We monitor the economics of the game very closely. We watch the in-game economy on a regular basis and have personnel that monitor game logs every day. When we see irregularities, we take action. This can range from exploring the account further, finding and removing exploits, or even possible suspension and bans. We also look closely at out-of-game transactions involving real-world cash for in-game items. Some of those transactions occur over eBay, some do not. But in many cases, the involved parties are warned or suspended, and some accounts are also banned.
BS. They might monitor farmers, but I've bought over 5000G worth of gold from ebay and never had a warning.
Can't a paladin just use their cleanse spell to cleanse it off?
Heck, Paladins could start charging lowbies for doctor visits. Finally a use for Paladins.
Why? It obviously works everywhere else. They aren't treated like 'whores' just because they are half naked (as are men in many games). Really, if you want to save the video game journalism industry get them off the hyper-feminist kick they have been on for the past 5 years.
Frankly, nobody wants you here if you're going to make us all look like fools. Let's face it: the last thing we need is another Hot Coffee-style sex scandal, especially when this crap is so puerile and insignificant to begin with. Do we really have to corrode society just to sell a few thousand more units? Why don't we just show everyone naked and copulating and be done with it?
Can't writers find anything different to whine about? Sex sells, it always has. There are plenty of successful games that don't involve sex, there are some that do. Just like any other form of entertainment. I don't know why these femi-boys feel the need to whine about this. If you think there is some huge feminist market out there, go make your game and strike it rich. Or more likely, go down in flames so I can laugh at you. Cookie cutter "fix the game industry" articles are even worse that cookie cutter games.
Memo to game developers: Yeah, yeah, TV and movies struggle with similar problems, so maybe video game developers aren't the only evildoers here. Still, you can buck the trend--just look at Beyond Good and Evil, a game with a hip, normal-looking female lead character. You won't find any jiggle physics, crotch-thrusting or bikini splits there, just an average girl with average looks. HOW REVOLUTIONARY!
Who cares, let the market decide what it wants rather than moral dictators.
#2 Your Storylines Suck--Get New Ones
Your article sucks, and is the same as 100 others, write an original one.
Ok, so here's a big one. Why is it that half the games on the market begin with your character as the sole survivor of some mysterious holocaust? As you stumble over the bloody bodies and piece together the ghastly clues, you come to realize that--HOLY CRAP!--the spaceship/planet/laboratory was invaded by aliens/parasites/demons!!! This storytelling clich? can be traced to the original Doom (and further back to films like Aliens) and it used to be a truly novel approach. Now it's just evidence of a much larger problem, a massive creative malaise. Stop, please. Also please cease employing stories that revolve around parasites, killer viruses, or zombies (please note that Halo's Flood fit ALL THREE of those criteria).
Because first person shooters revolve around gameplay, not storylines. Games revolve around gameplay more than they do storylines. Sure storylines help, but would you rather play a game with good gameplay and a bad story, or bad gamplay and a good story? Ideally you would have both, but if you had limited resources to put into only one, which would you choose?
Memo to game developers:
Memo to people writing about the video game industry. You are not insightful, and you keep spewing the same crap. Find something new to write about.
#3 Enough with the Epics
What do you want? A RPG about a hero who is a janitor and needs to clean 3 stalls before the end of the day? Stories _should_ be epic.
And how about this radical thought: what if there were no heroes and no villains, just ordinary people doing the best they could under supremely tough circumstances?
It's called real life.
Or how about a Reservoir Dogs-style scenario where almost everyone's a bad guy? No more excuses!
Ok, everyone be a bad guy! No half naked women though!
How come you said bad guy? Why not bad girl? Well, a fully clothed bad girl.
#4 Stop with the Spectacles
Because we don't want better graphics. As a matter of fact, lets all go play combat from Atari rather than the next FPS game.
The article clames Battle Arena Toshinden is the reason people bought their ps1, but it's more likely that the announced release of mk3 a few weeks after launch was the reason people bought a ps1 considering how hot that game was in the arcades at that time. Battle Arena Toshinden was the game you bought because you were waiting for mk3 and wanted a ps1 at launch.
