Not sure about that. The number of people actually playing SWG is abysmal after what Sony did to it.
And let's not forget one important thing: a lot of those are on a Station Account, which gives them access to all games for a flat monthly fee. A lot of them really have no interest whatsoever in the current SWG. I know I still show as a SWG subscriber because I once added it to the station account, and basically never bothered digging too deep to find out how to remove just SWG from it, because it doesn't cost anything to leave it there.
The vast majority of those don't make any income for SWG per se, because basically hardly any will leave because SWG shuts down. It's actually people who play EQ2 or even EQ1 or whatever, and they're not going to cancel their subscription because SWG shuts down.
Out of the few who still were specifically hanging around SWG to beg Sony to roll back the idiotic changes, most didn't really play much and their ranks are thinning out as it is. A lot of those can be expected to fuck off the instant there is another SW game out there, and those DO make a difference to revenue.
So let's look at it from Sony's POV: they could keep running a game which is hardly making them any money, and pay a shitload of money for servers, support, AND pay a shitload of money to Lucas for support. Or they could finally admit that they ran it into the fucking ground, and move on. The smart move is the latter.
Granted, I didn't expect Sony to do it, because they have this annoying habit of not admitting any mistakes and pretending they're Numero Uno, baby, even while they're digging themselves into a hole and alienating their player base. Must be one of those "losing face" things. In fact that's how they dug it into a hole with SWG in the first place. If they could admit they screwed up at any point instead of forging ahead into stupid land, they probably wouldn't be here.
Now let's look at it from Lucas's POV. Frankly, SWG never was the kind of game that is actually all that beneficial for their license.
I mean, at least with a Darth Vader t-shirt or plastic lightsaber, you know what you're getting, and no hard feelings afterwards. With SWG, you had millions of fans expecting it like the second cumming of Christ, and getting bitter and disappointed. It's not necessarily the kind of thing you want when selling licensed stuff. You don't license your toys to a turd-burger shop, you know?
And let's not pretend it was just NGE. While I can see why some people liked the skill system, pretty much that was all there was to it even before SWG. But that doesn't do much for Lucas. It wasn't exactly the best game for showcasing their license.
And in fact it was a game which did funky things to their license. The game launched without space stuff or Jedi. And for that matter without much stuff to do except some pointless PvP. The latter introduction of Jedi pissed all over the license, in making you acceptable as a Jedi only after you're a bitter old wreck that's been a dozen other professions and gave up. That's exactly opposite to canon, you know?
The NGE somewhat fixed that, but screwed everything else. But even the license issue wasn't really "fixed" except in as much as a kitten is "fixed" after a trip to the vet;)
The NGE went full tilt into shameless merchandising exercise, and to such an extent that it left a bitter taste in the mouth of everyone who wasn't explicitly after that. Suddenly you had Darth Vader personally pursuing some fucking Twi'lek dancer if the player was one, Han Solo personally rescuing her, etc. It's stuff that didn't even make much sense. WTF did she do, to warrant that? Gave Palpatine some Iridorian clap, or what?
It wasn't some subtle use of canon characters, but some mass produced drivel that shoved them down the player's throat whether he wanted them or not.
If you will, it's like those cheap knock-off toys that give Superman a parachute (WTF, can't he fly?) or put Darth Vader on a motorcycle.
Actually, I don't think it's just misunderstanding. There are historical examples of people having moral panics or outrages over things that didn't involve any special maths to understand.
E.g., the funniest was one monk having a long rant against the printing press, back in Gutenberg's days. Among other things, apparently copying books by hand builds character and appreciation, according to him, so obviously this newfangled printing press will cause some generations of wimps and illiterates. Actually it was one factor that caused literacy and access to literature to go up.
I don't think he needed any special knowledge to understand what a printing press does. He just feared the change it would cause.
But an even more common factor is: follow the money. You'll find that a lot of scaremongering over new technologies can be traced to people fearing:
A. Loss of income. Remember the whole scare campaign the Edison waged against AC, just because he stood to lose sales of his DC generators that had to be placed every couple of houses. That was sales of thousands of generators he stood to lose, should people switch to AC.
The same can be seen for many other scares. E.g., TV and radio stations making scare stories about computer games? Oh gee, I wonder why that is...;)
Even in the case of bringing electricity to homes that is quoted in TFA, remember that there was a whole industry to supply lamp oil and/or gas for lighting. A couple of electrical wires and lightbulbs would have put them out of business. And historically it did. Quick: how many whaling companies are there in the west to supply whale oil for lamps? None, eh? Well, now you know why they raised a stink and dressed it in some moral outrage BS.
B. Loss of status symbols.
Sometimes if I can get X while the Joneses can't get X, it's a symbol that I'm better than the Joneses. It can be a fur coat for the missus, or a sports car, or historically affording a well lit home or a book. Or whatever. What matters is that I have something that the Joneses can't afford. Historically we even once made a fashion thing to be deathly pale, to make a "look, I can afford to stay indoors all day, while the Joneses work in the fields" status point, and switched to it being fashionable to be tanned when most jobs moved indoors, so now the better point was "look, I can afford to go to the beach". Etc.
So, yes, expect a lot of people to oppose anything that would lower the price of something and devalue its status symbol value. If the Joneses can get X too, then my having X isn't worth any status symbol points any more.
Look at electricity and lit homes again. At one point having a well lit home was a status symbol. The poor would have at most a candle or small lamp and spend all evening clustered around it, while the rich could flaunt their having a whole mansion lit like day. The prospect that in a few years every plebeian could have the same... you can see how that would make a lot of ad hoc "moralists" raise a stink.
Only of course, they can't just come out and say, "you fucking plebs should fucking stay in the dark so I can keep bragging about affording light!!!" They had to pack it in some "it's for your own good" kind of bullshit.
If you had open wounds, maybe, but otherwise your skin has a keratin layer that keeps most of the stuff well away from your cells. It's basically the same reason why the doctor can wipe your skin with concentrated alcohol before giving you an injection, but if you tried the same on an open wound they could probably hear the scream from a mile away.
I'm not sure where you see the contradiction or being right vs being wrong, since it's different issues. Making money does not automatically equal quality or anything.
E.g., there's a billion dollar industry selling homeopathic pills that do nothing, or quantum chi crystal-power pendants that do nothing, or magical/wishful thinking "self-help" books that don't and can't work like that in the real world, etc. Or exercise machines which then sit idle in a corner and collect dust.
Now repeat business might be a more legitimate measure of whether something sucks or not. But selling some millions of overpriced consoles (for the hardware in them) based on a gimmick like pretending they're exercise machines, and then discovering that those people don't actually buy more games for them, nor actually use them to exercise... exactly what's the measure there whether it sucks or doesn't suck?
I mean basically you could say the same about scientology and its e-meters. It doesn't even do or diagnose anything even according to the church of scientology. ("By itself, this meter does nothing. It is solely for the guide of Ministers of the Church in Confessionals and pastoral counseling. The Electrometer is not medically or scientifically capable of improving the health or bodily function of anyone and is for religious use by students and Ministers of the Church of Scientology only.") So it's fair to say that it sucks. But they made billions selling them and auditing to gullible morons anyway. How's the latter a measure of the former?
