Star Wars Rebellion Was A Great Concept
on
The Chewbacca Awards
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I'm surprised they haven't tried remaking this game. It was a turn-based strategy 3x game with battles played out in 3D -- isn't that all the rage now? The concept was solid, and it had a lot of cool elements -- not only did you build a variety of rebel fleets, ships, ground forces, etc. to fight the empire from planet to planet, but the game also had all the special characters you could send on missions and such. Some could even become force sensitive!
It was a great idea that was sadly completely buried behind a horribly designed, low-res graphical interface that made it almost impossible to do anything. Had the game come out two years earlier minus a couple of features, it would have been great. And if they remade it today with modern graphics, a slick UI, and updated gameplay, it could be awesome.
1. Mark is the kind of guy who is not afraid to say what he thinks. He honestly doesn't believe embracing the exchange of in-game goods for real money is good for the industry and for the games themselves. That's his honest opinion and there are certainly many others who feel the same way.
2. Mark is also a shrewd businessman. He understands that, now to SOE has taken the move, if he genuinely doesn't agree with it, then he should not simply say nothing. He should get Mythic's own take on the issue out in the public discourse and work it as a product differentiator. Don't like what SOE is doing with their approach to gaming? Hey, come play Mythic's games, we don't do that lame shit here!
3. In the end, I don't think this is as big an issue as Mark makes it out to be. For YEARS people have been saying "Why don't we..." and we all have heard the reasons why it shouldn't be done; SOE finally decided to give it a try. Good for them for trying to innovate and to expand their business in a new direction. The market is big enough to support games for folks of different beliefs - some people believe the primary factor in progress within a game should be time; others believe money should be allowed to play a role.
4. If the experiment is a success, then Mythic will still see success in its role catering to those people with different tastes, and SOE will grow their business by catering to the players Mythic doesn't want. If the experiment fails, the exposure to SOE is going to be limited to only those few servers, even if some horrible legal decision costs them big bucks, and Mythic can capitalize on any fallout from SOE's weakened position in the marketplace.
1. Mark is the kind of guy who is not afraid to say what he thinks. He honestly doesn't believe embracing the exchange of in-game goods for real money is good for the industry and for the games themselves. That's his honest opinion and there are certainly many others who feel the same way.
2. Mark is also a shrewd businessman. He understands that, now to SOE has taken the move, if he genuinely doesn't agree with it, then he should not simply say nothing. He should get Mythic's own take on the issue out in the public discourse and work it as a product differentiator. Don't like what SOE is doing with their approach to gaming? Hey, come play Mythic's games, we don't do that lame shit here!
3. In the end, I don't think this is as big an issue as Mark makes it out to be. For YEARS people have been saying "Why don't we..." and we all have heard the reasons why it shouldn't be done; SOE finally decided to give it a try. Good for them for trying to innovate and to expand their business in a new direction. The market is big enough to support games for folks of different beliefs - some people believe the primary factor in progress within a game should be time; others believe money should be allowed to play a role.
4. If the experiment is a success, then Mythic will still see success in its role catering to those people with different tastes, and SOE will grow their business by catering to the players Mythic doesn't want. If the experiment fails, the exposure to SOE is going to be limited to only those few servers, even if some horrible legal decision costs them big bucks, and Mythic can capitalize on any fallout from SOE's weakened position in the marketplace.
Bruce
That has got to stop. According to both PricewaterhouseCoopers and KPMG, more than 90 per cent of corporate spreadsheets have material errors in them.
I'm not surprised they would say that, since PART OF THEIR BUSINESS IS GETTING PAID TO PREVENT/CORRECT SUCH ERRORS. In other words, it is in their best interests to tell businesses that their spreadsheets have errors in them, because they want you to pay them to fix them and thus "save" your company money.
Worse, estimates suggest that such errors costs between $10,000 and $100,000 per error per month.
While I have not read the original research, this seems like a misrepresentation. I suspect what they found was that was the SIZE of the average financial spreadsheet error. But it's completely wrong to conclude therefor that such an error translates into a cost for the company of the same amount. In most cases that $ figure is going to be buried in one of many metrics; it's unlikely to actually be in the revenue or profit line. Even if it were, it didn't really COST you that much -- it just mean you under-reported your earnings/revenues/etc. What is going to happen; you overpay a bill from a vendor? They are likely to catch that and it won't cost you anything.