Come to think of it even religion is surely a factor in evolution. It is the first means humankind had to spread 'rules that enable survival' to larger groups. I am sure you can think of many, if not think of combinations of certain type of meats, parasites and climate and how they are dealt with in different religions. These rules enable more religious people to survive than non-religious. Be aware that this is not only way to do this. There are now many different ways to spread such rules (laws, science, internet etc...)
I always thought this could be a reason for religions choosing not to eat pork...but why do some avoid cow? Were they not big fans of the atkins diet back then?
Yeah but they only do decent business there 4 months out of the year. Some of the boardwalk arcades move their better games into different locations during the winter.
If you are in NJ, there is always eight on the break though.
You are a disingenous clown, like the rest of your medieval Creationist zombie army.
Sorry, I'm not a creationist. I don't even go to church or practice any religion. Once again your bias assumes anyone who disagrees with you must be part of a "medieval Creationist zombie army". So who has the persecution complex?
.It's only ridiculous when religious zealots like you insist that we balance truth, like evolution science, with fantasy, like Creationism.
I was clear in my last post, that I do not support religion being taught in public schools. You are assume anyone who doesn't agree with you is a "religious zealot". These are all your words, not mine. It's your blind hatred that fuels your ignorance to the fact that someone could not be a creationist but still reject your hostile views (hatred) twards religion.
Only to racists, like the religious people thru the 20th Century who "forgive" black people, "because god made them that way, it's not their fault".
You can point out dark parts of any race or large religions history pretty much. Should we hold the rape of nanking against the Japanese today?
Of course people who insist on believing in an imaginary spirit that created the universe 7000 years ago, inserting dinosaur bones in the ground to fool us, and who insist children should be taught their myth is as valid as Evolution, are ridiculous.
So you are saying all religion is ridiculous? You can basically point out things in every religion that are ridiculous to believe if you don't have faith. Even if you believe all religion to be ridiculous, does that give you a basis to judge anyone who believes in a particular god as 'stupid' as you do later on?
It's their choice to be stupid, and impose their stupidity on us and our descendants. Deciding that some people are worth ignoring based on their behavior, including their senseless beliefs, is not the baseless prejudice of racism. It's mere judgement, which any sensible person exercises to protect ourself from accepting nonsense where the truth is important.
So people do not have the right to teach their children as they see fit? It's one thing to be an athiest, it's another to call people stupid based on their beliefs.
It's really sad that Creationists have cloaked themselves in the stolen garment of antiracism. Especially when so many Creationists are straight-up racists, from long lines of racists.
This is really no better than the Anti-Semitism that hate groups spew about Jews.
Creationism is the way many racists pass the buck, saying "we love niggers, it's part of god's plan that they're inferior". I've seen it up close, especially when I lived in Louisiana for several years.
I'm sad to see that living in Louisiana and your experences have biased yo to the point where you think religious people = stupid racists. You do realize, by judging them the way you do, you are as bad as what you claim they are? You have become no better than what you have so much rage against.
And I've seen nothing else from these Creationists anywhere else but the same (often unwitting) selfserving, willful ignorance. Ridicule is the fairest treatment they can expect - just as if they blathered on about how textbooks should dignify the theory that the Tooth Fairy created the universe.
There are logical, and legal reasons why creationism shouldn't be taught in public schools. You would be better off sticking to those rather than promoting hatred of a group of people based on their religious beliefs.
One major improvement was going from co-operative multi-tasking to pre-emptive multi-tasking. On Win 3.1 applications had to relinquish the CPU.
It is a statement of how far down the drain Slashdot has gone that it took 10 replies for someone to point this out, and it's not even modded up. Switching from co-operative multi-tasking to pre-emptive multitasking is what provided much greater stability, and was a huge leap forward IMO.
While 95 would crash, 3.1 would lock up fairly regularly. The failure of a cooperative multi tasking system is the OS's reliance on the code to actually give us the processor as you mentioned, rather than the OS enforcing scheduling.
Perhaps some mac fans noticed an improvement in stability from OS 9 to OSX? It was the same jump from co-operative multi-tasking to pre-emptive multi-tasking.