Sure, it's a feat of marketing, and for Nintendo's investors it doesn't suck. But then I think whoever criticized the Wii controller at launch wasn't talking about that.
On the same note, while they're at censoring ads, I'd like to see crap censored that includes:
- before/after images that either aren't even the same person, or are the same thing with a different zoom factor. Seen it from penis enlargement pills to diets to God knows what else. Yeah, it's soo not insulting my intelligence to try to sell me a diet where the before and after aren't even the same person.
- all those retarded "free IQ test" ads that actually have nothing to do with IQ, but are just ambiguous images that have no right or wrong answer. Sorry, if I'm to trust anyone to give me an IQ test, it kinda helps if the ad doesn't convince me up front that they're drooling morons who don't even understand what IQ means.
Though a new low in stupidity was such an IQ ad recently which was about solving a maze... where blatantly one end was completely walled in and quite within a short distance of it too. As in, next square.
- ads which are unskipable movies, and with sound too. I don't give a fuck about what colours they are in, nor about whether they blink or not. In an age where bandwidth caps are becoming the norm, and are sometimes measured in single digit gigabytes, serving a 100 MB video as an ad is just plain old evil. I don't care how important some cretin PHB thinks his new product is, if they waste so much of everyone's resources for it, they should be not just censored, but taken out back, put in a sack and beaten savagely with a stick. But I'll settle for just censorship too.
- ads served in the wrong dimension. I mean, not only it's some annoying animation, but now it's something that was in horizontal banner format and is squeezed and stretched in a vertical banner box. So not only it blinks and makes funny noises, but I can't even read what the fuck is it trying to sell me, even if just to avoid those idiots.
Etc.
Yeah, yeah, I know, there are plugins that do that. But, hey, if Google is going to take over the web, they might as well solve that problem for everyone. Right?:p
I'm not sure exactly what it'll censor, TBH. I mean, even they identify flash ads as the main problem it applies to, but it's not like most of those flashing or fake UI ads were coming from Google in the first place. And I should hope that google didn't index the ads on the page. (If I search for, say, "Rift MMO", I want to get to its home page or a page relevant somehow to it, not just to some unrelated gaming site that has an ad for Rift.)
There aren't many sites I've seen that actually have such content as part of their own page. Most sites would be quite happy to not have any such crap, but get it in ads actually.
So exactly what will Google reject there? Sites which signed with other ad providers than Google? Or will it be just an irrelevant filter that only rejects a couple of annoying newbies' pages that wouldn't rank as particularly relevant for any search anyway?
Sorta. I dunno about others, but what got me interested in programming when I was a wee little lad was that I could make something fun and immediately see the results. All games on my parents' old ZX-81 with 1K RAM (yes, 1024 bytes of RAM, total) were really far more primitive than your typical cell phone game these days. It wasn't hard to get ideas like "I can do better" and actually do so. I actually invited a few friends to play my own primitive strategic bombing "simulator", and they actually found it fun.
But therein lies the rub. It wasn't just the possibility to use BASIC as such. BASIC was just a tool, and the Sinclair BASIC was a piss-poor tool at that, being easily the slowest BASIC of that era. I actually "graduated" directly to machine code after a year, because ZX-81 basic was just too slow, and 1K RAM wasn't enough to run an assembler or compiler.
What mattered was seeing some fun results.
Think of it, dunno, like the quests on WoW. Nobody would run across half the continent and back just for the sake of running across half the continent and back. But throw in a reward, and it becomes fun.
Similarly, nobody learned BASIC for BASIC's sake, and I can assure you that nobody who's not terminally schizophrenic would do something as horrible as converting assembly to hex codes by hand, just for the sake of converting opcodes to hex codes by hand. We did it for the sake of seeing some results at the end.
I'm not sure most of the BASICs around can work like that. I most certainly wouldn't have learned BASIC for the sake of programming a fucking spreadsheet or a Word macro. When you're a kid and do that in your free time instead of playing something or hanging with some friends, if your dream in life is to make a better spreadsheet macro, you need professional help. Plus, it's not the kind of thing you can brag to other kids about.
But I think all is not lost. If I were to get some kid interested in coding these days, I'd get them a moddable game. Scripting a new NPC or quest in Fallout New Vegas gets one a tangible reward in a reasonable amount of time, and some bragging rights after you upload it to a couple of mod sites. Or there are several games that are scripted in Python these days, which also has the advantage of being a skill you can take with you to the next game that uses Python for scripts.
Maybe, but I didn't write that forum software, I just use it. And I have to do what works on those boards, regardless of exactly what the IQ of the people who wrote their forum software was.
If I want to link someone to a mod of mine on the Nexus, I can fuss all I want about how it should be <a href="something">, it won't make their forum software swallow that. Either I write that as [url=something] or I don't have a link.
And, honestly, I kinda outgrew the stage of waging a holy war over such issues. It's just a stupid markup language. Whether it's with square brackets, or angular brackets, or control codes like in the old WordStar, or whatever, who the fuck cares?
The only real difference is that Slashdot doesn't allow editing to fix it if I accidentally used the wrong one.
Nobody said they're identical, but there is plenty of evidence that people do connect to people in a movie or game in ways that aren't that clearly cut. E.g., seeing some people talking in a movie has been shown to make people less lonely.
You could equally postulate that there is no connection between seeing people in a movie and talking to people IRL, but for the hierarchy of needs the former seems to be enough. The brain can get a need or urge satisfied by just watching other people on a screen.
IOW, such personal postulates are pretty worthless. That's why we make studies, instead of just believing Random Internet Guy #12345678 to know exactly what outlets work for what.
Yeah, but unfortunately different forums have different ideas about how markup should work. Virtually all the PHP ones use square brackets, for example. Slashdot is just one board out of many for me, and really the one I read the least lately. So, you know, reflexes kick in and all that.
1. They don't say that violent games cause an increase in VIOLENT CRIME, but in aggression. Which is a whole other dish. One can be aggressive in various ways that don't actually involve bashing someone's head in.
The difference is basically like that between feeling horny and rape. Even if, say, pornography makes people hornier, it doesn't also make them go rape someone. I'm using that example because we already have a damn good correlation between access to pornography and a dramatic reduction in rape incidence over the years.
So basically it's not as simple as having a +10% crime safety and a -5% crime safety there to sum up. There is nothing in there that says you actually even have a - at all.
2. On the same note, if it's increased aggression that only happens in games, then who cares? You'd only have a - there if it translates to violence outside the games, which nobody showed yet. In fact even for aggression, nobody showed a longer term effect than the next couple of hours.
Again, I'll return to what we know about pornography and rape. Sure, pornography makes people horny, BUT it also offers the easiest outlet for that. It's easier to just spank the monkey and be done with it, than shut down the browser and go look for someone to rape.
On the same note, if violent games make people aggressive, BUT also offer a more immediate way to vent that aggression, then basically there is no - there at all. There is some increased aggression... in a game. Who cares?
Or to put it in an example less emotionally loaded than pornography, think buying a scratching post for your cat. Sure, it may make the cat scratch more than if it had nothing available, but it doesn't mean more scratching on your furniture. Scratching more on the post, who cares about that?