Finally, the errors are going to be distributed fairly randomly -- they are just as likely to "make" your company money as "cost" your company money. Yes, every error is a problem that needs to be corrected, but any estimate of "cost" to the company is going to be very haphazard. Business that fails to be transacted because a number is too low is offset by business that gets transacted successfully because a number is too high.
I saw John Cleese do a hilarious infomercial for some vacuum cleaner a couple of years ago. I want to say it was Sunbeam but I really don't remember. So I guess he enjoys the work.:)
I was given a version of Fractal Mapper a couple of years ago, but I found it difficult to use. It seems to be very powerful, though. The new versions might be more user-friendly.
The problem with the memo wasn't that it was poorly presented. Everyone understood what the memo said and that it represented a threat. The memo said nothing really new; Bin Laden had publically declared war against us years earlier.
The problem was that, at that time, the US had institutional inertia that said we should just go about our business and hope nothing happened and respond when it did. The general belief was any terrorist attack that actually managed to succeed would still be small in scale; on the order of 10s or 100s of deaths, not 1000s. Few actually thought they would actually be able to carry out a plan like 9/11, although it was certainly a possibility in many scenarios.
But, as I said, this meant nothing new. It was true when Clinton was in office and it was true when Bush was in office. Neither did enough to be "proactive" and treat this threat with the seriousness it deseerved. After 9/11, a lot of people woke up to the truth, Bush included. Before 9/11, he's no more to blame than anyone else.
Most people probably never actually got to the end of Rocket Ranger (on the Amiga, dunno about the PC), so they wouldn't know that after the shootout with the Nazi Amazon Women on the Moon, Cinemaware shows the typical ending splash screen proclaiming your victory! My friend Mark and I were rejoicing as we had worked together to win the game in the final battle, only for our cries of sucess to turn to screams of terror as the ending sequence graphics were ripped away and a giant moon monster started attacking us! It took everything we had to not get killed by the beast and finally take it out! Probably the most exhilirating moment I've ever had in front of a computer, made all the more precious in that it would be the last time I saw Mark; he died a year later.
Wing Commander III
The shock at Hobbes actually betraying the Confederation was almost too much. Seeing Mark Hammill's pissed off expression when he realizes the truth wasn't necessary -- YOU were pissed off! YOU wanted revenge! It was personal, and you couldn't wait to blow that furball into space dust as soon as you got the chance!
Is Guild Wars an MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game)?
Guild Wars has some similarities to existing MMORPGs, but it also has some key differences. Like existing MMOs, Guild Wars is played entirely online in a secure hosted environment. Thousands of players inhabit the same virtual world. Players can meet new friends in gathering places like towns and outposts where they form parties and go questing with them. Unlike many MMOs, when players form a party and embark upon a quest in Guild Wars, they get their own private copy of the area where the quest takes place. This design eliminates some of the frustrating gameplay elements commonly associated with MMOs, such as spawn camping, kill stealing, and lines to complete a quest.
Guild Wars takes place in a large virtual world made up of many different zones, and players can walk from one end of the world to the other. In Guild Wars much of the tedium of traveling through the world has been eliminated. Players can instantly return to any safe area (town or outpost) that they have previously visited just by clicking on it in the world overview map.
Rather than labeling Guild Wars an MMORPG, we prefer to call it a CORPG (Competitive Online Role-Playing Game). Guild Wars was designed from the ground up to create the best possible competitive role-playing experience. Success in Guild Wars is always the result of player skill, not time spent playing or the size of one's guild. As characters progress, they acquire a diverse set of skills and items, enabling them to use new strategies in combat. Players can do battle in open arenas or compete in guild-vs-guild warfare or the international tournament. Engaging in combat is always the player's choice, however; there is no player-killing in cooperative areas of the world.
Finally, unlike existing MMOs, all characters in Guild Wars inhabit the same virtual world -- they are not divided onto different servers or shards -- so players can always team up with or compete against any other player in the world.
You do hit upon the key issue, which is instancing - how much instancing can you have before it's no longer a MMOG and just a graphical front-end where people can connect and then go off into areas which only allow smaller groups? After all, this is how games like Diablo II work. I would argue that in any true MMOG, there must be some "Game" in the "Massively Multiplayer" (non-instanced) space. In CoH, you have this, but in Guild Wars, the game seems to take place almost entirely inside instances.
