Well, or maybe we'll just vote that if you scream into your phone in a train, the cops shove your phone up your arse. It has to be good for the economy too, since it'll stimulate a market and R&D for smaller devices;)
So, really, which would you rather buy? The one which forces you to not disturb the others, or the one which will make you walk bow-legged to the nearest hospital?;)
Well, more seriously, currently the only choice is to disable them completely, for example with EM shielding or with a pico-cell that doesn't let anything through. If we can enforce some manners, maybe we won't need to go that far. Maybe we'll even let the heart surgeon in a movie theatre get his emergency phone call, if we're sure that (A) the phone is capped to vibrating inside the room, instead of playing a retarded tune at 80 dB, and (B) he'll have to walk out to actually talk.
So basically, we're not going to give you the right to be an antisocial retard and annoy everyone else, one way or another. So you can choose between (1) losing any use of that phone in some situations and places, completely, or (2) having some lesser restrictions enforced by it. I hardly think that #2 is the less functional.
And that's not even getting into situations where retards on cell phones actually endanger everyone else. Like retards who pay more attention to their phone when driving, than to the road.
Yes, you may think that you're way above average as a driver, and you'd _never_ possibly cause an accident. Guess what? So does everyone else. Over 90% of the people think that their driving is above average. It's mathematically impossible.
At any rate, it's already proven that talking on the phone impairs driving more than being a little inebriated. So I'd like to see that enforced just like DUI. Forget points and fines, I want to see a few people go to PMITA state jail if they get seen doing that too often.
No, I don't care how simultaneously that call is the most important call in your life, and you also absolutely need to be in some meeting in 5 minutes. Neither is _that_ vital as to be a blank pass to endanger other people's lives. Whoever called you, is still going to be there in 5 minutes or an hour or whatever. Whatever important customer you're running to, well, if it's that important, postpone the phone call. If you can't prioritize, well, it's not anyone else's fault, so they shouldn't be the ones taking extra risks.
I'm guessing that it wouldn't be that horrible to have the phone remind you to park or use a headset then. Or not worse than the alternative.
Ever since he mentioned that you don't need to start at the beginning in order to get to a certain stage, i've just felt like it will be a bunch of mini-games, without present decisions being made in the current stage affecting your options in future stages of, what i assume, is the evolution of your creature(s).
Not necessarily. It can just mean you have a bunch of predefined choices at each step. It doesn't mean you can't do better.
I mean, look at, say, Paradox's games. Different genre, I know, but they do illustrate the point nevertheless.
You can start Hearts Of Iron in 1941 and get directly to attacking the USSR, or being attacked if you play the USSR. In which case you'll start from the historical situation in 1941. But you can also start in 1936, build up your economy, and build up teh uber-Wehrmacht or Red Army, and deliver some serious smack down when 1941 comes. Or play a USA which didn't wait around for Pearl Harbour to start thinking about war, and is in much better shape to deliver a devastating punch when that happens. Play a France which picked different doctrines and built up its army, and can hold its own at the Maginot Line. Etc.
Essentially having the option to skip to 1941, doesn't make the 1936 option meaningless. You can and _do_ affect your options in the future by starting earlier.
Ditto in any other of their games. You can skip to the 1600's in EU2 and get to colonizing America, or even directly at the Napoleonic wars, or start in 1419 as an England bogged down in the 100 year war and work your way from there.
Heck, IIRC you can even export your world from one game to the next, and play it as one uber-campaign spanning 1000 years. You can start in Crusader Kings, export to EU2 when you reach the 1400's, export to Victoria in early 1800's, and (if you have the expansion pack) export to Hearts Of Iron when you reach the 1930's. The option to start directly with Hearts Of Iron doesn't make the previous stages meaningless minigames. Starting at CK can _massively_ affect your options later. You can end up in EU2 with a Byzantine Empire that regained the former lands of the Roman Empire and has the Mediterranean as Mare Nostrum (our sea), instead of being a one-province victim of the Turks. Colonize, get to Victoria with it, and you can try to out-industrialize the English. Make Byzantium _the_ industrial and cultural capital of the world, like in the old days, and the empire over whose flag the sun never sets. Etc.
You can still ask, "why?" because it gets so ahistorical that it's not even funny. Still, the principle remains. And as Spore isn't a historical game, even that objection vanishes.
Saying that the shade of Venus is very cold, paints a rather mis-leading picture. It's not the same thing as staying in, say, really cold air. As you say, only radiation transfers heat in space, so _all_ the cooling effect you're going to get is whatever the craft radiates. That's not very much. It also depends of the fourth square of temperature, as per Steffan-Boltzman, it's a lot harder to lose the last (or next to last) 10% than it is to lose the first 10%.
But more importantly, you start gaining it right back, as soon as you're no longer behind Venus. It'll take years to go from Venus's orbit to where they want to get, simply because it's that hard to go down into a gravity well. You need to lose a heck of a lot of energy, but being that it's in space and you don't have friction as a cheap brake, it means as much firing the rockets as if you wanted to gain the same energy. So it'll have a heck of a lot of time to warm up right back.
And again, see Steffan-Boltzman. The farther you got from equilibrium by sitting in the shade, the bigger the difference will be between incoming energy and energy you radiate, hence the faster you warm right up. If you managed to get, say, 100K lower than equilibrium in the sunlight, the first 25K of that gain will be lost a lot faster than the last 25K.
In short, past a point, every Kelvin you go lower by sitting in the shade, will take longer to get it, and the faster you'll lose it when you get out of the shade.
With that said, I detest games that require you to stay on the treadmill to "keep up". At least when I do work I hate during normal working hours, I get paid...
The bleeding obvious answer is: so don't stay on the treadmill. Go do whatever keeps you entertained, when it keeps you entertained.
I'm somewhat surprised how many people seem to, well, think they have some kind of _duty_ to achieve some level, get some item, etc. Or in some pathological cases think they somehow prove their penis size by how many level 70's they have and with what gear. So they grind and work and miss the whole point of having fun and/or making friends.
The game between levels 1 and 69 is _the_ meat of the game. That's the zones you're supposed to explore, enemies you're supposed to test yourself against, the quests and bits of story you're supposed to discover, etc. That's the actual game. It's some hundreds of hours worth of content.
And it sorta amuses me to see some people try to skip the actual game, or even use some bot to skip it for them, just so they too can then willy-wave about having a level 70. And then get stuck in an endgame grind which is no more than a repetitive chore for people who've finished the actual game and don't know when to quit.
It's akin to trying to skip most of the LOTR trilogy, just to end up watching the last 5 minutes in a loop, for months.
So basically, then just don't stay on a treadmill. Realize that levels and gear are there just
A) to give you some sense of making progress,
B) so you can practice your new abilities and tactics one at a time, instead of dumping 60 icons upon you from the start, and putting you in front of Kil'jaeden before you even know what they all do, and
C) to gently guide you about in which order you're supposed to go through the story and quests. Among other thing _because_ that's the actual game, some hundreds of hours and thousands of quests, which you're supposed to play and experience. Not just click an "I win!!!" button and be over with it.