3. That duality between maybe increased urges, but also a way to vent them, is important when it's not the only way to get such urges in the first place. A way to work out that aggression without actually harming anyone can work not just for aggression from games, but for aggression that was there without games too. And you can't just decree what else should work for venting it.
Basically if someone is feeling aggressive, you can't just tell them to vent it on playing The Sims 3 instead of Call Of Duty. If the game they're allowed doesn't scratch the itch they have, then you don't just have the + without the -, you don't have the + in the first place.
Basically same as it works for the aforementioned pornography correlation. If someone is feeling horny, you can't really tell them to go pray and do wholesome activities and thoughts instead, because it doesn't work that way. We have thousands of years of trying to tell them that, and it didn't work as well as in theory. We tried to preach chivalrous courtly love and non-sexual thoughts, and even threaten people with hell if they don't, but it turns out they still went and raped someone. Then comes an age of just letting them watch porn and spank the monkey, and, what d you know? Something that actually scratches the itch works better than just telling them to pretend the itch doesn't exist.
Or same as the cat and the scratch post. You can't just tell the cat to do something else instead of scratching, because the urge is there anyway. If there is no scratching post or surface, you get scratched carpets and furniture, and that's that. The thing that works is to give it something better than your furniture to scratch.
Both TFA's don't just talk about crime levels, they talk explicitly about reducing VIOLENT crime levels. So, yes, it's a good thing, regardless of how you feel about petty crime.
Besides, I don't think the goal of the police is to worry about people's existential angst. Crime is something that one can objectively measure, while communities' feelings are subjective and unpredictable. You can't say that the police failed to do their job, if some scaremongering politician makes them feel less safe in spite of reduced crime.
Or to quote Dara O'Briain, who puts it the best: "[i]I give out when people talk about crime going up, but the numbers are definitely down. And if you go, "The numbers are down", they go, "Ahh, but the *fear* of crime is rising." Well, so fucking what? Zombies are at an all-time low level, but the fear of zombies could be incredibly high. It doesn't mean you have to have government policies to deal with the fear of zombies.[/i]"
Not just in Japan, actually. Last I've seen, just about anywhere where they could put some numbers on historical access to pornography, it correlates the same way with a reduction in sex crimes.
I don't think there's all that much cultural about it. A similar effect has been noticed before between splatter movies and violent crimes, for example. When a new one starts in theatres, for the next couple of days you see less less assaults and such. If nothing else, because they're in the theatre instead of on the streets.
Pretty much the same for porn, really. If there's an easier outlet for either sex urges or power over someone fantasies, well, more people take the road that's less risky. Plus, they can't be both at home spanking the monkey and out raping someone.
Makes sense for the games too, if you think of it. As I was saying, the correlation was already noticed for movies.
Much as I love leaping to conclusions as much as anyone else, I'd say let's wait and see what they want to do there.
For a start, from what I hear so far, it's less like free to play and selling l33t items for cash, as just having an indefinite trial account if you don't want to pay. If you're on a free account, you can't join a supergroup (think: guild/clan/whatever), you have only 2 character slots you can play, you can't use any endgame stuff, can't use the AE, can't have epic archetype characters, can't have mastermind or controller characters, have restricted access to the auction house, etc. They still expect to make their money from subscriptions, not from selling items or anything, but basically are giving everyone else an extended trial account that never expires and lets them play some basic version of the game. If you want more than that, you need to buy a subscription.
Second, COH already had micro-transactions, except they were more like buying extra costume pieces and character slots. And by "costume pieces" i mean literally just a mesh and texture. You're not getting some armour of invulnerability +10, because the game doesn't work that way, you're getting simply a funky robe or wedding tux or spandex outfit or funky cape that does nothing else than look cool. It has no stats whatsoever, because nothing else does. All superhero powers are inherent in your character, not in your armour or weapon.
Just abut the most tangible thing you could buy for real money was a jetpack that lets one fly for a month without learning a travel power. But then the same can be bought in game for 10,000 influence (think about the same purchasing power as 10,000 copper pieces in WoW) at any level and as often as you like, or obtained via some quests, or even crafted, flies exactly as fast (and both are slower than getting the normal flight power) and typically lasts you longer. Just about the only real advantage to the bought one is that it looks better than the in-game one, but that's about it.
So even for PvP, frankly, you get no advantage out of those. If I'm to worry about someone defeating me with real money, I'd worry more about the guy who bought a few billion inf from Chinese gold farmers and bought the purple sets from the auction house. The guy who bought a jetpack or a flashy cape from NCSoft, heh, that one's no threat.
Third, there is almost no PvP in the game anyway, and certainly none you need to take part in. If you're worried that someone will use an unfair advantage against you in PvP, shoot, don't go into the arena or the (largely deserted) PvP areas.
Most of us on COH had tried CO anyway. Heck, everyone was awaiting a second superhero MMO like the second cumming of Christ. It just wasn't all that good.
I suspect that someone could move to a game they like less, for the sake of 15 dollars a month. But it can't be that huge a segment of the population IMHO.
Replay value is a tricky thing to balance. Adding replay value might cut sales of the sequel, as players will hold on to the first game or buy it from the bargain bin and then install mods.
Well, there is of course that possibility, but it doesn't seem to have hurt either Bethesda or EA. I mean, Bethesda still sold FO:NV _and_ a metric buttload (about two thirds of an imperial arseload;) of DLC expansions for both FO3 and NV. And EA sold The Sims 2 and The Sims 3, and a butt-load of expansions and item packs for all 3 games, in spite of the existence of an unbelievable abundance of mods.
And about waiting for it to get to the bargain bin... look at The Sims. Not only the games didn't drop in price much over time, but even relatively minor expansion packs started at nearly full game price and only dropped in price very very slowly. Some would still cost more than half the price of a new game, some 2-3 years after release.
Fallout 3 also didn't drop in price all that fast. I mean, sure, it did, but slower than other games which only offered 10 hours of gameplay and then that was it.
Plus, there's plain old the factor that people talk to each other. Someone might buy your first game, because they heard good things about it. Even if then they skipped your next one, you still got the same money out of them, and got it a year or two earlier. It must be worth something.
Plus, there's the factor that no publisher is a complete monotony. The competition isn't just between your current game and your next game. It's also between your next game and the next game of the other publishers. The reputation of being extremely modder friendly made a lot of us pretty much guaranteed to buy any game Bethesda puts out, even if it means giving something else a skip.
Adding mod support also increases the possibility that your game might make the news in a bad way if it gets modded into something that offends the Moral Guardians. But on console platforms, adding replay value encourages people to hold on to the first game rather than resell it to a used game store, driving more sales of new copies.
The "moral guardians" sure seem to be running out of steam. Fallout 3 and NV have a bonanza of naked mods, bouncy boobs mods (no, literally), 'pornstar body' mods (makes the melons literally watermelon sized), lingerie mods, animated prostitution mods (yes, literally), mods that allow one to shot children, lolicon mods and screenshots, etc. It sure doesn't seem to have caused much of a fuss.
Mind you, there is the mandatory thread once a month from someone making some "OMG, why do you guys make naked women instead of modding the item *I* want", but that's about it.
It's not just about playability the first time, though, IMHO.