Still, it's a complicated issue. I might accept Guild Wars as a MMOG or MMORPG, but since NCSoft specifically says it is NOT one, I don't have to worry about it.:)
>Again, this misses the point. He didn't avocate >it, he PAID FOR IT.
Again, this misses the point. He didn't claim he paid for it; he claimed he took the initiative in CREATING it. Which he didn't. By the way, he didn't pay for it, either -- it already existed, and we, the taxpayers, footed the bill.
>By way of analogy: When your kid is playing >around in the garage and invents a new computer, >so you give him a million dollars and get all of >the zoning considerations worked out so that he >can start selling them from your house, you have >just as much a right to call yourself a founder >of the computer company as he does.
Your analogy is flawed. It's much more like the kid had already founded his company and was selling his computers, and then Al Gore was a VC who came along and invested a bunch of money to help expand it. Al Gore deserves credit for helping the company, but he in no way has a right to be called founder or, even worse, inventor of the new computer.
>The "IP network on which the Internet is built" >was not Al Gore's baby, but the network we use >and rely upon today is here because he "took the >initiative in creating" it just as much so as >the people who put technical expertise into it. >He deserves full credit for that.
No, he doesn't. He deserves credit for supporting a pre-existing Internet, but in no way could he be credited with help creating it. He could have said EXPANDING the Internet, or maybe even MODERNIZING the Internet, but not CREATING the Internet.
>This is not politics, this is just assigning >credit where it is due, and I was saying this >long before I even knew what Gore's politics >WERE (he was just some Congress-critter as far >as I was concerned in the 80s).
I don't care how long you were saying it; you were wrong to say it then and you're wrong to say it now.
It doesn't matter what Cerf says regarding Al Gore's advocacy/enthusiasm/promotion of the Internet once he was already in Congress. Al Gore's claim was he "took the initiative in creating the Internet", which simply can't be true because the Internet already existed before he took part in *any* initiative involving it.
Face it, Gore either didn't understand what he really did (and thought he DID help create the Internet), or he intentionally was misleading about his involvement. The latter could be to inflate his own sense of accomplishment or to deceive others as to the nature of his accomplishment. The fact he didn't own up to this quickly and completely is his own character flaw.
The first poster claimed that there were "No interesting combos" but that's untrue. You would string attacks together in combos; in fact, there was a mechanism very much like the "Heroic Opportunity" wheel in EQ2. Perhaps he simply didn't understand what he was seeing when he played it last year.
Secondly, from a design point-of-view, the distinguishing characteristic of Tabula Rasa was a "hub and spokes" model with instancing, which you see to some degree being used in other games like Guild Wars, DDO, etc. This is very different from most of the MMOGs that have come before.
Finally, WoW really didn't have a lot to do with this -- Tabula Rasa started being revamped after their E3 showing, partially based upon feedback they received there. Of course, almost EVERY MMOG, in development or released, took a second look at their game after seeing WoW's success. But it would not be fair to suggest that the TR team is revamping simply to become more like WoW.
... this is a true story that happened to me at Purdue University at the Knight Spot Grill in Cary Quadrangle. My roommate and I were in there late one night. No one else was around, which was fairly typical. I ordered something to drink, paid in bills, and got a couple of quarters back in change. We then went over to the pinball machine to play a game. I put in the quarter but it went right through and out the change slot. I examined it and noted it was, in fact, a Canadian quarter.
I returned to the cashier whom had handed me the Canadian quarter moments before. "Excuse me," I said, "but you gave me a Canadian quarter. I'd like a real [US] one, please."
"I'm sorry, we don't take Canadian money."
"No, you don't understand. You gave this to me instead of an actual quarter. I want my correct change."
"No, that's impossible. We don't take Canadian coins, so I couldn't have given that to you."
I was incredulous. "You think I came in here with a Canadian quarter and arranged this just to steal 25 cents?" After a few more failed attempts to convince the flunkie, we gave up and left.
Assuming you mean Star Trek and not Star Wars the second time...
Actually, while the market did seem very crowded in most of 2004, World of Warcraft proved they could grow the market, and brought in literally hundreds of thousands of new MMOG players. These people are all potential customers of a Star Trek MMOG.
