my bad, it's _two_ battlegrounds, if you also count defense of your own capital. Even if you're that hard into PvP, it seems to me that WoW _still_ has more content there.
As you were saying, "You and I have different levels of boredeom I guess."