1. Mods also add replay value.
E.g., putting a silencer on more weapons than the 10mm pistol (and I can take pride in being the first guy on the Nexus who put a silencer on a different weapon than the 10mm pistol, and before there even was a GECK as that) opened up a whole new possibility: to play a ranged stealth character from start to finish. In the normal game that 10mm pistol would get woefully underpowered by the end, so basically eventually you had to suck it up and just use loud weapons. Now I could have half a dozen different silent guns, ranging from point blank SMGs to long range sniper weapons.
And then there are the pure vanity replays, like playing a game only with a lightsaber, or in an Alucard suit and with the Jackal gun, or in a Boba Fett armour and with my very own EE-3 blaster carbine, or strictly by smashing heads with an authentic late-medieval six-flanged mace like an old-style D&D priest. Especially since many such concepts involved advancing different skills (e.g., if I use blasters, I'll want energy skills, so I might as well get medicine too and get Cyborg, etc) and sometimes figuring different ways to get past the same situations (e.g., I can't snipe with a melee polearm;)
Sure, FO3 was plenty playable without that. But, really, there's only so many times you can play it again only with the standard props. All those extra props let me have a lot more fun by giving me a reason to play the game again.
2. Modding the game is fun by itself.
I mean, sure, I didn't really need a 30mm/L40 portable cannon to play the game, but modelling and texturing it and the custom ammo was fun by itself. Or I didn't really need a scoped EE-3 blaster, but, you get the idea, it's fun to model all those fins and scratch the edges and darken the creases just right. Etc.
So, yeah, I'd say that Fallout 3 still benefited from being so moddable. Sure, it would be playable even without mods, but I think I got a lot more bang for my buck as it is.
Well, that's what I was saying too by the end of the message you reply to: make them available online and digitally signed, so it's easy to see that it's not been tampered with, and you can dismiss forgeries a lot easier. So we can really agree very quickly, what with both saying the same thing and all.
Think about it this way, though: wouldn't the best defense against that be to actually just comply and make those emails public, and cryptographically signed by a 3'rd party? I mean, if soneone is going to spin things out of context, they're just going to find something to spin out of context. It seems to me like being able to point at the context and have everyone able to check for themselves, is the best way to kill most people's belief in conspiracy theories.
Yeah, but also for a lot of people the number of "friends" they have on some list, is some kind of self-validation and status symbol.
To understand what I'm about to say, I must mention Dunbar's Number, which mans basically for a given species, how many relationships you can juggle around in your head. For Homo Sapiens that's a little under 150. The most primitive tribes can work without any form of organization below that number, for example, by simple virtue of everyone being friends with everyone else in the tribe. When it grows above that number, the tribe eventually splits into two.
But basically that's it: 150. If you try to be pals with an 151'th person, someone else falls off the other end of that list. It's like a total amount of fuck you can give. You start giving a fuck about an 151'th person, you stop having a fuck to give about someone else;)
And that includes RL pals, co-workers, relatives, ex-classmates one stays in contact with, guild-mates in WoW that one interacts enough with, etc.
The limit, btw, seems to be a function of brain size and complexity, and really a built in constant for each species. I know lots of nerds like to imagine they're some sort of mutant for which basic biology doesn't apply, and who know better than doctors what their metabolism needs or how their brain works or how many hours of sleep they really need, but they're usually proven wrong sooner or later, and usually in a nasty way. Just like those who think they can live on twinkies and energy drinks then discover they weren't mutants after all, same applies here: one may think he's the super-guy who can juggle 2000 relationships, but chances are that they're just as capped at 150 as everyone else.
But fine, let's say someone is really a complete mutant and can juggle... how much 200? 300? It's still far below the numbers of "friends" some people think they have just for having a name on a list.
What I'm getting at is that whether someone is "just another tubby, pockmarked, unkempt, pizza-sauce-stained, geeky dude like themselves" is fully irrelevant for the guy/gal with 21,537 friends on his list. He just doesn't even have the biological wiring to give a fuck either way about that many people. At that point, whether someone is actually a hot porn actress or a tubby basement-dweller is not even relevant any more. All that really matters is just that aggregate "21,537 friends" number to use as an e-peen meter.
And they'd probably accept the request for the 21,538'th friend even if it came with a text of "hi, I'm a spam bot written by a 50 year old virgin still living with his retired mom, do you want to be my friend?" Because, fuck, that's now 21,538 friends. Eat that, you losers with only 21,537 friends on your lists.
I'm not so sure, actually. Some of the absolute worst PHB's I've ever had the misfortune to work with, weren't MBA types, but former brilliant coders. They're the guys who thought they're still expert enough to take tech decisions by themselves, just because they once coded some clever calculations in FORTRAN and subscribe to some IT-for-managers ragazine. The fact that a lot still had the typical nerd personality of just having to be right about everything, and taking even the theoretical possibility of their ever being wrong as directly and insultingly questioning their intelligence, and you can see where this is going.
The MBA types, well [i]some[/i] of the MBA types, at least knew they know bugger-all and delegated to someone who does know.
I suspect that a good part of the reason is: Dunning-Kruger effect. The ones who know the least, tend to overestimate how much they actually know. But there seems to be a dangerous middle, where someone has slipped back just enough to think again that they know everything there is to known, but also slipped back enough that the parts they don't know start actually meaning they take dumb decisions.
Actually, from the screenshots I've seen, it's not just that three different games have soldiers running around with guns. It's that three different games have soldiers running around with the exact same fucking gun and the exact same extras attached.
Honestly, I hope that at least some will be single player and moddable, because then maybe I can make or port my own guns to it.
You don't understand that Richelieu quote, grasshopper.
Ya see, what Richelieu was saying there was basically just flaunting his abuse of power. That's it. It has nothing to do with the usual idiotic interpretations like too many laws, or everyone is guilty of something, or anything.
What Richelieu actually did was employ forgers to write whole contracts with the devil in the handwriting of his opponents. Then have them waterboarded until they confess, and then execute them.
You think I'm kidding? Check out for example Urbain Grandier for a documented case of such a victim of Richelieu.
THAT is what he needed six lines in the handwriting of someone for: as a writing sample for the forgers Richelieu employed.
And while in that quote he's clever enough to not directly say that, it's a very thinly veiled reminder of why it's not wise to cross him. If you can write and ever wrote anything, he can "find" something else in your handwriting to hang you for, even though you don't remember ever writing that.
I hardly think that Palin's emails are in any similar danger. And releasing them as paper is hardly a solution. If they're worried about forgeries in her name, then the sane way would be to release them as a file with a public secure hash value. That way if anyone says they found a damning email in there, you can see if their file actually matches the hash value. If it doesn't, it's been tampered with, and you can ignore the accusation.
Yeah, but that's exactly the point. You can just search google and get more than enough photos of chicks fitting any body ideal or fantasy one may have. "Amateur", skinny, fat, big boobs, small boobs, redhead, blonde, brunette, cheerleaders, goths, whatever you can imagine really.
So exactly what makes a certain category of idiot prefer to be a crook or a bully to get the same?
I mean, it's like having a public drinking fountain on one side of a road, and seeing someone shoplifting a bottle of water on the other side of the road. The question that comes to mind is: why?