Another thing is that, while the fantasy space is very crowded, the sci-fi space is not. There are only a few sci-fi based games out there, most notably Star Wars Galaxies, Eve Online, and Anarchy Online (plus City of Heroes if you count superheroes as sci-fi). And of those only SWG has really hit it big. There's plenty of room for another 200K+ subs sci-fi game, and several companies are working on exploiting that niche. Look for Imperator Online and Tabula Rasa to come out late this year/early next year as examples.
Finally, like Star Wars Galaxies drew in a bunch of Star Wars fans, Star Trek Online will draw in a bunch of Star Trek fans, who otherwise are not playing MMOGs. So the chance for success is quite good. I'd much rather be a company putting out a Star Trek Online game than one putting out Generic_Fantasy_MMO_#27.
Perpetual is still developing the Star Trek MMOG, but first they will be releasing Gods and Heroes. Don't expect to see Star Trek Online for another 2 years at least.
>Man, your lack of reading comprehension skills >definitely proves that you're an FFXI player. >First of all, if you read the MMOGChart FAQ, >Lineage and Lineage II list their subscribers in >a weird way. They count basically any trial >account that was ever created. That's why they >get ignored in most subscriber comparisons.
Sigh. No, they do not do that, nor does my FAQ say that. If that were true, their numbers would never go down, now would they? No, the number I chart is "unique monthly access" users, which includes both regular subscribers and those people who play at least once that month in a PC Baang. That means they paid money for that time. Just think of it as an alternative pricing scheme. But there's no reason not to count them; they're quite real.
Before anyone complains, I should not that WoW is played and payed for in Korea in the same way, and I try to count Korean subscribers in the same way for WoW as I would for Lineages I and II.
Also note that there are many Asian games with "millions" of monthly users that are not listed, like Ragnarok Online and Legend of Mir, because I don't have good data on them.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm surprised they haven't tried remaking this game. It was a turn-based strategy 3x game with battles played out in 3D -- isn't that all the rage now? The concept was solid, and it had a lot of cool elements -- not only did you build a variety of rebel fleets, ships, ground forces, etc. to fight the empire from planet to planet, but the game also had all the special characters you could send on missions and such. Some could even become force sensitive!
It was a great idea that was sadly completely buried behind a horribly designed, low-res graphical interface that made it almost impossible to do anything. Had the game come out two years earlier minus a couple of features, it would have been great. And if they remade it today with modern graphics, a slick UI, and updated gameplay, it could be awesome.
Bruce
1. Mark is the kind of guy who is not afraid to say what he thinks. He honestly doesn't believe embracing the exchange of in-game goods for real money is good for the industry and for the games themselves. That's his honest opinion and there are certainly many others who feel the same way.
..." and we all have heard the reasons why it shouldn't be done; SOE finally decided to give it a try. Good for them for trying to innovate and to expand their business in a new direction. The market is big enough to support games for folks of different beliefs - some people believe the primary factor in progress within a game should be time; others believe money should be allowed to play a role.
2. Mark is also a shrewd businessman. He understands that, now to SOE has taken the move, if he genuinely doesn't agree with it, then he should not simply say nothing. He should get Mythic's own take on the issue out in the public discourse and work it as a product differentiator. Don't like what SOE is doing with their approach to gaming? Hey, come play Mythic's games, we don't do that lame shit here!
3. In the end, I don't think this is as big an issue as Mark makes it out to be. For YEARS people have been saying "Why don't we
4. If the experiment is a success, then Mythic will still see success in its role catering to those people with different tastes, and SOE will grow their business by catering to the players Mythic doesn't want. If the experiment fails, the exposure to SOE is going to be limited to only those few servers, even if some horrible legal decision costs them big bucks, and Mythic can capitalize on any fallout from SOE's weakened position in the marketplace.
Bruce
1. Mark is the kind of guy who is not afraid to say what he thinks. He honestly doesn't believe embracing the exchange of in-game goods for real money is good for the industry and for the games themselves. That's his honest opinion and there are certainly many others who feel the same way. 2. Mark is also a shrewd businessman. He understands that, now to SOE has taken the move, if he genuinely doesn't agree with it, then he should not simply say nothing. He should get Mythic's own take on the issue out in the public discourse and work it as a product differentiator. Don't like what SOE is doing with their approach to gaming? Hey, come play Mythic's games, we don't do that lame shit here! 3. In the end, I don't think this is as big an issue as Mark makes it out to be. For YEARS people have been saying "Why don't we ..." and we all have heard the reasons why it shouldn't be done; SOE finally decided to give it a try. Good for them for trying to innovate and to expand their business in a new direction. The market is big enough to support games for folks of different beliefs - some people believe the primary factor in progress within a game should be time; others believe money should be allowed to play a role.