But there is no obligation to keep up with anyone or anything. There is no par time that you have to beat. And it's not some shameful failure to take things at your own pace, do the things you feel like doing, and generally just enjoy the game.
In other words, the game is about and consists of the road, not just the destination.
And if you think that that road, in fact the game itself, is just a treadmill, well, you can just quit it now. Because it doesn't get any better. Once you're done with that "treadmill", there is no grand reward waiting for you, and no "meat of the game" that begins at level 70. What happens when that "treadmill" finally ends, is that it spits you right into the tarpit of a repetitive and pointless grind that's there just do give you something to do while you wait for the next segment (i.e., expansion pack) of the actual game.
Reminds me of one of Vince Ebert's jokes. He's a physicist turned commedian. So after explaining relativity a bit, he goes something like, "So the faster something goes, the shorter it gets. Also known as the Porsche Driver Syndrome.";)
Hmm. I'd assume it's a lot harder to answer something like, "how do big bangs typically work?" since we only have a sample of one. For all we know, it could be a very unusual big-bang, and they usually produce universes very different from ours.
We can reconstruct the way ours seems to have worked. Sorta like looking at where the shrapnel went, scratching our heads, and going, "the bomb must have been _there_." But even with bombs, you can't really extrapolate much from a sample of one. If you did, you could get a conclusion like that the fragments go in all directions because your sample was a grenade, and never know that there are such things as Claymore mines.
I also wouldn't worry much about the possibility that the Flying Spaghetti Monster created it all, including relics and data pointing out all the way to the Big Bang. Even if that's the case, way I see it:
1. If he went through all that trouble, maybe He's trying to tell us something. Dunno, sorta like the back story of a MMO, for example. Might as well study it anyway. Maybe he _wants_ us to act like in a universe which wasn't created by His noodly appendage, if He tried to hide all inconsistencies and traces of divine intervention.
2. The laws we discover around the way, may be useful anyway. I mean, however it may have been created, it seems to act quite predictably each time we observe it. E.g., if you drop a cannonball from the tower of Pisa, it falls in the same place and after the same time, every time. Duly noted, stuff involving individual particles, atoms and molecules (e.g., the cancer that you mention) are rather probabilistic, but it turns out that there is a method even to that madness. E.g., even if you don't know exactly which electrons will tunnel, you can calculate a Zener diode anyway.
3. Well, does it matter? Basically those rules act the same, and those predictions are the same, regardless of whether you are a devout Pastafarian or not. Regardless of whether those rules and constants of the universe are created by His noodly appendage, or just are, you can predict the same things and expect them to be just as true or not.
That alone is reason enough to leave Him out of the explanation. It just doesn't change those equations, so you can simplify Him out with impunity.
4. Dunno, if I had went through all the trouble of creating an universe that's so internally consistent and where a small elegant set of equations keep it all going, I'd actually want people to notice those equations and stuff. You know, instead of a thoroughly mumbo-jumbo story about creating Adam with His noodly appendage.
Anyone can make a shoddy rigged demo, basically, which works only due to the support guys (or one support deity, same deal) intervening all the time, and with a bunch of disjointed things that don't share anything except their creator. Anyone can make each animal be a completely different NPC, created arbitrarily on a whim and without any common code or principle.
Making a system this complex which worked on its own without a major glitch or player wipe since the Flood, now that's something to be proud of. Making something where the same building blocks can encode anything from Amoeba to Human, and make it work too, doubly so. Boiling it down to something as simple and elegant as a handful of equations which say why carbon makes chain like that, or for that matter where it can form in stars in the first place, now that's pure genius. That guy coded in a few equations what we can't make with terrabytes of code.
Regardless of whether, say, evolution actually happened, or the whole world started yesterday, the amazing fact is that those chemical reactions in a cell _can_ allow just that. It's a machine as perfect as to be able to adapt itself and produce anything from Cyanobacter to Human, starting from just the basic ribosome. It's _amazing_ work that. Or even just looking at the end result, a human is encoded in just 3 billion nucleotids, or about 750 megabytes. Including code, data
Irradiance is the energy that gets to ground level. The problem there is that the atmosphere absorbs everything outside a narrow band. Just because most UV doesn't get to ground level (or life would be well and truly fucked), it doesn't mean that the atmosphere doesn't get warmed by it anyway.
Actually, having played a lot of MMOs, IMHO the login is the least of your worries.
In WoW a Shaman can easily run out of the 60 icon slots on the toolbars. On COH most of my characters had to keep some of the temporary powers off the 3 toolbars available (only _very_ recently they provided the option to open more).
You need _some_ way to activate them quickly. Be it keyboard or by clicking them with the mouse. Scrolling through lists of choices with a gamepad, in real time, would suck more ass than the vacuum toilets on the Soyuz;)
I mean, seriously, I can see the talks after a WoW-style raid:
Tank: "Dude, FFS, why didn't you heal???" Priest: "Sorry, guys, I had to look for a mana potion in through my action list." Mage: "Heh. Do what I do, just scroll to it in advance." Priest: "STFU, noob. The only reason I wasn't at it, was that I looked for the bandages earlier when you over-nuked."
The best I've seen done with a gamepad was Sega's PSO, which was little more than a hack-and-slash with 6 actions maximum, assigned to 3 keys on the gamepad. Plus one "shift" key to select between the first and second set.
The sequel, PSU, reduced that even more. Yeah, so you can play it on a gamepad. Except with any given weapon you have exactly one special attack you can assign to a key. And you have to scroll through a list to even select your mana potion or put on some special glasses. (Which turn off your sword, since you don't have enough buttons to activate the glasses _and_ use the sword.) It gets (A) annoying fast, and (B) repetitive fast, since the number of actions is finite and small, and there are no clever combinations and strategies to use with them.
Even NASA's data seems to disagree with you. We had twice your number since 1970 alone. Go figure. A 0.05% increase per decade, over a century, is 0.5%. (And over 150 years, it's 0.75%.) Now it doesn't go the full 1.2% we'd need to explain the Global Warming (unless it went up as a different rate before), but it almost halves the effect we can blame ourselves for.
Your characterization of climate scientists as a high priesthood says all I need to know about your respect for real science. You are one of those people who jumps to conclusions and then reasons backwards to find a comfortable theory that fits what you'd like to believe is true.
Heh. No, dearie. That was my satire at people who treat it as some kind of fucked-up religion. The moment you go some variant of "OMG, you're not worthy to question The Great Scientists", you're not about science any more.
Get this: you don't need anyone's seal of approval to use your own head. Einstein was a nobody working as a patent office clerk, when he thought he could do better than the great Lorentz. Galileo was a nobody to question the great scientists of the Aristotelian establishment. Etc.
There is _nothing_ that's sacrosanct and beyond questioning, no matter what Great Man said it. Even if he's a scirentist. In fact, _especially_ if he's a scientist.
Now I'm not saying that you or I are as smart as Einstein but the principle remains the same. Capisci? Attitudes like, basically, "OMG, don't even try to question The Scientists, you're not worth it," have _nothing_ to do with _science_. That's how religion works, not science.