I can't say I know the answer, but it looks to me like the forbidden fruit was basically the illegal act, rather than the pics he got.
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure about that. The number of people actually playing SWG is abysmal after what Sony did to it.
And let's not forget one important thing: a lot of those are on a Station Account, which gives them access to all games for a flat monthly fee. A lot of them really have no interest whatsoever in the current SWG. I know I still show as a SWG subscriber because I once added it to the station account, and basically never bothered digging too deep to find out how to remove just SWG from it, because it doesn't cost anything to leave it there.
The vast majority of those don't make any income for SWG per se, because basically hardly any will leave because SWG shuts down. It's actually people who play EQ2 or even EQ1 or whatever, and they're not going to cancel their subscription because SWG shuts down.
Out of the few who still were specifically hanging around SWG to beg Sony to roll back the idiotic changes, most didn't really play much and their ranks are thinning out as it is. A lot of those can be expected to fuck off the instant there is another SW game out there, and those DO make a difference to revenue.
So let's look at it from Sony's POV: they could keep running a game which is hardly making them any money, and pay a shitload of money for servers, support, AND pay a shitload of money to Lucas for support. Or they could finally admit that they ran it into the fucking ground, and move on. The smart move is the latter.
Granted, I didn't expect Sony to do it, because they have this annoying habit of not admitting any mistakes and pretending they're Numero Uno, baby, even while they're digging themselves into a hole and alienating their player base. Must be one of those "losing face" things. In fact that's how they dug it into a hole with SWG in the first place. If they could admit they screwed up at any point instead of forging ahead into stupid land, they probably wouldn't be here.
Now let's look at it from Lucas's POV. Frankly, SWG never was the kind of game that is actually all that beneficial for their license.
I mean, at least with a Darth Vader t-shirt or plastic lightsaber, you know what you're getting, and no hard feelings afterwards. With SWG, you had millions of fans expecting it like the second cumming of Christ, and getting bitter and disappointed. It's not necessarily the kind of thing you want when selling licensed stuff. You don't license your toys to a turd-burger shop, you know?
And let's not pretend it was just NGE. While I can see why some people liked the skill system, pretty much that was all there was to it even before SWG. But that doesn't do much for Lucas. It wasn't exactly the best game for showcasing their license.
And in fact it was a game which did funky things to their license. The game launched without space stuff or Jedi. And for that matter without much stuff to do except some pointless PvP. The latter introduction of Jedi pissed all over the license, in making you acceptable as a Jedi only after you're a bitter old wreck that's been a dozen other professions and gave up. That's exactly opposite to canon, you know?
The NGE somewhat fixed that, but screwed everything else. But even the license issue wasn't really "fixed" except in as much as a kitten is "fixed" after a trip to the vet ;)
The NGE went full tilt into shameless merchandising exercise, and to such an extent that it left a bitter taste in the mouth of everyone who wasn't explicitly after that. Suddenly you had Darth Vader personally pursuing some fucking Twi'lek dancer if the player was one, Han Solo personally rescuing her, etc. It's stuff that didn't even make much sense. WTF did she do, to warrant that? Gave Palpatine some Iridorian clap, or what?
It wasn't some subtle use of canon characters, but some mass produced drivel that shoved them down the player's throat whether he wanted them or not.
If you will, it's like those cheap knock-off toys that give Superman a parachute (WTF, can't he fly?) or put Darth Vader on a motorcycle.
Actually, I don't think it's just misunderstanding. There are historical examples of people having moral panics or outrages over things that didn't involve any special maths to understand.
E.g., the funniest was one monk having a long rant against the printing press, back in Gutenberg's days. Among other things, apparently copying books by hand builds character and appreciation, according to him, so obviously this newfangled printing press will cause some generations of wimps and illiterates. Actually it was one factor that caused literacy and access to literature to go up.
I don't think he needed any special knowledge to understand what a printing press does. He just feared the change it would cause.
But an even more common factor is: follow the money. You'll find that a lot of scaremongering over new technologies can be traced to people fearing:
A. Loss of income. Remember the whole scare campaign the Edison waged against AC, just because he stood to lose sales of his DC generators that had to be placed every couple of houses. That was sales of thousands of generators he stood to lose, should people switch to AC.
The same can be seen for many other scares. E.g., TV and radio stations making scare stories about computer games? Oh gee, I wonder why that is... ;)
Even in the case of bringing electricity to homes that is quoted in TFA, remember that there was a whole industry to supply lamp oil and/or gas for lighting. A couple of electrical wires and lightbulbs would have put them out of business. And historically it did. Quick: how many whaling companies are there in the west to supply whale oil for lamps? None, eh? Well, now you know why they raised a stink and dressed it in some moral outrage BS.
B. Loss of status symbols.
Sometimes if I can get X while the Joneses can't get X, it's a symbol that I'm better than the Joneses. It can be a fur coat for the missus, or a sports car, or historically affording a well lit home or a book. Or whatever. What matters is that I have something that the Joneses can't afford. Historically we even once made a fashion thing to be deathly pale, to make a "look, I can afford to stay indoors all day, while the Joneses work in the fields" status point, and switched to it being fashionable to be tanned when most jobs moved indoors, so now the better point was "look, I can afford to go to the beach". Etc.
So, yes, expect a lot of people to oppose anything that would lower the price of something and devalue its status symbol value. If the Joneses can get X too, then my having X isn't worth any status symbol points any more.
Look at electricity and lit homes again. At one point having a well lit home was a status symbol. The poor would have at most a candle or small lamp and spend all evening clustered around it, while the rich could flaunt their having a whole mansion lit like day. The prospect that in a few years every plebeian could have the same... you can see how that would make a lot of ad hoc "moralists" raise a stink.
Only of course, they can't just come out and say, "you fucking plebs should fucking stay in the dark so I can keep bragging about affording light!!!" They had to pack it in some "it's for your own good" kind of bullshit.
If you had open wounds, maybe, but otherwise your skin has a keratin layer that keeps most of the stuff well away from your cells. It's basically the same reason why the doctor can wipe your skin with concentrated alcohol before giving you an injection, but if you tried the same on an open wound they could probably hear the scream from a mile away.
I'm not sure where you see the contradiction or being right vs being wrong, since it's different issues. Making money does not automatically equal quality or anything.
E.g., there's a billion dollar industry selling homeopathic pills that do nothing, or quantum chi crystal-power pendants that do nothing, or magical/wishful thinking "self-help" books that don't and can't work like that in the real world, etc. Or exercise machines which then sit idle in a corner and collect dust.
Now repeat business might be a more legitimate measure of whether something sucks or not. But selling some millions of overpriced consoles (for the hardware in them) based on a gimmick like pretending they're exercise machines, and then discovering that those people don't actually buy more games for them, nor actually use them to exercise... exactly what's the measure there whether it sucks or doesn't suck?
I mean basically you could say the same about scientology and its e-meters. It doesn't even do or diagnose anything even according to the church of scientology. ("By itself, this meter does nothing. It is solely for the guide of Ministers of the Church in Confessionals and pastoral counseling. The Electrometer is not medically or scientifically capable of improving the health or bodily function of anyone and is for religious use by students and Ministers of the Church of Scientology only.") So it's fair to say that it sucks. But they made billions selling them and auditing to gullible morons anyway. How's the latter a measure of the former?