While I'm sure many people here will make jokes about Windows 95, it was quite a leap in stability and usablility from windows 3.1. I don't think windows has had such an upgrade since then, nor do I think Vista will be that much of an improvment over XP/2000.
1) Itemization. The current trend is that melee/weapon based characters are getting incredible increases in damage via weaponry upgrades, yet there is no equivalent for casters in terms of a) ability to dish equal damage or b) ability to take the damage of the 'epic' empowered melee classes even with epic items found in the same instance. I think there will be a large problem in the near future given this current trend: melee will do more damage have more hitpoints than caster types to the point of absurdity. How do you feel about these observations?
Melee damage still isn't as powerful as magic damage, because magic damage is unmitigated by armor. If melee fighters are so good, then why was the honor contest dominated by mages (around 35% of the winners were mages, with 25-30% being rogues iirc.).
Melee Based UI: If I'm a warrior or a rogue, I can look on my character screen, know what my attack power is, my DPS, my chance to dodge/crit/block/parry, and a wealth of information just by simply clicking a button. If I'm a caster type, I have no access to this information. I can't find out what my total +to spell damage is, what my crit percentage is, what the chance is that my spells will be resisted (or even how likely I am to resist a spell). From these observations I conclude the UI is fundamentally designed with melee taken into account and completely ignores the information relevant to caster types. Do you see this problem as I do and if so do you plan to address it at some point in the future?
The melee DPS on the character screen is BS. It takes into account auto attacking only. So as a Paladin, it's great to see you do 105 DPS (for example), but if you are using Seal of command and a DPS add on, you can clearly see you are doing 135 DPS. It's the same thing with warriors (it doesn't account for abilities like mortal strike, or exectue), and rogues (it doesn't count for evicirate.
There should be a total+ to spell damage/healing spells total, and a spell crit% in the UI, it's one of the many things they left out. The UI is pretty poorly done, and often bugged.
The early game is brilliant, and playing it was a joy. Why is that so hard to retain in level 60 play?
Because at low levels you could solo, and in a 1 - 2 hour playing session you would always come out with a new item, or a new level and with it some new abilities (well new abilities every other level).
At the endgame you need to find raids of 5-40 people to be successful. You group up with them, and raid a dungeon for 2-6 hours. You will sometimes come out with nothing to show for it.
WoW was so successful because levels 1-40 appeal to the casual gamer, and even 1-60 can be done by a casual gamer. Now if only they could make the endgame the same way. One man instances, quests for good items that you don't need raid groups to get, etc.
Two weeks before world of warcraft was launched the Paladin class was totally changed, with their two main talents (holy strike and crusader strike) being removed as well as their ability to cast undead spells on undead players. What prompted you to make a change so close to launch, and how do you evaluate what needs to be done to balance out the classes?
That is the funny part, I didn't buy it the last time because I I didnt like vice city very much. I'll probably have to go buy this one just to see what the fuss is about.
Didn't you know, it's ok to talk badly about christians, but don't ever say anything about another religious group or you are commiting 'hate speech'.
If anything, the conservative "Christian" circles I used to run in advocated taking personal responsibility for the activities of their children, including the content of the videogames they played.
Typically people from the right are more into taking personal responsibility. The fact that the right has a "few vocal minorities who think parenting is a job best left to regulations and rules" is suprising since the right is usually against government regulations. The left has had their share too, or should we forget about Tipper Gore and Joe Liberman?
Lets try not to troll religious groups.
I thought they weren't soulbound at all, I recall a Paladin trying to sell his level 60 mount after the Paladin quest for the epic mount became availiable
Slashdot Mirror
We monitor the economics of the game very closely. We watch the in-game economy on a regular basis and have personnel that monitor game logs every day. When we see irregularities, we take action. This can range from exploring the account further, finding and removing exploits, or even possible suspension and bans. We also look closely at out-of-game transactions involving real-world cash for in-game items. Some of those transactions occur over eBay, some do not. But in many cases, the involved parties are warned or suspended, and some accounts are also banned.
BS. They might monitor farmers, but I've bought over 5000G worth of gold from ebay and never had a warning.