Science works more like, "Ok, let's see your data."
And in a nutshell _that_ is what ticks me off about the carbon cultists. That fucked up attitude that there's only one Truth, some High Priests... err... "Scientists" hand it down as some sacrosanct beyond-questioning Holy Truth, and you're not worthy to question Them. And everyone is the Enemy if they even try to think about it on their own. That's _not_ science. That's religion in pseudo-science garb.
Regardless of whether the scientists studying that are right or right, and they probably are are real scientists... the gang of rabid eco-zealots waging holy crusade in their name, are not. They just perverted that science into some weird kind of religion.
Ok, let's do some science. Physics, to be precise. We'll start from the StefanBoltzmann law.
Radiated energy is proportional to the _fourth_ power of the temperature. For a black body j = sigma * T^4, for a body that's not quite black, you just plug an emissivity factor in too.
A body heated by an external source (e.g., Earth) reaches equilibrium when the radiated energy equals the incoming energy. So the equation works just the same with j being the _incoming_ energy from the Sun.
What I'm getting at is that the average temperature of Earth is in the ballpark of 300K. We had an increase of 1K in a whole bloody century. That's the whole Global Warming. That's an increase of 0.3% or so. Plugging it back into the StefanBoltzmann law, we need an increase of only 1.003^4=1.01205 times in solar output to _fully_ explain it. That's 1.2% btw.
But even that's a bit over-calculated. Being that the same law applies to the Sun's power output, basically we just need the same 0.3% increase in the Sun's temperature to get that effect, all else being equal. You don't need anything spectacular to happen, really.
Yes, sunspots are a cause of short term variations, but we really don't know what the Sun has been gradually doing over that century. If both Jupiter _and_ Mars have been warming up, maybe the Sun is warming up after all.
And finally, well, if you're that concerned about insults to people's intelligence... maybe you should STFU with the "shut up and don't dare question the High Priests" attitude. Just a thought.
what highways are you driving on? Most the SUVs I see on the highways are going 80-90, same as everyone else, and the lack of aerodynamics is most certainly a factor at that speed.
Um, no, not really. The point where things get start to get iffy is about Mach 0.3, or about 228 miles per hour. That's why you have teardrop tails on airplanes, but not on cars.
Plus, again, having the full teardrop tail (since that's where we started this sub-thread) does less to the aerodynamic drag coefficient than some people seem to think. E.g., a Volkswagen Lupo (chosen for no other reason than being an ugly little car which looks as far from the teardrop as it gets, with its almost vertical back) has a drag coefficient on 0.29. An Audi A2, with its even more abrupt back, has 0.25.
By comparison, a Dodge Viper has 0.35. A Porsche 964 has 0.32 and the 997 barely edges out the Lupo with 0.28. The Porsche 911 never got below 0.31, IIRC. A Lamborghini Murcielago has 0.33. The Lamborghini Diablo was only marginally better, at 0.31.
Basically the elongated tails on those "penis compensators" (as another poster aptly called them), are just for looks. They're there to make it _look_ fast and sportsy, and sold to people who need a _visible_ status symbol. It's the aerodynamics equivalent of "security theatre." They rarely actually do that horribly much for the car's aerodynamics, and sometimes even actually make the car's aerodynamics worse.
Because basically a long time ago, someone discovered that you can cut off the tail of that teardrop, and the air flow will still be largely the same. Only this time without the added mass and drag of that teardrop tail.
And especially if you read the RTFA, weight is a big problem. Increasing the car's weight with a useless tail would negate any aerodynamic benefits anyway. If you save, say, 0.5 litre per 100 km in aerodynamic drag with a tail, but pay 1 litre per 100 km to move that extra weight, it's not worth it.
Hrm? There is nothing more complex with multiple big bangs than a single one other than the fact that would just mean more of them.
Indeed, but that's not what Occam's Razor is about. You may predict or explain any event or thing, no matter how complicated. Occam's Razor is only about _how_ you explain it.
Basically, imagine that you walk through an apple orchard on a windy day, and an apple falls on your head. Let's pick two possible explanations:
1. Probably the wind shook a branch and an apple fell.
2. The Illuminati hired a secret Ninja clan from Japan, to follow you around and drop an apple on your head when a good opportunity presents itself. And they picked a windy day so the rustle of leaves would hide their noises.
Basically Occam's Razor just says that if explanation #1 explains it well enough, go with explanation #1. There is no need to complicate it with unneeded extra elements.
Incidentally, from a science point of view, #1 also has _some_ predictive power. You can, for example, calculate what the probability is to get hit by an apple, or in what season it's more likely, or whether you need to wear a hard hat or it'll likely be just a minor bruise. Explanation #2 is pretty worthless, since there's no way to predict who the Illuminati want to drop an apple on and on what date. You don't even know whether to wear a hard hat, since they might drop an apple made of lead if they want to. (Ninjas can do stuff like that;)
On the other hand, if explanation #1 doesn't explain it, _then_ you can look for a more complex explanation. E.g., if you were walking through a banana plantation and an apple fell on your head, maybe it wasn't the wind after all.
But again, this all has to do with the explanation, not with the thing you explain or predict.
Two wrongs don't make a right, though. (Though three lefts do;)
Far from me to defend the RIAA, but IMHO the best way to put an end to their own lawlessness is to smack them with the law, not to get into a "he did it first!" kindergarten show. I mean, going by "he did it first!" just sounds like a way to spiral into complete chaos, as everyone eventually finds some pretext as to why he/she shouldn't obey the laws either.
Hmm, I don't know what you mean there. What I was referring to was the ancient Central Fire hypothesis of , and the Counter-Earth it postulated to keep the universe symmetrical and balanced.
I find it interesting and relevant to String Theory because, well, it illustrates how far from the truth you can land by just postulating ideals of symmetry and what the maths _should_ be there, and not letting experimental data get in the way. He just postulated a mathematical view of the universe (as in, really, he thought that the universe is a mathematical construct) and that certain symmetries and numbers _must_ be true, and ran amok from there.
E.g., he introduced the idea of a "Counter-Earth" so:
1. the total number of planets would be 10, because in his maths view of the world they _had_ to be 10, and
2. the universe wouldn't be unbalanced. Since in the contemporary view, the other planets and stars were elemental and had no mass or weight, only the Earth really weighed anything. So if only the Earth rotated against that central point, the universe would be rather off balance. So he placed a mirrored earth on the other side of that central point, so the centre of gravity of it all would be nicely in the middle.
Now ok, it may sound a bit too critical. I do understand that it was an important stepping stone, even if as the first theory which wasn't Heliocentric, and didn't have an absolute up and down. (It had towards the central point and away from that central point.) For that age, it was a step forward. It doesn't mean we still need to do that kind of thing, though.
Anyway, if it clashes with some movie, novel or setting name, I apologise for not being clear enough.
Well, AFAIK the RIAA never sued anyone for downloading. They sued people who "made available" the songs for download by others.