4. If the experiment is a success, then Mythic will still see success in its role catering to those people with different tastes, and SOE will grow their business by catering to the players Mythic doesn't want. If the experiment fails, the exposure to SOE is going to be limited to only those few servers, even if some horrible legal decision costs them big bucks, and Mythic can capitalize on any fallout from SOE's weakened position in the marketplace.
Bruce
That has got to stop. According to both PricewaterhouseCoopers and KPMG, more than 90 per cent of corporate spreadsheets have material errors in them.
I'm not surprised they would say that, since PART OF THEIR BUSINESS IS GETTING PAID TO PREVENT/CORRECT SUCH ERRORS. In other words, it is in their best interests to tell businesses that their spreadsheets have errors in them, because they want you to pay them to fix them and thus "save" your company money.
Worse, estimates suggest that such errors costs between $10,000 and $100,000 per error per month.
While I have not read the original research, this seems like a misrepresentation. I suspect what they found was that was the SIZE of the average financial spreadsheet error. But it's completely wrong to conclude therefor that such an error translates into a cost for the company of the same amount. In most cases that $ figure is going to be buried in one of many metrics; it's unlikely to actually be in the revenue or profit line. Even if it were, it didn't really COST you that much -- it just mean you under-reported your earnings/revenues/etc. What is going to happen; you overpay a bill from a vendor? They are likely to catch that and it won't cost you anything.
Finally, the errors are going to be distributed fairly randomly -- they are just as likely to "make" your company money as "cost" your company money. Yes, every error is a problem that needs to be corrected, but any estimate of "cost" to the company is going to be very haphazard. Business that fails to be transacted because a number is too low is offset by business that gets transacted successfully because a number is too high.
Bruce
I saw John Cleese do a hilarious infomercial for some vacuum cleaner a couple of years ago. I want to say it was Sunbeam but I really don't remember. So I guess he enjoys the work. :)
Bruce
Bruce
How do we know it's not the Scott Bakula's evil Mirror Universe twin?!?
Bruce
The problem with the memo wasn't that it was poorly presented. Everyone understood what the memo said and that it represented a threat. The memo said nothing really new; Bin Laden had publically declared war against us years earlier.
The problem was that, at that time, the US had institutional inertia that said we should just go about our business and hope nothing happened and respond when it did. The general belief was any terrorist attack that actually managed to succeed would still be small in scale; on the order of 10s or 100s of deaths, not 1000s. Few actually thought they would actually be able to carry out a plan like 9/11, although it was certainly a possibility in many scenarios.
But, as I said, this meant nothing new. It was true when Clinton was in office and it was true when Bush was in office. Neither did enough to be "proactive" and treat this threat with the seriousness it deseerved. After 9/11, a lot of people woke up to the truth, Bush included. Before 9/11, he's no more to blame than anyone else.
Bruce
Most people probably never actually got to the end of Rocket Ranger (on the Amiga, dunno about the PC), so they wouldn't know that after the shootout with the Nazi Amazon Women on the Moon, Cinemaware shows the typical ending splash screen proclaiming your victory! My friend Mark and I were rejoicing as we had worked together to win the game in the final battle, only for our cries of sucess to turn to screams of terror as the ending sequence graphics were ripped away and a giant moon monster started attacking us! It took everything we had to not get killed by the beast and finally take it out! Probably the most exhilirating moment I've ever had in front of a computer, made all the more precious in that it would be the last time I saw Mark; he died a year later.
Wing Commander III
The shock at Hobbes actually betraying the Confederation was almost too much. Seeing Mark Hammill's pissed off expression when he realizes the truth wasn't necessary -- YOU were pissed off! YOU wanted revenge! It was personal, and you couldn't wait to blow that furball into space dust as soon as you got the chance!
Bruce
Is Guild Wars an MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game)?