Can't a paladin just use their cleanse spell to cleanse it off? Heck, Paladins could start charging lowbies for doctor visits. Finally a use for Paladins.
Science has and will be wrong many times. Thousands of kittens have died as a result.
What is wrong with thousands of dead kittens?
top Treating Women Like Whores
Why? It obviously works everywhere else. They aren't treated like 'whores' just because they are half naked (as are men in many games). Really, if you want to save the video game journalism industry get them off the hyper-feminist kick they have been on for the past 5 years.
Frankly, nobody wants you here if you're going to make us all look like fools. Let's face it: the last thing we need is another Hot Coffee-style sex scandal, especially when this crap is so puerile and insignificant to begin with. Do we really have to corrode society just to sell a few thousand more units? Why don't we just show everyone naked and copulating and be done with it?
Can't writers find anything different to whine about? Sex sells, it always has. There are plenty of successful games that don't involve sex, there are some that do. Just like any other form of entertainment. I don't know why these femi-boys feel the need to whine about this. If you think there is some huge feminist market out there, go make your game and strike it rich. Or more likely, go down in flames so I can laugh at you. Cookie cutter "fix the game industry" articles are even worse that cookie cutter games.
Memo to game developers: Yeah, yeah, TV and movies struggle with similar problems, so maybe video game developers aren't the only evildoers here. Still, you can buck the trend--just look at Beyond Good and Evil, a game with a hip, normal-looking female lead character. You won't find any jiggle physics, crotch-thrusting or bikini splits there, just an average girl with average looks. HOW REVOLUTIONARY!
Who cares, let the market decide what it wants rather than moral dictators. #2 Your Storylines Suck--Get New Ones
Your article sucks, and is the same as 100 others, write an original one.
Ok, so here's a big one. Why is it that half the games on the market begin with your character as the sole survivor of some mysterious holocaust? As you stumble over the bloody bodies and piece together the ghastly clues, you come to realize that--HOLY CRAP!--the spaceship/planet/laboratory was invaded by aliens/parasites/demons!!! This storytelling clich? can be traced to the original Doom (and further back to films like Aliens) and it used to be a truly novel approach. Now it's just evidence of a much larger problem, a massive creative malaise. Stop, please. Also please cease employing stories that revolve around parasites, killer viruses, or zombies (please note that Halo's Flood fit ALL THREE of those criteria).
Because first person shooters revolve around gameplay, not storylines. Games revolve around gameplay more than they do storylines. Sure storylines help, but would you rather play a game with good gameplay and a bad story, or bad gamplay and a good story? Ideally you would have both, but if you had limited resources to put into only one, which would you choose?
Memo to game developers:
Memo to people writing about the video game industry. You are not insightful, and you keep spewing the same crap. Find something new to write about.
#3 Enough with the Epics
What do you want? A RPG about a hero who is a janitor and needs to clean 3 stalls before the end of the day? Stories _should_ be epic.
And how about this radical thought: what if there were no heroes and no villains, just ordinary people doing the best they could under supremely tough circumstances?
It's called real life.
Or how about a Reservoir Dogs-style scenario where almost everyone's a bad guy? No more excuses!
Ok, everyone be a bad guy! No half naked women though! How come you said bad guy? Why not bad girl? Well, a fully clothed bad girl.
#4 Stop with the Spectacles
Because we don't want better graphics. As a matter of fact, lets all go play combat from Atari rather than the next FPS game.
You
The article clames Battle Arena Toshinden is the reason people bought their ps1, but it's more likely that the announced release of mk3 a few weeks after launch was the reason people bought a ps1 considering how hot that game was in the arcades at that time. Battle Arena Toshinden was the game you bought because you were waiting for mk3 and wanted a ps1 at launch.
And despite the stereotype that they were dumb, there's really no evidence of that either - their brains were even larger than ours
Brainsize doesn't equate to intellengence, or we would lose chess games to elephants.
Come to think of it even religion is surely a factor in evolution. It is the first means humankind had to spread 'rules that enable survival' to larger groups. I am sure you can think of many, if not think of combinations of certain type of meats, parasites and climate and how they are dealt with in different religions. These rules enable more religious people to survive than non-religious. Be aware that this is not only way to do this. There are now many different ways to spread such rules (laws, science, internet etc...)