The waters are muddier, because apparently some P2P programs do (or did) effectively default to sharing anything downloaded right back. (I guess because the whole P2P model wouldn't really work if there were 1 or 2 guys offering it for download, and a few million downloading from them. At that point, you're back to the classic server model, and not in a good way.)
AFAIK, it didn't predict anything (experimentally measurable) yet that isn't already predicted by other, simpler theories. I.e., it still fails Occam's Razor. Miserably.
Plus, AFAIK a lot of it has a lot of possible solutions, and for some they don't even have the equations (yet), so there's not much of a prediction you can do with it. So far the majority of it isn't even as much a theory, as in something where you plug your values in a clear formula and get a prediction, but more of a theory that a theory might exist.
Or to put it otherwise, it's more of a mathematical construct than physics. Don't get me wrong, maths is a very very useful tool. Essential, even. But if I'm allowed a bad analogy, it's a bit like a painter's brush: it can be used to paint anything, regardless of whether it's real or outright impossible in the real world. You can use it to paint Mona Lisa or Escher's impossible pictures. So is maths. You can describe an infinity of possible universes with it, most of which have nothing to do with ours. You can use it to describe light propagation through ether, or the raisin pie atom model, or the ancient geocentric model, or even the counter-Earth ideas from waay back, all of which by now we know to be false. It becomes physics (or generally science) when you can test that formula against the real universe and see if it fits or not.
Personally I dunno where people got that definition that you must need a group to even go to the toilet, to be a "real" MMO.
The name just says "massively multiplayer", which strictly speaking means lots and lots of players on the same server.
The first "real" MMO was UO, so basically it means whatever Origin wanted it to mean. It had no such restriction.
Some people would argue that MMOs are really a continuation of MUDs, only this time with a graphical interface. And while I would personally call it a new genre anyway, or a convergence of two former genre, I see their point too: the first ones played a lot like a DIKU with graphics. MUDs had no such restriction either.
Basically I'm not disagreeing with anything you said. Quite the contrary. Just wondering where people got that idea.
So, basically, they're trying to avoid what made WoW so successful? I'm sure they can ask the fine developers of Vanguard how well the plan went to avoid everything that made WoW fun.
I mean, seriously, even Sony had to grudgingly give up and demote most NPCs from heroic (think "elite" in WoW lingo) to make it more soloable, plus give all classes enough firepower (e.g., via "heroic opportunities") to solo.
Now I'm not commenting on Warcraft Online specifically, since I don't have enough info for that. I don't know whether it will rule or suck.
But trying to avoid solo-MMO at this point is really a way to say, "nah, we're not giving the vast majority of players what they want." I just have to question why would anyone sane do that? Did they (and their publisher) take a vow of poverty? Or are they trying to not compete too hard with Blizzard? Or what?:P
Or it could be that they're smarter than that, after all, and just give a wrong impression.
Well, the thing is, most people don't play a MMO for ever. A lot approach them with the idea that they'll live the rest of their life there, but eventually they finish the game, do the end grind 100 times, get bored, move on.
And a lot seem to have trouble grasping the idea that, basically, "it's ok. I played it for so long, I got bored, time to move on." They feel somehow betrayed and cheated, and throw tantrums that everything that kept them there for a year, now suddenly sucks. And please someone make a game without that WoW crap. And before WoW, it was EQ. But I digress.
Back when I heard a number, it was back in EQ times. (First one, not EQ2.) Sony figured out that the average player stays in the game for an average of 6 months. Some stayed a lot longer, of course, and some quit before the first month was over, but the average was 6 months.
I wouldn't know if it's longer or shorter for WoW, but most people don't stay for ever. They get bored, and they go looking for another MMO to play. And end up playing offline stuff for a while, and/or back to WoW.
What I'm saying is that WoW didn't just enlarge the market for itself. It also enlarged the pool of players who genuinely want to move to another MMO by now. It gets new players and sheds all players all the time. And sometimes gets them back.
Or to put it otherwise, just look at all those people in your guild who were swearing that when D&D Online comes live, that's it, they're outta here and generally it's going to bury WoW. Then it was LOTRO. And Vanguard. And God knows what else.
So to get to the point: to enlarge the market, someone would just need to catch those falling off it. Sure, maybe integrating with Skype could work too, nothing against that. But you could double the market over night without that too. You'd just need to make a game that's good enough for all those getting off WoW.
Then there are the untapped niches.
E.g., the chaos gods know there are a ton of us starving for a good _SF_ MMO. If you look at TV vs MMOs, something is amiss. There are more SF fans than high fantasy fans for TV, but on MMOs some 99% of the market is high fantasy. Can it be that there are a _lot_ of people just waiting for a _good_ SF MMO for a change? (No offense to the couple of AO and SWG fans left, but, eh, you get my drift.) There is the potential to do for the SF segment the same that WoW did for fantasy games.
E.g., there are a lot more kinds of games than RPGs, that have their followers. Business sims are quite big at least in Germany. And The Sims has sold more copies than some whole other genres. Or how about tactical/strategy games? Why can't I lead a squad or run a city-state on a huge map, instead of running around as one character? Etc. Now probably it's not as straightforward to convert most of them to a MMO, but if someone figures out how to do a good one, I'm sure they can enlarge the pie a bit.
So to sum a it up: there's a lot of room for growth by just, well, not making a half arsed job of it. And even more room if it's not yet another EQ clone.
Or in this case, are you sure you've played the same UO I've played?
You know, the one with exactly zero quests (the escort quests, dumb and boring as they were, got added later) and not much more to do than run around trying to get some species extinct? That is, if you got past the gangs of gankers camping the town exits for newbies to kill?
The one where you could max your strength by just dropping and picking a fucking coin all night? Or others by just assigning that skill to every single key on the keyboard? Where one skill (magic) did more than all other skills combined, so everyone maxed that one with a macro before going and doing anything else? And where by comparison, another skill (tinkering) was useless for anything other than trapping chests and leaving them around, hoping that some newbie would open them? Great balance there, eh?
The one where crafting was as freaking useless as to only be able to produce coloured versions of the bog-standard items that cost cents at any vendor? While any humanoid around the map dropped better ones and magical ones?
Yeah, that's got to be some great adventure/RPG. Misses all the idea of either adventure or RPG, any way you define RPG. It didn't have either the story of Japanese (and recently Bioware) CRPGs, nor the character advancement of traditional US RPGs, so I guess it must be great.
Or remember how the world got full of houses everywhere, including with a tree poking through the roof, filling every single bloody space, including where the game still pretended was some virgin-ish wood or mountain top? So you'd have wolves and ogres spawning and edging their way between houses, pretending that's their habitat? Yeah, very immersive world that.
Quality of the player base? You mean, how half of them were clones of the same ganker in a death shroud with the same a polearm and the same magic spells? Or how they camped the mines for anyone foolish enough to get encumbered with ore, so they can gank them right next to the town? Yeah, that was some inovative roleplaying there.
Remember the about a quarter of the population who even bought disposable accounts to scam and grief, and had whole website rings dedicated to sharing tips on how to drive a newbie off the game? Amazing idea to RP someone who can magically steal your items through walls, or who can abuse a bug to take your items in a trade without giving anything, by just dragging yours in a container before aborting the trade.