Sure, it's a feat of marketing, and for Nintendo's investors it doesn't suck. But then I think whoever criticized the Wii controller at launch wasn't talking about that.
Hell yeah, good example. If Google could get rid of those content-free template pages, THAT would get them a lot of good will from me.
On the same note, while they're at censoring ads, I'd like to see crap censored that includes:
- before/after images that either aren't even the same person, or are the same thing with a different zoom factor. Seen it from penis enlargement pills to diets to God knows what else. Yeah, it's soo not insulting my intelligence to try to sell me a diet where the before and after aren't even the same person.
- all those retarded "free IQ test" ads that actually have nothing to do with IQ, but are just ambiguous images that have no right or wrong answer. Sorry, if I'm to trust anyone to give me an IQ test, it kinda helps if the ad doesn't convince me up front that they're drooling morons who don't even understand what IQ means.
Though a new low in stupidity was such an IQ ad recently which was about solving a maze... where blatantly one end was completely walled in and quite within a short distance of it too. As in, next square.
- ads which are unskipable movies, and with sound too. I don't give a fuck about what colours they are in, nor about whether they blink or not. In an age where bandwidth caps are becoming the norm, and are sometimes measured in single digit gigabytes, serving a 100 MB video as an ad is just plain old evil. I don't care how important some cretin PHB thinks his new product is, if they waste so much of everyone's resources for it, they should be not just censored, but taken out back, put in a sack and beaten savagely with a stick. But I'll settle for just censorship too.
- ads served in the wrong dimension. I mean, not only it's some annoying animation, but now it's something that was in horizontal banner format and is squeezed and stretched in a vertical banner box. So not only it blinks and makes funny noises, but I can't even read what the fuck is it trying to sell me, even if just to avoid those idiots.
Etc.
Yeah, yeah, I know, there are plugins that do that. But, hey, if Google is going to take over the web, they might as well solve that problem for everyone. Right? :p
I'm not sure exactly what it'll censor, TBH. I mean, even they identify flash ads as the main problem it applies to, but it's not like most of those flashing or fake UI ads were coming from Google in the first place. And I should hope that google didn't index the ads on the page. (If I search for, say, "Rift MMO", I want to get to its home page or a page relevant somehow to it, not just to some unrelated gaming site that has an ad for Rift.)
There aren't many sites I've seen that actually have such content as part of their own page. Most sites would be quite happy to not have any such crap, but get it in ads actually.
So exactly what will Google reject there? Sites which signed with other ad providers than Google? Or will it be just an irrelevant filter that only rejects a couple of annoying newbies' pages that wouldn't rank as particularly relevant for any search anyway?
Sorta. I dunno about others, but what got me interested in programming when I was a wee little lad was that I could make something fun and immediately see the results. All games on my parents' old ZX-81 with 1K RAM (yes, 1024 bytes of RAM, total) were really far more primitive than your typical cell phone game these days. It wasn't hard to get ideas like "I can do better" and actually do so. I actually invited a few friends to play my own primitive strategic bombing "simulator", and they actually found it fun.
But therein lies the rub. It wasn't just the possibility to use BASIC as such. BASIC was just a tool, and the Sinclair BASIC was a piss-poor tool at that, being easily the slowest BASIC of that era. I actually "graduated" directly to machine code after a year, because ZX-81 basic was just too slow, and 1K RAM wasn't enough to run an assembler or compiler.
What mattered was seeing some fun results.
Think of it, dunno, like the quests on WoW. Nobody would run across half the continent and back just for the sake of running across half the continent and back. But throw in a reward, and it becomes fun.
Similarly, nobody learned BASIC for BASIC's sake, and I can assure you that nobody who's not terminally schizophrenic would do something as horrible as converting assembly to hex codes by hand, just for the sake of converting opcodes to hex codes by hand. We did it for the sake of seeing some results at the end.
I'm not sure most of the BASICs around can work like that. I most certainly wouldn't have learned BASIC for the sake of programming a fucking spreadsheet or a Word macro. When you're a kid and do that in your free time instead of playing something or hanging with some friends, if your dream in life is to make a better spreadsheet macro, you need professional help. Plus, it's not the kind of thing you can brag to other kids about.
But I think all is not lost. If I were to get some kid interested in coding these days, I'd get them a moddable game. Scripting a new NPC or quest in Fallout New Vegas gets one a tangible reward in a reasonable amount of time, and some bragging rights after you upload it to a couple of mod sites. Or there are several games that are scripted in Python these days, which also has the advantage of being a skill you can take with you to the next game that uses Python for scripts.
Maybe, but I didn't write that forum software, I just use it. And I have to do what works on those boards, regardless of exactly what the IQ of the people who wrote their forum software was.
If I want to link someone to a mod of mine on the Nexus, I can fuss all I want about how it should be <a href="something">, it won't make their forum software swallow that. Either I write that as [url=something] or I don't have a link.
And, honestly, I kinda outgrew the stage of waging a holy war over such issues. It's just a stupid markup language. Whether it's with square brackets, or angular brackets, or control codes like in the old WordStar, or whatever, who the fuck cares?
The only real difference is that Slashdot doesn't allow editing to fix it if I accidentally used the wrong one.
Nobody said they're identical, but there is plenty of evidence that people do connect to people in a movie or game in ways that aren't that clearly cut. E.g., seeing some people talking in a movie has been shown to make people less lonely.
You could equally postulate that there is no connection between seeing people in a movie and talking to people IRL, but for the hierarchy of needs the former seems to be enough. The brain can get a need or urge satisfied by just watching other people on a screen.
IOW, such personal postulates are pretty worthless. That's why we make studies, instead of just believing Random Internet Guy #12345678 to know exactly what outlets work for what.
Yeah, but unfortunately different forums have different ideas about how markup should work. Virtually all the PHP ones use square brackets, for example. Slashdot is just one board out of many for me, and really the one I read the least lately. So, you know, reflexes kick in and all that.
Not exactly.
1. They don't say that violent games cause an increase in VIOLENT CRIME, but in aggression. Which is a whole other dish. One can be aggressive in various ways that don't actually involve bashing someone's head in.
The difference is basically like that between feeling horny and rape. Even if, say, pornography makes people hornier, it doesn't also make them go rape someone. I'm using that example because we already have a damn good correlation between access to pornography and a dramatic reduction in rape incidence over the years.
So basically it's not as simple as having a +10% crime safety and a -5% crime safety there to sum up. There is nothing in there that says you actually even have a - at all.
2. On the same note, if it's increased aggression that only happens in games, then who cares? You'd only have a - there if it translates to violence outside the games, which nobody showed yet. In fact even for aggression, nobody showed a longer term effect than the next couple of hours.
Again, I'll return to what we know about pornography and rape. Sure, pornography makes people horny, BUT it also offers the easiest outlet for that. It's easier to just spank the monkey and be done with it, than shut down the browser and go look for someone to rape.
On the same note, if violent games make people aggressive, BUT also offer a more immediate way to vent that aggression, then basically there is no - there at all. There is some increased aggression... in a game. Who cares?