I always thought this could be a reason for religions choosing not to eat pork...but why do some avoid cow? Were they not big fans of the atkins diet back then?
Yeah but they only do decent business there 4 months out of the year. Some of the boardwalk arcades move their better games into different locations during the winter.
If you are in NJ, there is always eight on the break though.
You are a disingenous clown, like the rest of your medieval Creationist zombie army.
.It's only ridiculous when religious zealots like you insist that we balance truth, like evolution science, with fantasy, like Creationism.
Sorry, I'm not a creationist. I don't even go to church or practice any religion. Once again your bias assumes anyone who disagrees with you must be part of a "medieval Creationist zombie army". So who has the persecution complex?
I was clear in my last post, that I do not support religion being taught in public schools. You are assume anyone who doesn't agree with you is a "religious zealot". These are all your words, not mine. It's your blind hatred that fuels your ignorance to the fact that someone could not be a creationist but still reject your hostile views (hatred) twards religion.
Only to racists, like the religious people thru the 20th Century who "forgive" black people, "because god made them that way, it's not their fault".
You can point out dark parts of any race or large religions history pretty much. Should we hold the rape of nanking against the Japanese today?
Of course people who insist on believing in an imaginary spirit that created the universe 7000 years ago, inserting dinosaur bones in the ground to fool us, and who insist children should be taught their myth is as valid as Evolution, are ridiculous.
So you are saying all religion is ridiculous? You can basically point out things in every religion that are ridiculous to believe if you don't have faith. Even if you believe all religion to be ridiculous, does that give you a basis to judge anyone who believes in a particular god as 'stupid' as you do later on? It's their choice to be stupid, and impose their stupidity on us and our descendants. Deciding that some people are worth ignoring based on their behavior, including their senseless beliefs, is not the baseless prejudice of racism. It's mere judgement, which any sensible person exercises to protect ourself from accepting nonsense where the truth is important.
So people do not have the right to teach their children as they see fit? It's one thing to be an athiest, it's another to call people stupid based on their beliefs.
It's really sad that Creationists have cloaked themselves in the stolen garment of antiracism. Especially when so many Creationists are straight-up racists, from long lines of racists.
This is really no better than the Anti-Semitism that hate groups spew about Jews.
Creationism is the way many racists pass the buck, saying "we love niggers, it's part of god's plan that they're inferior". I've seen it up close, especially when I lived in Louisiana for several years.
I'm sad to see that living in Louisiana and your experences have biased yo to the point where you think religious people = stupid racists. You do realize, by judging them the way you do, you are as bad as what you claim they are? You have become no better than what you have so much rage against.
And I've seen nothing else from these Creationists anywhere else but the same (often unwitting) selfserving, willful ignorance. Ridicule is the fairest treatment they can expect - just as if they blathered on about how textbooks should dignify the theory that the Tooth Fairy created the universe.
There are logical, and legal reasons why creationism shouldn't be taught in public schools. You would be better off sticking to those rather than promoting hatred of a group of people based on their religious beliefs.
One major improvement was going from co-operative multi-tasking to pre-emptive multi-tasking. On Win 3.1 applications had to relinquish the CPU.
It is a statement of how far down the drain Slashdot has gone that it took 10 replies for someone to point this out, and it's not even modded up. Switching from co-operative multi-tasking to pre-emptive multitasking is what provided much greater stability, and was a huge leap forward IMO.
While 95 would crash, 3.1 would lock up fairly regularly. The failure of a cooperative multi tasking system is the OS's reliance on the code to actually give us the processor as you mentioned, rather than the OS enforcing scheduling.
Perhaps some mac fans noticed an improvement in stability from OS 9 to OSX? It was the same jump from co-operative multi-tasking to pre-emptive multi-tasking.
Creationists and lawyers: objects of ridicule and pity, so long as there aren't too many of them
It's sad that you think Creationists should be objects of ridicule based on their religious beliefs. That is no better than racism.