And grinding to achieve the biggest castle and the most status-symbol items, now that's _totally_ unlike the grind to the top of kids these days in WoW;)
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Well, or maybe we'll just vote that if you scream into your phone in a train, the cops shove your phone up your arse. It has to be good for the economy too, since it'll stimulate a market and R&D for smaller devices ;)
;)
So, really, which would you rather buy? The one which forces you to not disturb the others, or the one which will make you walk bow-legged to the nearest hospital?
Well, more seriously, currently the only choice is to disable them completely, for example with EM shielding or with a pico-cell that doesn't let anything through. If we can enforce some manners, maybe we won't need to go that far. Maybe we'll even let the heart surgeon in a movie theatre get his emergency phone call, if we're sure that (A) the phone is capped to vibrating inside the room, instead of playing a retarded tune at 80 dB, and (B) he'll have to walk out to actually talk.
So basically, we're not going to give you the right to be an antisocial retard and annoy everyone else, one way or another. So you can choose between (1) losing any use of that phone in some situations and places, completely, or (2) having some lesser restrictions enforced by it. I hardly think that #2 is the less functional.
And that's not even getting into situations where retards on cell phones actually endanger everyone else. Like retards who pay more attention to their phone when driving, than to the road.
Yes, you may think that you're way above average as a driver, and you'd _never_ possibly cause an accident. Guess what? So does everyone else. Over 90% of the people think that their driving is above average. It's mathematically impossible.
At any rate, it's already proven that talking on the phone impairs driving more than being a little inebriated. So I'd like to see that enforced just like DUI. Forget points and fines, I want to see a few people go to PMITA state jail if they get seen doing that too often.
No, I don't care how simultaneously that call is the most important call in your life, and you also absolutely need to be in some meeting in 5 minutes. Neither is _that_ vital as to be a blank pass to endanger other people's lives. Whoever called you, is still going to be there in 5 minutes or an hour or whatever. Whatever important customer you're running to, well, if it's that important, postpone the phone call. If you can't prioritize, well, it's not anyone else's fault, so they shouldn't be the ones taking extra risks.
I'm guessing that it wouldn't be that horrible to have the phone remind you to park or use a headset then. Or not worse than the alternative.
Not necessarily. It can just mean you have a bunch of predefined choices at each step. It doesn't mean you can't do better.
I mean, look at, say, Paradox's games. Different genre, I know, but they do illustrate the point nevertheless.
You can start Hearts Of Iron in 1941 and get directly to attacking the USSR, or being attacked if you play the USSR. In which case you'll start from the historical situation in 1941. But you can also start in 1936, build up your economy, and build up teh uber-Wehrmacht or Red Army, and deliver some serious smack down when 1941 comes. Or play a USA which didn't wait around for Pearl Harbour to start thinking about war, and is in much better shape to deliver a devastating punch when that happens. Play a France which picked different doctrines and built up its army, and can hold its own at the Maginot Line. Etc.
Essentially having the option to skip to 1941, doesn't make the 1936 option meaningless. You can and _do_ affect your options in the future by starting earlier.
Ditto in any other of their games. You can skip to the 1600's in EU2 and get to colonizing America, or even directly at the Napoleonic wars, or start in 1419 as an England bogged down in the 100 year war and work your way from there.
Heck, IIRC you can even export your world from one game to the next, and play it as one uber-campaign spanning 1000 years. You can start in Crusader Kings, export to EU2 when you reach the 1400's, export to Victoria in early 1800's, and (if you have the expansion pack) export to Hearts Of Iron when you reach the 1930's. The option to start directly with Hearts Of Iron doesn't make the previous stages meaningless minigames. Starting at CK can _massively_ affect your options later. You can end up in EU2 with a Byzantine Empire that regained the former lands of the Roman Empire and has the Mediterranean as Mare Nostrum (our sea), instead of being a one-province victim of the Turks. Colonize, get to Victoria with it, and you can try to out-industrialize the English. Make Byzantium _the_ industrial and cultural capital of the world, like in the old days, and the empire over whose flag the sun never sets. Etc.
You can still ask, "why?" because it gets so ahistorical that it's not even funny. Still, the principle remains. And as Spore isn't a historical game, even that objection vanishes.
Saying that the shade of Venus is very cold, paints a rather mis-leading picture. It's not the same thing as staying in, say, really cold air. As you say, only radiation transfers heat in space, so _all_ the cooling effect you're going to get is whatever the craft radiates. That's not very much. It also depends of the fourth square of temperature, as per Steffan-Boltzman, it's a lot harder to lose the last (or next to last) 10% than it is to lose the first 10%.
But more importantly, you start gaining it right back, as soon as you're no longer behind Venus. It'll take years to go from Venus's orbit to where they want to get, simply because it's that hard to go down into a gravity well. You need to lose a heck of a lot of energy, but being that it's in space and you don't have friction as a cheap brake, it means as much firing the rockets as if you wanted to gain the same energy. So it'll have a heck of a lot of time to warm up right back.
And again, see Steffan-Boltzman. The farther you got from equilibrium by sitting in the shade, the bigger the difference will be between incoming energy and energy you radiate, hence the faster you warm right up. If you managed to get, say, 100K lower than equilibrium in the sunlight, the first 25K of that gain will be lost a lot faster than the last 25K.
In short, past a point, every Kelvin you go lower by sitting in the shade, will take longer to get it, and the faster you'll lose it when you get out of the shade.
Yay, I'm off to grind bathing until it becomes grey, and then move on to the next on the list ;)
"That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange æons even death may die"
The bleeding obvious answer is: so don't stay on the treadmill. Go do whatever keeps you entertained, when it keeps you entertained.
I'm somewhat surprised how many people seem to, well, think they have some kind of _duty_ to achieve some level, get some item, etc. Or in some pathological cases think they somehow prove their penis size by how many level 70's they have and with what gear. So they grind and work and miss the whole point of having fun and/or making friends.
The game between levels 1 and 69 is _the_ meat of the game. That's the zones you're supposed to explore, enemies you're supposed to test yourself against, the quests and bits of story you're supposed to discover, etc. That's the actual game. It's some hundreds of hours worth of content.
And it sorta amuses me to see some people try to skip the actual game, or even use some bot to skip it for them, just so they too can then willy-wave about having a level 70. And then get stuck in an endgame grind which is no more than a repetitive chore for people who've finished the actual game and don't know when to quit.
It's akin to trying to skip most of the LOTR trilogy, just to end up watching the last 5 minutes in a loop, for months.
So basically, then just don't stay on a treadmill. Realize that levels and gear are there just
A) to give you some sense of making progress,
B) so you can practice your new abilities and tactics one at a time, instead of dumping 60 icons upon you from the start, and putting you in front of Kil'jaeden before you even know what they all do, and
C) to gently guide you about in which order you're supposed to go through the story and quests. Among other thing _because_ that's the actual game, some hundreds of hours and thousands of quests, which you're supposed to play and experience. Not just click an "I win!!!" button and be over with it.