Or to put it in an example less emotionally loaded than pornography, think buying a scratching post for your cat. Sure, it may make the cat scratch more than if it had nothing available, but it doesn't mean more scratching on your furniture. Scratching more on the post, who cares about that?
3. That duality between maybe increased urges, but also a way to vent them, is important when it's not the only way to get such urges in the first place. A way to work out that aggression without actually harming anyone can work not just for aggression from games, but for aggression that was there without games too. And you can't just decree what else should work for venting it.
Basically if someone is feeling aggressive, you can't just tell them to vent it on playing The Sims 3 instead of Call Of Duty. If the game they're allowed doesn't scratch the itch they have, then you don't just have the + without the -, you don't have the + in the first place.
Basically same as it works for the aforementioned pornography correlation. If someone is feeling horny, you can't really tell them to go pray and do wholesome activities and thoughts instead, because it doesn't work that way. We have thousands of years of trying to tell them that, and it didn't work as well as in theory. We tried to preach chivalrous courtly love and non-sexual thoughts, and even threaten people with hell if they don't, but it turns out they still went and raped someone. Then comes an age of just letting them watch porn and spank the monkey, and, what d you know? Something that actually scratches the itch works better than just telling them to pretend the itch doesn't exist.
Or same as the cat and the scratch post. You can't just tell the cat to do something else instead of scratching, because the urge is there anyway. If there is no scratching post or surface, you get scratched carpets and furniture, and that's that. The thing that works is to give it something better than your furniture to scratch.
RTFA. Srsly.
Both TFA's don't just talk about crime levels, they talk explicitly about reducing VIOLENT crime levels. So, yes, it's a good thing, regardless of how you feel about petty crime.
Besides, I don't think the goal of the police is to worry about people's existential angst. Crime is something that one can objectively measure, while communities' feelings are subjective and unpredictable. You can't say that the police failed to do their job, if some scaremongering politician makes them feel less safe in spite of reduced crime.
Or to quote Dara O'Briain, who puts it the best: "[i]I give out when people talk about crime going up, but the numbers are definitely down. And if you go, "The numbers are down", they go, "Ahh, but the *fear* of crime is rising." Well, so fucking what? Zombies are at an all-time low level, but the fear of zombies could be incredibly high. It doesn't mean you have to have government policies to deal with the fear of zombies.[/i]"
Not just in Japan, actually. Last I've seen, just about anywhere where they could put some numbers on historical access to pornography, it correlates the same way with a reduction in sex crimes.
I don't think there's all that much cultural about it. A similar effect has been noticed before between splatter movies and violent crimes, for example. When a new one starts in theatres, for the next couple of days you see less less assaults and such. If nothing else, because they're in the theatre instead of on the streets.
Pretty much the same for porn, really. If there's an easier outlet for either sex urges or power over someone fantasies, well, more people take the road that's less risky. Plus, they can't be both at home spanking the monkey and out raping someone.
Makes sense for the games too, if you think of it. As I was saying, the correlation was already noticed for movies.
Much as I love leaping to conclusions as much as anyone else, I'd say let's wait and see what they want to do there.
For a start, from what I hear so far, it's less like free to play and selling l33t items for cash, as just having an indefinite trial account if you don't want to pay. If you're on a free account, you can't join a supergroup (think: guild/clan/whatever), you have only 2 character slots you can play, you can't use any endgame stuff, can't use the AE, can't have epic archetype characters, can't have mastermind or controller characters, have restricted access to the auction house, etc. They still expect to make their money from subscriptions, not from selling items or anything, but basically are giving everyone else an extended trial account that never expires and lets them play some basic version of the game. If you want more than that, you need to buy a subscription.
Second, COH already had micro-transactions, except they were more like buying extra costume pieces and character slots. And by "costume pieces" i mean literally just a mesh and texture. You're not getting some armour of invulnerability +10, because the game doesn't work that way, you're getting simply a funky robe or wedding tux or spandex outfit or funky cape that does nothing else than look cool. It has no stats whatsoever, because nothing else does. All superhero powers are inherent in your character, not in your armour or weapon.
Just abut the most tangible thing you could buy for real money was a jetpack that lets one fly for a month without learning a travel power. But then the same can be bought in game for 10,000 influence (think about the same purchasing power as 10,000 copper pieces in WoW) at any level and as often as you like, or obtained via some quests, or even crafted, flies exactly as fast (and both are slower than getting the normal flight power) and typically lasts you longer. Just about the only real advantage to the bought one is that it looks better than the in-game one, but that's about it.
So even for PvP, frankly, you get no advantage out of those. If I'm to worry about someone defeating me with real money, I'd worry more about the guy who bought a few billion inf from Chinese gold farmers and bought the purple sets from the auction house. The guy who bought a jetpack or a flashy cape from NCSoft, heh, that one's no threat.
Third, there is almost no PvP in the game anyway, and certainly none you need to take part in. If you're worried that someone will use an unfair advantage against you in PvP, shoot, don't go into the arena or the (largely deserted) PvP areas.
I don't think so.
Most of us on COH had tried CO anyway. Heck, everyone was awaiting a second superhero MMO like the second cumming of Christ. It just wasn't all that good.
I suspect that someone could move to a game they like less, for the sake of 15 dollars a month. But it can't be that huge a segment of the population IMHO.
Well, there is of course that possibility, but it doesn't seem to have hurt either Bethesda or EA. I mean, Bethesda still sold FO:NV _and_ a metric buttload (about two thirds of an imperial arseload;) of DLC expansions for both FO3 and NV. And EA sold The Sims 2 and The Sims 3, and a butt-load of expansions and item packs for all 3 games, in spite of the existence of an unbelievable abundance of mods.
And about waiting for it to get to the bargain bin... look at The Sims. Not only the games didn't drop in price much over time, but even relatively minor expansion packs started at nearly full game price and only dropped in price very very slowly. Some would still cost more than half the price of a new game, some 2-3 years after release.
Fallout 3 also didn't drop in price all that fast. I mean, sure, it did, but slower than other games which only offered 10 hours of gameplay and then that was it.
Plus, there's plain old the factor that people talk to each other. Someone might buy your first game, because they heard good things about it. Even if then they skipped your next one, you still got the same money out of them, and got it a year or two earlier. It must be worth something.
Plus, there's the factor that no publisher is a complete monotony. The competition isn't just between your current game and your next game. It's also between your next game and the next game of the other publishers. The reputation of being extremely modder friendly made a lot of us pretty much guaranteed to buy any game Bethesda puts out, even if it means giving something else a skip.
The "moral guardians" sure seem to be running out of steam. Fallout 3 and NV have a bonanza of naked mods, bouncy boobs mods (no, literally), 'pornstar body' mods (makes the melons literally watermelon sized), lingerie mods, animated prostitution mods (yes, literally), mods that allow one to shot children, lolicon mods and screenshots, etc. It sure doesn't seem to have caused much of a fuss.
Mind you, there is the mandatory thread once a month from someone making some "OMG, why do you guys make naked women instead of modding the item *I* want", but that's about it.
It's not just about playability the first time, though, IMHO.