Guild Wars has some similarities to existing MMORPGs, but it also has some key differences. Like existing MMOs, Guild Wars is played entirely online in a secure hosted environment. Thousands of players inhabit the same virtual world. Players can meet new friends in gathering places like towns and outposts where they form parties and go questing with them. Unlike many MMOs, when players form a party and embark upon a quest in Guild Wars, they get their own private copy of the area where the quest takes place. This design eliminates some of the frustrating gameplay elements commonly associated with MMOs, such as spawn camping, kill stealing, and lines to complete a quest.
Guild Wars takes place in a large virtual world made up of many different zones, and players can walk from one end of the world to the other. In Guild Wars much of the tedium of traveling through the world has been eliminated. Players can instantly return to any safe area (town or outpost) that they have previously visited just by clicking on it in the world overview map.
Rather than labeling Guild Wars an MMORPG, we prefer to call it a CORPG (Competitive Online Role-Playing Game). Guild Wars was designed from the ground up to create the best possible competitive role-playing experience. Success in Guild Wars is always the result of player skill, not time spent playing or the size of one's guild. As characters progress, they acquire a diverse set of skills and items, enabling them to use new strategies in combat. Players can do battle in open arenas or compete in guild-vs-guild warfare or the international tournament. Engaging in combat is always the player's choice, however; there is no player-killing in cooperative areas of the world.
Finally, unlike existing MMOs, all characters in Guild Wars inhabit the same virtual world -- they are not divided onto different servers or shards -- so players can always team up with or compete against any other player in the world.
You do hit upon the key issue, which is instancing - how much instancing can you have before it's no longer a MMOG and just a graphical front-end where people can connect and then go off into areas which only allow smaller groups? After all, this is how games like Diablo II work. I would argue that in any true MMOG, there must be some "Game" in the "Massively Multiplayer" (non-instanced) space. In CoH, you have this, but in Guild Wars, the game seems to take place almost entirely inside instances.
Still, it's a complicated issue. I might accept Guild Wars as a MMOG or MMORPG, but since NCSoft specifically says it is NOT one, I don't have to worry about it. :)
Bruce
Maybe millions of GLBT and GLBT-friendly computer users will boycott Microsoft and start buying Macs?
Bruce
>Again, this misses the point. He didn't avocate
>it, he PAID FOR IT.
Again, this misses the point. He didn't claim he paid for it; he claimed he took the initiative in CREATING it. Which he didn't. By the way, he didn't pay for it, either -- it already existed, and we, the taxpayers, footed the bill.
>By way of analogy: When your kid is playing
>around in the garage and invents a new computer,
>so you give him a million dollars and get all of
>the zoning considerations worked out so that he
>can start selling them from your house, you have
>just as much a right to call yourself a founder
>of the computer company as he does.
Your analogy is flawed. It's much more like the kid had already founded his company and was selling his computers, and then Al Gore was a VC who came along and invested a bunch of money to help expand it. Al Gore deserves credit for helping the company, but he in no way has a right to be called founder or, even worse, inventor of the new computer.
>The "IP network on which the Internet is built"
>was not Al Gore's baby, but the network we use
>and rely upon today is here because he "took the
>initiative in creating" it just as much so as
>the people who put technical expertise into it.
>He deserves full credit for that.
No, he doesn't. He deserves credit for supporting a pre-existing Internet, but in no way could he be credited with help creating it. He could have said EXPANDING the Internet, or maybe even MODERNIZING the Internet, but not CREATING the Internet.
>This is not politics, this is just assigning
>credit where it is due, and I was saying this >long before I even knew what Gore's politics
>WERE (he was just some Congress-critter as far
>as I was concerned in the 80s).
I don't care how long you were saying it; you were wrong to say it then and you're wrong to say it now.
Bruce
It doesn't matter what Cerf says regarding Al Gore's advocacy/enthusiasm/promotion of the Internet once he was already in Congress. Al Gore's claim was he "took the initiative in creating the Internet", which simply can't be true because the Internet already existed before he took part in *any* initiative involving it.
Face it, Gore either didn't understand what he really did (and thought he DID help create the Internet), or he intentionally was misleading about his involvement. The latter could be to inflate his own sense of accomplishment or to deceive others as to the nature of his accomplishment. The fact he didn't own up to this quickly and completely is his own character flaw.
Bruce
I also played the TR demo at last year's E3.
The first poster claimed that there were "No interesting combos" but that's untrue. You would string attacks together in combos; in fact, there was a mechanism very much like the "Heroic Opportunity" wheel in EQ2. Perhaps he simply didn't understand what he was seeing when he played it last year.