But there is no obligation to keep up with anyone or anything. There is no par time that you have to beat. And it's not some shameful failure to take things at your own pace, do the things you feel like doing, and generally just enjoy the game.
In other words, the game is about and consists of the road, not just the destination.
And if you think that that road, in fact the game itself, is just a treadmill, well, you can just quit it now. Because it doesn't get any better. Once you're done with that "treadmill", there is no grand reward waiting for you, and no "meat of the game" that begins at level 70. What happens when that "treadmill" finally ends, is that it spits you right into the tarpit of a repetitive and pointless grind that's there just do give you something to do while you wait for the next segment (i.e., expansion pack) of the actual game.
Reminds me of one of Vince Ebert's jokes. He's a physicist turned commedian. So after explaining relativity a bit, he goes something like, "So the faster something goes, the shorter it gets. Also known as the Porsche Driver Syndrome." ;)
Hmm. I'd assume it's a lot harder to answer something like, "how do big bangs typically work?" since we only have a sample of one. For all we know, it could be a very unusual big-bang, and they usually produce universes very different from ours.
We can reconstruct the way ours seems to have worked. Sorta like looking at where the shrapnel went, scratching our heads, and going, "the bomb must have been _there_." But even with bombs, you can't really extrapolate much from a sample of one. If you did, you could get a conclusion like that the fragments go in all directions because your sample was a grenade, and never know that there are such things as Claymore mines.
I also wouldn't worry much about the possibility that the Flying Spaghetti Monster created it all, including relics and data pointing out all the way to the Big Bang. Even if that's the case, way I see it:
1. If he went through all that trouble, maybe He's trying to tell us something. Dunno, sorta like the back story of a MMO, for example. Might as well study it anyway. Maybe he _wants_ us to act like in a universe which wasn't created by His noodly appendage, if He tried to hide all inconsistencies and traces of divine intervention.
2. The laws we discover around the way, may be useful anyway. I mean, however it may have been created, it seems to act quite predictably each time we observe it. E.g., if you drop a cannonball from the tower of Pisa, it falls in the same place and after the same time, every time. Duly noted, stuff involving individual particles, atoms and molecules (e.g., the cancer that you mention) are rather probabilistic, but it turns out that there is a method even to that madness. E.g., even if you don't know exactly which electrons will tunnel, you can calculate a Zener diode anyway.
3. Well, does it matter? Basically those rules act the same, and those predictions are the same, regardless of whether you are a devout Pastafarian or not. Regardless of whether those rules and constants of the universe are created by His noodly appendage, or just are, you can predict the same things and expect them to be just as true or not.
That alone is reason enough to leave Him out of the explanation. It just doesn't change those equations, so you can simplify Him out with impunity.
4. Dunno, if I had went through all the trouble of creating an universe that's so internally consistent and where a small elegant set of equations keep it all going, I'd actually want people to notice those equations and stuff. You know, instead of a thoroughly mumbo-jumbo story about creating Adam with His noodly appendage.
Anyone can make a shoddy rigged demo, basically, which works only due to the support guys (or one support deity, same deal) intervening all the time, and with a bunch of disjointed things that don't share anything except their creator. Anyone can make each animal be a completely different NPC, created arbitrarily on a whim and without any common code or principle.
Making a system this complex which worked on its own without a major glitch or player wipe since the Flood, now that's something to be proud of. Making something where the same building blocks can encode anything from Amoeba to Human, and make it work too, doubly so. Boiling it down to something as simple and elegant as a handful of equations which say why carbon makes chain like that, or for that matter where it can form in stars in the first place, now that's pure genius. That guy coded in a few equations what we can't make with terrabytes of code.
Regardless of whether, say, evolution actually happened, or the whole world started yesterday, the amazing fact is that those chemical reactions in a cell _can_ allow just that. It's a machine as perfect as to be able to adapt itself and produce anything from Cyanobacter to Human, starting from just the basic ribosome. It's _amazing_ work that. Or even just looking at the end result, a human is encoded in just 3 billion nucleotids, or about 750 megabytes. Including code, data
Heh. Yeah, I bought a Dreamcast keyboard just to chat in that game. Not as cool as the combination in your link, though, I must admit.
Irradiance is the energy that gets to ground level. The problem there is that the atmosphere absorbs everything outside a narrow band. Just because most UV doesn't get to ground level (or life would be well and truly fucked), it doesn't mean that the atmosphere doesn't get warmed by it anyway.
Actually, having played a lot of MMOs, IMHO the login is the least of your worries.
;)
In WoW a Shaman can easily run out of the 60 icon slots on the toolbars. On COH most of my characters had to keep some of the temporary powers off the 3 toolbars available (only _very_ recently they provided the option to open more).
You need _some_ way to activate them quickly. Be it keyboard or by clicking them with the mouse. Scrolling through lists of choices with a gamepad, in real time, would suck more ass than the vacuum toilets on the Soyuz
I mean, seriously, I can see the talks after a WoW-style raid:
Tank: "Dude, FFS, why didn't you heal???"
Priest: "Sorry, guys, I had to look for a mana potion in through my action list."
Mage: "Heh. Do what I do, just scroll to it in advance."
Priest: "STFU, noob. The only reason I wasn't at it, was that I looked for the bandages earlier when you over-nuked."
The best I've seen done with a gamepad was Sega's PSO, which was little more than a hack-and-slash with 6 actions maximum, assigned to 3 keys on the gamepad. Plus one "shift" key to select between the first and second set.
The sequel, PSU, reduced that even more. Yeah, so you can play it on a gamepad. Except with any given weapon you have exactly one special attack you can assign to a key. And you have to scroll through a list to even select your mana potion or put on some special glasses. (Which turn off your sword, since you don't have enough buttons to activate the glasses _and_ use the sword.) It gets (A) annoying fast, and (B) repetitive fast, since the number of actions is finite and small, and there are no clever combinations and strategies to use with them.
Even NASA's data seems to disagree with you. We had twice your number since 1970 alone. Go figure. A 0.05% increase per decade, over a century, is 0.5%. (And over 150 years, it's 0.75%.) Now it doesn't go the full 1.2% we'd need to explain the Global Warming (unless it went up as a different rate before), but it almost halves the effect we can blame ourselves for.
Heh. No, dearie. That was my satire at people who treat it as some kind of fucked-up religion. The moment you go some variant of "OMG, you're not worthy to question The Great Scientists", you're not about science any more.
Get this: you don't need anyone's seal of approval to use your own head. Einstein was a nobody working as a patent office clerk, when he thought he could do better than the great Lorentz. Galileo was a nobody to question the great scientists of the Aristotelian establishment. Etc.
There is _nothing_ that's sacrosanct and beyond questioning, no matter what Great Man said it. Even if he's a scirentist. In fact, _especially_ if he's a scientist.
Now I'm not saying that you or I are as smart as Einstein but the principle remains the same. Capisci? Attitudes like, basically, "OMG, don't even try to question The Scientists, you're not worth it," have _nothing_ to do with _science_. That's how religion works, not science.