1. Mods also add replay value.
E.g., putting a silencer on more weapons than the 10mm pistol (and I can take pride in being the first guy on the Nexus who put a silencer on a different weapon than the 10mm pistol, and before there even was a GECK as that) opened up a whole new possibility: to play a ranged stealth character from start to finish. In the normal game that 10mm pistol would get woefully underpowered by the end, so basically eventually you had to suck it up and just use loud weapons. Now I could have half a dozen different silent guns, ranging from point blank SMGs to long range sniper weapons.
And then there are the pure vanity replays, like playing a game only with a lightsaber, or in an Alucard suit and with the Jackal gun, or in a Boba Fett armour and with my very own EE-3 blaster carbine, or strictly by smashing heads with an authentic late-medieval six-flanged mace like an old-style D&D priest. Especially since many such concepts involved advancing different skills (e.g., if I use blasters, I'll want energy skills, so I might as well get medicine too and get Cyborg, etc) and sometimes figuring different ways to get past the same situations (e.g., I can't snipe with a melee polearm;)
Sure, FO3 was plenty playable without that. But, really, there's only so many times you can play it again only with the standard props. All those extra props let me have a lot more fun by giving me a reason to play the game again.
2. Modding the game is fun by itself.
I mean, sure, I didn't really need a 30mm/L40 portable cannon to play the game, but modelling and texturing it and the custom ammo was fun by itself. Or I didn't really need a scoped EE-3 blaster, but, you get the idea, it's fun to model all those fins and scratch the edges and darken the creases just right. Etc.
So, yeah, I'd say that Fallout 3 still benefited from being so moddable. Sure, it would be playable even without mods, but I think I got a lot more bang for my buck as it is.
Well, that's what I was saying too by the end of the message you reply to: make them available online and digitally signed, so it's easy to see that it's not been tampered with, and you can dismiss forgeries a lot easier. So we can really agree very quickly, what with both saying the same thing and all.
Think about it this way, though: wouldn't the best defense against that be to actually just comply and make those emails public, and cryptographically signed by a 3'rd party? I mean, if soneone is going to spin things out of context, they're just going to find something to spin out of context. It seems to me like being able to point at the context and have everyone able to check for themselves, is the best way to kill most people's belief in conspiracy theories.
Yeah, but also for a lot of people the number of "friends" they have on some list, is some kind of self-validation and status symbol.
To understand what I'm about to say, I must mention Dunbar's Number, which mans basically for a given species, how many relationships you can juggle around in your head. For Homo Sapiens that's a little under 150. The most primitive tribes can work without any form of organization below that number, for example, by simple virtue of everyone being friends with everyone else in the tribe. When it grows above that number, the tribe eventually splits into two.
But basically that's it: 150. If you try to be pals with an 151'th person, someone else falls off the other end of that list. It's like a total amount of fuck you can give. You start giving a fuck about an 151'th person, you stop having a fuck to give about someone else ;)
And that includes RL pals, co-workers, relatives, ex-classmates one stays in contact with, guild-mates in WoW that one interacts enough with, etc.
The limit, btw, seems to be a function of brain size and complexity, and really a built in constant for each species. I know lots of nerds like to imagine they're some sort of mutant for which basic biology doesn't apply, and who know better than doctors what their metabolism needs or how their brain works or how many hours of sleep they really need, but they're usually proven wrong sooner or later, and usually in a nasty way. Just like those who think they can live on twinkies and energy drinks then discover they weren't mutants after all, same applies here: one may think he's the super-guy who can juggle 2000 relationships, but chances are that they're just as capped at 150 as everyone else.
But fine, let's say someone is really a complete mutant and can juggle... how much 200? 300? It's still far below the numbers of "friends" some people think they have just for having a name on a list.
What I'm getting at is that whether someone is "just another tubby, pockmarked, unkempt, pizza-sauce-stained, geeky dude like themselves" is fully irrelevant for the guy/gal with 21,537 friends on his list. He just doesn't even have the biological wiring to give a fuck either way about that many people. At that point, whether someone is actually a hot porn actress or a tubby basement-dweller is not even relevant any more. All that really matters is just that aggregate "21,537 friends" number to use as an e-peen meter.
And they'd probably accept the request for the 21,538'th friend even if it came with a text of "hi, I'm a spam bot written by a 50 year old virgin still living with his retired mom, do you want to be my friend?" Because, fuck, that's now 21,538 friends. Eat that, you losers with only 21,537 friends on your lists.
I'm not so sure, actually. Some of the absolute worst PHB's I've ever had the misfortune to work with, weren't MBA types, but former brilliant coders. They're the guys who thought they're still expert enough to take tech decisions by themselves, just because they once coded some clever calculations in FORTRAN and subscribe to some IT-for-managers ragazine. The fact that a lot still had the typical nerd personality of just having to be right about everything, and taking even the theoretical possibility of their ever being wrong as directly and insultingly questioning their intelligence, and you can see where this is going.
The MBA types, well [i]some[/i] of the MBA types, at least knew they know bugger-all and delegated to someone who does know.
I suspect that a good part of the reason is: Dunning-Kruger effect. The ones who know the least, tend to overestimate how much they actually know. But there seems to be a dangerous middle, where someone has slipped back just enough to think again that they know everything there is to known, but also slipped back enough that the parts they don't know start actually meaning they take dumb decisions.
Actually, from the screenshots I've seen, it's not just that three different games have soldiers running around with guns. It's that three different games have soldiers running around with the exact same fucking gun and the exact same extras attached.
Honestly, I hope that at least some will be single player and moddable, because then maybe I can make or port my own guns to it.
You don't understand that Richelieu quote, grasshopper.
Ya see, what Richelieu was saying there was basically just flaunting his abuse of power. That's it. It has nothing to do with the usual idiotic interpretations like too many laws, or everyone is guilty of something, or anything.
What Richelieu actually did was employ forgers to write whole contracts with the devil in the handwriting of his opponents. Then have them waterboarded until they confess, and then execute them.
You think I'm kidding? Check out for example Urbain Grandier for a documented case of such a victim of Richelieu.
THAT is what he needed six lines in the handwriting of someone for: as a writing sample for the forgers Richelieu employed.
And while in that quote he's clever enough to not directly say that, it's a very thinly veiled reminder of why it's not wise to cross him. If you can write and ever wrote anything, he can "find" something else in your handwriting to hang you for, even though you don't remember ever writing that.
I hardly think that Palin's emails are in any similar danger. And releasing them as paper is hardly a solution. If they're worried about forgeries in her name, then the sane way would be to release them as a file with a public secure hash value. That way if anyone says they found a damning email in there, you can see if their file actually matches the hash value. If it doesn't, it's been tampered with, and you can ignore the accusation.
Yeah, but that's exactly the point. You can just search google and get more than enough photos of chicks fitting any body ideal or fantasy one may have. "Amateur", skinny, fat, big boobs, small boobs, redhead, blonde, brunette, cheerleaders, goths, whatever you can imagine really.
So exactly what makes a certain category of idiot prefer to be a crook or a bully to get the same?
I mean, it's like having a public drinking fountain on one side of a road, and seeing someone shoplifting a bottle of water on the other side of the road. The question that comes to mind is: why?
I can't say I know the answer, but it looks to me like the forbidden fruit was basically the illegal act, rather than the pics he got.