Secondly, from a design point-of-view, the distinguishing characteristic of Tabula Rasa was a "hub and spokes" model with instancing, which you see to some degree being used in other games like Guild Wars, DDO, etc. This is very different from most of the MMOGs that have come before.
Finally, WoW really didn't have a lot to do with this -- Tabula Rasa started being revamped after their E3 showing, partially based upon feedback they received there. Of course, almost EVERY MMOG, in development or released, took a second look at their game after seeing WoW's success. But it would not be fair to suggest that the TR team is revamping simply to become more like WoW.
Bruce
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=chicago+meigs&ll=41. 860614,-87.612534&spn=0.015771,0.014784&t=k&hl=en
Bruce
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=32.366956,-64.69268 2&spn=0.007886,0.007392&t=k&hl=en
Bruce
>Star Trek Enterprise will be the first Star Trek
>show since the original series not to run a full
>seven seasons
Not so. That honor would go to Star Trek: The Animated Series.
Bruce
... this is a true story that happened to me at Purdue University at the Knight Spot Grill in Cary Quadrangle. My roommate and I were in there late one night. No one else was around, which was fairly typical. I ordered something to drink, paid in bills, and got a couple of quarters back in change. We then went over to the pinball machine to play a game. I put in the quarter but it went right through and out the change slot. I examined it and noted it was, in fact, a Canadian quarter.
I returned to the cashier whom had handed me the Canadian quarter moments before. "Excuse me," I said, "but you gave me a Canadian quarter. I'd like a real [US] one, please."
"I'm sorry, we don't take Canadian money."
"No, you don't understand. You gave this to me instead of an actual quarter. I want my correct change."
"No, that's impossible. We don't take Canadian coins, so I couldn't have given that to you."
I was incredulous. "You think I came in here with a Canadian quarter and arranged this just to steal 25 cents?" After a few more failed attempts to convince the flunkie, we gave up and left.
I never ate there again.
Bruce
>T.V. spinoffs are never as good as the movie.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer disproves this rule.
Bruce
Assuming you mean Star Trek and not Star Wars the second time...
Actually, while the market did seem very crowded in most of 2004, World of Warcraft proved they could grow the market, and brought in literally hundreds of thousands of new MMOG players. These people are all potential customers of a Star Trek MMOG.
Another thing is that, while the fantasy space is very crowded, the sci-fi space is not. There are only a few sci-fi based games out there, most notably Star Wars Galaxies, Eve Online, and Anarchy Online (plus City of Heroes if you count superheroes as sci-fi). And of those only SWG has really hit it big. There's plenty of room for another 200K+ subs sci-fi game, and several companies are working on exploiting that niche. Look for Imperator Online and Tabula Rasa to come out late this year/early next year as examples.
Finally, like Star Wars Galaxies drew in a bunch of Star Wars fans, Star Trek Online will draw in a bunch of Star Trek fans, who otherwise are not playing MMOGs. So the chance for success is quite good. I'd much rather be a company putting out a Star Trek Online game than one putting out Generic_Fantasy_MMO_#27.
Bruce
Perpetual is still developing the Star Trek MMOG, but first they will be releasing Gods and Heroes. Don't expect to see Star Trek Online for another 2 years at least.
Bruce
You're really in their world, now!
Bruce
That's why another acronym for EMACS at the time was "Escape-Meta-Alt-Control-Shift" Bruce
>Man, your lack of reading comprehension skills
>definitely proves that you're an FFXI player.
>First of all, if you read the MMOGChart FAQ,
>Lineage and Lineage II list their subscribers in
>a weird way. They count basically any trial
>account that was ever created. That's why they
>get ignored in most subscriber comparisons.
Sigh. No, they do not do that, nor does my FAQ say that. If that were true, their numbers would never go down, now would they? No, the number I chart is "unique monthly access" users, which includes both regular subscribers and those people who play at least once that month in a PC Baang. That means they paid money for that time. Just think of it as an alternative pricing scheme. But there's no reason not to count them; they're quite real.
Before anyone complains, I should not that WoW is played and payed for in Korea in the same way, and I try to count Korean subscribers in the same way for WoW as I would for Lineages I and II.
Also note that there are many Asian games with "millions" of monthly users that are not listed, like Ragnarok Online and Legend of Mir, because I don't have good data on them.
Bruce
Bruce