Science works more like, "Ok, let's see your data."
And in a nutshell _that_ is what ticks me off about the carbon cultists. That fucked up attitude that there's only one Truth, some High Priests... err... "Scientists" hand it down as some sacrosanct beyond-questioning Holy Truth, and you're not worthy to question Them. And everyone is the Enemy if they even try to think about it on their own. That's _not_ science. That's religion in pseudo-science garb.
Regardless of whether the scientists studying that are right or right, and they probably are are real scientists... the gang of rabid eco-zealots waging holy crusade in their name, are not. They just perverted that science into some weird kind of religion.
Ok, let's do some science. Physics, to be precise. We'll start from the StefanBoltzmann law.
Radiated energy is proportional to the _fourth_ power of the temperature. For a black body j = sigma * T^4, for a body that's not quite black, you just plug an emissivity factor in too.
A body heated by an external source (e.g., Earth) reaches equilibrium when the radiated energy equals the incoming energy. So the equation works just the same with j being the _incoming_ energy from the Sun.
What I'm getting at is that the average temperature of Earth is in the ballpark of 300K. We had an increase of 1K in a whole bloody century. That's the whole Global Warming. That's an increase of 0.3% or so. Plugging it back into the StefanBoltzmann law, we need an increase of only 1.003^4=1.01205 times in solar output to _fully_ explain it. That's 1.2% btw.
But even that's a bit over-calculated. Being that the same law applies to the Sun's power output, basically we just need the same 0.3% increase in the Sun's temperature to get that effect, all else being equal. You don't need anything spectacular to happen, really.
Yes, sunspots are a cause of short term variations, but we really don't know what the Sun has been gradually doing over that century. If both Jupiter _and_ Mars have been warming up, maybe the Sun is warming up after all.
And finally, well, if you're that concerned about insults to people's intelligence... maybe you should STFU with the "shut up and don't dare question the High Priests" attitude. Just a thought.
Um, no, not really. The point where things get start to get iffy is about Mach 0.3, or about 228 miles per hour. That's why you have teardrop tails on airplanes, but not on cars.
Plus, again, having the full teardrop tail (since that's where we started this sub-thread) does less to the aerodynamic drag coefficient than some people seem to think. E.g., a Volkswagen Lupo (chosen for no other reason than being an ugly little car which looks as far from the teardrop as it gets, with its almost vertical back) has a drag coefficient on 0.29. An Audi A2, with its even more abrupt back, has 0.25.
By comparison, a Dodge Viper has 0.35. A Porsche 964 has 0.32 and the 997 barely edges out the Lupo with 0.28. The Porsche 911 never got below 0.31, IIRC. A Lamborghini Murcielago has 0.33. The Lamborghini Diablo was only marginally better, at 0.31.
Basically the elongated tails on those "penis compensators" (as another poster aptly called them), are just for looks. They're there to make it _look_ fast and sportsy, and sold to people who need a _visible_ status symbol. It's the aerodynamics equivalent of "security theatre." They rarely actually do that horribly much for the car's aerodynamics, and sometimes even actually make the car's aerodynamics worse.
Because basically a long time ago, someone discovered that you can cut off the tail of that teardrop, and the air flow will still be largely the same. Only this time without the added mass and drag of that teardrop tail.
And especially if you read the RTFA, weight is a big problem. Increasing the car's weight with a useless tail would negate any aerodynamic benefits anyway. If you save, say, 0.5 litre per 100 km in aerodynamic drag with a tail, but pay 1 litre per 100 km to move that extra weight, it's not worth it.
Indeed, but that's not what Occam's Razor is about. You may predict or explain any event or thing, no matter how complicated. Occam's Razor is only about _how_ you explain it.
Basically, imagine that you walk through an apple orchard on a windy day, and an apple falls on your head. Let's pick two possible explanations:
1. Probably the wind shook a branch and an apple fell.
2. The Illuminati hired a secret Ninja clan from Japan, to follow you around and drop an apple on your head when a good opportunity presents itself. And they picked a windy day so the rustle of leaves would hide their noises.
Basically Occam's Razor just says that if explanation #1 explains it well enough, go with explanation #1. There is no need to complicate it with unneeded extra elements.
Incidentally, from a science point of view, #1 also has _some_ predictive power. You can, for example, calculate what the probability is to get hit by an apple, or in what season it's more likely, or whether you need to wear a hard hat or it'll likely be just a minor bruise. Explanation #2 is pretty worthless, since there's no way to predict who the Illuminati want to drop an apple on and on what date. You don't even know whether to wear a hard hat, since they might drop an apple made of lead if they want to. (Ninjas can do stuff like that;)
On the other hand, if explanation #1 doesn't explain it, _then_ you can look for a more complex explanation. E.g., if you were walking through a banana plantation and an apple fell on your head, maybe it wasn't the wind after all.
But again, this all has to do with the explanation, not with the thing you explain or predict.
Two wrongs don't make a right, though. (Though three lefts do ;)
Far from me to defend the RIAA, but IMHO the best way to put an end to their own lawlessness is to smack them with the law, not to get into a "he did it first!" kindergarten show. I mean, going by "he did it first!" just sounds like a way to spiral into complete chaos, as everyone eventually finds some pretext as to why he/she shouldn't obey the laws either.
Hmm, I don't know what you mean there. What I was referring to was the ancient Central Fire hypothesis of , and the Counter-Earth it postulated to keep the universe symmetrical and balanced.
I find it interesting and relevant to String Theory because, well, it illustrates how far from the truth you can land by just postulating ideals of symmetry and what the maths _should_ be there, and not letting experimental data get in the way. He just postulated a mathematical view of the universe (as in, really, he thought that the universe is a mathematical construct) and that certain symmetries and numbers _must_ be true, and ran amok from there.
E.g., he introduced the idea of a "Counter-Earth" so:
1. the total number of planets would be 10, because in his maths view of the world they _had_ to be 10, and
2. the universe wouldn't be unbalanced. Since in the contemporary view, the other planets and stars were elemental and had no mass or weight, only the Earth really weighed anything. So if only the Earth rotated against that central point, the universe would be rather off balance. So he placed a mirrored earth on the other side of that central point, so the centre of gravity of it all would be nicely in the middle.
Now ok, it may sound a bit too critical. I do understand that it was an important stepping stone, even if as the first theory which wasn't Heliocentric, and didn't have an absolute up and down. (It had towards the central point and away from that central point.) For that age, it was a step forward. It doesn't mean we still need to do that kind of thing, though.
Anyway, if it clashes with some movie, novel or setting name, I apologise for not being clear enough.
Well, AFAIK the RIAA never sued anyone for downloading. They sued people who "made available" the songs for download by others.
The waters are muddier, because apparently some P2P programs do (or did) effectively default to sharing anything downloaded right back. (I guess because the whole P2P model wouldn't really work if there were 1 or 2 guys offering it for download, and a few million downloading from them. At that point, you're back to the classic server model, and not in a good way.)
AFAIK, it didn't predict anything (experimentally measurable) yet that isn't already predicted by other, simpler theories. I.e., it still fails Occam's Razor. Miserably.