While I'm sure many people here will make jokes about Windows 95, it was quite a leap in stability and usablility from windows 3.1. I don't think windows has had such an upgrade since then, nor do I think Vista will be that much of an improvment over XP/2000.
So, what are the players to do?"
Bitch on slashdot.
1) Itemization. The current trend is that melee/weapon based characters are getting incredible increases in damage via weaponry upgrades, yet there is no equivalent for casters in terms of a) ability to dish equal damage or b) ability to take the damage of the 'epic' empowered melee classes even with epic items found in the same instance. I think there will be a large problem in the near future given this current trend: melee will do more damage have more hitpoints than caster types to the point of absurdity. How do you feel about these observations?
Melee damage still isn't as powerful as magic damage, because magic damage is unmitigated by armor. If melee fighters are so good, then why was the honor contest dominated by mages (around 35% of the winners were mages, with 25-30% being rogues iirc.).
Melee Based UI: If I'm a warrior or a rogue, I can look on my character screen, know what my attack power is, my DPS, my chance to dodge/crit/block/parry, and a wealth of information just by simply clicking a button. If I'm a caster type, I have no access to this information. I can't find out what my total +to spell damage is, what my crit percentage is, what the chance is that my spells will be resisted (or even how likely I am to resist a spell). From these observations I conclude the UI is fundamentally designed with melee taken into account and completely ignores the information relevant to caster types. Do you see this problem as I do and if so do you plan to address it at some point in the future?
The melee DPS on the character screen is BS. It takes into account auto attacking only. So as a Paladin, it's great to see you do 105 DPS (for example), but if you are using Seal of command and a DPS add on, you can clearly see you are doing 135 DPS. It's the same thing with warriors (it doesn't account for abilities like mortal strike, or exectue), and rogues (it doesn't count for evicirate.
There should be a total+ to spell damage/healing spells total, and a spell crit% in the UI, it's one of the many things they left out. The UI is pretty poorly done, and often bugged.
Which one of you is Caydiem sleeping with, to make druids so powerful?
It's more likely that she is threatening to sleep with them, have you ever seen what she looks like? Uggg
The early game is brilliant, and playing it was a joy. Why is that so hard to retain in level 60 play?
:)
Because at low levels you could solo, and in a 1 - 2 hour playing session you would always come out with a new item, or a new level and with it some new abilities (well new abilities every other level).
At the endgame you need to find raids of 5-40 people to be successful. You group up with them, and raid a dungeon for 2-6 hours. You will sometimes come out with nothing to show for it.
WoW was so successful because levels 1-40 appeal to the casual gamer, and even 1-60 can be done by a casual gamer. Now if only they could make the endgame the same way. One man instances, quests for good items that you don't need raid groups to get, etc.
All in my own opinion of course.
Two weeks before world of warcraft was launched the Paladin class was totally changed, with their two main talents (holy strike and crusader strike) being removed as well as their ability to cast undead spells on undead players. What prompted you to make a change so close to launch, and how do you evaluate what needs to be done to balance out the classes?
Coding boring business apps all day, or supporting boring and poorly written business apps all day
Or Both! Trust me on this one....
That is the funny part, I didn't buy it the last time because I I didnt like vice city very much. I'll probably have to go buy this one just to see what the fuss is about.
or the "Christian self-righteousness" comment.
Didn't you know, it's ok to talk badly about christians, but don't ever say anything about another religious group or you are commiting 'hate speech'.
If anything, the conservative "Christian" circles I used to run in advocated taking personal responsibility for the activities of their children, including the content of the videogames they played.
Typically people from the right are more into taking personal responsibility. The fact that the right has a "few vocal minorities who think parenting is a job best left to regulations and rules" is suprising since the right is usually against government regulations. The left has had their share too, or should we forget about Tipper Gore and Joe Liberman?
Lets try not to troll religious groups.
The current tax system in world of warcraft would accurately improve our tax system in the US.
the teleporting hack
They have code that detects teleport hackers now, a guy in our guild got busted.
I thought they weren't soulbound at all, I recall a Paladin trying to sell his level 60 mount after the Paladin quest for the epic mount became availiable
And why did the USA need to drop 2 bombs on Japan?
Yes, and the good guys won.