Plus, AFAIK a lot of it has a lot of possible solutions, and for some they don't even have the equations (yet), so there's not much of a prediction you can do with it. So far the majority of it isn't even as much a theory, as in something where you plug your values in a clear formula and get a prediction, but more of a theory that a theory might exist.
Or to put it otherwise, it's more of a mathematical construct than physics. Don't get me wrong, maths is a very very useful tool. Essential, even. But if I'm allowed a bad analogy, it's a bit like a painter's brush: it can be used to paint anything, regardless of whether it's real or outright impossible in the real world. You can use it to paint Mona Lisa or Escher's impossible pictures. So is maths. You can describe an infinity of possible universes with it, most of which have nothing to do with ours. You can use it to describe light propagation through ether, or the raisin pie atom model, or the ancient geocentric model, or even the counter-Earth ideas from waay back, all of which by now we know to be false. It becomes physics (or generally science) when you can test that formula against the real universe and see if it fits or not.
Personally I dunno where people got that definition that you must need a group to even go to the toilet, to be a "real" MMO.
The name just says "massively multiplayer", which strictly speaking means lots and lots of players on the same server.
The first "real" MMO was UO, so basically it means whatever Origin wanted it to mean. It had no such restriction.
Some people would argue that MMOs are really a continuation of MUDs, only this time with a graphical interface. And while I would personally call it a new genre anyway, or a convergence of two former genre, I see their point too: the first ones played a lot like a DIKU with graphics. MUDs had no such restriction either.
Basically I'm not disagreeing with anything you said. Quite the contrary. Just wondering where people got that idea.
So, basically, they're trying to avoid what made WoW so successful? I'm sure they can ask the fine developers of Vanguard how well the plan went to avoid everything that made WoW fun.
:P
I mean, seriously, even Sony had to grudgingly give up and demote most NPCs from heroic (think "elite" in WoW lingo) to make it more soloable, plus give all classes enough firepower (e.g., via "heroic opportunities") to solo.
Now I'm not commenting on Warcraft Online specifically, since I don't have enough info for that. I don't know whether it will rule or suck.
But trying to avoid solo-MMO at this point is really a way to say, "nah, we're not giving the vast majority of players what they want." I just have to question why would anyone sane do that? Did they (and their publisher) take a vow of poverty? Or are they trying to not compete too hard with Blizzard? Or what?
Or it could be that they're smarter than that, after all, and just give a wrong impression.
Well, the thing is, most people don't play a MMO for ever. A lot approach them with the idea that they'll live the rest of their life there, but eventually they finish the game, do the end grind 100 times, get bored, move on.
And a lot seem to have trouble grasping the idea that, basically, "it's ok. I played it for so long, I got bored, time to move on." They feel somehow betrayed and cheated, and throw tantrums that everything that kept them there for a year, now suddenly sucks. And please someone make a game without that WoW crap. And before WoW, it was EQ. But I digress.
Back when I heard a number, it was back in EQ times. (First one, not EQ2.) Sony figured out that the average player stays in the game for an average of 6 months. Some stayed a lot longer, of course, and some quit before the first month was over, but the average was 6 months.
I wouldn't know if it's longer or shorter for WoW, but most people don't stay for ever. They get bored, and they go looking for another MMO to play. And end up playing offline stuff for a while, and/or back to WoW.
What I'm saying is that WoW didn't just enlarge the market for itself. It also enlarged the pool of players who genuinely want to move to another MMO by now. It gets new players and sheds all players all the time. And sometimes gets them back.
Or to put it otherwise, just look at all those people in your guild who were swearing that when D&D Online comes live, that's it, they're outta here and generally it's going to bury WoW. Then it was LOTRO. And Vanguard. And God knows what else.
So to get to the point: to enlarge the market, someone would just need to catch those falling off it. Sure, maybe integrating with Skype could work too, nothing against that. But you could double the market over night without that too. You'd just need to make a game that's good enough for all those getting off WoW.
Then there are the untapped niches.
E.g., the chaos gods know there are a ton of us starving for a good _SF_ MMO. If you look at TV vs MMOs, something is amiss. There are more SF fans than high fantasy fans for TV, but on MMOs some 99% of the market is high fantasy. Can it be that there are a _lot_ of people just waiting for a _good_ SF MMO for a change? (No offense to the couple of AO and SWG fans left, but, eh, you get my drift.) There is the potential to do for the SF segment the same that WoW did for fantasy games.
E.g., there are a lot more kinds of games than RPGs, that have their followers. Business sims are quite big at least in Germany. And The Sims has sold more copies than some whole other genres. Or how about tactical/strategy games? Why can't I lead a squad or run a city-state on a huge map, instead of running around as one character? Etc. Now probably it's not as straightforward to convert most of them to a MMO, but if someone figures out how to do a good one, I'm sure they can enlarge the pie a bit.
So to sum a it up: there's a lot of room for growth by just, well, not making a half arsed job of it. And even more room if it's not yet another EQ clone.
Even nostalgia isn't what it used to be, eh? ;)
;)
Or in this case, are you sure you've played the same UO I've played?
You know, the one with exactly zero quests (the escort quests, dumb and boring as they were, got added later) and not much more to do than run around trying to get some species extinct? That is, if you got past the gangs of gankers camping the town exits for newbies to kill?
The one where you could max your strength by just dropping and picking a fucking coin all night? Or others by just assigning that skill to every single key on the keyboard? Where one skill (magic) did more than all other skills combined, so everyone maxed that one with a macro before going and doing anything else? And where by comparison, another skill (tinkering) was useless for anything other than trapping chests and leaving them around, hoping that some newbie would open them? Great balance there, eh?
The one where crafting was as freaking useless as to only be able to produce coloured versions of the bog-standard items that cost cents at any vendor? While any humanoid around the map dropped better ones and magical ones?
Yeah, that's got to be some great adventure/RPG. Misses all the idea of either adventure or RPG, any way you define RPG. It didn't have either the story of Japanese (and recently Bioware) CRPGs, nor the character advancement of traditional US RPGs, so I guess it must be great.
Or remember how the world got full of houses everywhere, including with a tree poking through the roof, filling every single bloody space, including where the game still pretended was some virgin-ish wood or mountain top? So you'd have wolves and ogres spawning and edging their way between houses, pretending that's their habitat? Yeah, very immersive world that.
Quality of the player base? You mean, how half of them were clones of the same ganker in a death shroud with the same a polearm and the same magic spells? Or how they camped the mines for anyone foolish enough to get encumbered with ore, so they can gank them right next to the town? Yeah, that was some inovative roleplaying there.
Remember the about a quarter of the population who even bought disposable accounts to scam and grief, and had whole website rings dedicated to sharing tips on how to drive a newbie off the game? Amazing idea to RP someone who can magically steal your items through walls, or who can abuse a bug to take your items in a trade without giving anything, by just dragging yours in a container before aborting the trade.
And grinding to achieve the biggest castle and the most status-symbol items, now that's _totally_ unlike the grind to the top of kids these days in WoW
Heh.